I’m still here, just busy with things. The holidays are done, at least. My mom wore herself out with stress about creating the “perfect holiday” and fretting that my soul was in jeopardy because I didn’t seem to care about the true meaning of the holiday. But on Xmas Eve and Xmas Day, we just snacked and did crosswords and watched Leave the World Behind, so it was a relaxing couple of days, and now it’s in the past.
Production for the podcast is going well. I think I have most of the kinks ironed out and it’s down to a process. I can start and complete an entire episode in one afternoon, though a better episode would require days of research and reading first. I started accounts on social media to promote the podcast, then deleted the Xitter account because it kept recommending alt-right politicians and pundits to me.
The newsletter is just for fun, inconsequential. I started it on Substack, shortly before the CEO of Substack announced he sees no reason to hinder Nazis on Substack, so I transferred to Buttondown. The owner was very helpful: subscription accounts are run through Stripe, which suspended me because I write adult content, but since my newsletter’s free there’s no reason to engage Stripe at all.
I’ve been struggling with depression (what else is new), which gets in the way of writing. Regardless, I’ve written six podcast episodes and a guest blog post on face-sitting and how it lends itself to Size Fantasy pretty handily. I still have a patron waiting patiently for me to conclude this long-running commissioned series, and I haven’t written a story for myself, for fun, in several months. I’m still composing a few ongoing series with ChatGPT, which entertains me, but I don’t know if anything substantial will come of that.
It seems like the community is disinterested in anything I have to offer. Times have changed and I have not. If I’m going to continue to create, I have to seriously commit to divesting external validation from my creativity. If I still want to write or render anything, I can only do it because it’s fun for me. I can’t do it in anticipation of anyone liking it and saying so. This may be another stage in a logical progression that I’ve been following, in the footsteps of many other creators whose time has come and gone. There’s no cue or guidance for me because this is the part where we stop talking to other people and create in isolation, regardless of whether it will be seen by anyone else.
This isn’t what I wanted, but this may be where the path leads, and I chose this path.
Aborigen 
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