Fluffy Dresses vs. Moth Wings

Last time I walked around Barnes and Noble, the cover of every YA chic book had a character in a full ball gown. In many of the getups I saw, it would be awfully hard to break into a jog, let alone a sprint. I prefer my protagonists to take the novel sensibly attired in something that allows mobility. Then they can face the conflicts of the novel at a sprint, or at least a jog. And they can sneak. Every try to move stealthily in a full ball gown? They rustle. A lot. 

Of course, back in the day, I was guilty of drawing all sorts of equally useful fashion designs. These, and especially the central figure, introduce a whole new set of pitfalls in high fashion.

Clearly, I should have my own fashion line.

Forget ballgowns - if people like me ruled the fashion world, everyone and their dog would go around wearing things as useful as an enormous pair of Luna Moth wings. But! If giant moth wings became the fashion standard, it would have several obvious benefits to the economy:

• Doorways would need to be widened for everyday convenience. This would reemploy carpenters and construction workers everywhere and solve the housing crisis. Just think of the industry! Statistics suggest that 99% of houses have doors.
• We would have more manufacturing and tech jobs to allow a fully electrical wardrobe. This would be necessary to give the wearer full control of flapping and potential gliding. 
• A powered wardrobe would necessitate more efficient portable power. This would lead to more efficient solar panels, with perks like ultraconvenient cell phone chargers in your shirt. What could be better?

This is not much better either.
At least she can move her legs.

Better, dare I say, may be something lighter, perhaps with your legs free. I distrust any book with really bulky dresses on the cover. It says to me that the character will be able to leisurely glide through all the problems of the novel. And that's not what I want in a story. You have to find the right outfit for the pace. Whatever she wears on the cover, I picture as she jumps over every obstacle, through every hoop. (Can she even fit through a hoop in those dresses?)


Rule of Hoops: If wearing a hoopskirt doesn't hamper your protagonist, you may need to pick up the pace of the narrative. 

Thrones are lame.

Moonblind Monday: well, sort of.

Oh man, it's Monday already? Lame. I spent all of last week adjusting to a new part-time job that somehow managed to give me a full-time percentage of souldeath and distraction from everything useful, like creating art. But on the plus side, I've been cleaning up my art desk, laughing at old artwork, and trying to clear some space so I'll have room to smack some art into those canvasses. 

So I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss my upcoming art plans for Moonblind. The plan is thus: pictures that are awesome. 

This is not moonblind art.
This is a REALLY OLD PICTURE.

What is necessary for awesome pictures is avoiding boring things. Like thrones. They are inherently flat and lend themselves to crowded and flat compositions. Fortunately, the Moonblind characters are the people doing the grunt work. They are not caught in boring compositions; they are full of action and excitement. 

As you can see in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, Royalty are pretty boring people. They spend all day sitting on thrones, which probably hurts their backs and sitting-pads, and leaves them in dull, static compositions. And as long as they're stuck sitting on a throne, they worry constantly about symmetry, looking impressive, lighting, and whether or not tigers will get hungry before feeding time. It is a dull, hard life, keeping up appearances. 

Also super old. Apparently her throne
is part octopus. Again, not quite Moonblind.

Lessons learned from old art: 
-Royalty is pretty boring. I'm sticking to action-oriented protagonists.
-Sitting is also boring.
- Bright colors are cheery no matter how many skulls you sneak in.
- Thrones are boring to draw.
- Depth is in a static, needlessly detailed picture.
- I wish I had a tiger foot-stool. I guess Comma will do for now.

Art Update

Fig 1. Look to Moonblind Mondays for moar
dragons! Probably with more body mass.

You have have noticed some changes to the blog. Slick new..teal? Turquoise? Blue? (With three faces, two sheep, one dragon/squid - find them all!) Because clearly I need to clash with all the artwork I'm going to be posting. And I am going to be posting artwork. I'm officially making a commitment to...a thing a week. Moonblind Mondays for fantasy art!

Yep. Fall remodeling. As much as I loved staring at that cup-o-joe, it was a stock picture, and really, we can't have that. Dormant-artist-Kat has awoken from a long sleep, and she won't stand for any generic background. I finished two art commissions this week. Now I can fill my car with gas over nine times times! And more importantly, I am back to the hopeless addiction of creating art.

Back to the blog, and the background. I knew I needed a new one. I lazily thought "hey, I'll stick a boring gray rock up! I have one I photographed from the Henchman cover."

! Little did I know that blogspot only took 300k files. And that an 1800x1600 file saved to be 300k is impressively blocky. But this was all learned quickly enough. Thus I turned to tiling as my sole hope of regaining detail.

! Little did I know that I would lose about six hours staring at it, putting puzzle pieces together (amid flashbacks to tessellations in seventh grade geometry), slowly making the tile bigger and bigger, then drawing creepy faces out of the shapes (all in the name of of apophenia!)

By monday I'll have some Moonblind art.

Fig 1. This is my favorite bookmark that I made in the bad old days of my artistic strivings. And yet, like most people who read books, I end up using random scraps of paper instead. A metro card. A movie stub. A tag for some piece of clothing marked down to $9.

I was considering making some artistic new bookmarks. But then, for the moment I've only got an ebook. Does you ever use real paper bookmarks?

Allusions and Associations? You're boned.

New weekly feature: Wordcount & #Writetip Wednesday. Everything is alliterative.

Wednesday-Wednesday Weekly Wordcount: 6,300 added to Gloaming, of 20,456 total.
This Week's Reads: Hunger Games, Gamble of the Godless (review soon!), and three chapters of Embassytown.

Weekly Words: Allusions and Associations 

Biblical allusions are especially popular because the biblical stories are well-known among English-speaking readers. But there are other many-millions-selling stories you could make use of (note that LoTR and The Hobbit take second and third top selling; fantasy authors everywhere have already experienced the joy of alluding/plot-stealing from them). And yet, biblical allusions remain by far the most popular to jaw about. Whether you see these as anchors to the canon of western literature, a vise squeezing the view of literature, or just plain glorified fanfiction, they can make, break, and problematize everything you write. Allusions are a tool at your disposal to link a character or situation into an existing framework.

Eve of the snake.
Get it? Get it? Ugh....
According to DeviantArt, I
painted that 6 years ago. I've improved.

Love them or hate them, you can't get through high school English without writing an essay on some Christ-figure character (Simon, from Lord of the Flies?! Your teacher will be deeply impressed that you did your SparkNotes homework). Pause. About all those reaching high-school and college essays. Is this what the canonized writers wanted? Did they  all mean to lay a biblical read-down on their text?

Well, some probably did. But not all. Allusions can be nothing more than similar features or offhand comments that get blown out of proportion in the reader's mind. Even if you don't intend to allude to anything at all, apophenia being what it is (some people call it patternicity (and is apparently also a TED talk, and reminds me that most of psychology is renaming the same concepts over and over again). In any case, people will find the patterns they are encouraged to find, or want to find in whatever they're reading.  This can make symbols pop with undue significance and characters fall into two-dimensional stand-ins for someone else in another story.

Allusions, even if you mean to use them, can bite you two ways. If you allude to stories without researching the connotations, you may convey nuance you don't mean. And if you rely too much on the nuance, 90% of your readers will miss it. (I remember one creative writing workshop I was in had a new allusion-dependent story each week, and it was maddening. The author would always get so offended when people didn't get it.) Writing tip: don't assume that just because you loved The Waste Land, that people will take the time to read the myth of Philomel as referenced in your story (unless Bettermyths blogs about it). And if your fiction can only be explained by a hypertext interface (or two), you might want to consider adding at least a comprehensive superficial plot on which to hang your allusive genius.

In conclusion, 'ware the allusion. Associations will slip into your story one way or another, though they may not be the right ones. Chances are it will be reminiscent of other stories. (If it is utterly unique, it is most likely incomprehensible.) Associations are sneaky. Sneaky like a snake, and just as treacherous (or does that depend on point of view?). Do your research before you reference, because you don't want to make a huge deal then get it wrong.

Really, whatever you do, your readers will get a random selection of their own associations.
#Writetip: Don't stress it. Just don't make your story hinge on one absolute allusion. 

Success is like a White Tiger

Success is like a white tiger: random, ferocious, and beautiful.

Once upon a time I was a member of DeviantArt. I still am, come to think of it (anyone still use that site?) Most of those drawings date back to high school, because I was the sort of kid who liked posting artwork. It helped encourage me to draw more, and that was always a good thing. Being in high school, I was very small fries, and I was excited if a drawing got two hundred views. Most didn't.

Then I drew this tiger(link to DA). I didn't do anything different than my usual routine of drawing a picture with an eye turned to some quality movie, like T2. I did nothing out of the ordinary, but the tiger turned into something special. Perhaps it was that people confused it with a photo when viewed as a thumbnail or perhaps because it made an attractively ferocious thumbnail, but it set itself off on a juggernaut run. It was an exception to the hundred-view rule. It was viewed over 67,000 times and had over 1000 favorites.

This is how art and writing work. It's random as hell. You do your thing, and sometimes you feel lucky to get fifty people read it. Sometimes it just turns into some weird juggernaut, and everyone sees it. You will never know when when it will happen or why it will happen. But it can and does. When it does happen, you'll never quite know why.

Success is like a white tiger: that snow-camouflage mutant of nature. You never know how it came to be or if it will maul you. But it is a beautiful, powerful, and ferocious thing. So keep drawing, keep writing. And sometimes the tiger comes.

Top Three Things I Miss About Video Games

Let's be real.
What I miss most is chocobos.

I used to play video games like an addict, and I think that may have shaped some of my literary tastes towards fast paced and full of action. Nonetheless I decided, a few years ago, to go cold turkey on games and get things done in life. Instead of gaining hours of free time, I gained an internet addiction. On the whole I am not sure it's an equal trade. The loading times are as bad or worse (especially with my internet tower dissolving). And there are some things that I really miss from video games that just don't translate well into written work: 

• 1. Exaggerated physical abilities. 

Especially as demonstrated by double jumping. In Devil May Cry, an excellent game, you have to unlock the skill, but once you do, you can jump, and then jump again in midair. In videogame land I jump everywhere.

(Perhaps I was a rabbit in a past life?) I do get genuinely annoyed if I encounter a videogame that does not allow me to jump with abandon. When they let me jump only as a special and relevant action button, it's the worst. I feel so controlled.

• 2. Even more exaggerated weapons. 

Disregard the crap-art.
Notice the impressive sword.

The size of swords in Final Fantasy games is one of the best things. Be the sword six feet long or one foot wide, IRL the characters' greatest threats would be their arms falling off.

(I assume this is what happens when you lift heavy things - I try to avoid testing the theory.) And yet these weapons are carried cheerily across the worldmap. Not to mention that the characters seem to have invisible packmules. Note: I think VII was the best soap opera, full of nonsense and betrayal and amnesia and tragedy.

• 3. Voice acting.

The voice acting was always. So. Good. 

It really added another layer to the plot developments and character appreciation. And none could ever come close to the excellent voice acting in the Devil May Cry series. That game should have been, and was, the one to fill my dark soul with light.

• But in writing...

These are things I miss. And yet they are high on the ridiculous spectrum as it is, and would be worse in writing. I like badass characters, but you gotta reign them in a little. They need weaknesses and emotions. Don't tell me they can doublejump off the air, or I can't take their life problems seriously. They can't have invisible pack mules - you need to think about what your characters could actually carry on their adventures. (Problems are tripled if your character is a shapeshifter.) And if the character's sword is bigger than he is, you need to provide a reason. 

Most importantly, any character monologuing should not bring tears of laughter to your readers' eyes. Because they probably won't be laughing with you.

The Importance of Spectacle

Lady Gaga, queen of spectacle.

Genius of our generation, Lady Gaga, is truly the Queen of Spectacle.

Say what you will about her music, she is a master of Spectacle. Writers could learn a thing or two about the incorporation of fashion and ridiculosity in her rise to fame. She is a provides great cues for entertainment: be crazy, be awesome, be shiny, and you will grow fans.

While I still consider Bad Romance, (which is the second most viewed video on YouTube), to be her video with the best aesthetic achievement, she hasn't released a boring one. And due to the transitive property of actors' historicity, she's essentially vampire hunter in Paparazzi, in which she kills Eric Northman.

Cover evolution

This is the process of change that the Shadowing cover went through.

Brainstorming phase:

Last time I went to a bookstore, sword hilts seemed popular.
I mentally combined that concept with a wolf door-knocker we have at my house.
I decided this was a bad idea.

There was another brainstorming picture, but it appears to have been so lame that I deleted it.

First idea for a cover with a halfway-transformed henchman standing there, like a bro.
Note that the wings are kind of like Devil May Cry swords.

In this stage his wings turned into spider webs, and his face, due to difficulties working out the jaw, began to bear a striking resemblance to Raziel from SoulReaver. Also, note the pen name idea and inherent flaw. 

In this stage his wings turned into umbrellas.
You already know about the name issue. 

And now it's just about perfect! Proper name, editors and publishing cited, series name finally mentioned, and the background is lightened up because it was brought to my attention that the last version looked like a lump of black on the Kindle. Still, there's something missing...

Aha! Now we have a fancy background texture! Thank you rock outside my house.  And now the process is done.

So there we have it: the very professional process through which I worked out the cover.