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I am taking a comment break for a bit. Ones on other pages like Till We Have Faces or Fanart 2023 are of course still welcome!
Clean Fiction Magazine is having a contest for character art, so I sent in my artwork of Artham Wingfeather. You can vote on the contest here, and you can vote daily until the 28th of January.
There is exactly one and only one 2023 calendar left. I had been holding onto it in case someone’s package got lost in the mail and their calendar needed to be replaced, but to my knowledge they have all reached their destinations by now.
Here are the prizes for the Novalog Heist Fanfiction Contest! Also, another art for the daily TSE prompts. This one is for “Crown”
I feel due for giving a personal update.
It is the best of times…
On Christmas break, my sister, Alyssa, got engaged! Her British man, Gareth, flew to VA the day before her flight was scheduled so that he could surprise her and propose to her when she arrived—BUT her flight had to be rescheduled because she got sick. So she was laid up in a hotel room wondering why her guy was MIA when he would typically be there for her. It felt like a contrived Hallmark movie because suddenly she’s stuck in the UK and he’s stuck in the USA, and all of us in the know still had to pretend that he hadn’t left! She got suspicious and turned into a proper Sherlock Holmes while she was shut up in the hotel. My favorite of her sleuthing was “He was offline from time [x] to [y]… which is the same amount of hours as a flight to America” (pro tip: if you’re going to surprise fly somewhere, that is the one time I would fork out the extra money to get in-flight wifi). My favorite of his deflections was that he did a call with both Alyssa and his brother and simultaneously and faked being with his brother in person. I had a blast helping decorate for the proposal and setting up cameras to record it before dashing off.
She’ll get married in the summer in the UK. I am very excited to have a new brother soon. I’ve never met someone who so seamlessly felt like family.
It is the worst of times…
A few months ago, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. She had surgery to remove the tumor a few days before Christmas, and all things considered, it went well. She’ll begin chemo treatments soon, and I’m planning to return to VA again next month to help out. I don’t even know what to say about it. It’s hard. The next few months will be harder still. Though I think we’ll pull through and at some point things will feel alright again, it doesn’t lessen the grief or the weight of a seeing a loved one suffering.