June is my all time favorite month!

The sun sets at 9pm in Portland.

21 Jun • This will only take you 10 minutes

I’m not doing many events in June or July. In fact, the only event on my radar is Summer Story Fest this weekend! It will be in the courtyard between Sonny’s House and Outlet. If you’re in the Portland area, please come! It’s a two day event (June 22-23), it’s free to attend, and it’ll be really fun. Last year’s was a blast, and I got to hang out with so many amazing authors and artists.

We did a lot of events in winter/spring of this year. I’m hoping autumn/late summer will also be filled with travelling and events. In the meantime, I’ll be spending most of June and July hosting family and trying to get outdoors as much as possible. I’m talking river float, beach day, the coast, the redwoods, the desert, waterfall hikes, evenings in the park. I want to be OUTSIDE for as long as possible before the wildfires put me back indoors.

Conversely, being indoors isn’t so bad right now since En and I moved into a two bedroom apartment, where we can both comfortably work at our desks without disturbing each other (or our sleep). The slight increase in rent has me wincing, but I know that just having a better work environment will make it easier for me to be focused and creative. Plus, the increase in tax deductible square footage for the home office kinda evens it all out--so. Whatever. Money is fake, this is all fake. What’s real is our baby girl cat loves sitting in the windows and feeling the breeze.

Summer Story Fest 2024

See you this weekend at Summer Story Fest! En and I will be in Halfcourt Studios at the back of the courtyard from 11AM to 5PM on Saturday and Sunday. This is our only event in Portland until Rose City Comic Con, and it’s free and so much fun :^) So please come say hi!!

June Mail Club Reward!

I’m giving pride month to Olene! She is Molly’s ex and Yona’s bestie and the catalyst for the events in How Could You. She believes in having fun and not putting labels on things while she drinks wine all semester in the south of France. Olene is one of the main girls from my debut graphic novel How Could You. I’ll be sending out June’s rewards next month. Peep her sticker below! Long live galaxy print leggings, am I right?? Join the mail club! 

Introducing: Amira Miles and Bunny

For the 18+ tiers on Patreon, I’m pleased to debut Bunny from Texas, the only tornado fit to match Amira Miles’s path of destruction. See more by joining one of the naughty tiers. More Bunny to come, but first…

Coming this summer: “AMIRA in Buff World”, a 24 page NSFW comic featuring our favorite van life dirt bag lesbian and the first true love of her life, the bodacious Juliette. For fans of Love Lies Bleeding.

Pride Weekend - Autostraddle Comic

This month’s Autostraddle comic is dedicated to the 22-year-old party animal in my life and all the chill ways one can kick back on a weekend in June. Read the full comic here and find my Autostraddle backlog here.

The Shepherd’s Sword - Chapter 4

After missing a Friday update this month due to moving apartments, The Shepherd’s Sword is back on track. Chapter 4 is a flashback chapter to Shep’s time with her girlfriend Nieve on their first ever adventure together in the wilds. Chapter 4 is complete on Patreon, where you can read ahead and also find a PDF of the complete chapter for your reading pleasure for just $2+. Find all the ways to read The Shepherd’s Sword for free here!

Threadless Offerings

I got invited to start selling some of my designs on Threadless! I’ve been working with their team for the past two months to get this shop set up. They did a great job. T-shirts, sweatshirts, phone cases, etc. are the kind of inventory I won’t carry myself due to logistics, so it’s nice to be able to offer them this way! Check out the shop <3

What else did I do this month, hmm…

I spent a week without internet while moving apartments. I also started a bit of an autoimmune health journey, shaved my head (to save money), and started going to the gym again. I feel better than I have in… at least a year. Which is weird to say because I didn’t have a bad previous year--it just got slowly worse and worse as I got more and more sick and stressed and burnt out. I was a frog getting boiled by my own body and mind.

To have gone from someone who went to the gym 4x a week to someone who had to nap every single day and maybe gym once a week if I was lucky? To have gone from someone who would do regular strenuous hikes to someone who could only take a walk in a park if I was lucky? To have kept my fatigue secret from most people, including myself, because of internalized fears of “laziness”??

Despite the rhetoric I believe about health coming first, capitalism being bad, and prioritizing rest as a main tenant of a good future society, I’m also self-employed in a bad current society. So of course I was scared to admit that I was feeling tired, ill, weak. I was devastated and depressed and not all the way here as a person or friend. Quitting my day job helped. Finishing my book helped. But once I got through all these milestones of stress and cleared my plate, all I was left with was this unwavering exhaustion (and a whole bunch of other symptoms). Part of me wondered if this was normal, like, oh I’m just getting old haha. Even my doctor said “welcome to 30”. But no, it’s not normal to feel this run down, and 30 is still so young.

I’m lucky. It’s common, and most importantly, it has a solution. Not just a solution, but a cheap solution. (Apologies for vagueness, you don’t get to know my medical history until you buy me dinner xoxo love you tho.) All these months of feeling like half a human, like a cloudy version of myself, instantly gone. I can go to the gym again. I can go on strenuous hikes and still run errands the next day. I can listen to my friends. I can form concrete ideas and communicate in full sentences! This was all impossible just last month and only getting worse. Now after some minor lifestyle adjustments and bloodwork, I feel like me again. These are all things I will never take for granted.

PS: if you’re curious, these symptoms started after getting covid for the first time in August 2023. At first I was like “oh boy, long covid” but turns out it’s an autoimmune thing that was triggered by covid. If you have “long covid” and are resigned to always feeling run down, it might be worth it to get bloodwork done or go on an elimination diet if you haven’t yet already. There might be some other issue at play that has a solution. Maybe?

Here’s some sweet treats for you to check out: