Happy New Year, everyone! It was a REALLY rough ride to get here, but... well... we're here.

As I take down last year's calendar and replace it with this year's, I can't help but think about my long-neglected project, Hotel Paradise. I've been public about how and why I lost my drive to write it due to a drive-by shooting nearly killing me, but now I really want to get back on track. The issue is that the track has changed. During the hiatus, plot points and character motivations/dynamics have shifted in my head, and I don't think I can really continue the story along its current path. I'm not saying I need to fully rewrite it and change character deaths or major plot points, but there are some things that need to be adjusted, corrected, or foreshadowed before I think I can keep writing the story. It's a bit different now than it was when I started writing it.

So, to that end, I'm going to start making those alterations, starting with Chapter 1. For anyone who's already read the story up to this point, don't worry, the canon events aren't changing. You don't have to worry at all about a dead character coming back to life or vice versa, I went into writing it with a full sequence of events and a "kill order" in mind, and I'm sticking to that. But there are a few lines of dialogue that don't make sense, or character actions/statements that blatantly contradict something that happens. There's even a point early on when a character is accidentally in two different areas simultaneously and I had to clumsily write around it. That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about changing.

And while I'm doing that, I'm going to keep working on chapters beyond what's already posted. I want to get back to the weekly schedule I was on at the start of things, with a backlog of chapters to post. My target is that new chapters will be added to my gallery around mid to late February, once all the editing to previous chapters is finished and I have a pile of new content. I'm not yet sure if I'll simply replace the existing submission files or move what's currently in my gallery to scraps and upload the new, corrected versions as new submissions.

Speaking of my gallery, I plan to clear it out. To put it simply there's stuff in there that just doesn't fit with my existing interests anymore, stuff that never went anywhere, or characters that I just never did anything with. Some of it will go to scraps, some of it will disappear entirely. I'm debating selling off some of the more abandoned characters to get myself some funds for the winter, since if they've been in my gallery for 7-8 years and I've never used them for anything at all, there's no real reason to hold on to them when somebody else could actually put that character to use.

I also have a comic that I'd like to start working on, which I believe I've mentioned before. "Sheepish", a slice-of-life romantic comedy thing about a sheep named Ewan who's secretly in love with his best friend, a tiger named Thomas. As the two of them move on to college, things become complicated for Ewan when Thomas introduces him to his girlfriend, a shiba inu named Maria, and Ewan himself ends up in a relationship with a zebra named Kurt. I've had these characters (and more) and some fun plotlines in mind for years now, and with my art practice starting to pay off, I think I want to try actually putting things on paper.

Speaking of that art practice, I have a Bluesky account where I've been posting a daily Pokemon sketch for over two years now. It's not technically a furry account, and is very SFW (I don't even cuss on it!), but for anyone who's interested I'm going to add a link to it on my profile page. I'd start posting the sketches on this gallery as well, but with over 700 of them done by this point, that would be a bit of an undertaking. I'll do it if there's demand, though. >.>

I think that's about it for now. Happy 2026, everyone! May this year find a way to be better than the last! (Granted, that's a pretty low bar...)

EDIT 1/3/2026: welp