It's Here It's Here It's Finally Here: Haly's End-of-Year Update & GenCon Announcement!
Haly, the Moonlight Bard celebrates a difficult year & peels back the velvet curtain on yarn dyeing plans for GenCon 2026.
My name is Haly, I am the Moonlight Bard, and if you don’t know me that means you’re new here. That’s cool! We were all new once. Welcome! 💜
I’m known as The Worldbuilder, Extractor of Pain, the Bard of Velvet.
I’m a co-founder of Television Sky and I write Fictations.
Support the work, buy Emil Ottoman’s FIRST novella.
We Left the Holidays in the Closet & I Feel Great
Not all stories about holiday decorations begin with a tree, but this one does.
Hippie Drillsgt drug our little fake fir out of storage. He assembled it. He put it up where it would make a cute backdrop in my video chats.
And it looked alright. For about five minutes. Until half of the lights went out.
He took it down and set it aside until we could deal with it on the weekend.
The weekend came, the weekend’s here, and he asked my opinion on his plan. I can’t tell you what his plan was because I don’t remember because it didn’t sparkle. I asked, Can we just not? Like, can we just not have a tree or even really decorate? I mean, we wrapped presents, I feel like that’s enough.
He agreed.
No more faking!
The expression “fake it ‘til you make it” can be a useful tool. After all, it’s sometimes the same as saying “practice makes perfect.” But faking emotional reactions doesn’t feel good.
It feels very, very bad.
I’m certain there’s a lot of research to back up my assertion, but in the end I think that if you’re reading this, you know exactly what I mean. That sick, yucky feeling inside when you have to pretend because it’s expected. So you lock your jaw like rigor mortis and crack your face into a corpse’s stiff grimace and “just deal with it” because “it’s just a few hours.”
Enough is Enough
My Neo-Rococo trashy side is trying to hijack this newsletter into the sort of year-end holiday hoopla that is expected of suburban soccer moms. Be grateful for the good and don’t focus on the bad. Always remember you could have it worse.
Yeah, well… Some things are worse than watching a ticking clock and knowing that you’re doing everything possible and it still may fall short.
The Editor’s First Novella, Selling FAST!
Exclusive doesn’t even cover it. The only legitimate way to describe it is Punk AF.
No ISBN. No ebook. No POD. 150 physical copies, periodt.
And only IF all 150 pages sell.
We aren’t running a charity. We’re crowdfunding a career that will allow a multi-generational family to find stable, long-term housing in a city that exemplifies the class warfare on open display in the United States right now.
It’s the GenCon Drop!
One of the cruelest jokes in life is how we must carry on living when everyone around us feels threatened by instability.
The calendar demands that I submit event details for next year’s GenCon. Details I’ve been dreading. Details that I hadn’t come up with until today.
As many know, I was in the middle of a mental breakdown during this year’s convention and while I was able to show up for my students and provide the best experience I could…I did not do a very good job of teaching how to dye yarn, only letting everyone play with yarn and dye and tools.
Which everyone was very happy to do!
But I’ve built my reputation on better. And this year, I mean to deliver.
As classes go on, we usually come up with a theme for the next year. That didn’t happen this time, everyone was so busy catching up with old friends and building relationships with new ones that new colors didn’t have a time to make an appearance.
I took a look around, at my year, at my life. Standing firmly at the crossroads of Wild Success and Dismal Failure. New friends and opportunities fertilized with the shit in the wake of a creative partnership gone to hell and several large projects that failed to meet expectations.
And hanging above it all: the ticking clock holding the rope on my brother’s “soft eviction” guillotine.
The Velvet Hours: A Late-Night Diptych
Welcome to noir-punk intimacy, softness and shock sharing the same cigarette.
This year’s base is a noir‑punk dream: 85% superwash merino shot through with 15% fluorescent neon Donegal neps in pink, orange, yellow, and green. At ~437 yards per 100g, this high‑twist fingering‑weight yarn takes dye like a confession in the dark. Deep. Rich. Razor clean.
And those neon neps? They flare under UV light, turning every stitch into a tiny electric rebellion.
Graveyard Shift Glamour
Saturday morning, 9 am - 1 pm
20 students
$90
No previous knowledge required; instructions and supplies provided!
Dye a skein of noir‑punk beauty: deep purples, blacks, and greys washing over neon Donegal neps that flare like shattered nightclub lights. A velvet‑soaked, after‑hours colorway that begs to be touched and taught by the Moonlight Bard herself.
Haly the Moonlight Bard returns to GenCon for her fifth year of sold‑out yarn‑dyeing sorcery. Welcome to The Velvet Hours, where the morning light doesn’t soften anything, it just reveals the shadows.
In this immersive class, you’ll hand‑dye a 100g skein (~437 yards) of fingering‑weight yarn in a palette of purple, black, and silver‑grey. These noir‑soaked tones sink into an 85% Merino base shot through with 15% UV‑reactive fluorescent Donegal neps — neon flecks that refuse to dim, even under the deepest velvet wash.
As the dye settles, the neps ignite: shattered neon tubes, ghost‑lights of the night shift, the glitter of rain‑slick pavement under a dying sign.
The result is a colorway that feels like after‑hours glamour clinging to its last cigarette: decadent, haunted, and impossible to ignore. This is the first chapter of The Velvet Hours diptych, and you’re not just dyeing yarn. You’re dyeing a story.
Midnight Signal
Saturday afternoon, 2 pm - 6 pm
20 students
$90
No previous knowledge required; instructions and supplies provided!
Dye a skein of electric noir: blues, purples, and blacks pulsing over neon Donegal neps that spark like midnight messages in the rain. A glitch‑bright, velvet‑dark colorway taught by the Moonlight Bard herself.
In this afternoon class, you’ll hand‑dye a 100g skein (~437 yards) of fingering‑weight yarn in a palette of blue, purple, and black—the colors of a midnight transmission cutting through static. Your canvas is an 85% Merino base threaded with 15% UV‑reactive fluorescent Donegal neps, neon flecks that refuse to stay quiet even under the deepest nightfall.
As the dye settles, the neps flare like: electron sparks, corrupted data packets, the eerie glow of a message not meant for human eyes.
The result is a colorway that feels like a coded confession whispered through rain‑slick circuitry: electric, intimate, and humming with tension. This is the second chapter of The Velvet Hours, the signal that answers the glamour. Together, they tell a story only you can finish.
Did I Mention Our First Book, A Novella by Emil Ottoman?
Go and buy a page. Get this thing made.
I’ve seen how it starts, I need to know how it ends.
My NEW Workshop Begins JANUARY 17!
Worldbuilding isn’t word-dumping. It’s the critical context that makes it possible for someone to understand your story from their own perspective. It’s how we bridge the gap between imagination and understanding.
Join me for six weeks of intensive practice designed to give you new patterns for creative thinking that apply to any storytelling, not just fiction.
