anachred

This is The Thief. The whole book!

...okay, so in a palette of blues with some brown and black and white, I created a landscape of sorts...but it follows the story from the start to end, in one of the strands. The other two strands are continuous in their colors.



Some of the sections (as close as I can tell now, and anyway the effect in person)

Out of Jail!
Dystopia
Aracthus' Rage
Attolian Jail Cell
Mountains (? or the Temple, color indefinite in photo...)
Eddis

I have pictures of the different blends before spinnin at my Flickr. Also, a whole list of stages in the yarn...


Still naming the thing, but I'm pretty smug about my intentional travel with the colors...
(The dystopia section is even shiny black, like flint, something I wasn't sure would come out.)

I've finished the 3 plies of COSTIS. I will be presenting him soon as well...

...when you go somewhere with the express purpose of sharing an alcoholic cider with your mom, bring an ID.

MANAGER: I'm sorry, but did she ask you for ID when she brought you that?
{ who do you think is not noticing you sharing that, child?}
BETHANY: No.
{here we go again--I guess it *has* been a few weeks since I had this conversation, I'm due}
MANAGER: If you're under 21* you can't drink that--
{clearly, you are a baby. Please stop making me look bad and uncarding-like, there may be a Fed here}
BETHANY: Actually, I'm 23.
(this said with much patience and no surprise at all)
MANAGER: Do you have an ID?
BETHANY (wincing): Oh no, I don't have my passport with me...
MANAGER: Then--please, don't drink any more.

Note: there was about an inch left in the bottom of the glass.

Though it was a shame about not having an ID, I think she felt the ring of truth in my words--anyway, she was the one upset.


the hilarity never ends.
At least this time I did something to deserve it.

You have got to go see how this chick did this:

Batman Costume Sweatshirt

and if you are part of any of my other crafter communities, you will be seeing cross-posting.
You have been warned.

I view my Etsy favorites as a bit of a wunderkammer mixed with supply closet.

I keep things I mean to buy for my fiber stash there, but also yarns I would never know to use, because they're fandom yarns I like, clothes I could never buy but adore, and pictures that illustrate a real eye for beauty.



Currently I'm plotting a Batman yarn ("Wayne Manor", unless it turns out very different from what I'm envisioning), and there's a roving in my favorites pertinent to that. I bought the stuff to make a Sabriel yarn. I have everything I need for a Kyoko/Skip Beat! yarn, just need to take the carders to some pink fleece.

Just like with stories, lack of inspiration will never be my problem in coming up with yarns.

I'm particularly eager to expand my range of fandoms in the yarn-shoppe, though, because of something fun:
I've signed up to be in Conestoga's Art Show.
It's kinda nice to have a fresh goal to work toward, and to be honest deadlines are good for me...

Newest Etsy Fan-Find:

________

"Secrets" and "Wood Between The Worlds" by Kecky

I just held a Writing Workshop, for my littler siblings.
An informal discourse on the Paragraph--surprisingly some of them had Ah-Hah! moments.

Which was nice.
The two books I'm reading aloud to them provided a nice comparison on how much paragraphs can vary in size, from style to style...

      

Unfinished Angel is adorable, and has chapters that could fit in most of Tolkien's paragraphs.

I find it so funny to have two earnestly novelling younger siblings. They'll probably give it up when they find their true calling, but it's flattering while it lasts...

Raindrops taste like
tears
without the pain

Funny. I didn't realize that salt was pain. "I love pain on my food, thx."

I have a crush on a fictional vampire. <3

Subtlety...FAIL.

you can't spell slaughter without laughter

I'm sure at some point this made sense to you...but hopefully it was a flash and then gone.

[Justin Bieber]

Oh help. The tween crush-idols are now babies.

I like hugging tall people. It makes me feel special. :]

I feel relegated to the Short People Nation, but to each his own...

[bieber again]

He can't be a day over 7...

A day without sunshine is like...
well...
night.

Despite the fail-looking typography, that made me laugh. Good work, kids!
...oh no, it's the contact LoL.

[bieber sighting!]

Okay, maybe he's 12.
His age is all in the hair-swoosh, though...

[you know what]

No. 8 at most. Maybe his publicity photos range...

(Page 17)
Okay, we're teetering between completely boring nonsense and actually cute stuff now. Must be past the hyper-popular!
...I don't think my headache is from here, but I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

[For the dying breed of "English man of letters"]... writing is less a compulsion than a misfortune, like a doomed love affair. We write because we fell in love with language when we were young and impressionable, just as musicians fall in love with sound, and there-after are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many way as we can.
~ A. Alvarez, The Writer's Voice


Maybe the English "Man of Letters" has become rare, but I think the American variant (due to those same differences of sub-species) is still alive and well. The SF/F genus particular seems to be flourishing...

The first time I read this book I wasn't sure where I was in the process of refining out my own voice.
I'm a bit more confident this time.
I'm further away from having it than I guessed then--but I know for sure that the first gleamings of it are emerging.

***

Having a mechanical pocket-watch is a bit like having a Nano-Pet, I thought when I picked mine up this morning.
It hadn't been wound in 48 hours; since it runs fast I've been less methodical about that than I would be if it ran reliably.
Eventually it will be wrong, anyway. I'm winding it up for the pleasure of taking care of it, no more...

***


Mirrormere

Yes, that is quite bright, isn't it?
If I hurt your eyes, I do apologize--though Eugenides wouldn't.

"That waistband doesn't go with that coat."
"As you have already noted, I was late." ...his coat was yellow, and so was the waistband, but the shades were not the same. "My attendants have triumphed this morning in their quest to make me look foolish."
..."Perhaps if you did not order your clothes in colors that would suit a canary?"



The Colors of Attolis

The King's coat was light gold, the color of the hills in the autumn heat, embroidered in matching satin threads. His tunic underneath was a contrasting dark mulberry color. The blood didn't show against the fabric, but it welled between the king's fingers, and its bright stain spread in a messy spiderweb across the back of his hand.




It amused her that their sartorial choices clashed so completely with each other. Eugenides's loosely cut coat in the Mede style, more like a robe, was red silk shading to orange.

I'm not quite sure if I bought a roving a bit brighter than I wanted, or  if Eugenides really is wearing such a brilliant spectrum. Your opinion welcome.

If I were to pick one moment this yarn was about, though, it is none of the above. I would call it "The Parade of Sashes"...

The attendants excused themselves, calculating how much more time could be wasted fetching and delivering sashes from the wardrobe, the least likely first, until almost every single sash the king owned was draped across the bed and hanging from the furniture around the room.

from The King of Attolia - Megan Whalen Turner
The Queen's Thief Series
Conspiracy of Kings coming March 23rd!


Attolis - Parade of Sashes

fabricalchemist is to blame. For this meme, among other things...
( an endless questionnaire of self-revelation (surprises! laughter! truth!) )

This is Sophie's Quest, a Howl's Moving Castle yarn.
There was a span of 15 minutes right before sunset I was able to get color-true pictures yesterday.
In a way the photography thing is frustrating, fighting with lighting and camera settings and an untrained eye--but then some of the shots seem like cool products on their own, and I cheer up about it...
Howl Flies
A yarn with notes of lighter blue and shadows as well. A few touches of burgundy break up any chance of monotony left with kettle-dyed wool that carries it's own textured color in the first place...

One of the best things about handspun yarn is showcased in the next shot.

I call it "moments"--the unique alignment of the different colors being plyed together. From a distance the overall tones of gray, purple and white make this yarn consistent. It's only as you get closer that you can see that there are some color combinations that may never repeat after coming together for a foot or so.

This is Aim for the Northern Lights, themed on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen.

It's supposed to recall a snow-scape with the purple and blue shadows against snow. It's a little less white than I envisioned...but it has duality with the colors of the Aurora Borealis, so I'm not at all disappointed.

Because this is a 3 strand yarn, I was even more intentional than usual about designing each strand. There's one that is sheer teal or white or lavender. There is one that is mostly hand-blended--the colors mixed with gray or white.  This means some of the "moments" are shading from white to the darker color in succession, or the blue shades to deeper gray.

I love 3-ply yarn's look and this one came together amazingly...

On the way to the library we got a flat--nice day for it.
There is no nice day for having well-meaning young fellers punch through your catalytic converter, tho'.


At the library I had yet another variation on the Age Conversation. I'm surprised there still ARE fresh variations to be had on the subject, to be honest.

"Was school good today?" the Other Librarian asked, in that sweet tone saved for children. Any real teen would have been offended. My teen dignity, though, has long since perished in the fires of Unrequited Adulthood, and at first I didn't know what to say. The question was repeated...


The real oddity in this occurred to me later.
Even if I were a teen when I first came to OK (and that library) I would no longer be one by now.
Five years later.
I mean, I have done NO visible growing up in all that time, which would be even weirder for a teen.

I was idly scanning paperback racks with the extra tire-changing time at the library, and came across a novelization of Dark Knight. I picked it out, but ended putting it back. Wayne's dialogue just wasn't...right. Not rich or muscular or cultured. And I do mean the voice, though that sounds like a physical description.
Hey, Batman's voice should be visceral, right?

So I need to go pick that Batman motif story back up again, since I know what I want from it. Maybe it'll take off if I start working on paper this time...

This book is awesome. The kind that will go on my "buy a copy for myself" list...not a very exhaustive one.

It's a changeling story. Unlike others I've read, every word of the story lent itself to the idea. The world is recognizable but just that one step sideways in description so you think, "It is...isn't it?"


Bee sat down on the dirty sand and scowled out over the gray water. She repressed an impulse to gather the chips of shell, put them in her mouth and crunch them to bits; pop seaweed pods and suck the salt; bury her body in the sand like a corpse in a sarcophagus.


Bee sees herself, a threatening self who demands her life back. Jostled somewhat by this she steps forward and makes two weird friends. They also color the slant of the world, as seen through their eyes. It's set in a beach town, not a rich one, where worries about climate change and green living are in the air.

By the time I was a good portion in, I had the feeling that the story wasn't going to end triumphantly, and I didn't mind. (That's not something I'm usually resigned to.) It ends well, in a way. It's fascinating and beautiful all the way through.

I'm not sure if I think the sections of verse added much, but they didn't detract, either.


I've heard a lot about some of Francesca Lia Block's other books (Weetzie Bat, How to (Un)Cage a Girl), she has a sort of cult following among YA readers. I'm not sure if this is her first fantasy novel or not. The impression I've gotten is that odd and interesting were her claims to fame, and in this book she definitely works that to deliver a tale of Faerie I'd put next to DeLint on my bookshelf.

...if I hadn't sent the only one I owned to a friend.




Cheers to the library system!

I spent yesterday morning in the bathroom.

[/pscyhe]
This was voluntary, inasmuch as it's ever voluntary to do a recording session with my brother.
Usually the mic is set up in his bedroom, but it's a song that's very fluid, and that we've performed a lot: he was having trouble getting the guitar track down. The obvious solution was to have me sing and him play for the recording at the same time.

So the isolated sound booths included the boys' bathroom. Not my favorite, but it's all for the sake of art...

First recording session of the year!

Other firsts of the past few days include
1st Rejection!
and on its heels
1st Submission!

I cut the fairies from Gift of a Riddle (the Ash Lad piece), partly enabled by having a different idea involving christening gifts...
I think it's better. Still sub-par, but better.

I really think this meme started by tithenai  is a fascinating question:

Were I a summonable creature, what kind of ritual would you craft to summon me?



I don't think I'm a particularly interesting subject, so I vote you all go and play amongst yourselves.
I will join in there...
I figured you may not all read tithenai  or rachelmanija , though they are fascinating people and well worth following, so I took the sharing upon myself.


I'm thinking about the components of a magic right now.
A chalice of mead?  A sprig of thyme? Three circles of the clock and a question in rhyme?
I've written a few short stories in a world that I think would be perfect for a novel I'm planning, Letters to My Nemesis.
I have to take it from snapshots in stories mostly about relationships and make it fill a book. Which will still be dominated by relationship--but 10,000 words, while too long for a short story, is still a lot less than 70-90,000. The general semantic feel of a few moments has to become a cohesive world.

Intimidating.
WHEE!

Part of starting something new is sorting through the old, at least for me.

You can't clean out your closet without sifting through the things cluttering it and throwing away what isn't needed, remembering what you have stored up.

So I went over my submission statistics the other day.


What Encouraged Me
1/3 of my submissions got personal responses...
or at least the alternate form that requests you to submit more.

I'm not counting the two "personal" responses from [unnamed magazine] that always has some reader feedback, since they were both insulting. I'm not saying that it wasn't deserved, but since they always respond, the personal nature is not even a back-handed compliment....

Tho' all my agent rejections were only forms (except one fluke)
the number was less than I thought. 15 down, 50 prospects left.



I think I need to scale back my query 'blurb'. I was trying to say too much--and I'm relieved to have some idea where I was going wrong.

If you have a moment, you can pick this apart for me:
( The Carnie's Conspiracy )

I'll just be shuffling websites around over here, poking at agent bios....

This may be changing the subject, but what is mild incest?            *




{...there are no words...}

Only slightly relatedly, I often get the feeling I'm searching the dregs of manga for stuff I haven't read yet.


*don't answer that

In my Friendly Neighborhood Spiderman shirt and ready to really pack in the work on this last day of 2009!

Why?

Because my college roommate Bekah is coming to see me!
Bekah is a pilot in mechanics school right now: she moved out of CA for the first time and experiencing her first Wisconsin winter. As far as I can tell she's surviving the culture shock.

She also enjoyed her holiday back in San Diego...

So far I've rehung my cork-board, taken down the Spiderman poster she gave me for Christmas at school (too obvious), hung fabricalchemist 's Longing IN A FRAME finally.


longing by ~turbulentoast on deviantART


Handy tween siblings are doing the grunt-work cleaning. I will be touching up the place afterward. Sad as it is to say, in our family, we move so much and entertain enough that holidays and guests are our primary times to actually...clean. We never got the habit of deep-cleaning unless we were moving out and had to perform to buyers/landlords/the-mess-we-uncovered-by-moving-furniture.

In other news, I have a Sophie Hatter/Pendragon/Howell yarn now...

I'm pretty sure I pulled a rib coughing.
I'd be prouder of this if it was the first time--unfortunately, I have hale, hearty coughs and a slightly less resilient rib cage.
Being a mixed bag of Peasant is so inconvenient...



Sesshoumaru is going abroad! A lady in German has bought this aloof, unavailable ice-queen.

So it's *really* time to start working on my real Snow Queen yarn for my Ravelry home-room, now...

...not really. I've actually been kinda mulling over that word recently. Loot. Loot. It has a funky sound.


BUT! If you are someone I see personally, you *will* be forcibly shown my new but old pocket watch, and made to listen to its delightful little ticking sounds.

Dan just handed it to me at work yesterday. It's beautiful, and I will *not* send it through the wash, like I did my San Diego souvenir one.
(That one has been gutted and awaits some brilliant idea of how to make it a phantasmagorical costume piece watch. Kaleidoscope images are all I've got right now...)


Pocket watches are just fabulous, you know? And since there is a watchmaker in the jewelry store I've met some men who carry them. I repressed my glee to meet them, never fear.

Got to go home early from my last day of work!
This was because we had a long exciting and tedious drive over solidifying sleet, but now we have snow over it, so all is well!


...until we run out of cream for our coffee.
(Pretty solves everything. But undercaffeination only for a short while.)

This Christmas deal is making me wish I had something of my Candyland story done. (Though I consigned it to the Netherworld long, long ago...) Pffff, I should just whip something up, right?
It just occurred to me that it could take an underlying structure from the Nutcracker or something profound like that.

Anyway. Minty is AWESOME as I revamped him, but I really wish I'd gotten to Licorice. He needs to be creep+tastic.