Another old piece. This was a panther martial artist character I semi-randomly made up and never did anything with. Back in junior high/high school/college, I often used to make up characters and vague storylines behind them, but not really do anything with them besides draw them a lot. I'm not saying that's an invalid thing to do with characters; I guess it's just struck me looking back, how many characters I used to make up who never went anywhere, when nowadays I generally only create characters that are going in a written piece.

At any rate, I still like her design.

 More old art. I love working with markers. Brush pen and marker is seriously one of my favorite media combinations.

This creature design stemmed from a frankly bizarre story idea I concocted in high school, about a motley group of humans and aliens living on a derelict deep-space station. The main character was a preteen boy whose ancestor on the station had stumbled upon a sinister entity from another dimension who had emerged in the depths of the station, but no one believed him and his family became regarded as a joke through the generations. There was also a mysterious and brooding young man who was secretly the lost prince of a planet that had experienced a civil war some years past, and a moody teenage girl with an alien stepdad whose biomech she regularly "borrowed" for space escapades. 

(It's okay, you can laugh.)

The biomechs in the story were very odd creatures that were organically grown in laboratories and had armor plating and control systems implanted into their bodies. They were sapient and capable of communicating with their pilots.

I never really went anywhere with the story; I think I was trying to be cool and come up with some conceptually super deep sci-fi, but, well, I was 14. 

(I executed this piece much later. My art definitely did not look like that in high school.)

The other day I was feeling bored enough to do some vanity Googling, and to my surprise, Google's AI actually came up with an overview for my Neopian Times work. I'm a little shocked because nobody actually seems to care that much about it, but perhaps it has more to do with the fact that I was fairly prolific back in the day, and my username showed up frequently across many issues of the NT in a certain time frame.

(Although, this is the first I've heard of being "well-known" within the community. One of the reasons why I stopped writing for the Times was because my work was getting ignored, and I honestly haven't interacted with the player community in ages. Apparently AI thinks that prolificity = renown, so it needs a reality check.)

 As much as I eternally loathe generative AI, I concede that sometimes it is good for a laugh. I have no idea why the AI picked those four particular pieces to detail, instead of, say, one of my epically long series. The bottom two are super old and janky contributions from when I was in high school, and every time I see them I just sort of wince. 

Okay, actually that "Fifty Reasons" article is pretty decently funny by high-school-me standards. It was basically me poking fun at how, for two consecutive plots, players could choose to fight on the side of the good guys (Isca, Hannah, et al) or the bad guys (gangs of pirates and thieves, respectively), and so many people inexplicably went the "evil is cool" route instead of seeing the logic in trying to keep Neopia safe. This article was trying to point out, in a tongue-in-cheek passive-aggressive manner, that both thieves and pirates are pretty gross when you stop to think about it.

"The Ensorcellator" is a tepid little short story from when I was going through a writerly phase where I had just plain run out of ideas, and decided my inspiration process would basically be "pick random stuff and make stuff up about it". Yeah. I'm glad I grew out of that phase and moved on to "let's wait until I actually get an idea for a story".

The AI summaries are also a little off. "On Developing Your Neopet's Character" is actually an op-ed that discusses various ways one might go about giving one's Neopet a personality and biography, with examples of how I formulated my own Neopets' characters. And that's a pretty generic description of "Ylana Skyfire: Protector of Spring", which is actually more about Ylana and a clingy fanfic-writing geek (who is totally me making fun of myself) searching for a missing Illusen. (I actually do recommend this one, as it's more recent and I had great fun writing it. Maybe I'll put it on this blog at some point.)

As an opinionated aside, I'm still not a fan of the directions Neopets is heading under its current management and I have no desire to start playing the website again. I much preferred the Adam-and-Donna and Viacom days, when Neopets was more "we're marketing this franchise to kids but we know plenty of adults play too" and not "Hey Gen-Z's! Let's make your childhood on-trend!". Way to alienate everybody else, guys. Thanks.

 Another old piece; I was just playing around with character design. I'm aware the proportions are really funky; I actually went in and tried to fix them a bit in Corel but they still look off. Still, I'm fond of this illustration because I think it nicely evokes the feel of adventuring through a fantasy world.

 Another old traditional piece. This is a life reconstruction of an ammonoid (possibly Parapuzosia seppenradensis) looking very hypothetically like a modern nautilus. Usually ammonoids are reconstructed with more octopus-like soft tissue, but from what I understand, so little ammonoid soft tissue has been found, it's still really up in the air what they looked like aside from their shells. I just like the idea of a 2-meter nautilus cruising along the oceans of the Cretaceous. I imagine you could probably hitch a ride on its shell and it wouldn't even notice.

Executed in brush pen and Prismacolor marker, with some white acrylic paint for accents. I love the look and feel of Prisma markers, but their two major downsides are that a) they are expensive and b) they're noxiously smelly so you have to use them in a well-ventilated area. That's why I haven't done much with them lately. If I had the budget, I would invest in some Copic markers, which last time I checked are hands-down the best art marker in the universe (and don't smell), but they're also on the pricey side. I guess that's probably why I do more digital work these days; traditional art is fun but the materials are so costly. /artist rant

 Recently I remembered that I actually have a bunch of old traditional (i.e. non-digital) artwork lying around (i.e. neatly tucked away in a portfolio), and I thought it would be fun to post it here.

Here's a little standee of Blynn that I crafted for a Neopets contest some years ago. It didn't win (apparently most people don't share my cauliflower obsession), but I had fun regardless.

 Remember that announcement I teased a while back? Well, it's ready to be announced: Between the Salt Water and the Sea Strand is getting an audiobook adaptation!

Not only that, but the narrator is none other than David Ault, co-creator of the Jodcast, professional voice actor, and all-around awesome guy! We got to chatting on a comment thread on a Jodcast X post, I asked him if he'd be interested in the project since the character of the faerie king was actually partly inspired by him, and now an audiobook has happened, and it turns out social media can be useful after all!

David has been an absolute joy to work with, and he did an amazing job drawing the listener into the story and bringing the characters to life, and even singing which he gets a jillion gold stars for. (And, being English, he can do a much better British accent than I can.) 

He also did me the huge service of going through the text and making sure everything was in proper British English. Because as much as I love the UK, I have never been there (yet), and although I grew up reading a lot of British children's literature, enjoy following British astronomy, have written way too much Neopets fanfic that was required to use British English to be accepted for publication in the Neopian Times, and I think nowadays I actually listen to Brits more than Americans*, there are some definite gaps in my knowledge (usually about items that are not related to astronomy or food or medieval combat). (Did you know they call crosswalks "pedestrian crossings" there? Wild!) 

So I am indebted to David for giving me a crash course on British English (and a fascinating side trip into British geographical nomenclature!), as well as correcting things that I promise I actually already knew, but that I missed when I was converting the manuscript from American to British English. To make a short story long (which I can do because this is my blog and there are no word count limits that I have yet found), I originally wrote the manuscript in American English despite the story taking place in England, simply because I am American, I live in America, and aside from aforementioned fanfic with specific publication requirements, I feel it's dishonest of me to pretend to be British when I write. But when David signed on for the audiobook, I figured that sort of gave me the green light to just go ahead and make it British. It's an international production, much like the James Webb Space Telescope and Fraggle Rock! (But I still missed some odd things in the transition, like calling trousers "pants" which is British English 101, and not spelling "armour" the Commonwealth way, despite my Neopets fics involving quite a bit of armour and I am perfectly aware how it's supposed to be spelled and I am still kicking myself about it. I think I need more sleep. David was so patient with me and he deserves a medal.)

Anyway, that's neither here nor there; the point of these ramblings is that the audiobook is coming to Audible very soon, so keep an eye out for it (or keep an eye on this blog, or my social media, I guess)!

*Speaking of listening to a lot of British people, I think I've begun to pick up a little bit of an English accent, which is going to be very awkward if I ever have a real spoken conversation with a British person. I guess I could try hard to sound more American? Would they even notice? Am I just overthinking everything again?????