Hey, everyone! Long time, no post. Hopefully everyone's doing great.

Where to even begin? I haven't posted anything in a while, so I really need to get on that. I have a few goodies that I've left unposted that probably deserve to go in my gallery. Aside from that, my creative juices in the art department have been slim. However, I have popped out a couple of good doodles or two.

Most of my time and energy has gone into writing lately. As I've said many times, my best friend and I have been working on, I guess you could call it, a novel. We write every night and we have a good chunk of it done, but aside from writing that, I've been concentrating on some of my own things, two.

One thing that I really like about having a new sponsor for the Young Authors club at school is that our sponsor is very involved. He makes us bring writing and discuss what it's about in front of the group, and I think it's very interesting to hear what interests everyone else and to learn why they write what they choose to write.

Currently, I'm working on a piece in the point of view of a male werewolf and his views of smell and what smell really means in the world we live in. It's sort of an internal battle, I think. There are good things and bad things to write about and it's a rollecoaster of emotions all wrapped up into one short story. It's a challenge, but I'm having a blast writing it. If the finished product is any good, I'll be sure to post it .

Outside of my art/writing life, life life has been alright at the most. Today, it just seemed that everything came crashing down around me.

The town I live in thrives off of the local steel mill (my dad works there) and today we found out that they're putting it on what's called a 'hot idle' which means, for the next three months, maybe less, they're going to cut steel production to a minimum and it's going to effect up to 3500 people in the tristate area. Not fun. It's not guaranteed that my dad will be laid off, but it's likely, so that's kind of a hard thing to go through right now.

Aside from that, a few dramatic events happened today. There was a fight at school. One girl, apparently, ripped another girl's hair out. After school, two people that go to my school were hit by a car, and the creme de la creme, we found out that one of my best friend's dad's could have possibly been sleeping around. It's safe to say things haven't been alright in my neck of the woods.

All of the dark and dreary bits aside, there has been some light at the end of my tunnel. I'm seeing one of my idol's, Kristin Chenoweth, in concert on Januart 10th and Legally Blonde the musical on January 24th and January 31st, so I'm quite excited for that, but I just thought I'd update, seeing as I haven't in a while.

-Dustin