Eats, shoots, and leaves

True grit: cowboys have it embedded in the seams of their faces.

The cowboys had it right. They were free agents with nothing more to weigh them down than a gun and a (possibly stolen) horse. They weren't burdened with consumerist culture and the accumulations of years of acquisitive tendencies. None of this schizoid postmodern existence. Just the sun on their faces, potentially fatal dehydration, bullets every which way, and the quiet of nature.

Ignoring the deconstructive readings that problematize the lone gunman fantasy with criticisms of the marginalized and mistreated Native Americans, gender politics, general race relations, and the fallout of shootouts and casual mayhem -- the cowboys had it right.

It would be great to go west, where there are no rules. To discover the great untamed land. Walk out of the society that would rather have them working in a store for an honest living. It's an escapist fantasy for people droning in jobs they hate. I can relate. It's all Man vs. Society. Man eats, shoots, and leaves. 

But generations swing like pendulums. Once the tv channels were full of cowboys. Now they're full of cop shows, which tend towards the other side of law and order. But as long as cynicism and darkness are in (see the popularity of the super successful Batman reboot, the popularity of Dexter) the outsiders can do their thing, just in different clothes. Cowboys can't come back in a big way; too many cheesy shows and movies have come and gone.

After all, the wild west is gone. But unexplored territory isn't. 

Now it's time for the wild web?

Trees!

Fun fact: I like painting trees. 

Both of these were commissioned for the same friend who wants a collection of Yggdrasil. The first was supposed to be a tree of life. It may or may not look like a tree of death.

Whomever invented celtic knots must be a masochist.

The next time a tree was commissioned for her, it was requested with the wolf and ivy for secret symbolic reasons that you would never guess in a million years.

More tree!

Right now I want to paint trees all the time. It's autumn, and the leaves are almost all gone, so I miss the foliage. At the moment is a beautiful sliver of time for autumn yellows in late sunlight. And our Japanese Maple is a brilliant blood red for just a few days. I doubt I can paint the thing fast enough before it vanishes, but it may be time for another painting. 

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.

Moonblind Monday and Fever Dreams!

As I get deeper into Moonblind book 2 (sequel to Shadowing), I am doing an art push. Expect dragons, Knights, Overlords, and almost demotivational style character sketches.

Art of the week: What is a Moon Dragon?

I would have posted this at some reasonable hour, but have a terrible cold with fever and chills, and I may or may not have woken up just before two o clock today from a vivid dream.

The dream was of a team-style version of The Hunger Games. I think it was freelancing army types with guns that were trying to kill us for the audience's entertainment. Rather than strangers, we were a close-knit team of seven kids that had been raised up in a cultish and hard-labor situation. I'm not sure if the games were going to change and go all Hunger on us to determine a winner. Probably would.

Comma was there, but she was a cute little robot-cat full of little robotic beads like huge nanoparticles. The sponsors briefly drained out her robot beads and left her as a 2d puppet until I complained enough that they refilled her back fully functioning. She continued to be ornery, but I dragged her along so she would not get blown up. Oh dreams. Always crazy.

...And without further tangent: Moonblind Art of the week!

Possible Omnibus Cover!

Get excited for next Moonblind Monday!

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.

New and Improved Cover!

Seriously? A second post on your cover, Kat?

Well, I like the look and feel of the new background, so I would like to take the time to announce that the new and subtly improved cover is now a go!

With a texture like that, it has to be good.

Now, as you can see, I have added a very cute rock-texture in the background. You may wonder why I bothered poking at the drawing (note the previous post on full evolution). I was happy with the center, you see, but the dull boredom of the prior flat gray background always made me sad. I wanted a nifty texture, but I resisted using anything stock.

Because I do not approve of using stock textures, my previous solution was to whine about it. But the other day something extraordinary happened; I walked outside. I tore myself away from my computer long enough to realize that there were some very big flat stones outside with some very nice moss/mold/lichen/growing things/texture. And thus this texture was easily added. 

Also on the bright side, it should look decent on the grayscale of a Kindle. My first cover was pretty much black, so you could only see Shadowing and my name and kind of a face.  

Anywho, this is a very cute fantasy story (who doesn't love antiheroes and violent elves?) Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords. Most people buy Amazon. You can find reviews there.

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.