WTH Con Report
Good god, that was exhausting.
Just a reminder, gang–I’ll be at WTH Con in Greensboro this weekend with me, art, Kevin, and a bunch of webcomics people. Admission is free, it’s a neat little con, I will wear the Boots, come on out and say hi!
Every now and again, a painting grabs me by the throat and does not put me down until it is painted. Sometimes the results are awesome. Sometimes…well, sometimes I’m the only one who thinks they’re awesome. Such is life. The inspiration seems to arrive independant of the quality.
I have attempted to locate a word for the feeling when the painting grabs me–it’s not the same as getting in the groove, which is something else. I am frequently in the groove, but it does not feel like this, and there is less maniacal laughter when I am in the groove, and I do not get that feeling of brief artistic invincibility where every stroke lands in exactly the right place and the inside of my skin itches and I want to get up and run around except that I have to keep painting. Insomuch as I have religious experiences these days, that’s the closest.* It doesn’t happen often.
About the only word I like is "awen" after the Welsh word for blinding inspiration, although I feel sort of flaky and froofy and self-consciously-paganny when I do that, and also the modern we-are-very-serious-druids use that one for other stuff, and those people tend to be either laughable or bloody goddamn terrifying, apparently without any middle ground.
Anyway, all that said, this took about six hours, interrupted by the bathroom and a brief food run.
*I mean, I have the quiet personal spiritual moments of gardening and whatnot that most of us probably have, but this is the 180-proof stuff.
This is just too much fun.
yourfonts.com allows you to make a font out of your handwriting if you have an image editing program or a printer & scanner. Astonishingly, this actually looks a fair amount like my handwriting, although the angles are a little peculiar and I tend to squash stuff up next to my t’s.
This is why I don’t do my own lettering for Digger. Nobody wants this.
Birds and Bird-Herding
Huh. That thing I saw circling over the house, keening like a banshee, yesterday afternoon was apparently a broad-winged hawk!
That’s a lifer! Most of the time, I just assume that any hawk I encounter is probably-a-red-tailed–they’re the little brown job of the raptorial world– but it was circling the house for over a minute, and I got a very good look at the underside. There’s really only one thing it can be with those marks. The book didn’t say anything about them hanging out shrieking over and over again, but maybe he’d lost his car keys or something.
So that was pretty neat.
(ETA: Or would be, if broad-winged hawks were in town at this time of year! Now I’m stumped again…the markings looked awfully crisp, but I’m waiting to see if the bugger comes back.)
In more annoying news, the squirrels have dismantled my Yankee Flipper birdfeeder AGAIN. I don’t know how the hell they’re doing it, but they’ve figured out that they can grab the nut holding the base on and unscrew it, causing the whirling perching section to fall to the ground. I don’t know if this does them any GOOD–I don’t see any on it, it mostly just means that only the wee little birds can perch on the feeder and eat–but this is the second time they’ve dismantled the feeder. I think they’re doing it out of general cussedness. Bugger.
Blargh. It was too easy to wake up this morning–I was having this wonderful dream that I was moving into this incredibly cool house. The first floor was a kind of compact English-cottage sort of space, the second floor was a fairly open floor plan set of bedrooms, with one massive bathroom with a huge shower and vast expanse of tile floor. "It’s great, but I can’t live here," I was telling my mother, "there’s no place for my studio!" "You could try the third floor," she said, and I found a narrow set of stairs that led to a heretofore unsuspected third floor. It was gigantic, a huge open hunting-lodge sort of space, built around a glass case containing a lightning blasted tree. There were massive fireplaces at either end, heavy log furniture, skylights, and wraparound balconies. There was a bathroom with cast-iron tub. It was a really epic space. (It was also located at 31 Othello St, in a town called Boyal. These were unusually precise directions for my brain to provide for dream architecture. )
Eventually, Angus walking on my head woke me up, and I realized that there was no such building. Bummer. Normally I’d console myself that if I’m ever filthy rich, I will BUILD my dream home (granted it hasn’t literally appeared in dreams before…) but in this case, the laws of physics don’t seem to support it, given that the top floor was three times the size of the lower ones, and there was that peculiar load-bearing tree.
Darn.
Probably means that the bit about President Obama reading Digger wasn’t real, either.
On the bright side, my editor tells me that a lot of stores are starting to buy up the countertop display for Dragonbreath–it’s a little display, holds six copies, with a cut-out on top of Danny, the main character, saying "Laugh until smoke comes out your nose!"
If I ever see one of these in person, I will drop dead of squee on the spot. Kevin or Deb or whatever unfortunate is with me will have to carry me gibbering out of the store. I don’t know if anybody local will have them, but if any of you at bookstores in a few months see the display coming in and wanted to snap a photo, I would be very happy to see it…
The weekend is passed, I cleaned yesterday, there’s stuff to do. Stuff. Yes. Must do stuff. Stuff needs to be done. Need to get on that stuff.
*sigh*
I am about as motivated as a roadkilled ham…
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