27/02-2023 - Monday
A quiet month
Good evening, sharks. Hope you’re all doing well despite these challenging winter months. I haven’t written a lot of entries this month (aside from promoting events.) Truthfully, February is always a very challenging month for me every year. It’s at the very tailend of long, dark winter months and it’s when I finally wonder how much more of this depression I can take. Then comes the sun and spring and I forget all about it until next year. I’m trying my best to stay on top of things, but I have to admit I’m very drained from the constant hustling. I’m not good at promoting myself and I wish I didn’t have to constantly create and be present. I wish it was a choice, not mandatory.
I lack the energy to do any proper write-ups this month, but I will share the three books I managed to get through and briefly what I thought of each one. My ambitions were to tackle more books, but as already mentioned, this month was not kind to me.
The books
First out was A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. I picked this up because it was so warmly recommended by a book person I follow on insta. He could not praise this enough as a comfort read and the premise sounded interesting enough. Yet I have to admit I never really jived with this book. I think the writing style wasn’t really my cup of tea. Beautiful cover art, though.
Then I jumped into How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix. Now for those of you who’ve followed me for a while, you know I could not gush enough about My Best Friend’s Exorcism. So when I heard this guy was about to release a new book, I ran to the bookstore. Despite being an easy read, this took me two weeks. Several times I got so frustrated with the characters I had to put the book down and do something else. Parts of it were surprisingly touching and made me cry, but the main character and her brother had me yelling into pillows. Not a bad book by any means, just very demanding for me personally.
Last but absolutely not least was Patricia Wants to Cuddle by Samantha Allen. I picked this up after discovering it through a mutual of mine. And boy am I glad I did. The premise is so silly but I found myself invested from the very first page. If you, like me, both grew up with and really despise reality TV, this might be a good pick. Very fast read to boot.
Some work in progress
Before I wrap this up, I’ll throw in some WIPs from this month, as well as a couple of compilations of many WIPs from the last year +. It’s sad to see so much stuff not finished, and this isn’t even all the sketches I have laying around.
PS: We raised over 3,5K dollars for charity at the beginning of the month. Isn’t that positively wild? Thank you to everyon who contributed.
This Friday I am getting the promised charity tattoo, but who knows how much I can share, since it’s gonna be NSFW! Perhaps I’ll dare to show it on twitter as well as in a future newsletter - with proper warnings.
And one final reminder, I have a podcast now!
Take care of one another.
-Jaws