2025! Not a round number, but it feels pretty momentous. It's already proving itself to be a year of changes and challenges, and my love and thoughts are with those who have already experienced hard challenges this year.

Let's call this year the 20th anniversary of Dimestore Novel. Not twenty years since it started, but twenty years since I started thinking about it. Twenty years ago I started taking the various silly ideas I had and piecing them together. I had wizards and magic books, depressed cartoon characters, murderous cops, centenarians in cyber suits, and then the final piece that really brought it all together: a girl that I felt should be holding a sword for some reason.

I thought about it for a while, then put it on the back burner for a while, and then around 2017 I really started thinking about it again. I started practicing with pen and ink, I met some encouraging friends, I posted on social media and started a Patreon. I had an idea in my head for what I wanted, but I couldn't find the path to get there. I experimented with 3D backgrounds. I tried a few different kinds of digital art tablet. I even tried hiring a couple fellow artists to see if they could fill in my gaps. Of all the things I tried, the only thing that felt right was pen on paper.

Late last year, I found something that filled a gap for me. I mentioned it in the last roundup, a tool to quickly lay out a set of panels on a regular sheet of paper. I was using it and for the first time drawing comic pages felt as good and right as all the other drawing I had been doing. Just me, the pen, and the paper, making my characters talk and making things happen for the first time. Right after the new year one of my many encouraging friends showed me an upcoming strip he was working on for his comic, and I showed him one as well. "I think this is the first page of my comic." I said. I was wrong, I had a better idea and scraped out a new page 1 at the last moment. But I posted it on time, January 3, 2025. I was done waiting. I was done rolling it around in my head year after year. It's 2025; I'm not getting any younger. It's finally time for people to see what I'm cooking.

So here it is. Dimestore Novel. Updating every Friday for as long as I can do it.

Soon, I hope to have something on the main page that shows and directs folks to the latest comic. At this point I care more about telling the story than getting lots of people to read the story. Deep down I can't shake the feeling that this is still just the prototype for a better story yet to come, but if this is all I ever do it will be enough. I'll have told my story, I'll have said my peace.

Well, that's another year in the books. This is the time of year when artists whip up little retrospectives showing what they accomplished over the last year. I've done a bit of that myself. Want to see it? You're in luck because you're already staring at it! That's right, this website is actually an elaborate retrospective work where all my favorite art of the year is collected for your enjoyment. Feel free to look around and see what I thought was worth archiving for future generations!

Another month has passed, and oh what a month it has been. I don't begrudge anyone for wanting to retreat to the realm of fantasy in the face of all this. After all, that's the only place where impossible things like "evil being punished" and "powerful people receiving justice for their crimes" and "me actually drawing a comic" can happen.

In more possible news, I did draw a good amount of art this month. Unsurprisingly, it is mostly Natasha. She does make some rather daring fashion choices, though, so that's fun. I also colored one of these, which you can see over on the gallery where finished art goes.

At the end of September 2024, beloved social media website Cohost shut down. Cohost was a site with a bold proposition: What if we start a social media site that treats its users well, one that doesn't exploit people and track people and show them intrusive ads? What if we make a social media site that has no clear monetization plan?

When they ran out of money and shut down, a lot of folks were left without a good place to post their weird nonsense, myself included. But unlike most people, myself had a backup plan. I call myself Mr. Encyclopedia because for a long time I had a website called The Encyclopedia of Pointless, where I enjoyed posting my silly nonsense for up to dozens of friends and acquaintances. Luckily, I had recently rescued my venerable old URL, eopoint.com, from the clutches of spammers and domain squatters. I had been planning to relaunch The Encyclopedia of Pointless for a long time, and now I had a motivating factor.

Running on the venerable wiki engine pmwiki The Encyclopedia of Pointless is reborn, and for the time in nearly 20 years the old "Choose your own Error Adventure" collaborative interactive fiction fever dream is back online to shock and offend a new generation of Internet.

Oh yeah also I made art.

Well, here we are. Just you and me, with nothing between us but a thin layer of HTML and CSS. And PHP and SQL and some other acronyms I guess. Cohost? Patreon? Who needs 'em? Social media is dying, but the Web abides. Twenty, no, twenty-five years later and I'm still here tapping away in Notepad because this site's built in rich text editor doesn't play well with the javascript I have to embed to get these galleries to work. Whatever! You're not here for this rambling, you might not be here at all! You're here bear witness to the artwork I made this month and let me tell you folks, I made some artwork this month.

We've got Natashas a plenty, as we always shall. We've got Evangeline, and Virginia is here trying out some new fashions. And good old Hitomi Kanzaki, my 90s anime muse, is here as I use pen and page to think about how her unique style can be adapted my unique style. So that's it! Stay tuned for any breaking news but otherwise I'll see you again in November for the next roundup!

Every time I've logged into patreon the last few weeks I get some stupid little popup about ways I can squeeze more money out of my audience. I'm not doing this for money. It rubbed me in exactly the opposite way Patreon probably hoped it would, and that's why all my art is now here on dimestore.fun instead of Patreon. I intend to keep posting art here, and maybe even make art roundups going even further back.

I also plan on closing down that Patreon at the end of the month, so I've updated the links above with the best places to keep up with what I'm doing. From now on this website will be the number one place, but bluesky and mastodon are there for you social media weirdos. I'm also going to remain on Ko-fi for anyone who truly wants to continue to support me financially. You don't need to do that, I think we've all proven conclusively that getting money isn't what motivates me to do this.

Anyway! This month we have our requisite number of Natashas, as well as Virginia, Evangeline, and Asher. There's a picture from a brief period when I spent too much time thinking about Rise of the Shield Hero (not recommended). Also a couple of attempts at hand-drawing an entire comic page. They turned out not half bad, I think.