Please check out my adoption auction for Miriam the Mothwoman, the last from the batch of 'Cryptid Carnival' adopts I crafted! The link will be right below here and again at the bottom of the journal!

Miriam the Mothmom Ring Mastress!

https://ych.art/auction/225706

Next, I want to thank my supporters on Patreon. Thanks so much to my Parishioners for their long-term support! A lot of you have been here for a very long time, and it's enormously appreciated. Not to leave out my donors, most of whom I'm pretty sure have been here for over a year or more! Thanks for the continued support.

PARISHIONERS

Unformed
FluffyWolf117
Dr.Portal 455
Amancalleddominik
C. Archive
Sypher597
Warwolf416
DuskyLycanroc
BovineMage
Notnat
KarakuriCentral
Daylight Shadows
Shadō Date
Sir FancySwank
Toonophile
JustCallMeFaux
Martin Nilsson

DONATORS
Majot Matt Mason
Hippo Dippo
EkhonACT09

So... it's been a... crazy few months back-to-back. The holiday season didn't go great. It wasn't the worst I've ever experienced, but the respiratory infection I caught right after Thanksgiving stuck with me until about a week before Christmas. Also, I'm going to lead with the health stuff here because it got in the way of everything. So here we go.

I was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea around the time my infection wrapped up. I'm still waiting on my machine, which I'm supposed to pick up on Tuesday. (You have to actually go to a facility and be trained to use it before they'll let you take it.) I've been told there's a good chance it'll significantly improve my quality of life, perhaps by 60 percent, according to the sleep doc. If that means I'll even be half as tired and sick as I am now, it would be a vast improvement on my daily life. I might actually be able to have something approaching normal fatigue levels for the average person.

I was also diagnosed with Autism. Level one, apparently, which is good... I just didn't know it had a grading curve. Granted, I had my suspicions, and in the six months leading up to the actual testing and results, I was looking at my past with a very fine-tooth comb, becoming more and more convinced that I had it with each overturned memory. I just didn't want to go self-diagnosing all willy-nilly, because it feels like that's what everyone does online. Also, a proper diagnosis means no shadow of a doubt, so I won't second-guess my appraisal forever, and access to resources I might not have otherwise. I also have generalized anxiety and severe social anxiety disorders, which... was also not a shock. Again, it explains a lot about my life in hindsight.

Considering my crashout over Z2, I suppose that should have been the final nail in the coffin on the autism question. When I write or create, I put a lot of myself into my work. It's something I didn't fully realize until I was already neck-deep writing two books' worth of content about a twist villain character from a Disney movie. I spent a lot of time crafting a world that seemed to resonate with a surprising number of people (to this day, it still shocks me the readers it raked in.). I met some wonderful people and made some real friends, all because of that story. Connections to some of those people have reached the point where I consider them family. Given all the positives, I've had very few negative interactions in this space over all this time. That alone made the journey all worthwhile and impossible to regret.

But once Z2 was on the horizon, I realized there was no way I was going to come away from it satisfied or happy. I know what Disney is, I know how they operate. Especially now, as opposed to almost a decade ago, before the world went nuts. I knew the movie would do gangbusters unless it were so awful, bad word of mouth would sandbag it after the first week. But the overwhelming positive praise got to me, snakes and flanderization and all. That and knowing Dawn's complete slapstick villain persona would just lead to an upsurge in bitchy prison whore fet porn in the tags on most of the sites I go to wasn't an appealing aspect either. Everything I've seen of it gives me a decidedly different vibe from the first movie, to the point where it feels like it's its own sort of fanfiction. And the fact that it's almost all the same beats makes it come off like a soft reboot for a new generation. The overwhelming praise makes me feel like Wildehopps fans are glossing over everything else just to get the barest taste of confirmation. But I'm aware I'm biased here to begin with... and overanalyzing a movie for kids, which is essentially what it is.

It's clear I let myself get too invested for too long. Still, you feel pretty alone when you're one of the few opposing voices in a community that...well, honestly, I never felt like I was conventionally part of. I was never a strong Wildehopps person, and it feels like unless you're peddling it aggressively, you probably won't fit in at ZNN or the other fandom sites. Not like I'm great with being social anyway, so that's probably self-inflicted to some degree.

I'll be honest, I spent a lot of time more mad at myself than anything else. I was annoyed that I allowed myself to get so attached to something I didn't make myself. Of course, knowing I'm autistic now kinda makes that all make sense. But...as I said, I put a lot of myself into my characters. I did the same with Dawn, I guess. Even though I should have known better, despite knowing that being disappointed or upset didn't make logical sense, I was still disappointed anyway by what I felt was lazy, poorly implemented canon. Not just with Dawn, but the setting, and everything else. And that was all amplified by Z2's overwhelming positive reception. Anyway, I've said my peace on all that. I'm not walking away from the niche I've carved out...But I do need some more time to reorient myself on how I want to approach the 'Bellhunterverse' content in the future.

Once again...turning this from simple information about health hurdles to a therapy blog. So let's move on to the actual interesting stuff, so I can stop being vulnerable for a moment.

I'm very behind across the board, from commissions to writing to personal projects. Even my current slew of adopts, the 'Cryptid Carnival' series, is only just wrapping up now, when I intended to finish that in the first week of December. I'm glad I saw it through to the end, but it also made for more projects taking up the queue. I've got two commissions currently that are about halfway through production. They are full color and cell-shaded, respectively. I've also got a bunch of little unfinished one-shot stories, another chapter that needs editing for 'The Family Vulpes', which is....I guess up in the air right now, and a co-author project that I've made next to no progress on, save for lore building.

I also have to finish the editing of the second chapter of "Rehab Revisited", A version of "The Rehabilitation of Dawn Bellwether" where I fix a retcon or two, and add a little bit here or there...(I don't want to go all George Lucas on it.) I'm mostly doing this to take a stab at Audiobooking the story, so I want to make sure I'm reading from a revised version, so hopefully I cringe a little less at my own voice readings.

I'm also toying with the idea of doing my own...narrative project that basically yanks a bunch of the characters from the Bellhunterverse and reorients them into something original using some of the various AU concept content I came up with. But I haven't had time to think about the setting too deeply or decide what kind of story I want to tell with it. Purely slice of life? Supernatural? How depressingly real do I want to make it? I usually avoid things that feel too closely tied to contemporary dystopian stuff because I want my stories to be an escape, not a reminder. I need more time to think, to wait for lightning to strike when my thoughts are a little less clouded by exhaustion and anxiety.

I've got a bunch of personal projects I also want to start and finish, and to top it all off, I've got a bunch of study work I want to sit down and do that was derailed entirely at the start of the holiday season. This extends to 3-D modeling and animation, as well as keeping up with the cube-brush art program. Then there's the voice recording stuff....god...The more I list things off, the more anxious I feel...that's not helping.

I'm also revising some stuff about my Patreon. I checked in with the five-dollar backers, and aside from extending the public release window, they also want Patreon-specific exclusive art. Essentially, stuff that never goes public. The only reason I hadn't been doing that was that Patreons always leak, so I thought a delayed release was the best middle ground. I've also implemented a random sketch-a-month reward for the 5-dollar backers. They submit characters, and then it's up to random chance who gets picked. It was the best sort of middle ground to avoid the sketch becoming a gambling thing for specific members, instead being a group-consensus-built character pool that is then picked at random.

That said, for those of you following my public pages, releases will be scarce after the next workload drop, and not everything will end up on my public pages. The Patreons demand it, and who am I to deny them?

So hey, check out my Patreon! The $5 tier gets access to a Discord chat where WIPS and finished works tend to drop first. 2 dollar gets you access to finished works, and a thank you! Links will be right below this on all my 'public' pages.

Miriam Is live right now! The auction goes for one week or until the max bid is met! Happy Bidding!

https://ych.art/auction/225706

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