Hello creatures! Thank you for your patience and apologies for being quiet in this last period. I've wanted so desperately to put out more of my writing and I've felt guilty for just having art updates so many times! Even if my art has joy and charm to it I know that it's my writing that always hits hardest, especially when it comes to my beloved themes of transformation and mischief. I ended up getting all tangled up with perfectionism and feelings of having failed as I struggled to manifest my writing in a way that felt like me. But that's no way for a good creature to live, so I've been determined to work through it. Whether it's from removing more distractions or just taking more vitamin D, I've been able to feel writing click again, and it's making me so happy to actually feel like myself again. The only problem is that I just got hit with Covid right as I was ramping up and finding my flow. Even with the brain fog I'm still feeling it flow better than before though, so I'll likely have some updates sooner rather than later depending on how my brain congeals.

ANYWAYS I don't want to just make excuses or ramble about my mental health, I mostly wanted to thank you creatures for bearing with me as I've been working through this as well as taking a moment to outline some of my plans for future updates. I'm going to post my art more frequently without fussing about metrics of descriptions, but I'll be limiting my platforms to bluesky, furaffinity, patreon and a new telegram channel. I'm mostly going to keep things simple just so that I can be more consistent about sharing. As for my writing, I'm going to focus on posting some new microfics (if anyone remembers my 750-1500 word stories I kept making ages ago) and warm up to finishing some of the older, more ambitious stories that I got stuck on earlier this year. The key for me is really not to worry so much about making things "the best" and to allow them to be gloriously imperfect. Sometimes a bit of campiness can be more charming anyways. I'll be starting off with some catch up posts of art that I drew while I was hibernating, but over the next week I'm also hoping to post a few new short stories as well. I felt a bit silly only posting pdf files before, so I'm going to post writing in more of a directly viewable style, like this journal. Larger stories I'll keep posting as .pdfs though.

Thanks again for following me and showing so much support, I have no idea how I would have kept going without it. I've felt so spoiled by my audience and I'd love to pay it back by sharing so much more of what brings me joy to create.

- Ixen Blazetail