Happy Canada Day! A year and a half since my last update, I am finally slowly coming out of the woodwork to try and re-establish a presence here again. I can't promise it will be as regular as it was before my health did a nosedive &mbsp; and to be honest, my presence had never done numbers on social media, so that should give you a good gauge of how visible I intend to be now. But! At least I am finally working on my original projects once again, albeit on a more sustainable pace.

As you can probably see if you've visited my site pre-2025, I have tweaked the UI once again. What can I say? I will always have the millenial urge to customize my website themes. Remember themes? Once upon a time, you can apply a coating of CSS on social media sites and truly make them your own!

But changes to my website is more than skin-deep. I've performed a pretty heavy overhaul of the back-end, from switching webhosts (I'm with a Canadian host now, yay!), switching code version control platforms, and refactoring the code to make development faster and easier. I also trimmed down my blog posts to the ones that are more focused on craft.

The biggest cause for celebration, however, is the huge rewrite I did for The King's Eyes. It's so huge, in fact, that the title even changed! (It's mostly because I couldn't translate "King Eyes" properly in Tagalog without it sounding super awkward.) About 40-45% of the story is different, as I tried to anchor Dalon and Kari's motivations to something more concrete and believable. I don't know whether people will like this version better than the first, but I think it's just a bit more cohesive. I have a lot more thoughts and feelings about my journey writing this novella, but I'll save that for a future blog post.

You might also notice, I hope, the brand new book covers for Metalmade and The King's Eyes! I absolutely loved working with Maria over at Maria Spada Book Cover Design. It's almost like she can tell exactly how I envision the story, and she's able to translate that to a very accurate image. What a talent! And of course I'm elated that she's a Filipino designer &mbsp; I always strive to work with fellow Filipino creatives on my projects.

All right, I think this is a good place to wrap up. I have an idea for a new story, which right now looks like it would probably be a serialized webnovel, but I'll share more information on that when the project is more developed. At first I thought I would work on The Crocodiles of Ring Lake, which you might remember was posted in a "Coming Soon" section of my homepage, but the timing isn't right for that project at the moment. So, to stop myself from announcing something that I might renege on later, I'll just share more news when things are further along.

It's nice to be back!