I commissioned a new banner for my website a while back, and I wanted it to portray a wider range of what I actually do besides just chakats. Obviously Goldfur had to be part of it to represent the main point of the website, and Cogs represents my forays into the MLP Universe, but I was a bit undecided on who would be the third character. I wanted a non-taur to go with the taur and quadruped, so that pretty much just left a standard biped morph. I had a male and a herm, so I wanted a female. I considered putting Jazmyn there as she had no relationship to either of the others, but her story was basically a one-shot, even though I did add a bit more after the original story. Therefore I chose a strong character from one of my most successful stories, and that's how Bethany got the place.

I spent a couple of days during my Christmas holidays freshening up the website's main page and stories page. I realized that they did not work very well when displayed on smart phones, and besides there was a lot of old and obsolete stuff there. I pared out the unessential stuff and rearranged things to look better. I also took all the multi-episode stories that had been collected into books, and concatenated them into online novels. That alone saved me a lot of page space. You will notice that the link to the stories now points to Stories.html instead of FT-index.html – "FT" of course stood for Forest Tales, but the page has grown to encompass much more than just that. I wanted to preserve the old page for posterity, so it still exists, but if you want to keep up with new additions to the page, I suggest that you update any bookmarks that you may have.

By the way, I had a notification service for when I post new stories to the page. Because of the major failure of my computer a few months back which corrupted my hard drive, I lost my entire mailing list. I don't intend to try rebuilding it, which is why I removed that advice from the stories page.

Speaking of computer failure, repairing that and replacing the smart phone that I accidentally destroyed with a nail gun were major hits to my finances in 2014. In fact that year can be marked down as the year of the financial disasters for me because those were only two of the major hits that I took. Admittedly I made a couple of foolish financial decisions of my own that I can't blame on fate, but the upshot is that I am now quite broke. There won't be any more art commissioned that somebody else doesn't sponsor. In fact the last few illustrations for my Canterlot Café story were only possible due to said sponsorship. I couldn't even afford to print books to sell at the ConFurgence convention that was just held this weekend. Fortunately my only expense for a local convention is the train fare to Melbourne city. I will be scraping to pay my bills for the next few weeks.

It's back to work for me tomorrow. I could do with another week off, but that's just more wishful thinking on my part. Hopefully I'll get some more creativity flowing anyway, and we'll get to discuss that soon. Tail high!