Another journal

I go by B most often and if you are wondering how to pronounce my handle/name, this post right here has visual and aural examples, thanks to a wonderful podficcer ask.

I’m all over the internet because I’ve been here a long time, see my Beacons for the regular places. Tarot card stickers can be found here!

I’m also on AO3 as bzedan as well because the fact that I’m very googlable has yet to be a problem with work.

I ended up reading a bit less this month (well, in book numbers, not page numbers) thanks to Flash Fiction February. That said I also am trying to be better about having more than one book checked out on Libby at a time. I get nervous is all, what if I don’t finish the first book while I have the second book checked out, ugh, it’s there hovering, waiting. But Libby has changed it’s delay options, so rather than pushing things back to a date a week, two weeks, some months from now you can only suspend a hold and then unsuspend it when you’re ready. I have, ah, several books suspended right now (most of which are non-fiction because I’m slow at reading them and like to pace them between fiction).

Anyway, here’s the roundup and stats for February.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

The Works of Vermin by Hiron Ennes

What a grody, gorgeous, viciously verdant book. The story drips thick and rich through a rotting, sprouting world of opera and overthrown regimes, as the characters twine relentlessly to their fates.

Boy-o, what a delight this was. It’s thick and visceral and lived-in. It just makes me want to use squishy descriptive words about it. It also does some things with structure that I didn’t catch right off, so I don’t want to say too much, but I’d loved Leech and now I guess Ennes is just on my list of To Watch For. This felt like a good companion to Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide, so if you like one or the other, there’s a rec for you.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Whew what a book! So many shadowed layers, thickly and deliciously spread with an inhabited world and the mess of people in it. The plot doesn’t twist so much as turn like a winding snake, a winding ribbon to an ending.

This had been on my to-read and I’d then forgotten but then a pal’s review (and a better review than this) reminded me about it and I dropped it in the hold queue. Weirdly?? Reminds me a little of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler but maybe just parts of it, maybe just the journey of it, the papers and the periods of being lost, the structural play. It’s certainly a better book than IOAWNAT, to me at least.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor

The layers of this book fold together like beautiful cloth wrapping, from novel-in-a-novel to interviews to the main tale. It kept me turning and unwrapping the story drawn in by lush descriptions of family and food and life. You want to call the ending the bow on it but it was instead the thing hidden by all those layers and I don’t! feel it was quite what I wanted or expected to find.

Notable about this book, I paired it with Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward in the latest newsletter reading recommendations and I’ll just copy what I said there:

I recently read two books in a row that had the same thing going on. Not the story or the style or anything, but both were awesome rides the full way through, doing some neat things with how a story is shaped, but then the ending didn’t hit for me as solidly as I needed it to. Which does not! Mean they’re not worth reading. It was actually really interesting to interrogate myself on why the endings didn’t work for me the way I wanted. Maybe (probably) they’ll do better for you.

I can’t hate a book for not sticking the landing, not if they do it the best they can. I don’t know how either of these books should have ended but the endings here work! And I enjoyed the ride, so I can’t complain (well, I can, but you know).

Here’s the pretty gradient of the month’s covers:

There’s Legendary Children again, this time it was as audio, a joy. The other book in this lot was Kate Elliot’s The Nameless Land, the concluding book of the Witch Roads duology. As sometimes happens, the second book didn’t do it for me as the first did. Still glad for it, well-written, good conclusion etc., etc., but I can’t pick out which ingredient (longing? world building? quests?) I found so tasty in the first book that was missing here.

It was a bit of a lot of a week, hence the weekly blogpost coming on a Sunday rather than in the week. February was itself a bit much, as doing Flash Fiction February often does–even when I’m writing some every day otherwise I’m not writing a complete thing and setting aside an hour to write it then share first lines and, new this year, share with the Storytelling Collective discord and read other people’s flash.

I do a weekly accounting of what is done on which projects over on Patreon and Comradery, so I’m trying not to do the same here but like, more thoughtfully examine how this year’s Flash Fiction February went. But, yeah, first some stats.

Average wordcount was 598, which is very solidly flash fiction, goldilocks zone for me here. Three works were in the 300 word range and three were in the 800 word range, but none dipped to 200 or up to 900. Lol, it looks like I even got one *exactly* at 500 words, amazing.

Total wordcount 16,747, which is just an nice big number to look at. Like, check that out! That’s like a fourth? Of how long a novel is. Wild.

Of course, I track genres and whatnot, have every year (parly it’s to make sure I’m getting a nice assortment in the inevitable collection. Here’s the genre count:

More fantasy than anything this year, but with “Normal World” close behind?! I did a lot of everyday types of vignettes this go-round. I also hit up some genres/story worlds I have build in previous Flash Fiction February challenges. I’ve already got one gathered as an eventual fix-up story, sitting on ice for now, but I think I’m going to end up with another, based on the sub-genre stats.

This is the fifth year I’ve done Flash Fiction February, and it’s neat to look at the work I’ve made with it (here’s a link to the pieces I’ve shared here) and the work I’ve done beyond it and see the growth in storytelling but also to feel how it has helped keep the muscle flexible to write when I can and if I need to. What I realised it also has done, something I hadn’t realised until I was in a group of other people doing it, was teaching useful brevity. A lot of folks seemed to have trouble reigning it in to the standard flash fiction word count of under 1,000 words. Not to say short is better, but it’s a cool strength to build, to learn when to accept a vignette or a scene as a whole and valuable thing.

I mean, I also thrive in writing under restrictions, so this is kind of where I live.

Not to say I am amazing at it all, at the start of the month I was *certain* I’d be able to keep working on my longer writing project while also doing FFF, which immediately proved itself untrue. That is fine! I almost didn’t get the monthly newsletter done in time but I did, hooray. I ended up only being one day behind, which might be the best I’ve done as far as skipping days? And I did stuff this month, went out to museums and worked on other projects.

I think, it’s just nice to find ways to prove to yourself you can do a thing. I have done a thing! Hooray for the fifth FFF completed to me.

I was cleaning up tabs today, not in a way that would result in a satisfying tab cleanout post, but because once more I’d opened up my browser in the morning and encountered a bunch of things open about a topic I’d apparently looked up before going to bed. I do this, finding a series of rabbit holes to burrow down when I’m between reading books or otherwise just looking for a lower-investment bit of reading.

This round was about sumptuary laws–opened because I’d looked up something briefly while working on a Flash Fiction February entry. It’s silly to be looking stuff up when I’m trying to keep each day’s time below 45 minutes (I’m averaging about 30), but the laws around patent theatres that restricted speaking roles were part of the mix that created pantomime and well, I got distracted.

Previously to that, I woke up one day and found my phone browser was full of things on the St. Francis Dam disaster and the California Water Wars. That made sense as I’d rewatched Chinatown in the background while working on something.

Anyway, I do this a lot. The most notable was the time I found a bunch of tabs open on Punch and Judy. Why? No idea.

I made a post about this on Tumblr, because two years later (and an innumerable mornings finding gluts of tabs open on pantomime, or clowns, or commedia dell’arte) I had checked out The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian by Andrew McConnell Stott.

I’ve since become the kind of person who notes that actually it was Grimaldi’s son, JS, who inspired the character in Dickens’ Pickwick Papers that was the tinder on which the fuel of “scary clown” fire fed. I will bring up how Regency theatre was still so close to its riotous history that many stages still had spikes on the edge of the stage from previous generation’s crowd control.

You know they had a sea battle shows, in the theatre? We wild out on the Romans filling the colosseum with water but damn, they were doing it too, and had dogs starring in the shows.

So, I’ve become The Clown Guy. The kind of person who wakes up in the morning sometimes and opens their browser and sees they’d been searching for “clown schools near me,” who has a dedicated tag on Tumblr for clown vibes reblogs. Noting, btw, that apparently I started populating the tag in March, 2022. What the hell happened in March 2022 that had me looking up Punch and Judy and posting clowns.

And who knows when that will happen again, I wake up one day and find the detritus of a previous night’s search, within it a kernel of a new obsession. Well. Such is life.

This year I’m trying some things around my reading habits. Chase and I are listening to non-fiction audio books (often ones that one of us have read in text previously) while hanging out in the same room. I have a little bit (a lot bit) of trouble hearing and following audio so it’s partly to help me build that muscle, but it’s also the only way for us to read a book at the same pace, as I read at an unfair speed. Also, Chase’s mom sent me a lovely stack of barely-read mid century mass market paperbacks that I am doling out to myself at the pace of one a month. They’re so pleasant to hold! What a perfect object they are.

Let’s look at what the top-level stats were for me in January.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life by Lorenzo Marquez, Tom Fitzgerald

I started watching RuPaul’s Drag Race right when it came out, trying to get this new streaming thing working on my laptop. This book is such a deftly handled thing, weaving queer history with the show and adding context to all the things that have made Drag Race what it is. Sure, I knew a lot of it but there were bits of queer history new to me, new movies to seek out and people to learn about. And every time T&L touched on a subject or era and I thought “oh, they better mention [x],” they did. Like any history spanning a wide range of time, it can’t go into full depth on any one thing, but the depth they manage to go into is very good. It’s made to read while pausing to look up and learn or watch more, a brilliant jumping-off point for anyone, no matter how much or little they know.

We’re now listening to the audio book of this, which Tom and Lorenzo read, and the east coast “a” of Tom’s light accent delights me constantly. A delight. I made a Letterboxed list of the movies they mention in the book, even in passing. Most are available on Kanopy!

A Scent of New-Mown Hay by John Blackburn

A tense cold-war thriller that also offers up the science-fictional monstrous. Non-stop pacing with a well done written version of not showing the monster to make it scarier, it’s a neat and tidy book that is like a bit of eldritch horror in a spy novel coating.

This is a snappy, spooky little book that does some very deft things. It has a good aftertaste, if that makes sense, not like you’re thinking of it often after so much as it has a nice little shiver in your memory.

Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco

Ooh, a good and creepy hungry house story.

Lol, not a lot in that review. But that’s what this book is! It’s one of those books of an era that feels hinged around a specific family dynamic that isn’t as much the norm today. That said, a person having a deep and unexamined hole in her life and self that makes them vulnerable to devil’s bargain trickery is eternal.

Here’s your pretty gradient of all the covers from this month.

Another title of note this month was Non-Stop, which I picked up because the cover I saw in a 70’s Sci Fi Art newsletter intrigued me. It has a banger of a twist. And The Light Eaters, have you heard the good word of Light Eaters? I will get everyone I know to read it at some point. I think it adds a really beautiful dimension to looking at the world and the wealth of growing things in it.

Been a bit since I did one of these! That’s mostly because I’ve been up on my browsing, good job me. And anyway, mostly these kinds of posts are good for me ensuring I keep my weekly blogging habit and I’ve been managing that okay. This week though, not so much, lol. Find all these link dumps on the tag “tab cleanout.”

The World of Playing Cards, a very cool and in-depth resource that “documents playing cards across cultures and centuries, from early handmade cards to industrial production, and from games of chance and skill to education, advertising, political satire, magic and fortune-telling.” I stumbled across it while looking up something about court cards and was delighted.

status: moved to REF: Assorted

The George Quaintance Blog, curated by Ken Furtado and John Waybright. I always love single-subject blogs, and I found this one while looking up more on Quaintence and the physique paintings he was known for after he was mentioned in a book I was reading. There’s a book as well, which I dropped in it’s own bookmark folder.

status: shared

Of Yuppies and Yippies and Hippies, over at the English Language & Usage stack exchange. Chase and I were trying to pin down in our memories what exactly a “yippie” was, and encountered this pretty in-depth history of the word and how it grew from hippies and morphed into yuppies. And also if it’s a portmanteau or not. Then, because it’s a stack exchange, there’s even more detail about related words.

In addition to the historical threads that ScotM identifies in his excellent answer, several other -pies formations that were current in the 1960s and 1970s may have contributed to the adoption of yuppies as shorthand for members of the sociological category “young urban professionals.” To wit: preppies, bippies, blippies, dippies, and trippies

status: moved to *absolutely random shit

Understanding AI: Facts, Myths & Protecting Your Work, over at TrueReft, stuck in an open tab so I could check some of the settings it mentions. It’s a nice little rundown of the basics, if you want some good bullet points for explaining why GenAI gives you the ick.

status: read and closed

“Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism — Yes, You! Yes, Now,” an imposed (ready-to-print) zine from It’s Going Down (who have a post with a lot of other new media projects covering current social movements and news here). These quotes from the intro sum it up:

We offer up this sampler of ideas, encouraging you to think and act for yourselves, with each other, as precisely the only winning strategy. If each idea here seems not enough on its own — well, it isn’t.

Here are twenty things you can do to counter fascism—yes, you! yes, now! Dream up and put into motion many, many more things too. This is only a beginning.

status: saved to my zine distribution folders

Okey dokey, that’s the lot, my tabs are tidied, and I’ve blogged for another week.

Over on Tumblr I encountered a great fibre arts bingo post, The past couple of years I’ve tried to be better about integrating successfully (starting and finishing) the multitude of fibre craft I work in back into my life. Often I glom onto a particular type of craft for a period (embroidery, that time I sewed along at home a Project Runway season, etc) and after the burst of obsession the method is sort of folded into daily life.

This both is great (I work in a lot of disciplines, I can’t focus on them all at once), and frustrating because I will feel like I’ve “forgotten” a thing, left it by the wayside. Which is silly. I feel like I never do fibre craft but in the past couple of years I’ve mended a coat with decorative embroidery, sewn multiple pairs of pants, crocheted a sweater. What is real though is I have so much craft stash. Too much. And I sort of would like to move *objects* next time we move, rather than raw material. So! Gotta integrate fibre arts into my more daily life, along with writing and whatnot.

A bingo card felt like a great way to do this and this square speared me directly:

Finish a WIP that’s been lingering for over a year.

Maybe you’ve seen me mention the t-shirt scrap quilt I’m working on, at some point over the past couple of years. I have saved many beloved t-shirts that were worn out or that we’d grown out of, or were from ancient eras that didn’t need to be remembered with clothing. Previously, I’ve turned t-shirts into yarn and made them into throw rugs. But some shirts aren’t well suited for that, or I want to preserve the images on them. So, why not a quilt?!

I can’t remember when I last worked on the quilt last so the first step was pulling the bag of it out and seeing where I was.

Turns out I had it mostly finished before being distracted and not finishing it. Like an asshole! I was annoyed but grateful. At least there was little left to do of my least favourite thing: piecing. NOT that I am piecing this nicely or neatly or with thoughtful pattern. Pieces are going together so they fit and make a final lap-blanket shape. That is all. I am not a precision crafter.

I made a list of what needed done next: finish the last couple of blocks and sew them together so they’d achieve lap-blanket size and shape, figure out what I was doing for the back, sew the sides together, bind it, quilt it.

Easy enough to finish the front. I’d, in the recent past, done a bit of a closet clean that had pulled aside a couple of t-shirts and those were all I needed to finish the blocks and get it blanket-sized.

I am a small enough person and I live in Southern California. I am cold all the time but acknowledge that sometimes all you need is a light blanket that is two layers of t-shirt. For the back I took some more boring shirts and just made big squares with them, sewed them together and called it good.

I hope you are enjoying the dimly lit shots, by the way. Anyway, I sewed the sides together, right sides out because I was going to bind it. Quilts are bound, I think? It felt right. I sewed together so much scrap and made about 200 inches of t-shirt scrap strip. Then. Then I had to cut 200 inches to a consistent width. Thankfully, there’s the thumb trick (using the first joint of the thumb as a ruler or guide when cutting or sewing).

Then it was ironing 200 inches, then sewing it all on, not that neatly. But the thing is, neatness literally doesn’t affect how cosy a blanket is. I know my skills and it has never been sewing on binding neatly. But then?! It was done, it is a blanket.

It’s still not technically a quilt as it is not yet quilted. But I was able to hunt down some quilting thread and start working on it. It’ll take a bit, because did you know (I knew, I knew this going in and yet), t-shirt fabric absolutely sucks to do this kind of stitching in? I’m also quilting it in a pictorial way. The final thing is going to be messy and imperfect and also wonderful. Memories of a life in this thing.

I can’t really check this space off the bingo card yet, but I nearly can. And I quilt a bit every night so it won’t take too much longer until this is done done done.

I think everyone has got their mail, so it’s time to share the card we sent out this year.

Some folks also got some zines of puzzles and mazes collected from the newsletter zines I’ve been making. We always try to add a little fun thing in with the cards (as I’ve explained before) and a couple of these puzzles I had a lot of fun with making and wanted to share. I’ve put both zines (one is all mazes, one has other kinds of puzzles) up on Itchio, for free to download.

I was despairing earlier in the winter about what the heck I’d do for the card, and had resigned myself to just doing another pretty landscape. But the oranges came a little early this year, putting those of us who live in the apartments a bit closer in competition with the squirrels who also like to eat the oranges (and mandarins). And also, when many daily joys feel like something you have to work to snatch when and where you can, a bit of a mood as well.

Crossposted to Patreon and Comradery.

One of the things I want to do for this year is do monthly bookposts. I read apparently 91 books in 2025, a number which normally would indicate I am having ~problems~ but I haven’t, and my time management has been good, so! I think a bit of that volume was me tearing through some series like Nero Wolfe. Anyway, I do keep short little reviews on Storygraph but I thought it would be nice to integrate the fun little visuals they provide for each month and share those here.

Also, a friend has reached 20 years of bookposts and wow! Throwing my hat in the ring. Though I must note: I am not a reviewer, I do not have the mind for it. I can write you a tasty little paragraph max.

All that said, I’m not properly counting my monthly bookposting until I am doing it about January’s reads, but a quick warmup into the concept with December, why not.

Here are my Storygraph reviews for my top rated books:

The Witch Roads by Kate Elliott

Deeeeeeelightful. Tore through this and now impatiently await the second book’s release from library hold. Love the worldbuilding, love the intrigue, the characters, the food descriptions, but oooh boy love me a yearn and the one hear is all slow burn.

Somebody recommended this to me or to folks in general and I don’t know who! But it’s a duology and it’s very fun. Mmm, flavours of The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri and Magebike Courier duology by Hana Lee, so if you like one or the other then the other two might also hit for you.

Night of the Living Cat Vol. 1 by Hawkman with Mecha-Roots (Illustrator), Nan Rymer (Translator)

What a delight! I had seen the anime and wanted to check out the manga, which is even more full of horror references (down to its own dense, darks-heavy style). What an utter delight this is, especially for the horror nerd. It’s a celebration of genre and trope, but also: cats.

I’d actually bought Night of the Living Cat–we watched the first season of the anime and loved it utterly. There are so many treats in there for the horror or sci-fi fan. And all the while the story very aggressively avoids violence (at most, loud noises or water to scare cats, which make everyone feel sad) while blackout-bingoing horror tropes. So I used a gift certificate I earned through insurance points (what a world) and bought myself some treats at a bookstore. I don’t need nor have space for the full run of this right now, though I super want to have them at some point. The art looks like a horror manga, but its just: cats.

The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar

This was a delight! The same things that make Schar so fun in his Wayside and other middle reader books translate enjoyably to a grown up book. The framing was fun, the characters were a delight, and the story was a joyful romp with a smidge of darkness.

I couldn’t remember why I’d put this book in my Libby hold but as I was flipping through the front matter, a title caught my eye and I paged back: Oh. Wayside!!! This was the second book I’d read recently from someone who mostly wrote YA or middle grade and where the other made me mad, this one was a grade-A romp. It’s fun to have fun!!

Okay and here’s just a pretty gradient of all the books read for December. I’ll pull out Battle Royale by Koushun Takami and Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei as two more faves and note that if you are interested in historical burial practises and/or vampires, Killing The Dead by John Blair is a tasty non-fiction.

Okay, that’s it for December reads! I think this is how I’ll approach it for the upcoming year.

I'm still picking through Yuletide fics and making some bookmarks for recommendations. I had been hoping my Yuletide Reading Bingo attempt this year would help me some there but after I generated it and started filling it out I realised I had two matching squares and two squares that were antithetical to any tag you'd find in the Yuletide collection, so!

I had a fun time deciding my fandoms this year—my own fandoms are those that are verrrry small and specific, so my depth of knowledge or confidence to approach others isn't always that high. That said, this year I lucked into matching for Earthsea!

First, the fic and tags etc:

To be useful, if not free (2343 words) by bzedan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Serret (Earthsea), Yarrow (Earthsea)
Additional Tags: No Dialogue
Summary:

The child knew that if a queen were to have yet produced but a single daughter, then the creature should be at least pleasant to look at, easy to care for, and useful. Of the three, the most important was that she was to be useful.

Writing commentary

I honestly didn't mean to write another story from the POV of a seagull, I swear. But the prompt had so many delicious ingredients in it—the simple joyfulness of Yarrow, the mystery of Serret's background, the possibility of her escaping.

A secret: I had seen this prompt last year and felt like I just didn't have Earthsea fresh enough in my mind to offer the fandom. Which was a shame as the Earthsea books are a dear favourite. So, I reread the series in 2025 (among other LeGuin works, as my best friend read Lathe of Heaven for the first time and my partner read The Disposessed), and added the fandom with confidence. I was excited about all the fandoms I offered, but over the moon to get matched with one I'd already prepped for.

I love to approach things with form, so the idea of not naming our narrator (Serret) and using ages as periods/delineating times for each vignette set me going. Then I started giggling at the idea of taking "maiden/mother/crone" and making it "maiden/mother/bird" and, well.

Also, in the books, it is sort of intimated that only Ogion could have returned poor Ged to his human form, so I thought Serret might well be stuck as a bird. And that, on further reflection, for a woman who was only ever the tool of others, the simple and straightforward life of a seagull—the selfish joyfulness of it—might be preferable.

Additional Earthsea notes

Now, the fun thing about Earthsea is it had a hand in my partner and I meeting and getting together. Chase's mom is a librarian and they had the Earthsea trilogy (and Tehanu) on the shelf of their dorm. Those specific first edition paperbacks, if you remember, with the bold colours. Distinctive as hell to spot on a shelf.

It was why, when I first saw them on an endcap at my high school library, I picked them up. I don't know if they were part of a display or if they'd just been purchased, or what. But I picked up the first one, read it, returned it, then picked the next from the same display. The problem was, the display was gone by time I was ready for the third book (or the fourth—it has been decades, so the details are fuzzy).

As I had not taken in the author's name, so I had no idea who this series I was in the middle of were by. I did find them eventually because I knew what genre they were and they had those bright colours, so it was just a matter of searching the shelves with a sharp eye.

All that to say, the covers were well-impressed on my mind and spotting them on some guy's dorm room shelf made me go "Oh, I bet you're interesting." Turns out they were and now some 20-odd years later the books are on our shelf.

Ah, the last update of the year! I suppose I could make an accounting of what I’ve done over the year. I keep track, because I’d forget and then think I did nothing at all but read possibly too many books. This is a common brain thing, I think, as I see others putting together their art versus artist, or otherwise also looking back over the past 12 months.

(I have a very legit excuse for not posting this yesterday, btw. My laptop decided it did NOT like being charged and just… ran out of juice after I’d typed up the above then gone to have dinner. I had to stay off it while it got back up to speed.)

Anyway, here’s the bodycount of Shit Did, links go all over, will note where. Now, most of this happened in the front half of the year and you might have already seen it in my mid-year roundup, but odds are you also didn’t so! Please have fun counting how many things are for my favourite franchise. A lot of this is documented in blogposts because I started blogging weekly about halfway through the year! (in fact, you are at this moment reading it on the blog, which I’ve crossposted this Patreon/Comradery update to).

The real bulk of it is zines and bookbinding:

– Book gifts I made my family for the holidays (blogpost).
– More book gifts, for the same reason (blogpost).
– A very dorky fanbind of a Locked Tomb short story, that keeps getting hits on tumblr, where the nerds are (blogpost).
– Flash Fiction February 2025 collection, my standard yearly collection of the best ten flash fics from the monthly challenge. (Itchio)
– I laid out my newsletter (which is coming up on its third year?!) as zines, which are available as physical prints or a collection of digital files, and it was really fun. (Bigcartel shop, Itchio)
– I did a paperback fanbinding of a favourite unfinished fic–yes, it is a Fallout: New Vegas fic–which turned out very cool and also gave me a reason to source some classic mass market paperback-style paper. (blogpost)
– A zine of the campfire recipes from Fallout: New Vegas, because I needed a reference sheet so why not. It’s free, also. (Itchio)

Illustrative stuff:

– The finished Labours of the Month calendar was dropped on Itch and I 100% then forgot about it and did not promote it monthly like I should have. That’s a years worth of illustration lol, such is life! (Itchio)
– I did hourly comic day, which is always a fun time. (Tumblr post roundup)
– Made the final card in my nostalgia 3 card draw, which is stickers and really was an indulgent fun thing for me to do. (Bigcartel shop)
– Neil banging out the tunes, which y’all fucking loved, wow. (Bluesky)

Writing stuff:

– When I finish a Flash Fiction February zine, I then also release a handful of my top faves from the previous year’s collection onto my blog with illustrations. (Blog archive)
– For my best friend’s birthday I wrote a fic using his OC ghoul from Fallout: Jammin’ With Junker Val -02.02.75, 16:23, (Archive of Our Own)
– The Fourth Step, a short story from last year’s Ominous October. (blogpost)
– Any Small Town, a short story from last year’s Ominous October. (blogpost)
– Café By-The-Sea, a scary short story that I shopped around to a couple markets then decided to just share on The Blog. (blogpost)
– Continued sending out a monthly newsletter over at Any Tree, Flowering.
– Also nearly forgot: I serialised that old book of mine, The Audacity Gambit, and included extra short stories from the world of it. (blog)

Other stuff:

– Papier-mâché dice tower video, part of the cleanup of old projects thing. (YouTube)
– Unearthed a 1998 video I made of Julius Caesar, because it’s stupid and silly and fun to see old work. (YouTube)
– Otter Pop*Stars Neocities page, which was partly a thing to remember “oh I like coding a little.” (webpage)
– I made a real-life model of a 3D asset from Fallout: New Vegas: A Sierra Madre Casino snow globe, which btw part of it broke inside so now I get to decide if I drain and fix it. (blogpost)
– A monster brainstorming worksheets game, which I made to help me generate some creatures for a project. (blogpost)
– I made a linktree-type page, because I realised that I own my own website and could just *do* that instead of using somebody else’s kit and url. (webpage)
– Dyed yarn for the first time, and did also finish crocheting a sweater, though it needs more work before it’s done-done. (blogpost)

Plus all the stuff that feels incidental, like helping out at an art fair, sewing a pair of shorts, finishing mending my coat, figuring out a cool map-making hack (play a game of Carcassone), made nine different cool prints as part of a challenge with Chase, and whatever other little fun things one does to fill the days. I think? A pretty fruitful year and full of Stuff Did.

Also I managed at least four posts a month here, swapping from private to public updates in early July. I just! Don’t care any more. I like sharing information. There will always be things that I gotta keep behind a paywall like if I start serialising something new and there are early updates, or if I make a short story collection and there’s a free download. But I got nothing going on behind the scenes that is worth paying a dollar for. I just like making things I dunno. My best friend sent me the script for Ricki Hirsch’s latest video (because she knows if I am given a video link I will just never watch it), and then I read the originating blogpost, which has this line at the end that I like a lot:

You can control how you and your work are received just as well as you can control lighting but you can always control whether you’re going to try.

Like, the script has the same line worked more cleanly but for some reason the way it resonated more with me in this form. Anyway, I will keep making things and thank you for looking at them with your eyeballs, whoever does. I have some cool things to show your eyeballs this upcoming year.