A General Life Update and Explanation of Why Storytime Sunday is Not Anymore

So Storytime Sunday, you may have noticed, has ceased. It was an enlightening and rewarding experiment in many ways, and one that I hope to repeat after the start of the new year, but it had reached the point where it was actively interfering with larger goals. For a time, I simply tried to tack on the work for the larger goals in my typical bullheaded optimistic fashion, but it didn’t take long to realize that something had to give.I had done what I set out to do with Storytime Sunday. Art-brain and writing-brain learned to work together in a more cooperative fashion, I kept my deadlines, and I think I got some interesting pieces out of the experiment (also some crap; I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which). It also took a lot of time, particularly for the art portion, and derailed my focus on the novel I’m working through, as well as other writing opportunities with a better chance at pay.And so it is low on the priorities list. It is not gone; I’m going to try to work it into a larger content strategy that should add more variety to this blog, with things like helpful information and personal anecdotes in addition to the tales of monster pets and thinly veiled metaphors for how frustrating my day job can get at times. I’ll be slowly working on getting the blog on a regular schedule, taking it one thing at a time so that I can still focus most of my energy on my novels and the artwork related to them, the art and bridesmaid duties for my sister’s wedding, and, of course, the holidays.Anyone who knows me knows how difficult it is for me to let go of a project or idea I’ve committed to finishing, a trait that proves more often to be a weakness when faced with too many or too varied projects. There’s also an inherent anxiety to trading Storytime Sunday’s regular updates and quick turnaround for work that will take a long time before even works-in-progress will be ready to share. This is probably the result of a combination of instant gratification culture and growing up with work defined more by deadlines, quantity, and speed than defined by quality. It’s time, though, to un-train myself the bad habits learned from the college system and reinforced by my day job and instead practice delving deeply, taking my time, and focusing on quality. Also sleep. Sleep is good.In the meantime, here’s a snippet of what I’ve been up to in lieu of Storytime Sunday.My roommate and I have been hard at work on a new YouTube series. We have several episodes in various states of completion right now. It might be a little bit before we can update regularly; our work schedules are at odds and working with a half-trained cat has its special… challenges. We were actually going to release our intro episode a week before this one, but one of our shots was unusable because cats are buttheads by both nature and choice, so we’ll be reshooting and then finishing that soon. Luckily, Cricket’s a talented actress when all the scenes where she’s not cooperating are cut, and we’ve got plenty of outtakes for the future.We also started a D&D campaign! The last time I’d played was in college, so it’s great to get back with some of the old gang and roll the dice again. This is Kit, my human child rogue character with uncanny knowledge of body decomposition, more strength than either of our dwarves for some reason, and a strange magical mark on her person. She killed a wolf in the last game we played, and she’s saving its carcass to turn it into footie pajamas, like a more sick and scary version of Max from Where the Wild Things Are. She also stole a druid’s hat. She’s looking forward to scaring people with her new costume pieces.The week of October 20th was the Week of Birthdays. My Dad, roommate, and niece-by-association all had celebrations full of food and good times throughout the week. I made this Chocolate Whiskey castle cake for my roommate, who loves chocolate, whiskey, and Sour Patch Kids almost as much as he loves Chinese food. I also got him a giant thing of pepper. He eats an upsetting amount of pepper.And of course the best holiday ever happened. I’ll take any excuse to paint my face all weird without being kicked out of my workplace or other peoples’ homes.In addition to all this stuff-accompanied-by-media, I joined a Worldbuilding writers’ group that seems like it’s going to be a ton of fun, started up dance classes again, wrote more novel, started work on giant novel-related drawing, had a booth at Pagan Pride, started an instagram (@carmandaarts things if you're on this strange and confusing phone app), and ate more brownies than I should. I have no photographic evidence of any of this, so you’ll just have to take me at my word. Especially the brownies part.