So since I received a modicum of interest in my art (I use the word in the loosest possible terms), and since I have less than a modicum of interest in coming up with anything else to say before I jump right into pitching my book, allow me to present to you a small selection of the mermaids I have painted over the last few weeks!

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This started out as me following a painting tutorial by The Art Sherpa  and then took a weird turn when it got to the mermaid. I’ve been following her Big Art Quest for 2018 too, and if you’ve ever wanted to go to one of those paint-and-sip parties or just hang out with a good friend and slap paint around on a canvas, this is the channel for you. Her tutorials are fun, educational and full of heart.

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My first koi mermaid. I could not get the hang of those frilly little fins, but I sure loved the colors.

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Jellyfish mermaid! I managed to cut the tail off in the photo, bah. Just imagine a wicked good frilly tail with bio luminescent dots. The final version on canvas will glow in the dark.

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Heh.

If ya’ll want to see more paintings from time to time, let me know. If not, let me know that too. Any ideas for what to blog about are greatly appreciated.

But now, plugging time!…ew. I could have found another way to phrase that…What I meant to say was, the latest chapter of my FNAFic has gone up! Fans of the game can read it while watching Dawko have an aneurysm trying to beat the Ultimate Custom Night on 50/20 mode. Everyone else can just noodle on over to fanfiction.net or archiveofourown.org and check it out sans background jumpscares and the screaming of an increasingly frustrated YouTube gamer trying desperately not to swear on his family-friendly channel. Fun for days, friends.

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Freddy’s commands didn’t come with a preset time limit and sometimes only lasted a few seconds even when Bonnie wasn’t hammering away at it from within. This one held, either despite his internal resistance or maybe because of it. Whatever the reason, Bonnie was forced to follow Freddy all the way to the back end of the building. A couple cameras lit up on the way, following their progress, but there was no camera in the security room and that was where Freddy took them. When Foxy and Chica finally joined them, Freddy brought the doors down.

The small room’s windows began to light up, one by one, as the cameras on the other side turned their lenses (and their microphones) toward the security room. First, the one-way glass next to the door leading to the employee’s break room; then the one next to the other door, the one to the back hall; then the one outside the front window, where guests could pass things through to the guard without going into a restricted area.

Scowling, Freddy opened the top drawer on the desk, shoved the junk inside to the back, opened the bottom compartment, and disconnected the in-house security monitor—nearly the same size as Ana’s tablet, although thicker, with less rounded corners—from its charging station. It came on automatically, its dirty screen slowly brightening to display an image of the Fazbear Band with a few simple icons arranged in a neat row along the left side. Using the attached nib and making no effort to disguise what he was doing from the watchful eye of the camera on the other side of the glass, Freddy tapped into the security system and pushed the grey square at the bottom of the screen.

Dust blew outward on the other side of the glass as the armored shutter dropped, then Freddy turned and stared tensely at the last window, the one between this room and the manager’s office. Bonnie, still mostly frozen by compliance to Freddy’s authority, managed to look that way too, and as mad as he was about, well, other things, all of that went away as he waited for the lights in there to come on and for him to be standing on the other side of the glass, grinning through his rusty teeth.

He couldn’t get out. There was no way. Even with the power on, the workshop door was locked and there were only two keys. Ana had one, their creator had the other, and that was that. Hell, even if he’d gotten around that…punched the doors open or gone through the wall or something, he’d need the key to work the elevator, too. He could barely walk in that old rotted suit and the fine motor function in his hands were fucked. During the Grand Opening, he hadn’t even been able to use a doorknob. He’d tried for three painfully long minutes, clumsily groping and prodding and dragging his knuckles back and forth across the face of the door before simply standing back and letting the Puppet do it for him, and that was years ago. If Bonnie’s own deterioration was anything to go by, he’d only gotten worse. So yeah, he might be able to brute force his way into the elevator shaft (if he could break out of the workshop, no other room in the building could hold him), but there was no fucking way he could climb it, not in that body.

But no matter what he told himself or how convincing his arguments were, Bonnie watched the window of the manager’s office and if he could have, he’d have held his breath.

The window stayed dark.

While they were all looking at it, in the lost-and-found box on the bottom shelf of the cupboard, unseen by any of them, Babycakes powered on. It did not yawn itself awake. It did not giggle or sing. It opened its eyes, but saw nothing. Its eyes were not the important thing right now. The thing in the basement could barely see anyway. The important thing was the microphone hidden in the cupcake’s plastic candle. The thing in the basement dialed up the volume on the master security control panel and listened.