I really tried to make this page and the next a double, but I ran out of time. It was, admittedly, a little bit my fault.

So, Tamer 11 came out, at least it did if you supported the Kickstarter. If you didn’t, you can buy it off MSE’s site in a few months I think. Now, I didn’t read it during the day while I should have been working, but I did maybe accidentally stay up till 4 am reading it one night, and let me tell you, one of the best ways to supercharge ADHD is to throw a little sleep deprivation in. I was not super productive the next day. Fortunately I finished the book the next night, and before 3 am too, so… all good, right?

Okay, hear me out. The day after Tamer 11 came out, the next book in The Vixen War Bride series dropped. I didn’t even know the series was continuing after the first story wrapped. VWB is one of my favorite xenoanthropology sci-fi books, by which I mean it changes PoV between human and “alien” characters and both sides have their little thoughts about how odd the other is. By the start of this book, the story is past the “nobody speaks the others’ language and hilarious misunderstandings ensue,” trope, and kind of oddly, this story is more of a murder mystery.

So naturally I also had to read that as soon as I finished Tamer. I didn’t stay up till 4 am again. It might not have been physically possible for me at that point, but still I finished that book in 3 days.

Then there was  Good Intentions Book 5, A.K.A. Devil In the Details, then The Doctor from Nowhere, Book 2, which is a Russian translated Isekai about a modern Russian surgeon getting blowed up in… uh, Afghanistan, or somewhere, doesn’t matter, and waking up in the body of a recently deceased (or so they thought) Russian soldier in, a slightly alternate history 1914 or thereabouts? It’s pretty well written and translated. The MC does kind of win at everything super hard, and there’s a little bit of Russian jingoism in there, which I suppose I can’t fault the author for. There’s just a few “Russia’s not quite the shitshow everyone seems to think” rants. It’s not pervasive. Then after that was Taroniah & Kyron Unite (Ithria Book 15). Ithria is a bit of an odd series, because the books alternate between Taroniah the sorceress and Kyron the swordsman, and I’ve skipped all the Kyron books cause… I don’t know, the stuff about the sorceress sounded more interesting.

So I had a bit of a reading dry spell for a few months it seemed, then 5 series I’ve been reading hit all at once. Especially Tamer and VWB. You guys know I enjoy Tamer. And I’m bad at pacing myself. So, sorry the page isn’t a little more… you know, “Grrl Power-y 9 panels when there should have only been 5.” (TM) Just trying to work the average back in the other direction? Yeah, I didn’t buy that either.

Here is Gaxgy’s painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.

I did try and do an oil painting version of this, by actually re-painting over the whole thing with brush-strokey brushes, but what I figured out is that most brushy oil paintings are kind of low detail. Sure, a skilled painter like Bob Ross or whoever can dab a brush down a canvas and make a great looking tree or a shed with shingles, but in trying to preserve the detail of my picture (eyelashes, reflections, etc) was that I had to keep making the brush smaller and smaller, and the end result was that honestly, it didn’t really look all that oil-painted. I’ll post that version over at Patreon, just for fun, but I kind of quit on it after getting mostly done with re-painting Max.

Patreon has a no-dragon-bikini version of of the picture as well, naturally.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.