Hello, and Happy December! 2020 has been a long and hard year, and honestly, I’m pretty excited to see the end of it. I saw an article earlier about how getting your hopes up for 2021 is magical thinking and likely to lead to depression, but come on, article. We need something to look forward to, and a new calendar year is as good an arbitrary marker as anything else!

I’m particularly excited because if the Mermaids Monthly Kickstarter funds by the 12th of December (that’s in 10 days!!!), I’ll have twelve months of mermaids to look forward to next year! We’ve got 400 backers so far, and just over $8,000 left to reach our minimum funding goal. That’s also 75% of the way there! To celebrate, we put up our submission guidelines. Our first submission period will be from the 20th of December to the 9th of January, and we’re looking for art, comics, poetry, stories, and non-fiction.

We’ve also been giving away some fun items to random backers, and we have a few more giveaways coming up, so backing early gets you more opportunities to win a little something. So far we’ve given away a mershark drawing I made and two pieces of jewelry made by Hugo Award-nominated artist Meg Frank (who is also my co-captain on this sea venture). Coming up, we’ll have more jewelry and art giveaways. Some of these are things like pearl bracelets! And anyone who backs the project will be automatically entered to win.

Image Description: Me holding up my mershark drawing to show it to someone on FaceTime.

I am not an artist, so drawing a mershark was an interesting challenge. I have so much respect for all the awesome artists we’ll be featuring in the magazine! But for now… I have to figure out how to draw a confused manatee. Oh dear. That’s the next thign Twitter voted that I should try to draw. I’m sure it will be fine and totally easy… no problem…

Finally, something completely unrelated to aquaculture…

The newest episode of Wizard Seeking Wizard is out, and it has the report on the date my wizard Flora Bunnyhop went on! If you can’t quite remember what this is all about, Wizard Seeking Wizard is an audio drama podcast in which wizards submit personal ads and then the audience votes to send some of them on dates. My wizard’s personal ad originally appeared in Episode 2. In Episode 3, you can hear all about how Flora’s rivalry date at the wizard equivalent of a state fair went!

What are you up to this December? What are you looking forward to? What’s keeping you going?