Happy Twenty-twentywhaaaat? (Patreon)

Happy new year, Beastlings!

I was writing in my agenda today and really had to stop and ask myself if I was insane writing the date. I CANNOT believe it is already 2021!

Did you all have a nice new year? What did you end up doing to celebrate?

Obviously this year is off to a crappy start with the passing of Alexi Laiho. I LOVE Children of Bodom and Alexi was a total sweetheart every time we met. Deepest condolences to his family and friends and to the metal community as a whole. This is a tragic loss for music.

Otherwise, here are a few things to catch up on!

• Merch Discount codes are posted in your My Memberships tab and also by email for Silver and up!
• Platinum and Blue Beastlings have started to receive their Membership Merch! This winter item will rollout over the next few weeks,  I am so happy!!!🤩☕️ Please take a photo with it and tag me on Instagram so I can see you with it!
• I will be resuming my Creator Chronicles this week so if there is a particular topic you would like me to talk about, let me know in the comments (keeping in mind I try to keep these episodes very short and simple)
• In December we did the very first Virtual Signing Session - off to a great start! I will let eligible patrons know about the next one when the time comes. I think it is such a cool concept and I really enjoyed it!
• Winter Solstice Photo Prints: I got my hands on these prints way ahead of time, in November I believe. I wanted to have them all shipped by the holidays. But - when I received them I was not satisfied with the quality of the print. The crop was off, the brightness was wrong. So I decided to pay for a whole new batch of photos and ordered corrected prints. The issue is - those have been stuck at customs for weeks now. I know we are all familiar with shipping woes, but I just wanted to update you that I will be autographing and personalizing these as soon as I can get my hands on them!
• I have made myself unavailable on Cameo for now (as I mentioned, I will only be able to do these from time to time). This doesn't affect the video messages you get as patrons in any way. Sweet Relief Music Fund is very happy with this first run and thanks everyone who booked a Cameo for the support! I also really loved watching some of the reaction videos - I am very glad to be able to bring tears and smiles to people in this way. I will make myself available on there again as soon as I have bit more time and I will let Beastlings know first, of course, when the time comes.

Finally, I wanted to share with you all the poem I read at the Virtual Meet & Greet in November. As you might recall, I posted an unreleased photo and asked you all to give me the first word that came to mind upon viewing it. I wanted to start a chain-reaction of inspiration. I give you a visual -> you give me literary -> I transform literary and finally -> I give you musical. That's right, I composed a song using your words as the skeleton.

This exercise was to demonstrate the effect of collective consciousness but also to give myself boundaries and challenge my writing. So this poem contains every single word left in the comments of that post at the time of writing the poem. The comment words are in turquoise - do you see yours?

It was really fascinating to see so many differences and some similarities between the "stream-of-consciousness" we harnessed here. The word I thought of, that no one commented, was "Yearning".

To come full circle, the photo that sparked all this is actually on the Winter Membership Merch item 😎

I am still in the process of recording the vocals so I don't have the song to show you yet. In the meantime I thought I would share the poem itself. This might be even cooler for you to know the lyrics BEFORE hearing the song. That never happens! Enjoy!

Thank you, Beastlings! 🤘

~AWG