RELAX, MAMMAL!

wrote a little more about this on the site, but all 34(!!!) remaining Brainchild chapter 4 pages are completely penciled, and I'll be posting these black-and-white roughs on a weekly schedule for the next several months on Patreon (3 USD/mo) for anyone who'd like to read ahead, with 5 whole pages up there already!!! wowie!!

*sound of me blowing dust off of this blog*

okay! so: to cut to the heart of the matter of what's been going on with me for the past 2-3 years:

i lost my job. my cat died. my rabbit died. my dad died. i was left with a home to sell and an estate to manage. i had several friends in crisis situations who i needed to mobilize for. my wife and i moved (this one--good!! but not any less exhausting from a logistical standpoint, as it turns out). a million tiny cracks of wear and tear weathered and eroded my life. after the move--approximately one year ago, at the tail end of all this--i needed to basically fuck around with zero creative stakes riding on me and hibernate for a year. which i'm glad i did, so that i could fucking survive, but: the longer i spent hibernating, the heavier the albatross of Brainchild weighted down my neck. every day spent away from it furthered the problem of not knowing how to return to it and only served to widen the chasm between the point where i stood in its chronology and the enormity and scope of the whole story that i, more than anything, so desperately want to tell to completion.

at some point in the past couple of months, the dam broke in me again and I realized how, more than i needed to sit around wringing my hands about this stupid shit, i once again needed so badly to Try. so for the immediate timeline of the next several months, my primary goal is finishing Brainchild chapter 4--currently I've penciled 19/~30 of the remaining pages, and once the ENTIRE chapter is wrapped up behind the scenes, I'll be queuing it up to post on a bi-weekly schedule and letting it run to completion. this will bring the total page count to over 250(!!!), which will serve as an awesome "Book One" of sorts. doing some kind of print run of all these pages is a very tantalizing idea for the near future...

however. the major Thing remains that the end of chapter 4 is not the end of the story. it is so, so unfathomably not even close to the end of the story. SO!! while i leave my thoughts and my future, to the best of my ability, open to the potential to continue Brainchild as a webcomic, I'm also picking away behind the scenes at a proposal for another avenue, a different format for this story to occupy. this is where you'll have to allow me to still be tight-lipped for a while, because i'm a little bit terrified about it, and terrified of over-promising at this point, but it's also making me so so so very Insaneified with renewed passion and excitement and the glimmering promise of getting to do something VERY cool.

on that tangent, i realized i've also very much been mentally at war with the concept of making myself Available on Social Media, and with trying to increasingly Micro-size shrink and fit and shave my presence and myself and my ""content"" (blegh) into a posting + sharing format fundamentally out of step with the type of old-school Macro storytelling world of "just telling a long-ass serialized story" i naturally inhabit. part of my "fucking around" cycle of ~2025 purely involved letting myself goof around on tumblr again, and man. turns out, i still fucking love tumblr? like, i'm on bluesky and stuff but what I really yearn for is a good ol' unlimited-and-unfettered-by-character-constraints Blog Post. just cramming a whole bunch of thoughts and sketches and ideas in there willy nilly. so my other soft goal is to really start using this Space as a Home again, and to re-engage with the concept of "an audience" in a way that feels more like a chill back-and-forth and less like standing on display in an arena for spectating bloodsports. i wanna post sketch dumps again!! i want to answer OC asks!!! so i intend to breathe life back into the internet as i want to make it, and take all my own dumb self-enforced limiters off, and do exactly that here. and, to really at last allow myself have fun with it, I will also be tipping my hand and teasing just SOME of the very-long-held, very close-to-my-chest spoilers i sit upon. because i would like to build some hype, and i have waited...long...enough. lol.