Krampus!

I hang around the Absolute Write forums on occasion, and there have been odd little Christmas themed graphics going by in one of the ad spaces. Today it was this one, which I loved dearly. I haven’t been able to find an artist, or turn it up in another search–looks vintagey, although the border is obviously modern.

Nevertheless, I wanted to share it with you guys, because it’s AWESOME.

krampusshot — Copyright unknown artist, I guess. If anybody turns up the name, please let me know!

It’s not the Krampus design itself—my buddy Miss Monster’s are way better. (And often plagiarized, more’s the pity.)

No, it’s the kids…

BOY #1: Dude! Hell! Not cool!

GIRL #1: I have something in my eye. Now I’m sad.

KRAMPUS: Gene Simmons got nuthin’ on me!

GIRL #2: Ho hum, dragged to hell again. Hell is so boring this time of year.

BOY #2: HI, MOM! GUESS WHERE I AM!?

Reminds me of those old style saint cards that Catholics give out at random events. (Sort of like the wackier Protestants give out Chick Tracts, I guess, if you want to support bad painters and feel too guilty to actually lecture anyone about anything. There’s a whole subset just for funerals, with the deceased’s stats on the back like a very odd sort of baseball card.)

Nanofimo Wrap

I drove home from the coffee shop singing, which is something I only do when no one else is in the car, because even my mother, who loves me and believes I am the most wonderful and talented daughter in the world, doesn’t think I can sing worth a damn.

I sang:

Thirty thousand words,

I am so awesome

I wrote thirty thousand words!

So yes, as y’all can probably guess, I did 30K this November.

And that’s pretty good. I generally get out two or three times a week and write a minimum thousand words, which works out to about 12K a month, unless I’m under Terrifying Screaming Deadline or hit the groove or something, which makes..oh, let’s say 150K words a year, because I take whole weeks off when traveling, and then some days I throw down four thousand words and go “Awww, yeah!” So 30K, even if it’s not the full 50 of a Nanowrimo challenge, is a pretty good sum for me in a single month, particularly a month that involved a road trip, Thanksgiving, and tearing up old carpeting.

Hey, I write short books for a living, what can I say?

I look back at my stated Nanofimo goals. It’s a mixed bag.

Didn’t touch the thing with the Goblins. Sigh.
Did add 8.6K to Armadillo Wizard, which I am going to call Very Close To Goal. (Okay, like 4K of that was BEFORE November, but anything over the 18K I started with makes me happy.)
Added around 10K worth of connective tissue to Slate. Carved out a big chunk too, though, putting me at 73.5K there. And these are good solid filling out the plot Point A-to-Point B words, not just me writing extra scenes and shoving them at the end in hopes I’ll figure out where they go eventually. (Yes, I do this. Sometimes they go somewhere! Sometimes they never do, and then I gradually remove them as they become obviously useless.)
Got 5K on the next Hamster Princess book, (The Twelve Dancing Mouse Princesses) which is not actually due until 2015, but it’s still nice to have. (This book may run around 18K all told, so 5K is actually a Substantial Portion Of The Text.)
Added various odds and ends to various other projects—another few chunks on House with Bird Feet (awaiting agent notes before going too hog wild) plus almost 9K on something that which is looking promising as a middle-grade book sometime in the semi-distant future.

All in all, y’know, it was pretty productive. I do wish I’d finished the Goblins, but I got pretty close to my goal on Armadillo Wizard, which is moving along nicely, and I put a hurtin’ on the Slate project, which is now much farther along, even if I didn’t finish it this month. I’m actually very pleased with the middle-grade thing—I foresee coming back to that one and going “awwwww yeah!” someday—and Hamster Princess 2 is just gravy.

I was joking earlier about pretending not to be disappointed with not making 50K, but when I lay it all out, I don’t actually have to pretend very hard. For the near future, I will probably keep alternating between Hamster and Armadillo* until I get edits on the two outstanding projects, but overall…not too shabby!

Hope you guys also had a productive Nanowhatevermo!

*Glancing at some of these working titles, I am thinking that maybe it is obvious that I am a trifle dotty about animals

The Glass Mountain And The Sensible Child

…and then one day she realized that her life was not wonderful. That she was miserable. That people were being cruel to her, and when she said something, she was told to be grateful that she had friends that cared about her enough to treat her so cruelly for her own good.

It probably won’t surprise you, my dear, to learn that she got angry.

Yes, indeed, she did. And the person that she got angry with was herself—

No?

But this happens a great deal, you know.

Ah. You are a sensible child, I see. Well, perhaps she was not so sensible. And it is not so unreasonable, you know. If you get angry at other people, there is often a great deal of yelling and fighting. Our heroine hated yelling, and she cried when she was angry.

(Though I do hear that goes away with menopause—

Hmmm?

Oh. Ask your mother. I am sure that she will be happy to explain it to such a sensible child.)

At any rate, it is a great deal easier to be angry with yourself. There is less yelling. And you do not have any of the excuses that you can invent for other people—that maybe they didn’t know, or had bad childhoods, or were badly frightened by spiders when they were small.

I am afraid you will simply have to trust me on this one.

Well. I could tell you a great many stories that fit inside this one, but it would take a long time. There are stories we tell ourselves, you know, about how lucky we are and how much worse off other people are. There are people dying right now in camps strung with barbed wire, and how can anyone feel sorry for themselves by comparison? At least you’re not dead and everything mostly works and nobody makes you eat maggots on toast.

Yes, it is a great deal like eating your vegetables because children are starving somewhere. Other people’s misery is supposed to be some kind of garnish to improve the taste, I suppose. I was never entirely clear on how that worked.

Seems a bit ghoulish, doesn’t it?

Well.

There were days when our heroine stood on street corners and thought “Someday, I will leave,” and felt nothing at all. And there were days when she curled into a ball on the couch and ached, and there were days she went along with everything because she was so afraid that this was the best it could be and no one else would ever want her again.

Am I talking about her job or her husband?

Well, yes.

When you love something, it has its fingers wrapped around your heart, whatever it may be. You’ll learn that soon, if you haven’t already.

I am afraid that being sensible will not help you much with that.

At any rate. Eventually things move on. All the brave knights ride at the glass mountain until they get to the top or get tired of sliding down the sides and go home to their mothers or lovers or cats.

I would like to tell you that the heroine got fed up and got angry with people who deserved it. It’s a better story that way, certainly. Would you like her to have a silver sword and cut the heads off her enemies?

I would, too. Let’s pretend that’s what happened.

But you cannot cut your own head off with a silver sword—no, you can’t. I see you trying to work out the mechanics. Trust me on this one—oh, fine. But it requires pulleys, all right?

At any rate, you are still left alone, at the end, with the person that you are in the habit of being mad at.

I know, I know.

Perhaps it will please you to know that in time, she got tired of sliding down that glass mountain, too. She stopped thinking of all the times when she should have stood up and said “Enough! No more!” and walked away—from her job, from her lover, from people who claimed to be friends—and getting angry at herself for not standing up.

And she stopped thinking “At least it’s not maggots on toast.”

Instead she thought “That was horrible, and that poor girl didn’t deserve it. Even if it was me.”

And a long time later, when she could hardly see the glass mountain in the distance any more, she thought “Goodness, if I lived through all that, I must be very stubborn and tough as nails to boot.”

And she stopped worrying about all the times she curled up on the couch and cried and started thinking about all the times she got up afterwards and splashed water on her face and went on, because work still had to do be done and art still had to be made and somebody always has to feed the cat and count out the till and turn off the lights at the end of the day.

She thought “At least I always got up again.” And she began to think rather tenderly of her younger self, as someone who was not terribly bright, perhaps, but who kept getting up again, and who had eventually turned her back on glass mountains.

Her silver sword? Well, she hung it up over the doorway. If you’ve got a silver sword, after all, it’s no good if you don’t know where it is so that you can get to it.

She met quite a few people who knew about glass mountains, too. She loved some of them very much, and she was mostly patient with the ones who kept throwing themselves at the sides of their own glass mountains, although not that patient, because some memories still made her tired.

An end? Well, I don’t know the end yet. She hasn’t died, you know. And hardly anyone lives happily ever after, unless they have one of those wires in their brains—on second thought, let’s not talk about that.

Endings.

Yes.

I could make one up, I suppose. We don’t really have a convenient villain to dance in red-hot iron boots….

No. We are not taking nominations.

Let’s have pie. I think pie would be a good end to this story, don’t you?

See, I knew you were a sensible child.

Breaking The GM

Sometimes, it just all comes together in D&D.

When last we left our intrepid adventurers, they were battling through the Walt’s Wasps* hand-lotion factory, to foil the plot of a demon lord who had decided to enslave the world with evil hand lotion.

PALADIN: Seriously? Evil hand lotion? Are you guys sure you don’t want to come back and try again? Maybe something with a little dignity this time?

DEMONS: We know, right?

PALADIN: I am smiting you under protest.

DEMONS: Would you like a pamphlet about our hand lotion?

PALADIN: …This degrades us both.

After dispatching the demons, the party had accidentally split up at the end of last session. (Cue Rooster sitting alone in a room with a portal and his trail rations, playing harmonica, the picture of a sad paladin waiting for the rest of the group.) At last, after a rousing nap, the party went in search of their lost paladin.

RANGER: I want to stay here.

DRUID: There might be more slaad. With tadpoles.

GNOME: They do that impregnate-you-with-tadpole-babies thing!

RANGER: I’m going, I’m going…

On the other side of the portal, they found…a lonely trail ration, and no paladin. Fortunately, they were re-united in the next room.

PALADIN: (dangling thirty feet in the air, in his boxer shorts,** over a vat of molten hand lotion) So, hey, I found the bad guys!

DRUID: (facepalms)

CULTISTS: Death to the infidel! We will boil him alive in our hand lotion of evil!

GNOME: I feel it’s time for diplomacy!

CULTISTS: It is time for hand lotion! And salt scrub!

GNOME: Do you have the salt scrub in lavender?

PALADIN: Don’t mind me…

RANGER: I’m going to shoot something.

A pitched battle ensued! A battle rather more pitched than usual, because all our battle plans mostly involve having a working paladin, not someone who is shouting encouragement from thirty feet up! Our trusty Gnoll fighter can only hold so many enemies at the same time!

GM: And that’s a twenty-six damage and ten ongoing and…whoa.

THIEF: Ow. That’s bad, right?

GM: …you have two hit points.

THIEF: THIS IS NOT SHINY.

GNOME: Let me get that healing potion warmed up for you…

Meanwhile, Fizzgig, the paladin’s trusty pet demon, was rooting around through his*** master’s clothes until he finally seized upon—the holy symbol!

PALADIN: Good boy! Good Fizzgig! Somebody give him a chewy horse-hoof!

FIZZGIG: Grah!

GNOLL: Hey, a chewy horse-hoof sounds good right now…

Unfortunately Fizzgig is approximately ten inches high, and the paladin was, as previously mentioned, thirty feet up over molten lotion. But he had a plan!

FIZZGIG: (Spits holy symbol onto the druid’s foot.)

DRUID: …what am I supposed to do with this?

FIZZGIG: Grah! Grah-grah-grah–GRAH!

FIZZGIG: (grabs Lawrence the Toad, the Gnome’s familiar.)

LAWRENCE: (does amphibian interpretive dance while Fizzgig beatboxes.)

DRUID: ….what?

GNOME: It was perfectly clear to me.

THIEF: I could swear that all this blood was supposed to be on the inside, not the outside…

PALADIN: I HAVE A BRILLIANT PLAN!

DRUID: Oh lord.

TWITTER: This is a very Rube-Goldberg sort of plan.

The druid, in his spare time, is a shape-shifter. He turned into a flying drake, grabbed the holy symbol, landed on the chain from which the paladin was dangling, and very carefully dropped the holy symbol around the paladin’s neck.

PALADIN: (holding holy symbol in his teeth) ‘Ank oo’.

PALADIN’S PLAYER: I have my holy symbol back now, biatch!

DRUID: I do a backflip off the chain and throw lightning at the Big Bad Cultist standing right there, because I am just that badass.

BIG BAD CULTIST: You’re badass? I have taken almost no damage and am about to set you on fire. Also I am a Warforged and thus nearly indestructible. Let me just cast this spell–

PALADIN: THE POWER OF THE WEASEL COMPELS YOU!

Let us pause here for a moment to explain some of the mechanics of being a paladin.

There is a spell.

It is called Knightly Intercession. It means that if you are a paladin and somebody attacks an ally near you, you yell “I don’t think so!” (or presumably something suitably paladinly) and through sheer power of divine badassery, you instantly haul that attacker to a square right next to you. You then take the attack meant for your friend, because this is what paladins do. And then you get to attack them back.

But if you happen, just hypothetically, to be dangling thirty feet in the air over molten hand lotion, then the square next to you…

Well. Sucks to be them, doesn’t it?

PALADIN’S PLAYER: I have to make an attack, I’m wrapped in chains—so I headbutt him. Then I let him go.

GM: …!

DRUID’S PLAYER: Oh. My. God.

GM: ……..!!

GM: ………………!!!!

PALADIN: Told you it was a brilliant plan.

GM: ….he vanishes into the molten lotion. There is a lot of splooshing. And he’s out of the combat. That’s it for him.

PARTY: (wild cheering)

DRUID’S PLAYER: You could have told me that was your plan! We have instant messaging!

PALADIN: …I wanted it to be authentic teamwork. It has nothing to do with my inability to find the buttons.

GM: I…you know, there’s only one thing I can do.

GM: (applauds into the mic)

GM: …and now we’re gonna call it for the night, because I got nothin’. Damn. Well-played, you two.

*No relation to any other alliterative lotion company involving hive insects.

**Embroidered with little weasels, of course.

***We’re assuming. Under “gender” his character sheet says “Fizzgig.” This is also his race, class, and primary language.

Dream Labor

I had a great idea for a quick, pithy blog post. In the time it took me to get here, I have forgotten it utterly.

It might have had something to do with gardening—been reading about the jardin de cure or “priest’s garden” which is France’s answer to cottage gardening. Or possibly it was about Nanowrimo, or maybe about the new deli that is supposed to be opening in town (everyone says it is “fancy” but since it’s not open, I don’t know where they are getting their information) or about the fact that I had a really complicated dream about slaying a dragon the other night and I woke up before the dragon was dead and it was incredibly frustrating, because damnit, I was supposed to slay that dragon! What was I doing with the prince and the big iron cages and the lance mounted on the front of the Buick if not to slay the dragon?

And of course since I woke up, the dragon is presumably not slain, which leads me to wonder if there is some place somewhere where dreaming people are drafted into doing all the crappy dangerous jobs, or even just the really boring ones, since presumably dreamers will accept anything you tell them to do as part of the dream. Useful way to run the nasty bits of the economy, and unlike zombies, you don’t have the feeding and storage issues. Maybe all those moving dreams I have aren’t actually deep-seated displacement anxiety, but me being recruited as unpaid labor to schlep boxes between apartments in another dimension.

No wonder I’m always pissed off in those dreams…

Wordcount: 23250

Post-Thanksgiving

Got the awesomest quilt hanging EVER from Kevin’s mom, aunt, and cousin—it’s Digger!

Will post photos later. At the moment, still a bit squishy ’bout the innards. Something’s been bothering me for a couple of days, and I was mostly fine on Thanksgiving (thankfully!) but it started to get kind of unpleasant later in the evening. I don’t know if it’s a bug or if my acid reflux meds react badly in the presence of stuffing.

Thank you to everybody for the goth fashion advice—I think I’ve got a few ideas on where to go with it, and I really appreciate the input. Y’all rock!

If you have not seen this Ted talk, it’s pretty damn brilliant:

Wordcount: 21500

Internet Fashionistas, I Need To Pick Your Brains!

I am bad at fashion and also at sewing, so I am turning to the internet brain trust on this one, for a story that is trundling along and has hit a point where I might need some information.

Let us say that you are a twelve-year-old girl and you are determined to be an impressively Wicked Witch.

You are also short, plump, have a round face and regrettably frizzy hair. You rather wish that you were six feet tall and interestingly pale and vaguely consumptive and had straight hair down to your waist and cheekbones you could slice cheese with, because life.

You are not sufficiently magical to achieve this with illusions, because plot.

However, what you DO have is a very skilled tailor with impeccable fashion sense and really good stompy boots. With purple shoe-laces.

There are no adults with authority to go “YOU ARE NOT GOING OUT OF THE HOUSE DRESSED LIKE THAT, YOUNG LADY!” but you are twelve and thus going to dress age appropriately for a middle-grade book, because Ursula likes not having to eat out of dumpsters.

There is no male lead, unless you count the Igor-like character. This is not, as they say, a kissing book.

What do you wear?

My many goth and costuming friends, please advise—photolinks welcomed particularly (and I’ll approve the comments, don’t worry if they vanish into the aether for hotlinking.) I am expecting that the heroine is going to have to settle for not looking like a consumptive Romantic poetess, but still, I want her to be happy that her Mom isn’t buying her clothes and that she finally gets to indulge her gothic little heart. However, I have neither the sartorial imagination nor the vocabulary to cover this, and so I turn to you. I just need one or two outfits I can actually wrap my head around, and I can more or less hand-wave the rest.

Imagine the target audience is small goth girls who’s mom doesn’t understand why they won’t wear that nice shirt with the Dalmatian puppies on it. (I’m nearly sure that’s a viable market share…)

Wordcount: 20500 (Oh, I am so not going to make 50K…)

Declutterification

I had not actually intended to freak out and clean the closet this afternoon, but I was idly flipping through house stuff on-line and found a reference to the book Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century which was an anthropological study of how we live (or how Americans in LA live, anyhow, which may not quite resemble the rest of us.) It pretty much took one photo of dirty clothes being stored in the shower and that weird bit in the back of my brain that is convinced that I am five minutes of vigilance away from LIVING IN SQUALOR screamed like a regiment of drunken Highlanders and went for the garbage bags.

Honestly, the house looks pretty good at the moment, as long as you stay out of the closets and the garage. The new flooring in the living room makes it infinitely better. The library is about half awesome and half…not quite so awesome, but the rest of the downstairs is totally awesome.

And now the closet is…at least more functional.

Someday, I will do the coat closet. I will need a chair, a whip, and some contractor bags. But not today.

I Love My Dentist

I needed two fillings today. Actually I needed one at first, and then the dentist got in there and muttered a bit and said “You’ve got kissing cavities…they’re right in contact and they’ve both decalcified and you’re already Novocained up, so why don’t I just do this now?”

I, like most people, lived in stark fear of the dentist for many years. Having braces pretty much ensures this. The dentists themselves didn’t help with this much, and having lived much of my life in relative poverty and being in an insurance-free field, I tended not to show up until they had something to yell about. Preventative care is for people who don’t worry where the next check is coming from.

And then Kevin got me on his dental insurance, and found this dentist.

Who is only a few years older than me, who goes to Ren Faires dressed as the Tooth Fairy, who is a huge My Little Pony fan and who spent the morning grilling me about which Wacom tablet to get while shooting Novocaine into my gums.

I went in at first with trepidation. I had not had dental insurance since my divorce. I floss on alternate Thursdays. My gums have been a wreck my entire adult life. (And tangentially, they got MUCH worse when I went off the Pill. Man, hormones do EVERYTHING.)

I went in expecting shame and degradation to be heaped upon my head. I slunk into the waiting room like a criminal.

And she looked things over and said “Looks like you’ve done as good as can be expected, given the circumstances. I’ve seen way worse.”

And scheduled a really serious cleaning and a follow-up exam a bit later when my gums were recovered. And they put that numbing gel they use when they’re going to shoot you with Novocaine on the gums first so the cleaning wouldn’t hurt.

O Readers, it was like going in for confession for the first time in a decade and spilling out your guts to the priest—ALL the sins, not just the skipping Easter mass and the unpaid parking tickets, but the deep meaty ones about envy and lust and despair and what you REALLY think about your sister’s kids—and as you sat there in quivering silence, waiting for the axe of judgement to fall, hearing him say “Is that all? Pfff, don’t worry about it, my child, you’re only human. Say a couple Hail Marys and we’re having a blood drive on Friday if you’re free.”

Some months later I found myself having lost a filling and I went in. Fearlessly. Knowing that there would be drilling. Knowing that there might be big needles. Knowing it wouldn’t feel good. It was about the same level of stress as a pap smear—“Yes, this will be physically uncomfortable, but then it will be over until the next time, and it’s not THAT bad.” I was filled with resignation, not with dread, because however much it might suck, nobody was going to yell at me.

When I think about all the things I would tell my younger self if I could, a lot of them I might wind up not saying, because maybe not knowing at the time was important. I don’t think I’d tell younger me that I would someday be successful beyond my wildest dreams in a field I never expected, because maybe I’d just sit around waiting for it to happen. I haven’t got a clue what I’d say about love. So many opportunities involved being in the right place at the right time, I’d hate to jinx it.

Ultimately I might just go with “Life will be better and stranger than you ever thought, and you really will get over the bad bits.”

And then I’d add in the caveat “And someday you’ll find an awesome dentist and that bit won’t suck any more either.”

Wordcount: 15750

In Before Scalzi!

(at least, if I type fast enough)

So yet again, the blog-o-sphere has exploded—twice in a week, no less!—with geeks (male) telling women that they are not nerdy enough or not hot or too hot or…I don’t know, it all blurs together after awhile, honestly. The word “hot” definitely features, and “cosplay.” As usual, it seems to come down to how-dare-there-be-women-cosplayers-who-do-not-meet-my-arbitrary-standards-of-fandom, in whatever flavor you happen to want.

So, y’know. The usual.

One of them was a comic creator who seemed somewhat upset that there were cosplayers who were taking attention away from fine upstanding comic creators who might have made the characters they were cosplaying. That seemed to be the gist. There was a lot of yelling in caps, at any rate.

You can find his rant easily enough—I’d suggest “geek misogyny” put into google, but sadly, that may turn up a few million results. Still, I have faith.

Well.

I am nobody special and do not expect most angry geek males of this stripe to listen to me, but on this one little topic, I do have something to say.

As some of you might know, I am a comic book creator. Artist. Writer. That kinda thing.

Did an obscure little comic called Digger. Don’t expect anyone to have heard of it. Do a hybrid comic called Dragonbreath. Bit wider audience, but mostly under twelve. In geek circles, I am obscure.

(Before you leap to my defense here, oh audience, it’s okay. I know YOU know who I am. But I don’t do superhero comics, so I don’t actually expect mainstream comics to know I exist, and really, I’m okay with that.)

But just in case…

I hereby grant, in perpetuity, the right to all cosplayers of any age, body type, or gender—or lack thereof—to cosplay as anything I have ever created, including the Biting Pear if you can figure out how.* Doesn’t matter if you’re hot, or not hot, or maybe hot if you like that sort or maybe it’s none of my goddamn business if you’re hot because who the hell died and made me the arbiter of hotness? Hell, I’m still trying to find a bra with the nice t-shirt back where the little front snap doesn’t break after a dozen washings. (Okay, that has nothing to do with male geek rage, but seriously, if you know one, comment.)

In fact, I grant you right-of-cosplay even if you’ve never read the comics or seen more than one of my paintings and know nothing about any of them and just think one of the characters would make an awesome costume. Apparently this is a mortal sin in some eyes, but for me, I think it’s fantastic. Go forth and cosplay! Knock yourself out! I’d love to see photos.

Now sure, this is maybe easy for me to say, because if you want to cosplay as Digger, you’re gonna need a LOT of fake fur and some serious know-how, and if you manage to cosplay as the Statue of Ganesh, I will load you down with so much swag you’ll need a hand-truck leaving the table, because that is an engineering feat for the ages.

But there’s a few others characters of mine that do commit the sin of having human skin. Murai. Jhalm. Sings-to-Trees. Those odd little fellows in the robes with the checkerboard hems. And if I ever see a Celadon Toadstool cosplayer, I will take an unbelievable number of photos and hug you even if I get green bodypaint all over my clothes.

If you ever get the urge to cosplay as any of them, do it with my blessing. I don’t care if you’ve been in fandom for forty years or if you once caught a Dr. Who marathon while you were stuck on the couch sick and think a midichlorian has something to do with swimming pools. (Pretty sure we all envy you your innocence on that one, actually.) I don’t even care if you’re doing it because you are the BIGGEST FAN EVER** or because you really do think that you look dead sexy in wombat fur and you want in on all that hypothetical…hot…wombat…lovin’….

Well, moving on. More power to you either way, sez I.

I am not going to sit down and administer a standardized test to people to make sure that they are the Right Sort to cosplay as something I created. Love is love. Appreciation is appreciation. I do not require you to read my entire back catalog and know my blood type in order to think one of my characters looks damn cool/sexy/fun to be.

Frankly, if you’re cosplaying, it’s not about me. You’re a cosplayer. That’s your expression of fandom. You can do things. With the sewing and the glue and the whatnot. Sometimes wigs. (Wigs! It boggles the mind.)

Me, I can’t sew a stitch, so as far as I’m concerned, that is black magic.

And if you choose to use your astonishing black magic sewing powers to express admiration for something I created, I would have to be both an ingrate and an astonishing jackass to tell you that you weren’t a true enough geek to do it.

And if anybody ever tries to yell at you for dressing as one of my characters, you tell ’em I personally said it was fine. And then flip your hyena ears or wombat tail or orc battleaxe in their direction and go off and be awesome.

Thank you.

That is all.

*Subject to all usual disclaimers about the making of money off copyrighted properties, etc, for legal purposes.. Also, please don’t knock over a bank dressed as Wendell the iguana. My agent will say all the words. She will say some of them twice.

**Post currently held, to the best of my knowledge, by a small boy in Virginia. I apologized to his mother several times for this.

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Red Wombat Studio

November 2012