A Clash of Seasons

I love this time of year. For one thing, autumn is my favorite season. For another, it's this wonderful clashing of seasons and holidays when no one seems to know where to focus their attention and Halloween decorations compete for retail space with all things Christmas. To celebrate that whirlwind of seasonal chaos, I'm doing my part to blur the lines too.

Yeah, I know. It's the end of October and I haven't posted anything for almost two months. That's because I've been busy! New art, new stories, so many goodies to share! And this time, I promise I'll post another update next week. Why? Because Summit is coming! As you can see from the updated site content, I'm in the final preparation stage of releasing my lovely little Christmas story that I've been teasing for a while. I've been mentioning it wherever I can, and I'll mention it here too... Summit is pretty much book 2.5 of the Galactic Explorers series. It takes place directly after Eltanin and directly before Nashira. If you read it without having read Eltanin first, you're going to get some spoilers, so be forewarned. And while I'm addressing the Christmas story, let's talk about the Halloween image above. I honestly don't know how big a thing Halloween might be in a few hundred years, but let's pretend the holiday is still around and that Ren introduced Tali to it. I wanted to do some fun autumn art with my characters, so there you go. Jack-o-lanterns on an empyrean planet in the Theta octant. Why not?

While we're on the topic of implausible holiday portraits, how about Noa and Skylar's visit to a pumpkin patch? Cute as hell, but I very much doubt it's something either of them did when they were kids. Especially since they essentially grew up on Mars and both are from places with seasons that don't conform to the ones I'm used to. Like I said, these are fun pieces of art, not necessarily canon compliant. But, I mean, come on... How adorable are these two?

If anyone needs even more evidence of how fickle my aesthetics are and just what an insufferable perfectionist I am, here are the two images I'd previously used as the cover of my latest release. The first was the cover when the story had a different name, and the second was the cover I'd shared before. Obviously, I settled on neither one. The image I did use just felt more Christmassy to me, and I'm happy with it. Though, I see now with the images together that I gave Ethan's original outfit to Liam for the second one, then swapped them for the final one. That's funny... It's just how I am, I guess. There's always something to improve and tinker with and that's how I end up here.

That's it for now. I wanted to share my autumn art while it was still seasonally appropriate, since we all know that as soon as the calendar switches to November 1, it's nothing but Christmas until the new year. Happy Halloween to everyone celebrating and I'll be back next week with all the release details for Summit.

​Thanks for reading!