i've had this very sweet message sitting in my inbox for months, because it took this long for me to get over myself and reread all of my original stories... they were all made within the span of 2020-2022, usually in a very body-destroying timeframe. it can be emotionally difficult for me to reread them for this and a few other reasons.

but i'm glad i revisited them, honestly. i still like them very much, and they all hold up way better than my brain seemed to remember. so, without further ado, i'll take this time to jot down some of my feelings for each of my projects, starting with...

elysium (2020): this was my first original story. it's also the one i have had the most complicated feelings about before, during, and after making it. i think it's kind of easy, at least for someone like me, for your own perception of your older works to get funhouse mirror'd over time in your memorybanks... especially when any kind of perceived audience reception is tangled up in in there.

sure, i wish that gray i used was a lil more hueshifted in some direction. and the plot/characters are a lot more shallow than i ended up preferring as i continued writing stories. but i still love elysium, overall. it hits. it's lovely.

amy really is cute when i don't have a bunch of people screaming in my ear about bug fables. and jax is simultaneously cartoonishly evil, but has more small touches of consideration than i recalled. and while cecil is actually the least "interesting" main character to me as an author, i can understand people gravitating to him when it's still pretty damn rare to find his archetype in the wild.

when i was working on this project, i distinctly remember wishing at least one person would come out of it hateshipping jax and cecil. i think that person ended up being me. it's more textual than i thought, even if the story itself doesn't linger on it.

i am glad i could mentally heal enough, over time, to reread it with way less bias. thank you, elysium. i wouldn't be where i am now without you.

ruin & magnum opus (2020): lot of milestones with this one. the columbos remain very sentimentally important to me, but diego especially. every day of my life i wish i made char's dick design a bit sexier to me. i also had a ton of fun drawing char using his shadowmancy, i kinda wish i had done that more. i still love how much he sucks, though. he sucks so bad. ehehe~ <3

katie, my sweetiepie angel... i had a really hard time writing her, at first, until i realized she should develop more of a freaking Spine. everything clicked into place pretty quickly after that. she starts out with buckteeth, gets braces, and ends up filing her teeth into a tooth gap anyway. imprinting on diego, whether she realizes it or not...

speaking of, i forgot the first line he ever says is, technically, "hoo-hoo". he's so. (clenching my fists) it's also pretty funny how much more noticeably i have fun with the visuals the moment diego shows up. my priorities.

diego put so much effort into nudging katie towards her sexual awakening, but she just ended up fanatically devoted to her father. tragic... even though he absolutely still checks in on her from afar, from time to time......................

his origin story in magnum opus is also still very fun. my gay little love letter to my muse. he's my #1 most difficult character to draw, so i rarely draw him—but i also randomly get struck with inspiration to do so, and he's very insistent about it. bastard.

i remember wishing i could have given ernest more screentime in either story, but honestly, it suits him to take a backseat. my very first doujinshi, error terror (2018), starred ernesto—so it feels like a very cute little bow to tie on everything to have ernest as such an overt nod to my roots, despite him not being in the limelight. i'm smiling about it.

ruin's palette looks nice, but it was fucking hell to work with in ways that would be difficult to explain. nobody was forcing me to stick to palettes that rigidly. even during night scenes etc, i still used the same colors with alternate layer modes/filters. it just makes my brain happy to craft a palette that works, i suppose.

the magic system in this setting is corny, but in a way that i am endeared to. it's cute. i like it. i'm still proud of myself for putting ruin out there.

cyan & hardware (2021): here it is. my most babied and intricate setting/cast, originally conceived circa ~2014. with a completely different protagonist and story. thaddeus' space pirate crew is the only functionally unchanged component (other than their designs).

i did not need to make the linework this polished. it looks beautiful, but it was killing me, and every project after cyan has noticeably less "pristine" lines for this reason, lmao. the palette remains one of my favorites, though. it's so juicy!

there's some action sequences that are kinda hard to parse, even for me. this is the case for the majority of my stories, though. dmitri and thaddeus' tussle with the pen light near the finale is the most glaring example. comics are hard!!!!! it's okay.

when i was rereading, i remarked to my wife "why is he like this" re: dmitri, even though i wrote him that way. he is so funny. they probably still don't have words for what's wrong with him, even in that far-flung setting. love him so much.

cortez's introduction still hits me right in the feelings. thaddeus is hysterical from the very beginning. he is actively attempting to weaponize dmitri's obvious attraction to him when they first meet, but it is still insane of him to just shove his foot in the kid's mouth like that. you're not fooling anybody, old man.

i love..................... aliens.......... i grew up inundated in every sci-fi franchise insisting that any spacefaring alien species Must be blue humans or utterly hideous, coupled with an overt lack of curiosity for anything that doesn't think or act exactly like a human and/or dog. me feeing personally incensed about this remains the heart and soul of the spaceshit setting. you really can just make your own thing with blackjack and hookers.

cyan remains my most sentimentally important work. i'm still so happy people can read it with their eyeballs.

hardware was, originally, a timed-exclusive for the physical version of cyan. i always intended to release it digitally afterwards, and was upfront about this. i stopped shipping out comics and merchandise, in general, at some point. the logistics of storing+shipping stuff just got way too convoluted and expensive over time, especially internationally. i still have the remainder of my cyan & memento mori issues, somewhere. i just don't realistically know how to get them to people anymore.

cradle, my VN, is in the same spaceshit setting, with a different cast. please continue to wait warmly.

undefined (2021): this project jumpscared me when i was trying to work on devastation, ruin's sequel, instead. so i ended up finishing undefined first. lmfao. god.

it's a lovely palette, with relatively unusual colors for me to gravitate towards actually using. i got very experimental with this comic, overall. color-coded font colors for each character, and getting way more aggressive with layer filters.

the first page is also noticeably messier than the rest of the comic. whenever i would start up a new story, making the art for any first page was always particularly hard. it'd set the tone for the rest of the story, and it wasn't unusual for me to return to it as i worked to nitpick at it (especially if i had adjusted the project's overall palette since).

so, with undefined, i was burnt out enough already after churning out cyan that i was like "i just need to keep moving". i honestly wish i had remained messier throughout. the character/gesture of some linework in particular sequences got sanded away.

but i'm overall very satisfied with this project. salem and penny's dynamic is... still so wonderfully messy to me. i'm so cool and smart. prototype salem is moe in a way i forgot about. puppy.

i can also understand why people assumed salem fucked up his reprogramming on purpose, i think i could have conveyed things going "wrong" a little more clearly, at least via dialogue. inc'est la vie.

devastation (2021): ruin's palette remained extremely hard for me to work with, because i stubbornly insisted on adhering to it in the sequel (with some necessary additions). but it looks fuckin awesome. it's also apparent from the very beginning how much more confidently i was drawing pretty much everything compared to ~a year before, even if the lines are "messier". lovely.

luci was incredibly difficult, but rewarding to write. i always knew i wanted its true intentions/feelings to at least initially feel ambiguous. i was really interested in exploring a character that was primed from birth to deceive everyone around it, including its own parents who raised it that way.

xavi's fucked up speech patterns were really funny to sprinkle throughout. i didn't want them to overstay their welcome, and i'm sure there's at least some readers out there who never even picked up on it. plus, the handful of dialogue references to how supremely fucked up the columbo family tree is remain hilarious ("our father...").

dev. what do i say about dev. i love him very much. his matching tattoo with xavi is meant to evoke chains/shackles, stylized intentionally after the charcoal logo. gayest shit i've ever designed.

my multi-generational incest buffet. the concert sequence is fucking insane (positive), this was before i even started actually making my own music. i was very shy about the lyrics, at the time. i think they're still pretty great, though they might be a bit awkward to actually adapt to a consistent rhythm.

i'm not actually too upset about barely including delta/caspian in the narrative, in hindsight. it suits them. delta's design is still crazy sexy tho. help, i'm too good at character design, and i have more erotic characters than i can afford to give attention to in my stories </3

i don't actually imagine i'll get around to expanding on this setting in an official, narrative-style capacity. but i still like rotating aspects of it in my mind palace at times. i need to draw lich!char & katarina again at some point, their outfits at the end are entirely temporary & therefore kind of frumpy. unacceptable.

thank you for everything, ruin & devastation. i love you.

ellipsis (2022): this is my most recent work, and it's also the one i still personally feel is my strongest. the narration style is completely different from my typical approach, and the palette is even more heavily stylized than i'd ever worked with before.

i love that you only ever see ada's perspective. maybe she's right about everything. maybe she isn't. the beauty of ambiguity, my favorite playground, and far more of a focal point in this narrative than usual.

crazy first page to cold open with, and an even crazier sequence following it. the page with the grandfather clock turned out exactly how i'd envisioned it, when initially scripting. a rarity. the page with the mirrored reflection of zieg was a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS TO MAKE. it's still sexy. you're welcome.

rereading all of these made me realize that i'm insane for attempting to sweep my beautiful narratives under the rug like this for so long. why the hell doesn't my website have individual pages for each story. What's my problem. i'll get around to it.

to everyone that has ever been touched by any of my stories, original or otherwise... from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much.

(belatedly) thank you. it's a concept/emotional landscape that remains very precious to me. i think there is something so sacred and beautiful about the passion and enthusiasm that characters can inspire in someone... regardless of medium.

there are many concepts, fragments of stories, and specific dynamics that have tugged at me, over the years. the most formative of them burrowed into me long before i ever felt i had the skill or mental faculties to even articulate what i liked about them, let alone depict it.

some of them i return to frequently, such as pokemon—long after i've lost interest in the modern official franchise. when i feel like it, anyway.

but others... it can take me a while to feel like i know what i want to communicate about something, whether i first saw it 1 or 15 years ago. and when a composition does fall into place for me, to that effect, i do everything in my power to honor exactly what i was feeling, whenever such a thing first sunk its teeth into me.

my vision, crystallized. there's a bioshock piece from 2021 i'm still extremely satisfied with, as an example. and i often end up feeling like i have nothing left to say about a particular topic, afterwards, which is what happened here.

sometimes it takes multiple attempts. sometimes i end up finding more and more angles to ponder in the process.

regardless, i am always happy to share whatever i've made. someone out there may feel similarly, even if i never hear about it. and there is no higher honor to me, personally, than finding a stranger on the internet whose specific love for something harmonizes with your own.

if you're talking about diego, who pascal has nothing to do with: diego can see and go anywhere, without exception. he just doesn't really give a fuck about my futuristic setting in particular, so he barely ever touches it. there's an infinite amount of universes and timelines diego ignores due to arbitrarily finding them uninteresting... he is a very whimsical creature, after all. and while he'd have the faculties to keep tabs on absolutely everything, his attention span is another matter entirely.

he's also generally not "affected" by any setting he chooses to poke his nose into directly, but often intentionally alters his appearance/mannerisms accordingly (if he feels like it). he's extra like that.

but if he's showing up via a particular medium, such as an electronic display vs. a billboard, it would legitimately "feel" different on his end of things, even if it wouldn't directly impact his abilities.

you are asking the wrong person. i don't want my art to be "noticed." i actually wish i could completely opt out of having my art shoved in front of others via recommended feed nonsense.

i love having a niche. i love it when my work finds the people who would resonate with it. i go out of my way to decline commission inquiries that do not suit my skillset and/or interests. i have no aspirations of becoming a Public Figure in any capacity. i only care about my fellow perverts.

i am actively distressed by watching other creators perpetuate the notion that artwork of theirs has "flopped". i understand the mechanics of capitalism that have led people to this perspective, but i still abhor it. that piece wouldn't have existed if you didn't make it, and that's still worth celebrating! to this day, i still receive the occasional message from strangers who have adored my artwork for years, without me ever knowing a damn thing about it. you cannot distill how anyone on the internet might feel about your heartfelt creation down to "number go up". you also will never truly know the full extent of your true audience, or your lasting impact on the world around you.

i spent many years "posting into the void" on tumblr. it's not like it was never lonely, or isolating. but i kept making things, even if i felt like they were silly, or that no one else would ever want to see them. and it took me a very long time to even truly like what i was making consistently. and i feel like having the lived history+perspective of creating something, regardless of whether anyone actually ever interacts with it—let alone seems to like it—is crucial to developing a strong sense of artistic identity.

but, as for your other question, i have also clickwalled my nsfw art for many years before ever switching to bsky. i never had a single issue with clickwalled stuff on twitter (in fact, i only ever got bonked over non-clickwalled nsfw art), and at least so far, i have not had issues with clickwalled posts on bsky either. if you're tired of the song and dance of remaking accounts, it's worth a shot!

i mean, i've been working on a VN! i finished all the writing earlier this year, so i can at least talk about that aspect of it.

prose in visual novels isn't always identically constructed to conventional novels (in particular, there's often less ceremony around characters speaking, since you can just look at their sprite/name label)... but it was still a very interesting challenge to make a serious, concerted effort to write a narrative in prose, for once.

i've written things before, though nothing very long. some fanfics, here and there, beyond schoolwork. a lot of unfinished stuff. fair bit of poetry and lyricwriting at this point, too.

but as a storyteller, i prefer writing shorter stories. i am very accustomed to "trimming the fat" with any of my narratives, pruning and rewriting things until i'm satisfied. i found this especially important to do when making comics, largely to reduce the overall pagecount/amount of work i'd have to do visually.

i needed to slow down more than usual, pacing-wise, when writing my VN. it's not even an especially long one, regardless, but i had to deliberately linger more than usual, which took some adjustment. the pace i would have naturally settled on was far too breakneck for this project. i ended up enjoying the process, though. i learned a lot.

though, to answer your question more directly... i think my stories could still work, largely, in text format. they would just come across differently. i mean, simply put, i'm a significantly more experienced cartoonist and character designer than novelist, even as someone who likes my own prose.

i believe the various disciplines i've dabbled in, however unevenly, go down smoother when my visual art is somehow involved. but i still have a lot of work left to do! so please continue to wait warmly... for as long as it takes.