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bladesparkIn this issue:
Subscription renewals
I was a pirate (and fought a kraken while riding a dragon!)
Everfree happened also
Hey, cat!
Etsy shop update
Silicone plushes are the new hotness
Subscription renewals
I have sent out bills to everybody who's already signed up! For the rest of you, if you want to support my writing, you can sign up to pay a single annual payment and get the following rewards:
$1 a month ($12)
-Early access to all finished stories
-Access to a private channel on my discord
-First pick opportunities, input when I can't decide what to write, etc.
This can all be a bit irregular, and has been on the low side lately, as I'm busybusybusy, but yanno, it's a dollar, you get what you pay for. :D
$5 a month ($60)
-All of the above
-A physical copy of every book I publish for no additional charge. (Opt-in, I will ask rather than just mail you books you may not want cluttering up the place. At LEAST one "real book" a year, plus zines, anthologies, etc.)
$20 a month ($240)
-All of the above
-Story commissions at 3 cents a word, so theoretically 750 words every month.
Currently FULL because I am burnt out on commissions and can't add anybody else, sorry!
If this sounds cool to you, leave a comment here, or drop me an e-mail, discord DM, smoke signal, carrier pigeon, etc.
And THANK YOU so much to everybody who does support me. It is beer money, not survival money, but having a little bit of extra personal cash is so great. <3
I was a pirate
(and fought a kraken while riding a dragon!)
Tortuga Nights is a three day Pirate event held not far from where I live. Picture a ren fair, but with nautical flavor and a lot more booze. (Yes, I know ren fairs have a lot of booze. More booze than that.) It's held in a wooded area near a river, so there are even some actual boats. I was invited to share a booth with a friend of mine who's vended there for years, and I had a pretty damn good time.
Unfortunately it wasn't very profitable. I did better than break even, but not "three days of logistical nightmare" better. The event was fun but it was organized to party not to vend, and the location made the load in and out a pain. There were only single-lane, muddy roads that were filled up with pirates with nowhere to park and load in or out conveniently, and the parking space was about a mile from the event, in somebody's field. They had golf carts so people who couldn't walk a mile could still participate, but that didn't help me any. Most of the vendors were camping there, and set up the day before the event started, but I didn't have that option either. I had to just deal with trying to get a car through the crowd.
That is, however, how I ended up engaged in Epic Combat.
Since by the end of day two it was clear that I should probably be spending my time making Etsy listings, not shilling smut to pirates, however much joy the latter might bring, I decided to pack up the booth on Saturday night and not stick around for Sunday, the third day of the event. So I walked out to get my car and prepared to try to get it close enough to the booth for loading up my stuff to be reasonable.
I drive a '96 Land Cruiser, which if you don't know cars is an ancient monster of an SUV. It was a very, very nice vehicle when new; the engine is solid as a rock, it's got 200k miles on it and it's probably good for another 200k. But the AC no longer works, various other bits are falling apart, it leaks when it rains, including into the interior panels so the doors slosh sometimes, and it gets maybe 10 miles to the gallon. There's no car payment, though, and it can haul everything all three of us need for a week spent camping in luxury at an undeveloped campsite, so it's a great machine.
And of course it's great for hauling all the merch, tables, and whatever else I need to vend at outdoor events where nothing is provided but a square of grass.
It also, though, idles at about 60 decibels. It is LOUD.
Picture the scene: a wooded area with a tangle of dirt roads running through it. Tents and mock ships and bits of dock and deck and nautical brick-a-brack are everywhere. It's dark, sunset was long ago and no hint of light remains. There are some lights; vendor booths brightly illuminated, ships carrying lanterns, reveling pirates in anachronistic glowstick jewelry or draped in fairy lights. No street lights, though, no overall illumination, just an ocean of drunken humanity irregularly spotted with rainbow glows, festive and loud and full of songs and shouts and chants.
Through this slowly eases a behemoth vehicle, headlights dimmed, but on, because there are no street lights. The engine is a low, profound rumble. Pirates sometimes scatter, but mostly just go their way, drifting in brownian motion that the car sometimes nudges aside.
One pirate, seeing the twin-glowing eyes of the car, hearing the rumble, shouts "A dragon! A dragon approaches!"
Suddenly the whole laughing, drunken crowd is shouting it. "Dragon! The dragon! Make way for the dragon!"
So the pirates make, and I reach the vending area and load up my gear.
As I finish and climb into the car to take my dragon and my goods home, though, I hear another shout.
"Make way for the Kraken!"
This is repeated too, and other cries come with. "Beware the kraken!" "Run for your lives!" "Chtulhu! Cthulhu has risen from the deep!" "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fatagn!"
I start the car, and as the headlights come on, they illuminate what has just rounded the corner before me: somebody wearing an inflatable giant squid costume. The kraken itself, it seems, standing in my path.
The road is lined on either side with tents. My car pulled into one of the only spots to pull aside and now I need to pull out and go down that road to home. The kraken, however, also needs the space for its wide skirt of tentacles, and meanwhile we are both surrounded by the reveling throng.
At least one of which had been around when I drove in, for somebody suddenly shouts, "The dragon verses the kraken!" Cheers and shouts rise, that call too repeated, and the kraken seems to take the challenge to heart. The monster lowers its head at me, and scrapes two tentacles at the ground, miming a bull about to charge. Battle, it seems, is about to be joined.
I rev the engine, my dragon roaring loudly.
At the roar the kraken jumps, then scuttles aside, wedging itself into the space between two tents, head tilted so that one giant eye peers out at me.
So with cheers and laughter ringing all around, I take my foot off the brake and move forward, my dragon rumbling as I make my way out of the pirate camp and towards home.
Everfree happened also
Nothing there was quite as epic, admittedly, but it was both easier to vend and much more profitable. And still very fun! I especially liked meeting some old FimFiction friends in person and managing to sell a few ponyfic zines. Though the real money was of course in the plushes. Didn't quite sell out, but came pretty close.
Hey, cat!
Kali naps there all the time, though Ged sometimes steals the spot while she's somewhere else.
Etsy shop update
Since I had a few things leftover from Everfree, and a loooooot from Tortuga, I've updated my Etsy shop with, uh... some stuff? Lol. (There's 163 active listings currently.)
So if you want plushes, costume tails or ears, silicone fidgets, silicone sex toys, handmade zines, or small resin art dolls, all of that is here.
Silicone plushes are the new hotness
For one last bit of fun news, I though I'd share my latest brainstorm. I'm combining my two main crafting lines by using ground up scrap silicone to stuff plushes.
It's like the weight of beanie pellets, but firmer, it doesn't move around. It's somewhat heavier, too, and of course squishier. My first test I just chopped up silicone as small as I could, so it was a little lumpy and odd, but still pretty nice. And of course it's ideal for plushes with more, ah, adult features. :D
I have also been experimenting with silicone foam. This gives a quite different result from ground silicone, but it's a great way to make plushes solid, firm, and also have some give and bounce.
So far so good on both fronts, I've finished a test plush of each, though the foam is just a pair of Loonakit (ball plushes.) The dragoness I tested the ground silicone on has already found a new home, but I'll be putting the test Loonakits up on Etsy sometime soon.
That's not remotely everything I've been doing lately, so as always I'll note that the best way to follow me currently is on Discord, you can find my server here, and the next best is probably on a gallery site such as Furaffinity, Deviantart, Inkbunny, or Weasel. I am bladespark on all those, same as here!
Subscription renewals
I was a pirate (and fought a kraken while riding a dragon!)
Everfree happened also
Hey, cat!
Etsy shop update
Silicone plushes are the new hotness
Subscription renewals
I have sent out bills to everybody who's already signed up! For the rest of you, if you want to support my writing, you can sign up to pay a single annual payment and get the following rewards:
$1 a month ($12)
-Early access to all finished stories
-Access to a private channel on my discord
-First pick opportunities, input when I can't decide what to write, etc.
This can all be a bit irregular, and has been on the low side lately, as I'm busybusybusy, but yanno, it's a dollar, you get what you pay for. :D
$5 a month ($60)
-All of the above
-A physical copy of every book I publish for no additional charge. (Opt-in, I will ask rather than just mail you books you may not want cluttering up the place. At LEAST one "real book" a year, plus zines, anthologies, etc.)
-All of the above
-Story commissions at 3 cents a word, so theoretically 750 words every month.
Currently FULL because I am burnt out on commissions and can't add anybody else, sorry!
If this sounds cool to you, leave a comment here, or drop me an e-mail, discord DM, smoke signal, carrier pigeon, etc.
And THANK YOU so much to everybody who does support me. It is beer money, not survival money, but having a little bit of extra personal cash is so great. <3
I was a pirate
(and fought a kraken while riding a dragon!)
Tortuga Nights is a three day Pirate event held not far from where I live. Picture a ren fair, but with nautical flavor and a lot more booze. (Yes, I know ren fairs have a lot of booze. More booze than that.) It's held in a wooded area near a river, so there are even some actual boats. I was invited to share a booth with a friend of mine who's vended there for years, and I had a pretty damn good time.
Unfortunately it wasn't very profitable. I did better than break even, but not "three days of logistical nightmare" better. The event was fun but it was organized to party not to vend, and the location made the load in and out a pain. There were only single-lane, muddy roads that were filled up with pirates with nowhere to park and load in or out conveniently, and the parking space was about a mile from the event, in somebody's field. They had golf carts so people who couldn't walk a mile could still participate, but that didn't help me any. Most of the vendors were camping there, and set up the day before the event started, but I didn't have that option either. I had to just deal with trying to get a car through the crowd.
That is, however, how I ended up engaged in Epic Combat.
Since by the end of day two it was clear that I should probably be spending my time making Etsy listings, not shilling smut to pirates, however much joy the latter might bring, I decided to pack up the booth on Saturday night and not stick around for Sunday, the third day of the event. So I walked out to get my car and prepared to try to get it close enough to the booth for loading up my stuff to be reasonable.
I drive a '96 Land Cruiser, which if you don't know cars is an ancient monster of an SUV. It was a very, very nice vehicle when new; the engine is solid as a rock, it's got 200k miles on it and it's probably good for another 200k. But the AC no longer works, various other bits are falling apart, it leaks when it rains, including into the interior panels so the doors slosh sometimes, and it gets maybe 10 miles to the gallon. There's no car payment, though, and it can haul everything all three of us need for a week spent camping in luxury at an undeveloped campsite, so it's a great machine.
And of course it's great for hauling all the merch, tables, and whatever else I need to vend at outdoor events where nothing is provided but a square of grass.
It also, though, idles at about 60 decibels. It is LOUD.
Picture the scene: a wooded area with a tangle of dirt roads running through it. Tents and mock ships and bits of dock and deck and nautical brick-a-brack are everywhere. It's dark, sunset was long ago and no hint of light remains. There are some lights; vendor booths brightly illuminated, ships carrying lanterns, reveling pirates in anachronistic glowstick jewelry or draped in fairy lights. No street lights, though, no overall illumination, just an ocean of drunken humanity irregularly spotted with rainbow glows, festive and loud and full of songs and shouts and chants.
Through this slowly eases a behemoth vehicle, headlights dimmed, but on, because there are no street lights. The engine is a low, profound rumble. Pirates sometimes scatter, but mostly just go their way, drifting in brownian motion that the car sometimes nudges aside.
One pirate, seeing the twin-glowing eyes of the car, hearing the rumble, shouts "A dragon! A dragon approaches!"
Suddenly the whole laughing, drunken crowd is shouting it. "Dragon! The dragon! Make way for the dragon!"
So the pirates make, and I reach the vending area and load up my gear.
As I finish and climb into the car to take my dragon and my goods home, though, I hear another shout.
"Make way for the Kraken!"
This is repeated too, and other cries come with. "Beware the kraken!" "Run for your lives!" "Chtulhu! Cthulhu has risen from the deep!" "Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fatagn!"
I start the car, and as the headlights come on, they illuminate what has just rounded the corner before me: somebody wearing an inflatable giant squid costume. The kraken itself, it seems, standing in my path.
The road is lined on either side with tents. My car pulled into one of the only spots to pull aside and now I need to pull out and go down that road to home. The kraken, however, also needs the space for its wide skirt of tentacles, and meanwhile we are both surrounded by the reveling throng.
At least one of which had been around when I drove in, for somebody suddenly shouts, "The dragon verses the kraken!" Cheers and shouts rise, that call too repeated, and the kraken seems to take the challenge to heart. The monster lowers its head at me, and scrapes two tentacles at the ground, miming a bull about to charge. Battle, it seems, is about to be joined.
I rev the engine, my dragon roaring loudly.
At the roar the kraken jumps, then scuttles aside, wedging itself into the space between two tents, head tilted so that one giant eye peers out at me.
So with cheers and laughter ringing all around, I take my foot off the brake and move forward, my dragon rumbling as I make my way out of the pirate camp and towards home.
Everfree happened also
Nothing there was quite as epic, admittedly, but it was both easier to vend and much more profitable. And still very fun! I especially liked meeting some old FimFiction friends in person and managing to sell a few ponyfic zines. Though the real money was of course in the plushes. Didn't quite sell out, but came pretty close.
Hey, cat!
Kali naps there all the time, though Ged sometimes steals the spot while she's somewhere else.
Etsy shop update
Since I had a few things leftover from Everfree, and a loooooot from Tortuga, I've updated my Etsy shop with, uh... some stuff? Lol. (There's 163 active listings currently.)
So if you want plushes, costume tails or ears, silicone fidgets, silicone sex toys, handmade zines, or small resin art dolls, all of that is here.
Silicone plushes are the new hotness
For one last bit of fun news, I though I'd share my latest brainstorm. I'm combining my two main crafting lines by using ground up scrap silicone to stuff plushes.
It's like the weight of beanie pellets, but firmer, it doesn't move around. It's somewhat heavier, too, and of course squishier. My first test I just chopped up silicone as small as I could, so it was a little lumpy and odd, but still pretty nice. And of course it's ideal for plushes with more, ah, adult features. :D
I have also been experimenting with silicone foam. This gives a quite different result from ground silicone, but it's a great way to make plushes solid, firm, and also have some give and bounce.
So far so good on both fronts, I've finished a test plush of each, though the foam is just a pair of Loonakit (ball plushes.) The dragoness I tested the ground silicone on has already found a new home, but I'll be putting the test Loonakits up on Etsy sometime soon.
That's not remotely everything I've been doing lately, so as always I'll note that the best way to follow me currently is on Discord, you can find my server here, and the next best is probably on a gallery site such as Furaffinity, Deviantart, Inkbunny, or Weasel. I am bladespark on all those, same as here!
no subject
Date: 2023-10-07 02:23 am (UTC)lolol Love it.
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Date: 2023-10-07 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-09 04:57 am (UTC)