My brain amuses me. It comes up with really silly things sometimes. Like once when trying to come up with the word that means "to invent new words," Brain supplied the word "spoon." (The word I wanted was, in fact, "coin.")

Yesterday at work I was listening to a bunch of random John Williams music, and the Superman theme came on. Good stuff. So while enjoying the music, Brain started to wander into the realm of me+comics and had an interesting train of thought. It went from Twitter to Ron Perazza (one of the comics pros I follow) to his work with Zuda Comics, an offshoot of DC that publishes webcomics. Brain thought about how it's too bad I don't want to sell Muse to Zuda (I don't like their rights agreements), then wondered if maybe I could participate by doing some kind of shorter work. I'd been pondering other directions in my me+comics future (if I'm going to study sequential art at the graduate level, I'd better have some plans for it*, right?), and have been thinking about short pieces that experiment with style or storytelling, or adaptations of famous works (so as to prevent the travesty of Marvel's "Pride & Prejudice" adaptation from happening again)..

Then Brain came full circle and handed me a gem - what if I wrote/drew a comic based on Superman?! That'd be so cool!

Then I laughed at my silly brain and told my coworker what was so funny. ("Brain, I hate to tell you this, but.. it's been done.")


I'm writing this because I just had another Silly Brain moment that I thought I'd share. This one actually may be a fun idea, as well as serving to amuse me. I was thinking about Twitter and Muse again, and the progress I've made lately (which nobody on Twitter besides Ki, Fi, and Isaura really cares about, since I don't actually have any readers yet), and had the idea of making a series of Tweets to this effect:

Just handed off Ch1 to the artist. Ch2 going well!

Then, shortly afterwards, Just got Ch1 script from the writer. Took her long enough! (Geez, when does she want this done by? She's kidding, right??)

And a little later still, Artists are so temperamental! She sure gripes a lot. Hope the book comes out nice, though. Can't wait to see it done!

It amuses me to refer to myself in 1st/3rd-person as though there are two people on this creative team. Maybe I'll actually do it, when it comes time to make the hand-off. XD Well done, Brain!


*Btw, this new direction in seq-art in no way negates my goal of becoming a novelist. I would adamantly do both!!

I love it when I run into pop culture references in-game.

Today I found a human named Harrison Jones in a cage inside some troll ruins. I took a few screencaps to commemorate the quest.

( Cut for big pictures )

What made it even more epic is that I had the presence of mind to play the Indiana Jones theme while the quest was going. It *felt* that much cooler. XD

Anybody need friends for Thanskgiving Dinner? phoenix_melody and I are staying in town, and any of you are welcome to join us. My house, next Thursday. (Fi says I'm in charge cuz it's at my house, so I'm coordinating.)

So post here if you'll be in town/coming, and let me know what you'll be bringing!



I need a food icon.

PS~ If you have a dream in which people keep asking you, "How do you ID a missing body?" you should let them know that their reasoning is wacky.

Also, if anybody's interested, the CW is marathoning "Vampire Diaries" December 14th through 18th (2 eps a day).

HOOOOLY COW, "Mentalist" was intense tonight! "Vampire Diaries" was, too (how many revelations/milestones can you have in one episode?), but the Mentalist definitely took the cake for intensity. (And I missed the first couple minutes that evidently showed Rigsby and Van Pelt showing skin. I was spoiled by the stupid TV Guide magazine.) The magazine also mentioned that somebody in the CBI would die, but I didn't expect them to go through with what they did. It leaves me wondering where they'll go from here.

Anyway, this is actually a happy post - pay no mind to the blood smiley in my icon.

I found out today that I've got 13 days of unused vacation/sick time that I'll lose at the end of the year. Six or seven days of that can be paid, if I want to cash out all my PTO hours (which do roll over at the new year).

So I took a good look at the calendar and determined that I'm going to take a whole couple weeks off for Christmas (and use the PTO there so I'm not hurting for funds in January), and a few other days here and there. That is, I'm taking a long weekend one week, and I'm only going to work one more Friday for the rest of the year! My boss gave me a bit of a hard time about my vacation plans, but hey, I earned it by not being gone the rest of the year. (A good bit of that was saved for Sirens Con, which didn't work out.) And I'm not going to feel too bad about it, cuz I'll still be there 4 days out of 5, except for Christmas break. So there.

This is where I finally make real progress on Muse! *crosses fingers and hopes for productivity tomorrow!* (But first, preparing my costume photo for the Simplicity contest!)

see more Lol Celebs

It's been a busy - but rather successful - day.

( LTUE progress / Campus / SCAD / Costume! )

The rest of the week is going to be busy, too; hopefully I can continue to keep my head above water. Next week I think I deserve a break. In fact, I think I'll take a couple days off work next week. Yeah! That's a great idea!


EDIT: Did I mention that SCAD has an Equestrian Studies program? How cool is it that you can go to an art school and learn to ride! (English, it looks like.) That would be a lovely opportunity to cross off "jump horseback" on my life-goals list!

Was browsing the SFF section at the library a couple weeks ago, mining for gems (brought home a few, which I haven't had time to read yet), when I had an interesting idea:

When I get published, who will be my shelf neighbors?

So I checked. Turns out I'll be sharing shelf space with the honorable Robert A. Heinlein. Cool. We're very different genres, but surely I'll catch some good collateral traffic from him, seeing as he's one of the "Big Three" grand masters of science fiction. :P Or I'll be overlooked completely..

Who will be your shelf neighbors?



In other book news, I just finished listening to Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold. I guess it's a sort of prequel to the Miles Vorkosigan series, since it's the tale of how his parents met and married. Delightful. The proposal scene had me laughing hysterically. I'm definitely open to more by her. I bought The Warrior's Apprentice too, and I'm hoping I won't miss too much by skipping the one in between, seeing as Audible doesn't have it. Bah.

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
- Lois McMaster Bujold

No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar.
- Donald Foster

They certainly give very strange names to diseases.
- Plato


I love my ward. It's full of such neat people! Last night I met a fellow who, it turns out, is my next-door neighbor. I said, "Oh! You're the roommate who's out of town a lot." "Yes," he said. "What do you do, that you're gone so much?" He's an airline pilot. How cool is that? We had a lovely long chat about interesting places he's been, and in which I called him a glorified bus driver and he said that's exactly what it felt like sometimes. (It was appropriate in context, I assure you. I don't normally go around insulting people's occupations!)

It's so cool to be in a ward full of people with careers instead of just students! Although, technically, my neighbor goes to the family ward, but a lot of the family ward folks come to our ward prayer and activities, so I'm glad we get to know them, too. Cuz 31 is definitely not too old for me these days.

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult.
- Charlotte Whitton

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
- Noel Coward


Last night's affair was a lot of fun, but I missed pixiepilot and pudges. :( We toured my house, chatted, vented about LTUE, ate my soup and the goodies people brought (Ki's brown butter sea salt rice krispy treats were a big hit - would you share the recipe?), sang me happy birthday and ate cake, watched "Wolverine" (and laughed a lot) and then the first two episodes of the 90's "X-Men" cartoon (and also laughed a lot).

It was a good night. Sorry if my crappy couches hurt anybody's back. :P

I wrote last night! Woot!! It's only 350 words or so, but it's fun and I wanted to share it with you. This scene takes place soon after Cassie joins the hero team.

***

( Cassie wandered the halls of the massive headquarters building, heart pounding at the reality of it all. )

***

I decided that if I'm going to write off Comic-Con, the Muse website, and all the reference books I've bought in the last year, I need to have something concrete to prove that I'm working at this as a business. The IRS might not need it as proof, the first year, but I'd like to play it safe. So I guess I should get serious about getting this behemoth off the ground and seeing if it will fly. That's my goal: Have chapter 1 written, drawn, and begun to be *posted* by the end of the year.

Which means I also need the website up and running (I may use the ComicGenesis one for now, if I can't get the official one done by the time the art's ready to go up) - and once I've got chapter 1 done, I'll pick a few of the best sequential pages, write up a synopsis (on which I've made significant headway this week), and send my proposal off to Image. :D

As we say in P90X - BRING IT!


~PS~ I've added Josh Groban's song "In Her Eyes" to my Muse playlist. Go listen to it!

So I don't remember whether I mentioned it before, but I got a call last month from my contact at the City Attorney's office. I'd sent him a letter that gave them my new address (a little late) and asking for a status report of my case.

He sounded surprised that I'd asked. He said it was in the hands of the District Court now, and gave me their number.

Today I finally called the Court to see what I needed to do. They looked it up and said that there was a hearing in May. May! The girl didn't show up at court (naturally), and so now the ball was back in the hands of the Attorney's office, whether to summon her again, or put out a warrant, or whatnot.

So I called the Attorney's office back and explained what the Court told me, and after a while the guy came back with good news. He said that it hadn't been noted in their records, and so he fixed it and put her in the queue of summons to go out tomorrow. The Court explained that if they need me to show up at a hearing or anything, they'll send me a subpoena, so I don't have to do anything else at this point.

I'm glad I checked up on it, though. Too bad I didn't check earlier.



[Then I immediately called Rory Scanlon's office (costume design professor and associate dean of the College of Fine Arts & Comm) to set up an appointment with him next week, for LTUE purposes. I think I've had my fill of stress today, so can we please not have issues at work that cause me lots of stress? I think I'd like to crawl into my little corner and just work quietly now.]


A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
- Victor Hugo

Dear Payless:

( Listen to my soapbox )

EDIT: Yes, I sent this in an actual email this morning. I got a reply this afternoon that said "thanks for your feedback; we have forwarded your comments to the appropriate department." Cool.

I just read this excellent essay by Scott Westerfield (who wrote the Uglies series, etc.) that I thought a good number of you would enjoy.

"A Slayer Comes to Town" - how the Buffy universe is neither 'alternate world' or 'trespass' story, but rather both.

PS~ Footnote 1, at the end of the essay, totally describes Isaura.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
- Mitch Hedberg


I had a thought this morning that made me really excited, when for some reason I had "We're Off to See the Wizard" stuck in my head. I was reflecting that the characters in the Wizard of Oz fully believed this nebulous "Wizard" fellow to be the solution to their problems, and their expectations were shattered when they discovered he was nothing like they had hoped. Yes, he helped them solve their problems in the end, but the circumstances were completely different from the way the characters thought they were.

I realized that that's kind of what I've been looking for in my story, in the bigger picture - the try/fail cycles of figuring out what's going on in the world and how they can fix it. I have trouble misleading people, even characters; I like things to be honest and straightforward. But in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and the gang didn't know they were wrong; they just put together their plan from limited information. Likewise, if I can give my characters bits of information along the way, from people who don't know the whole story, either, then it shouldn't be too difficult to make them work for the payoff. Specifically, I think I need to send them to someone they think has the answers, and then turn it on its head and reveal a problem that's worse/different than the one they thought they were solving.

Now I need to solidify this try/fail idea and determine how much they figure out, and from whom, and have these steps fill the different volumes with good flow and logic. Flesh out with local problems, characters' personal issues, relationship threads, and a bit of theme, and the story should pretty much write itself!

Also, I'd been keeping the light on for a fifth culture/city-state to present itself as the setting of the final book, and I think I've found one that will serve my purposes. ^____^ I'll have to research it to find out what it will require me to change, but I'm excited to try it on for fit.

Just caught up on two weeks' worth of Mentalist... HOO-BOY! Fun stuff. I'm sure Jane knows about Rigsby and Van Pelt - he saw it in the pilot, after all. I'm sad that I didn't find out til now, though.

And Jane with the inmates was hilarious. I wasn't super impressed with his manner of escape, but it was amusing nonetheless.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to more, as always.

I also watched 1 episode of Stargate Universe, so I have this weekend's left. And I have to watch this week's Vampire Diaries, too. I guess it's a good thing that some of my shows have taken time off in the last couple weeks, cuz I've been too busy to watch them. :(


By the way, does anybody watch "Lie to Me"?

Tomorrow night (Monday), at 9pm, my brother's doing a small cabaret (like couples figure skating, but without the skates) performance on campus, 270 RB. I haven't seen his routine yet, and he's competing at Dancesport on Saturday, but this one is free! Anybody want to join me? :)

Well, I didn't win a place on the Cricut Cruise. :( I'm a little sad. I hope they implement my ideas, though; I think they could be really good. Three people I work with won, though. One person on my team, one on the art team, and an admin friend of mine. Ah well - I'm not married, so I'd have a hard time deciding who to take with me, anyway. (Probably my sister, if she could take her 1-yr-old.) And this way I can spend my days off on other things, instead of using them in January.

So last night was another 10-12 hour sewing stint, only this time I had to go to work! Which is how I ended up going to bed at 5:30am and being an hour late for work. I couldn't let down the team.

Which is why my hair is crap-ola today, and why I'm so wiped. But I got my flamingo, and the costume is functional and still awesome and only needs a few more finishing touches for tomorrow. I need to put another button/button hole on the underskirt because the waist is too big and it ends up longer than the overskirt, and I have to add the decorative buttons to the bodice front and the sleeves.

Otherwise, though.. Not bad!

( They look way better in person than they do from my camera phone )

I'll post better photos later, both of the finished costume (tomorrow-ish) and of the group/me as taken by our company photographer.