We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like every other day I’m doing something for it or coming up with something for it to do. The quizzes are my big push right now; I’m done with the coding for the peltedverse quiz, I just need to finish the art. Then I can move on to the Kherishdar quiz, which is going to be fun.
I feel like every time I figure out a quiz, I try to do something bigger/fancier for the following one. The Peltedverse one is up to almost a month of development time at this point!
My hope, of course, is that these quizzes will get passed around and help existing fans recruit friends, and convert curious people into fans. But if they’re only ever present as evidence of me learning to do cool stuff, I’m good with that too. I don’t mind my website representing a skill-stack portfolio.
Anyway, eventually I’d like the quiz node to have other toys, like name generators and color books I can use to create character generators (see the screenshot). If you have ideas for quizzes or toys, let me know! I might put it on my list.
I’m also, somehow, sticking with my scanning project this time, and wow, is that a way to unearth all sorts of complicated emotions. Seeing stories that were discarded; seeing stories that are still with me after decades; remembering what it was like to be that person; paging through drawings done for and of people who’ve passed out of my life, and through drawings done for and of people who are still in it (hi EngineerSam, Tufty, Stryker!). There are meta-conversations in some of these old books that are me wrestling with my inability to penetrate trad-publishing that make me feel great pity for Younger Me… and meta-conversations that make me marvel at her resilience, and wonder if I am still capable of that level of determination. I probably am.
My next writing project, as I mentioned is Kherishdar 5, which is probably about 2/3rds done. (I hope. It’s already bigger than I planned.) I’m trying to be philosophical about having lost nearly four months of writing time to my shoulder injury, which I’m still wrestling because it wasn’t so much an injury as an indicator of a pre-existing, long-term injury state: it turns out if you spend decades accumulating repetitive stress, when that part of your body fails you can’t fix it by treating the latest in a long history of similar micro-injuries. You have to treat the disease state. Decades of sitting in front of a computer have seriously compromised my shoulders, so I’m trying to address that, slowly and holistically, mostly by gentle daily exercise in water. The root of the problem is that weak chest and shoulder muscles can’t resist injury well, but when you try to strengthen already irritated muscles with exercise, you re-hurt yourself. Water’s a great way to get around some of that. If I can heal my upper body, that should, slowly, resolve the neuralgia that’s affecting my fingers. Such a mess!
I think a lot about the fact that you probably either think you are your body, or think you’re in your body, and both these approaches lead to their own particular problems. But those problems inevitably come home to roost, and then it’s time to handle them.
Sales are bad lately, but I feel cheerful about everything anyway. The long (injury-enforced) break from writing has reminded me how much I love my work. I love seeing the evidence that stories I was developing 25+ years ago are now on the shelves and delighting readers. I love watching my drawing skills progress over the decades. I am grateful for my superfan community, and my casual readers and all the people who talk about Mindtouch on tumblr and the handful of people who (!) buy my books from a mall boutique. I love being able to code my own website again! I don’t control everything (and what a burden it would be if I could), but I have a little multi-world empire to which I can escape, and leave a trail for others to follow if they care to, and they do! How cool is that, seriously. 💛
Anyway, that’s where I’m at! I hope you’re looking forward to more Jokka and more Kherishdar and more quizzes/toys!
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.
