photos

miscellany & tessa in a bag

So far this week is all storybirds and sketching the tarot kings. I think I have strong sketches for all four kings now. I ended up starting them over and making them all a bit more modern and sort of formal yet casual and I think it works. I’m going to let them sit overnight and if I still like them in the morning I will start painting them tomorrow.

And then this long crazy tarot journey will be a happy squirrel and some detailing away from complete. Which is kind of baffling.

I am mentally dipping my toes back into revisionland again, though the holidays and the snow and something vaguely resembling a head cold are making it a bit difficult. I have Ideas. I am attempting to string them together into something cohesive. I feel like I’m deconstructing the old draft the way they deconstruct food on Top Chef and I’m worried that it won’t taste good but I can’t taste it properly until all the ingredients are on the plate. Someday I will be able to explain my writing process without metaphors but today is not that day.

Also, I got tickets to see Sleep No More a third and final time after the holidays. Sleep No More & revisionland are currently tied up in my head in this moody masquerade of darkness and tuxedos that smells like evergreen. There’s something in it that is precisely what the novel needs. If I can find a way to translate wordless immersive theatre into text.

But I’m trying not to worry about that too much yet. Here, have a photo of Tessa in a bag.

tessa in a bag

Kittens love the holidays. ‘Tis the season of bags and cardboard boxes.

By erin, ago

50k!

Well, 51,132. And I have at least 20, possibly 30 more before the end will roll around. Going to try to get it done before December.

Bucket remains unimpressed.

unimpressed bucket

By erin, ago

tipping into autumn

We’ve had a very busy, very long weekend.

Thursday night we went to see Moby at the House of Blues. I’d never seen him in concert before but I listened to Play practically non-stop when it first came out and his new album, wait for me, is marvelous, so the boy & I decided it might be fun. It was phenomenal. Quite possibly the best concert ever and it just kept going and going. And Moby is seriously adorable. Go see him if you get a chance. Highly recommended. (And hopefully you won’t have people loudly discussing BC football standing behind you the way we did.)

Friday night we went to the boy’s cousin’s wedding, which was sweet and fun even though the cake was elusive. But for two nights in a row we didn’t get home until about 1:30am. So we’ve been pretty tired.

Rather than sitting around all day yesterday, I suggested we take advantage of the lovely weather and run around outdoors. Our original plan was to go apple picking, but that was apparently also the plan of every other person in New England yesterday, so instead we ended up wandering around Den Rock Park for a couple of hours.

den rock 2

It’s really lovely, and we had great light for it. There’s a beaver pond (we saw a goose, but no beavers) and a river and tall rocks and absurd amounts of acorns. We saw two little snakes and a lot of ferns and I took a bunch of photos. It was a relaxing way to spend the day (and so quiet! We only encountered a handful of other people walking around, and one very pretty dog) after all the raucous late nights.

den rock 7

And then we came home and made apple crisp. There are more photos on my Flickr photostream (of the park, not the crisp). Today is grey and rainy and not so photogenic. I am packing up my wine and cookies to take back with me to revisionland, where I will be pretty much full-time for the next two weeks.

den rock 12

By erin, ago

flopsy yawning kitten sort of day

yawning tessa

Tessa looks how I feel right now. Maybe without the yawning. But she’s been sprawled out in front of the fan all day and I would really like to be able to do the same but I don’t think I’d fit on that table and I have work to do. Lucky kitten.

I know, I should have the a/c on when it’s this humid. But we’ve had such a mild summer that we haven’t put the air conditioners up. It’s really not that bad with the fans, but it’s uncomfortable enough that I don’t really feel like doing much and would rather flop like Tessa. But I’m trying to be good.

Tarot Queens are going slow, mostly because the humidity makes it hard to paint. I still should be able to finish them by the end of the week, the base layers are down already and they mostly need detailing.

There will be sharable news on the literary agent search soon. I’m still playing the waiting game so nothing is definite yet. I think I’m actually getting better at the waiting game because I stopped biting my nails and I don’t freak out quite so much every time I have new mail.

I am not a summer creature, despite being born in July. I’m craving autumn already, with crisp leaves and pumpkin spice lattes and apple picking and none of this horrid humidity.

By erin, ago

knights & orchids

On Saturday we went to see Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, which was enjoyable for about an hour and a half and then boring and badly paced for the last hour. And when the credits started I immediately turned to the boy and said “Today we have learned that a good director can elevate a mediocre screenplay to something decent but cannot salvage a final scene as horrible as that one.” Really. Love the direction, love the look of everything, love Luna, love Alan Rickman, Daniel Radcliffe has some brilliant comic timing, but that screenplay was awful.

On Sunday we found out someone has been using my debit card to go on a spending spree in the UK. Bright side: some card monitoring place called to alert me, plus froze the card for me. According to the bank I need to go fill out fraud paperwork. There’s some confusion at this point as to what charges went through and what didn’t, but it’s several hundred dollars, at least. Joy.

In better news, I finished the Phantomwise Tarot Knights today. They’re up in the gallery on phantomwise.com. They were rather difficult, but I’m pleased with how they came out. Only 8 cards left, which is just crazy. Since I started in October of 2006 I’m thinking they’re going to end up finished almost exactly at the 3 year mark.

In other news I’m toying with multiple writing projects in hopes of finishing a draft of something by the end of the year, I just got these bracelets from Bullfinch & Barbury on Etsy and I’m in love with them, Tessa is in love with the huge cardboard box, and I’m going to go make dinner now.

In closing, here is a photo of the gorgeous orchid the boy got from his office, apparently they raffle off the old flowers when they replace them and he got this one. We’re trying not to kill it.

By erin, ago