You may recall I got away from the digital noise of social media and took more time to myself. This approach helped me reflect on what art means to me and how I connect to online communities, nearly half a year later I can say without qualifier this was the right choice for me to have made. It really let me know who my real friends are and my point of view has been valued by other artists going through rough patches and wanted to have that deep, difficult conversation about their own work and audience expectations. I think we're all a little healthier for it, and I've been selectively re-engaging with a sharper eye to my comfort and energy levels. Given success so far, I'm preparing to delete my reddit, tumblr, and pinterest too as they seem like the next big time and mood sinks.

With each cut I make, the more it becomes clear what it is I truly value and I feel has made me better. Not being constantly plugged in, my attention span is longer, my social skills improved, and I feel more in control of my life. As I'm going about making my own entertainment by checking what's happening locally and meeting new people. It also helped me deal with life's pressures which unfortunately did keep me apart from my drawing board (I now cleared and organised my own physical space to work with traditional mediums again), so I was unable to commit to making a spring art pack for the end of March. Not that it matters, the idea was always to give myself time to experiment, to fail, to have that unstructured play time needed to grow and mature as an artist. I've been using the assortment of sketchbooks, and getting ideas on where I want to go. I don't want to keep doing moody, introspective pieces of my own fursona, I want to turn my eye out to drawing multiple characters hanging out or something with a better narrative than 'look and think about it'.

This does mean I need fuel for the fire to get better ideas (and also because reading books and watching films is enjoyable for their own sake), I've put together some lists:

Reading List: (ambitious for a dyslexic, I know):

- Blood Meridian (McCarthy)
- The Lathe of Heaven (Le Guin)
- House of Leaves (Danielewski)
- Titus Groan (Peake)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter)
- Naked Lunch (Burroughs)
...and several others.

Film Queue:

- Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Tsukamoto)
- The Seventh Seal (Bergman)
- Oldboy (Park)
- The Lighthouse (Eggers)
- Blind Chance (Kieślowski)
- Horns (Aja)
...not including the anime list.

I'm not promising to get through everything or use everything I see as inspiration for some future piece. I want to immerse myself and find unexpected connections. I'm going to continue living and working in the slow lane, than making risky promies of quick turn around on grand pipe dreams. It's been ... fun. I'm looking to evening art classes to flesh out my skillset a bit more and keep me accountable. Given how pressing it is, I'm also looking for computer classes around web design and development. Its been the forever goal to properly set up a personal website, and I think I have gotten lucky and found a programmer I can work with. I'll let you know how that goes.

Finally, to the handful of people who've engaged meaningfully with my work over the years and reached out to me, rather than showing up whenever I post something new asking me to roleplay: Thank you, you're the reason I post anything at all.

- V.

PS. I did curate my gallery and scraps, there's many pieces that have been removed due to no longer being an honest reflection of who I am. Although I am sorry to take down any piece as I think they have archival value for documenting my personal journey, I simply couldn't keep them around as they've been used to mischaracterise me. There was always a gap between what I intended, and what select audiences took away from it. I know I can't account for something like that, but given its been a recurring issue I've taken the stance just to inject a little normalcy back into my art. Getting in touch with that inner vanilla. It's been the hold-up regarding new work as I ask myself a run through of questions given many of you treat my work as if its part of Vosyl's Continuity Universe of Notable Tragedies (or CnNT for short). The new rule of thumb is anything in my main gallery is 'canon', anything in an artpack given to you elsewhere in the brown paperbag you found it in is 'for your pleasure'.

PSS. "Why did you censor-" there was a spider. I just had to turn the cup on top of it.