(I'm going to put my "update" for the day under all the art. Even if you don't have time to scroll through all my art/commentary about my art, which is reasonable seeing as some of these chapters go up to 2k-3k words, I highly suggest you read that. Thanks!) 

So once again, the daily doodle is named after an Everything Everything song. It's really hard to recommend the band to anyone because half their songs have really, really strange lyrics and they're all secretly about P O L I T I C S instead of you know, romance, or other things you can apply easily to yourself or your edgy OC. I also usually dislike them the first time I hear them but I'm in love by the third listen, for some reason. I make sure to find the less explicit ones when choosing chapter titles because damnit, Chrona's going to be PG unless it comes to the brutal murder of my characters in which case... okay, a little less PG. 

I listened to an entire album four times in one day while I was on the plane to Colorado (family's on vacation) and had some GREAT ideas for songs and worldbuilding, some of which are reflected in the images below and some of which are... less so? I've been having some brutal art/writing block since I got here but I'll talk about that more under the pics.

This was actually done weeks ago, I wanted to color it in but never had the time, especially because I ended up hating a lot of the composition. I had this plan in my head to draw something akin to promotional art for every one of my stories, starting with the oldest and working my way up, but anyone who's been here since the beginning or close to it is probably already laughing at me because they know just how batshit insane my old stories were, from terrible punctuation/capitalization to plot threads that were never resolved or bought up again to... well, this.

The above is Phoenixfeather (later Phoenixstar) and Ripplefoot, two of the main characters from Vengeance, my very first Warriors fanfiction on here. Like any good Warriors fiction written by an amateur, it's centered around a blatantly obvious prophecy... or is it really. The story is about old DragonClan and I mean REALLY OLD DRAGONCLAN so instead of having tunnels full of lesbians and demons (yes this is the plot of Ashleap's Fall) you get people running away to make their own clan every five minutes, ridiculous power hierarchies that kept the powerful users in charge, and a black fox who was actually from one of my other stories I wrote in seventh grade who was supposed to make it into a story on here but didn't thus rendering the crossover useless and... you can see where this is going. 

(Let me attempt a brief synopsis.)

Pheonixkit (do you like reading Phoenix spelled wrong? You're going to love this book.) is born into DragonClan, a clan where all the nursery tales are real and everything in the forest wants to kill you. She receives a strange feather as a gift from a delusional cat who waltzes in and out of the clan a lot to give cryptic prophecies and somehow manages to stick it up behind her ear for the whole book. Then she learns that foxes are evil, especially the one that's black because it's fur got burned... or something... which has been murdering her clanmates since they came here because it's a very determined fox. Apparently, though, not all foxes are evil because one saves her life and then dies. Pheonixkit/paw/feather continues to be an ass to her clanmates for almost the rest of the book, including Ripplepaw who she attacks because he might be in her prophecy but then isn't and then... they're mates? (This book gives me a migraine.) Luckily there's a B-plot far more interesting than the A-plot about the leader, Moonstar, along with several of the other cats in the clan who weren't born in DragonClan. In fact, many of them, including Moonstar's mate, came from another clan that DragonClan may or may not have conquered. Many of the clan cats are not terribly loyal due to the constant shifting of borders at that time and then there's an entire subplot about an internal rebellion and one of the rival clans being cut to shreds... a rival clan that might be lead by a DragonClan defector?

Ripplefoot comes in from the B-plot, turns out to be the second cat in the prophecy, and then some things happen and he may or may not have been the fox from those first chapters reincarnated because all of us were really invested in that subplot, let me tell you. 

The moral is that old DragonClan is weird and reading my old books from three years ago is a real adventure.

I've been trying (key word: trying) to work on some character designs for Athena and Agate, a Felis and Nyuhenge respectively (although a Nyuhenge is just a Felis with more tails and some bonus powers), for some of my Dreamland stories. I think they look a lot better in my head... anyhow, this is Agate, done in a hotel room with an unsharpened pencil I borrowed from my brother... hence the quality. 
She's really important in Dreamland lore and is one of the Princess's only confirmed... significant others? I mean, they didn't even get to first base, but when you're two god-like figures on opposite sides of a bloody holy war, how far can you really go?

I wanted her to look somewhere between Norwegian Forest Cat and big cat, giving her a sort of lion-ish mane to make her look authoritative, but as a testament to my current artist's block, she just looks like someone ran her over with a blow drier and she's not happy about it. Given, the only HAPPY Felis I've ever had as a character is Minx (thus far), perpetuating the blatantly untrue stereotypes that exist in world about Felii, but man do I love my beautiful asshole cat children.

Let's just say I'm working on it?

Fyera and Flare from The Cities Have Fallen. I will never stop being obsessed with my TCHF children, and I can only hope future revisions of the book will help bring the ensemble cast up to speed with my new writing style.  Hopefully I can also make Flare stop looking like a female version of Torch by then.

Unlike Vengeance, TCHF is not an acid trip and thematically makes sense, even if some parts of it (COUGH COUGH EVERYTHING ABOUT THISTLEPATCH AND TWITCH) are super dated. I don't know how much I can recommend it because I haven't reread it in a while... but people who have been reading it claim it still holds up and many of my old fans still say it's the best one in their heart. Whether that's nostalgia or some wayward spark of genius imparted in Smol Chrona is completely up to you, but I will say it's when my writing started improving dramatically.

So! Update! 

Before I go any further with update schedules and the like, let me just say the feedback on my new works (TSBS and WTRB) has been A M A Z I N G. I never expected anything like this and reading each comment from readers, both old and new, has made me all the more determined to keep bringing forth my best effort with both books. You guys have seriously made my month with everything you've done, from fanart to just taking the time to leave comments and votes, and I couldn't be happier to be here and be providing content for you all. QvQ

Now that that's out of the way, I'm sure a lot of you are wondering where the chapters are if I've been feeling better about my work. Unfortunately the same thing that's driving me forwards is also currently holding me back, and that's striving to produce higher quality work... yeah. As I've said, I'm on vacation, and while the time is adequate I've been tired and jet lagged ever since we got here. I also have hours upon hours of homework so all in all my situation is a bit grim. I don't want to say I won't update over the weekend, as I could still pull through in theory, but I wouldn't expect anything. I do think, however, that I can finish my goals and end January with a total of 30 chapters even if I fall behind over this weekend. Since I'm working three stories at once, I can also do this without spamming one book, which is GREAT.

What I have been working on behind the scenes, whether you see the results or not, are my auxiliary books. While I write a lot less down for them, save for on here, I've been attributing a lot of time and energy to developing the likes of Deja Vu, Gevona's Hope (the CYOA I mentioned once a few years ago), The Dragon Book, Spirits Rising (ahahaha), and a whole bunch of new Dreamland works- I currently have THREE choices for my NaNoWriMo right now, although any Princess I've mentioned is fair game. I was considering posting a demo chapter of Deja Vu on here first to gauge the reaction before I start taking it on as a fourth project, if only because I can't stop thinking about my kids. The real issue with Deja Vu is that I kind of like the Alpha team way more than the Omega team and the villains are underdeveloped. Criminally underdeveloped. If writing one side becomes a chore for both the audience and I, I've failed as a writer, and having boring villains kind of kills a superhero story. :/ There's always more drastic measures I could take to redo the whole story but I believe I can give the Omega squad more to do and I refuse to axe Will out of his own book. 

(Oh yeah, speaking of axing characters out, Spritz doesn't appear at all in The Space Between Stars and Gash doesn't exist anymore. Spritz still EXISTS, he just doesn't leave to go after Snow Hare, which seems cruel but it's actually because he knew her for longer and she made him promise to care for their kingdom because of political tensions. Rain is still canon to new!TCHF so don't expect her to go anywhere. As for Gash, he's literally white bread the character and if I never have to see him again it'll be too soon. In canon, he now gets to live with Blossom and Deepkit in the cushy pile of 'characters that are so boring they had to be retconned out of existence'. Whether or not Ylva will join the pile before I reboot Extraordinary is up for debate.) 

Sorry for rambling about my characters at the end of an update but... it's my art book... kind of what I do. If you didn't understand any of that last bit, you don't have to worry about it- it's just stuff that only pertains to other books.

See ya.

-chrona