miscellany

monday

I have been absurdly productive today. Like, giddy-making productive. Being productive apparently makes me a happy puppy, I should do it more often.

Spent most of the morning working on this set of panoramic photo-based paintings. Got all the photos mounted on their respective boards and I’m leaving them to dry overnight before I start adding more layers. They’re likely going to have a lot of layers when they’re finished. But I am on schedule to finish them this week, so that’s happy. Here’s a peek at what my table looks like, with all the seasons piled on it:

And my brain did that weird thing it does sometimes when painting (or rather, pasting prints of photos) unlocks the writing bit of my brain and I figured out how to fix one of the scenes in the novel that I’d been working on, so I wrote about 600 words that can be edited and added, and I’m absurdly pleased about that.

I also took a shower, drank a lot of tea, exercised and read another 50 pages of Then We Came to the End, which I started and abandoned sometime last year and picked up again yesterday. Nearly halfway through and liking it better this time around.

I’ve set myself up for a busy week but I think it will be an enjoyable one.

By erin, ago

three things for may third

  • I just made a huge pot of lemon chicken soup with spinach and orzo and egg and it is really lovely, that perfect kind of “comforting bowl of soup on a chilly day” kind of soup.
  • I also baked chocolate hazelnut cookies. With Hershey’s kisses on top.
  • And I mended the tear in the seam of my Radiohead shirt. I am all kinds of domestic this weekend.
By erin, ago

blossoming

Went on a photo excursion today. I’m working on this little seasonal photograph-based art project and I had photos that worked for every season except spring, so we ran around graveyards and wandered around Salem to get some appropriately springy photos. I have one I can use for my project now, and a bunch of lovely other ones to spare.

Bunches more on my Flickr photostream. Beautiful day, happy blossom-filled spring with flowers and bumblebees and sunshine.

By erin, ago

beltane miscellany, with links

It’s May! It’s warm and blossomy and rainy and happy Springy goodness. I baked cookies today, which wasn’t terribly Springy but still fun. 

I won Jenny Rappaport’s blogiversary microfiction contest over on Lit Soup. I was totally surprised, I entered on a whim mostly because the challenge of a 140 character story appealed to my OCD tendencies and I liked the result I came up with too much not to enter. I’m still giddily happy about winning. It makes me feel better about the writer part of artist/writer, since I still lean heavily to the art side. Excited about getting new books. One can never have too many books.

I started a dreamwidth account, mostly because I could. I’m erinism over there. Have yet to decide what to do with that journal, exactly, but I’m oddly glad to have it. Art content may migrate over there, or maybe not. We’ll see how it goes. It’s shiny and new and I do have a penchant for shiny things.

Anyway. Have wine & cookies. Am going to try updating this blog every day in May and see how that goes. Topics & suggestions welcome. There will likely be lots of pictures of kittens

By erin, ago

bat for lashes

The weather gods decided to drop a weekend of summer into the middle of spring. It is warm to the point of floptastically floppy kittens and desperate desire for sangria. (I have the floppy kittens, but sadly lack sangria.)

I am reading and writing and contemplating a series of monochromatic rainbow paintings.

The other day Stephen Fry tweeted about Bat for Lashes and of course I had to investigate Stephen Fry-approved music. I haven’t fallen this hard in music love since I first heard the Dresden Dolls.

I listened to everything I could find online and then promptly bought both albums on iTunes. LOVE. It’s like someone put all my favorite music in a blender with a volume of fairy tales and a bottle of red wine. There was supposed to be a show in Boston tomorrow but that’s now postponed until August, which makes me extremely happy since I wouldn’t have been able to go tomorrow but might be able to depending on when exactly in August said show is postponed until.

So, anyway. Basking in unseasonable summer and in music love. Will likely spend the afternoon sketching knights and keeping an eye on the Kitten Flop Barometer.

By erin, ago

days of tea & editing

I think I don’t post here as much as I likely should because my days are all very similar lately, a blur of tea and reading and writing and wishing it would be warm enough to open the windows.

For instance, today I have mostly been sitting and re-working two sections from the novel, one of which just needed re-arranging and editing and one that was previously non-existent and needs to be cobbled together from notes. The former is done, the latter I am still working on.

This part of editing is weird, futzing with story and character as much as structure and form. I’m making a particular relationship more blatant than it was in previous drafts, but I think it will help. I’m taking other bits out to vague up some stuff. It’s coming together, this draft will be done soon and will be better, stronger, all that fun stuff.

I have a cup of white tea that I think I boiled the water too hot for. It is too cold to open the windows.

This morning I woke up to 770 spam messages on my previous post, all advertisting a creative variety of webcams. For different things, but all of them were both LIVE and FREE.

I am excited about LOST tonight.

I am wearing a BPAL scent called Mag Mell that I got as a bonus frimp (BPAL speak for free imp, samples are imps in BPALland) in my last order. It is light and pretty and smells like amber and ginger and grass which is more springy than today actually feels.

My days seem quiet and repetitive lately. Productive, but repetitive. I’m nearing the end of editing, and I have query letters and synopsises and such to tackle after that which I am not particularly looking forward to. But hopefully the days will be warmer and I’ll be able to open up the windows and maybe that will help.

It’s supposed to be 70 degrees on Friday. I hope that’s not lies.

By erin, ago