Shuffle concept art from @ghostfish's book, Blue Flame!

Balance is an ever changing struggle in our lives, especially after the last two years. I feel like those clowns spinning 13 plates on long poles, meanwhile 2020 and 2021, […well, let’s face it, 2022 so far, too] are a group of asshole teenagers pelting our nuts with rotten fruit, trying to get us to drop the whole show. Lately, I’ve felt on. I’ve been identifying where things need to improve in my life and attacking those head on. Kickboxing three days a week and food! Food has been a big one. I’ve been eating the same boring thing for months and the last two nights, I took the time to actually cook […which I do love to do].

@ghostfish came over and helped me hang roughly half of my living room ceiling. I wrote about it a few nights ago and shared some photos. @ghostfish and I go way back. In many ways, he was one of my first friends when I moved to Minneapolis in 2010. He’s a multifaceted artist and creative mind. When I met him, he was writing a series of books called, The Blue Flame. Horror genre. He was part of a collective of artists in the Twin Cities area called Dim Media and one of his friends was doing artwork for the pages of the novel. He successfully got it funded on Kickstarter in 2014 and is still expanding the story.

I always wanted to work on a project with him. Minnesota has an abundance of people that talk about doing things, but never actually doing them. As a native east coast transplant, few things are more frustrating to me than that. @ghostfish always followed through. In fact, when Kickstarter was a new platform and I’d just heard about it, he successfully launched and funded Blue Flame before I even got my project near completion. In 2019, we finally collaborated on our horror anthology, @coppercoins, and we did successfully publish that first book.

I recently took on a project to do a character concept for the main antagonist for his book, Blue Flame. His name is Shuffle. He has an endless curiosity for the occult and dark magic, and eventually changes in to a hideous, Lovecraftian being. I’ve been working on some projects that stress my creative muscles and this was something just for fun. @ghostfish may use it, and it may need to be finished in a more formal sense, but for now, it was a great part of my on going work in balancing my mind, body and soul.