For the past five (almost six) years I worked as a senior production artist with the company Access Lane.  It was a company which created themes, apps, and other kinds of customizable graphics for a wide variety of mobile devices.  Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, I was laid off along with another co-worker.  

However, the fates seemed to decide that they were going to use this unexpected hardship as an opportunity to make life better for me and my family.

For years now, I've been longing to move back to the state of Colorado, where I last went to art school.  I've been wanting to move there and set down roots in the Rocky Mountain state with my family.  Through a combination of good fortune and knowing the right people, within two weeks of my last day at my old company, I have a confirmed job waiting for me in Denver in August.

Things seem to be falling into place to make the transition from Texas to Colorado as smooth as possible.  There is still a ton of work that needs to be done by us for the move, but we are looking forward to it.

In the mean time, while preparing for the move, I'm not sitting on my laurels creatively.  This unexpected lay off has turned into a sort of unexpected vacation.  I can't recall the last time I took more than a few days off at a time just to relax and indulge in working on my own projects.  This means that I'll hopefully be updating my DeviantART site more often.  Here's what I'm working on right now:

Writing-wise
I've been working on fanfiction stories as practice before starting a new original fiction piece that has been sitting on my laptop in outline form for the longest time.  My main active story is an ongoing Batman/White Collar fanfic called Confidence Lost.  It's fourteen chapters in, with the end still nowhere in sight.  While it is updated every 1-2 days on both Fanfiction.net and Tumblr, I've been posting up PDF versions here every seven chapters.

Visually
Got a little bit burned out on creating fractal art.  Since I have the time now, I'm going to be turning my focus to brushing up on the current standards for HTML and CSS so that I can practice creating skins for online blogging platforms, such as Tumblr and WordPress.  Back when I was in college, I used to create custom themes for LiveJournal.  I think I also need to look at how I can customize my DeviantART site here too.

Blogging
Right now my main active blog is on Tumblr.  It's called A Few Novel Ideas and is going to be focused mainly on my views on art, writing, design trends, and pop culture.  It's pretty unfocused and rather random right now, save for my own person opinions on things that interest me.  However, in the coming weeks I'll be trying to solidify what I want it to represent.