Another pointless journal because I'm bored. How do you guys pronounce "Bryar", Megan's last name? I wanna see if anyone pronounces it the same way I do.

If this gets any interest, I'll update with my pronunciation in a bit.

Edit: The way I pronounce the name is Bry - to rhyme with "rye", ar - to rhyme with "are". Also, this got a lot more of a response than I ever expected, so thanks to all of you!

She's got kind of a spiffy style, so why not take a peek?

Journal: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4152878/

We had Harold Camping barking about the Rapture in 2011.

Then in 2012 everyone was all hot for Mayan predictions of doom.

I swear, I'm just going to get a big square posterboard or something somewhere and paint it with I Survived the Apocalyspse! Then, every time a prediction of doom comes and goes like this I'll just stick a nice gold star on it, just to see how many I can get.

Humanity's fascination with its ultimate destruction just continues to fascinate and amuse me.

Screw it. If anyone still want to play, ask away. Ask about me, my characters, anything you have in mind.

I'll (probably) answer, though I can't guarantee that every question will get a serious one!

As of right now, I'm leaning very much toward keeping Fiachra female for good. Both because I'm just having fun with her that way - and because she looks awesome with pink hair - but also for personal reasons. While Fiachra is not, and will never be, a personal avatar in the way that Megan is, it's kind of nice to have a character I can use to explore my thoughts and feelings on being trans. While I was never unhappy with Fiachra as a male, I can't help but feel she's been somehow liberated this way and freed to explore and get in touch with her true self. Which is probably just me unfairly projecting my own feelings on her, but what are characters for if not exploring your deepest feelings and ideas?

Fiachra may still be drawn as a male from time to time. I know some people liked her better that way, and there are still some scenes from Oseille and In the City of Cats I'd like to get illustrated at some point. Plus, there are a few people I'm willing to loan her out to, and they're more than free to choose whether they want her as a boy or a girl. And there may be a few other situations that bring her male side out again. After all, it's just possible that our intrepid rabbit might have fathered the odd child back in the day. But, for the most part, I think she's staying a doe.

I hope that won't disappoint anyone too much.

 iko's sketch of the newly girlified Fiachra's self discovery has broken a hundred favorites. I haven't gone all the way back to the start to check, but I'm reasonably certain that this is the first time any submission of mine has earned that many favorites. Hell, not so long ago, getting 30 or 40 favorites on one of my commissions was pretty impressive. So thanks, guys. That's pretty awesome and I shall definitely be getting more of Miss Fiachra in the future.

It'd be awesome of you guys if you'd go give  iko some love, too.

I've got to head out in about 20 minutes, so there may be a bit of a delay in replies, but fire away. It was kind of fun last time.

I'm a little more than half way finished with posting In the City of Cats, which may come as a relief to some of you. It's not really a very long story, and I'm not sure if it really holds up as a sequel. It was more an idle thought that got out of hand. But I kind of like it anyway.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last journal, and I'll get back to you guys as soon as I'm awake enough for my brain to function.

You and I could be friends. Not because I want anything from you, but because you always treat me with such kindness whenever we talk.

Or that I could at least tell you I admire you, not just for your art but for the way you think and your lovely imagination, without it sounding creepy and wrong and stalkerish.

I wish I thought you were happier.

Edit: While I'm happy to make friends with plenty of other people as well, I do have someone specific in mind.

Just as it says in the title. Stupid question time. I've seen several people lately claiming to be "demisexual" and I was wondering if someone could fill me in on just what this means? Mind you, this is just pure curiosity, as it makes no difference to me what identity people wish to claim. I'm just kind of old, by the standards of the fandom, and out of touch here.

Anyone?

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and watchers here in the US. However you celebrate the holiday, or even if you don't, here's hoping you have a great day. Safe roads, if you're traveling, short lines, if you must face them at all, and harmony with your family, friends and neighbors, at least for this one day.

To those of you outside the US, you guys have a great day, too.

I've got three rabbit characters who each have spots and who are all more or less kin to each other. People who have been following me for a while ought to have a pretty good idea who each of them are, but lately it has been confusing a lot of my newer watchers. This hasn't really been helped by my turning Fiachra female, either. So I thought I'd throw together this little guide to help people sort the three of them out.

1. Megan Bryar - Female - Ex: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8959474/
Distinguishing features: Dark brown and cream fur, brown eyes, black butterfly-shaped muzzle marking. Normally wears a purple collar and glasses. Megan is my personal character (fursona, avatar, whatever) and meant to represent me. Megan is Fiachra and Niamh's cousin.

2. Niamh Lohan - Female - Ex: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9249573/
Distinguishing features: Light brown fur with darker brown on her forearms/lower legs, shading to black fingers and toes. Auburn hair, brown eyes. Normally wears glasses and often wears an amethyst pendant. Niamh is a character I created originally for writing stories about and does not represent me. Megan's cousin and Fiachra's younger half-sister.

3. Fiachra O'Malley- Male, recently transformed into a female - Ex: Male: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9147558/ Female: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9193105/
Distinguishing features: Light brown fur with darker brown on his forearms/lower legs, shading to black fingers and toes. Or, as female, plain light brown fur with no spots or markings on arms/legs. Green eyes. As female, wears a gold heart-shaped necklace. Fiachra is Megan's cousin and Nimah's elder half brother.

Nothing too fancy, just a little raven tattoo on her (his) left arm.

What do you guys think? Too hokey?

(Never mind that you can't tattoo over fur...)

My friend  abigailfrench is leaving the fandom for, in her words, reasons of moral and spiritual health and she's asked me to post a journal to help get the word out to those who knew her.

She's posted a journal about it here: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/4032935/

She's also insisting on giving me Abigail when she goes. I've agreed to take the character and to keep her mostly true to what Abi had done with her. I know this probably won't make people happy, and I'd rather have my friend stick around, too, Maybe she'll change her mind one day, though, and I can give Abigail back to her.

So yeah. Really cheerful news for this Friday morning, huh?

I got about two questions last time. Let's see if we can't do better today, shall we?

Let's have 'em.

Just a matter of idle curiosity, but while I've seen plenty of species oriented groups here on FA, such as the  bunnies group, I can't ever remember seeing one for foxes. Now, obviously, I can't join up, even if I do sometimes moonlight as a vixen, but I am curious to know is such groups actually exist since you'd think you'd see it everywhere.

Anyone?

Happy Halloween to all those who celebrate it, and here's hoping everyone has a safe, warm and dry night!

Thanks to  mabarial's generous offer, I now have a Weasyl account.

https://www.weasyl.com/profile/meganbryar

I haven't uploaded anything there yet, save for a user icon, as I'm not smart enough to figure out how their collections system is supposed to work, but I'm there if anyone cares to look me up.

It looks like a pretty spiffy site, too. I don't have any plans to abandon FA as my primary site though, never fear.

 bluesidewind is holding a new art raffle and she really does have a cute style, so why not check it out?

Relevant journal: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3960576/

For those of you who might still be interesting, I've actually done a fair bit of writing lately. I just haven't managed to finish much thanks to various distractions and crises. Still, in the last two years I have:

- Written what might pass as a sequel to Oseille, which lets Ciara and Niamh face Sabia again and, I hope, fleshes their world out a bit more. Though I've done my best to write it so that it stands on its own, too. It also gives Ciara a baby sister, though that's probably only interesting to me.

- Actually made a halfway decent start on writing Deirdre's history prior to her involvement with Connor and the birth of her daughter. The first part actually starts when Deirdre's about 10 and introduces her parents and her elder sister.

- Made a fresh start on revising The New Girl at Silver Street, which is my second novel and the one that features poor Jessamine as its heroine. I've decided I'm just going to post it to FA as, given its extremely violent themes and anthropomorphic characters, I kind of doubt any publisher will actually touch it. The book is kind of a wreck right now, but I hope to start posting it sometime in 2013.

So I haven't been slacking off too badly, promise! I plan to finish all of these projects up and get them out there for people to read just as soon as I can. Maybe then I can start to build a readership up again. She said with undue optimism.

I've been seeing a lot of journals like this lately, so what the hell. I'll jump on the ol' bandwagon, too. I don't have anything better to do today.

So go on. Ask me questions. Anything you like, about me, my characters, or just totally random stuff. You can even note me questions if you're too shy to ask them in public.

Have at it.

Go take a peek, she's got a cute style.

Relevant journal: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/3944319/

A couple of days ago,  saetia posted a journal about what each of her characters meant for her, and in that journal she asked other people to explain their own characters as well. I started to answer, but realized my response would likely require a bit more than a brief response and I didn't want to flood her with a huge reply. All of which is to say, she had a neat idea and I decided to steal it for my own amusement rather than simply replying to her. So here we go.

Almost all of the characters I actually created were made for one story or another. So, except for Megan, none of them were ever specifically meant to represent me in any way. Still, they say that a writer puts something of herself into every character she creates and this is certainly true of mine. Some of my best characters, or at least the ones I like the best, got more than most.

Megan Bryar:
(http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8382000/)
Megan is "me", or close enough. She's weird, perverted, awkward, obsessed with legwarmers and an irredeemable nerd. Granted, she's a bit more extroverted than I am, and you'd never catch me going out in public without my pants on, but you can't have everything. In other words, she's as much a fantasy as any sort of reflection of reality, just like most furry characters really, but I flatter myself that she's mostly grounded in reality.

Niamh Lohan:
(http://www.furaffinity.net/view/6482197/)
A lot of what I said about Megan can be applied to Niamh as well. For you new folks, I used Niamh as my first character for a while and the reason I picked her was because she was easily the one character I created who was the most like me. She still is, too. The trouble is, because I created her as a story character instead of a personal representative, she ended up having a life of her own that didn't in any way reflect mine. She's even got a wife, and I thought that made things too complicated. So I decided to create Megan to be "me" and let Niamh go back to being her own person, as it were.

Ciara Lohan:
(http://www.furaffinity.net/view/6393072/)
Ciara was the only other character I considered using as my "self", and she's the character who, I think, embodies my "hero" self. She's not classical hero material, as I have no illusions on that score, but she's the part of me who would rush out to save the world and who would do all she could to protect those she loved.

Cassandra Cooper:
(http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5239906/) NSFW
I actually created Cassandra as nothing more than a joke. After all, if you're going to have red fox colored rabbits, why not a rabbit colored red fox? Still, she has grown to be one of my favorites and I think, if anything, she represents my embrace of my having always been outside of what most people would think of as ordinary society. Everyone makes up their own definition of "normal" anyway.

Jessamine Bryar:
(http://www.furaffinity.net/view/4668201/)
Jess has evolved quite a bit since I first created her, to the point where the Jessamine who shows up in my second novel and the one most people are familiar with are practically different characters. Still, in what I guess you'd call her true form, Jess does a pretty good job of embodying both my cynicism and my stubborn refusal to give up. She was also a great deal of fun to write for.

Questions about these or other characters are welcome.

Comments and favorites are always appreciated, but if you like anything I post here please do go give the original artists some love, too. They're wonderful people and they work very hard on their art, and all I do is ask them to draw my perverted little ideas.

Just like the title says,  tigerskitten is working on a cookbook, and it sounds pretty neat. She still needs some help to put it together, though, so won't you please take a look?

Relevant links (taken from her post):

http://www.indiegogo.com/refried-brains?a=1149600
http://www.facebook.com/RefriedBrainsCookbook