In Common with Humans

I know I haven’t done a real update for almost two weeks. I’ve been very involved with pushing my boundaries into a new area, and it’s taken a lot of time and energy. I hope this all doesn’t come off sounding hopelessly ego-ridden, but it’s not just about me. I know a lot of you are very talented and I think most of us know the feeling of being reluctant to try something because we don’t believe we’re good enough.

The bottleneck in my publishing production line is, and has always been, cover designs. I hated doing mash-ups, and I wanted to do real illustrations for the covers: completely composed from scratch, freeing me from the need to find (or set up and take) just the right photos, and being limited to those that were legal to use, and available in high enough resolution. Even when I was successful getting the images, and mashed them up as carefully as I could, I still was never very happy with the result. I wanted to do Real Art covers. I just didn’t have the confidence.

It wasn’t just that, of course. I’d get bogged down in all the self-sabotaging, neurotic internal dialogues, like: “You know you can do it.” No, I can’t, I can’t do real art! “Come on, you did three t-shirt designs for Rites of Spring, you’ve been paid for design work, you used to do the white boards at Community Education and people every day walked in and looked and said, ‘who’s the artist?'” Yes, but that was different! I can’t do this! “Yes, you can, just get your butt in gear and do it!” But it’s such hard work…

Bingo. See, that was the thing. I was a visual artist way before I was a writer. When I was a kid, I drew pictures all the time…constantly. I couldn’t leave a piece of paper blank. I filled the backs of all my school papers with elaborate drawings. I didn’t start writing until I was in junior high. I took (and aced, with exclamation points) art classes all through high school. But then…I just stopped drawing and painting, and started writing, instead. I never knew why…

…except for one fact that I really have to face. It was laziness. Writing was so effortless for me. Art, with the standards I set for myself, was hard work. And it was so different from writing. That’s gotten in my way with music, too. I was raised in a musical family. I have near-perfect pitch and I can compose original music. But I never really applied myself to it because it was too much work, and I had so many creative abilities, it was easy for me to coast into the least challenging paths. Laziness joined hands with perfectionism, and when I hit the first snag I just backed away and went to do something else.

The only exceptions to this pattern occurred when I’d made committments to other people and didn’t want to let them down. That gave me the incentive to follow through. Now, I have signed contracts with authors to produce books that need covers–by next month.

So, I needed to do the cover for Krymsin Nocturnes. I had some ideas I liked, and they all involved portraits of *gulp* people. In particular, I wanted Montgomery Quinn, the hero of the book, on the cover. I’d asked the author to suggest an actor that he thought resembled his character, to give me an anchor point. He suggested Michael Jai White. I’d looked up photos of Mr. White (he was in the last Batman movie) for reference, but obviously, they’re all copyrighted. But I didn’t want to do a mash-up, anyway. I’d tried mocking up one, a couple of months ago, and set it aside. I opened it up on this new computer, with its high-definition 22″ screen, last month.

“Ew, yuck,” was what I thought. It wasn’t holding together at all. I just couldn’t find legal images that were even close to what I wanted. I was going to have to start over from scratch, anyway.

So I posed myself a challenge. I have this new computer, and I have this Bamboo tablet tool that allows me to sketch in digital media, something that’s very hard to do with a mouse or a touchpad. I can draw and sketch and rough out, and then paint, holding the pen tool like a pen or paintbrush. It’s very liberating. I decided to see if I could paint Quinn, just as I imagined him, free-hand, and get a decent portrait. If I could do that, then I’d do the whole thing that way.

I didn’t work from photos. I did the initial portrait entirely from my imagination. Only when I was well along in the project did I consult a few photos, and several times posed in front of a mirror, to get certain details about anatomy or shadow/light effects or structural detail of inanimate objects correct. Every bit of the finished project is drawn and “painted,” using the art media tools in Paint Shop Pro, free-hand. And here’s what I learned.

• Yes, I can do art.
• Yes, I am an incredibly lazy person who kept trying to sneak around and use short cuts and then had to throw them out and start over because all those clever short cuts look like just that. If you want a detailed illustration that looks good, you have to do all the details…one by one. So a good part of this past week has involved dragging myself by the scruff of the neck to sit and do, say, a distant cityscape by carefully layering a zillion tiny little rectangles in different sizes, proportions and colors, one at a time. And how do you make water look like water? Quick hint: there is no fast and dirty way to do it.
• It’s time-consuming, but ultimately no more so than mash-up covers with all the time they require in finding or making the images to mash, and it’s much, much more satisfying.
• All 2-D art is impressionistic, and after a point you have to stop worrying about the fact that it looks like a painting and not like a 600 dpi technicolor photo. I’m using digital art media tools to make it look like art, not photography.

When I had just finished Quinn, and was starting the background (which is a full wrap-around cover), the author emailed me and asked about the cover design. So I sent him the figure of Quinn so far.

He was very gracious, but I know it didn’t look enough like Quinn for him–for one thing, my Quinn isn’t rugged enough. And I know one reason why…silly me. At the moment, I am totally crushing on Nelsan Ellis, the actor who plays Lafayette in the first season of True Blood, and I made Quinn look too much like him. The author sent me a couple of images and some feedback, and I made some adjustments in Quinn. I made his jaw a little squarer and changed his facial hair, and started to feel like a police sketch artist. I changed his whole left arm because it was too tight against his body. His shoulders could be broader, but Quinn is supposed to be very tall and I didn’t visualize him as a linebacker, anyway.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for over a week. The art is done and I just need to make it into book covers–that is, put on the title and author’s name and all the text that goes on the back and spine. That’s why the picture, by itself, looks rather empty. Book cover art has to leave room for a lot of text, or the art will just get obscured. You also have to think about the surfaces where text will be superimposed and need to be readable.

If you want to take a look, here it is. The universe of Krymsin Nocturnes is set in “the twin cities” on “Borrego Bay,” a fictionalized clone of San Francisco and Oakland. That’s what the background represents. You can read the book and tell me how well you think I did with Quinn. It will be released on April 15. This is no romance–it’s got lots of action, blood and thunder, great for Tax Day!

But no more mash-ups from now on. And I may be doing more art than just book covers. I’ve really missed it.

Welcome Spring! It’s the Vernal Equinox–the Sun is exactly halfway between Winter and Summer Solstice, and it’s the beginning of a new astrological year. I did a ritual for the exact local time of the Equinox node, which was 1:20pm here in Pepperell. I did my Tarot reading for the coming octave before I went to bed, and it was a very good reading–“good” not only in the sense of interesting and fairly positive cards, but also in how cohesive and clear the reading was. At Imbolg I got The World as an Outcome card. For this octave, the Outcome card was The Fool. There’s a pair to ponder!

Tonight, I’m going to go see The Twilight Saga: New Moon at the Pepperell library for free. They may have space left if you’re in this area and would like to see New Moon! You need to preregister but you can do that online. I haven’t seen New Moon yet, and I haven’t heard or read a lot about the movie (I read the book), so I’ll be getting a fresh experience of it.

It’s a nice day, 73 degrees but hazy. It’s supposed to rain on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, fooey. But I heard the spring peepers last night for the very first time–I think the water was too high before that. morvenwestfield, who is southeast of my location, reported them on Thursday night but I listened carefully and couldn’t detect them. (Strangely enough, for frogs, I’ve noticed in other years that spring floods delayed the peepers.) They’re still twelve days earlier than last year. I checked the date book and I didn’t hear the peepers last year until March 31! It was cold last spring.

The Nashua River is finally dropping below flood stage today. Rte 119 re-opened yesterday so the traffic is back to normal. They were afraid it might be closed for an extended period but evidently Mass. DOT cleared off the road surface and found no damage, just debris. The local weekly has photos and news coverage. One somewhat scary result of the flooding that I’d been oblivious to: EMTs in Townsend couldn’t get to the closest hospital, Nashoba in Ayer, because every primary road (119, 2A, and 225) between Townsend and Ayer was closed! I hadn’t realized that. Townsend EMTs had to take patients down to Leominster Hospital for a couple of days, which is a longer trip. That’s how pervasive the flooding was around here!

Me, me, me!!! And you four furry losers call yourselves cats, ha. 🙂

Last week, there was a chipmunk hiding in the kitchen. They come from the crawl space–I haven’t figured out yet whether a cat catches one down there and loses it upstairs (if one of them gets something, a chase ensues), or if the chipmunks come up on their own. Either way, the chipmunks are extremely sorry. The one last week was hiding under the microwave cart until I flushed it out and Giles got it before I could rescue it.

This one was trapped under the old computer monitors stacked in the kitchen corner, and I’m surprised he lasted that long because the monitors don’t provide much cover. Chipmunks can stay very still for a very long time, and the cats don’t key in on them too well if they don’t move. But they knew he was there and kept checking out the corner and sniffing around, and finally the chipmunk lost his nerve and broke for it. He went back and forth until Giles grabbed him and ran off into the main part of the house.

Then Giles reappeared without the chipmunk, which meant that either there was a corpse somewhere that I needed to find, or he’d lost his grip on his prey, which meant there was a chipmunk hiding somewhere. I looked around and found no corpse.

A short time later I heard chirps, and traced them to the bedroom, where Giles and Cerridwen were staked out on either side of the bed. This was not very intelligent of them because the chipmunk was actually in the corner by the bureau, hiding behind a piece of wood that stands in that corner–the end of his tail was sticking out, which I saw right away but which the cats had completely missed.

So, I went and put on heavy gloves and tried to grab the chipmunk. He was unappreciative of my efforts to save his little hide and frantically eluded me, ran up my arm and down, got under the bed, ran back and forth and tried to get into the grille of the furnace duct, miraculously did not get nabbed by the two LOSERS (we’re talking major #catfail here), and wound up right back where he started. I got an old pillowcase, poked him out of the corner again and scooped him up in that. I hastened through the house to the door and put him outside. I think he was very surprised, but after a couple of seconds to get his bearings he scurried off under my car, and he didn’t appear to have any life-threatening injuries.

Giles is a pretty formidable hunter for a cat that’s never gone outside, but he sure was off his game today, sheesh!

Rte. 119 is still underwater and closed on the Groton-Pepperell line (the linked map shows you exactly the spot, although not the flooding), so traffic is still being detoured through Pepperell. That means I’m staying home for the second day in a row rather than fight the traffic on Main Street, which is annoying. (For everyone not familiar with this area, Pepperell is nowhere near any major highway in any direction. Two-lane Rte 119 runs northwest from the junction of Rte 2 and I-495 up into New Hampshire and is the major commuter route for people who live out here and work in the Boston suburbs. It’s heavily traveled, to the point that Groton Center, whose Main Street is 119, is a parking lot during commuter hours daily. Now all that is being diverted through Pepperell.)

There’s a current photo on the Pepperell town website showing the Wilkens (or “Gary’s” on the map) farm stand and florist, which is right on Rte 119 by the river, with its parking lot and building submerged. The building is just a sort of shed, so you can be confident there’s just as much water inside. I feel bad for them because they do have a number of big commercial coolers for flowers and food.

I edited the video I took on Tuesday down at the bridge and put it on YouTube. This was a great project because it was my first chance to seriously tackle Sony Vegas Movie Studio since I took the video editing class, and now I’ve got it down. I didn’t take a lot of time with this, but here’s our historic flood. Watch all the way to the end if you want to see the “punchline” I spotted.

It’s been very nice weather, at least. But the water is going down a lot more slowly than in previous spring floods I remember, probably because the ground was already so saturated and everything was so full from all the precipitation and snow melt we’d had all winter.

ARRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!

I just had to say that.

I’m working on something new, ambitious, very challenging, and very creative.

It’s going very, very well.

But I’m stuck on one last snag…and I have to break and do workout before it gets any later!! I don’t want to stop and spend almost an hour and half doing workout!

On the other hand, a break would probably be good, because I’m getting rather frustrated.

Fuck this healthy mind and healthy body shit, anyway…*grumble*

What is in the air this month? No sooner had I posted my last entry than I looked at Twitter. thinkerofthunks has been called to the hospital–police came to her door to inform her that her husband has been in a “very serious accident.” Send her good thoughts and energy, it sounds like a bad situation…

ETA 10:30 p.m.: thinkerofthunks‘s husband passed away. He may have had a heart attack and hit a pole because of that. This is so, so sad and awful.

I’m feeling sad about another death–not a public figure. A dear friend of one of my ‘Net friends passed away in a very shocking and unexpected way. On February 27, he was taken to the ER with severe chest and arm pain, and ended up in emergency surgery for a torn aorta and heart valve replacement. He had to go in for more emergency surgery the next day because of internal bleeding. He never woke up after the first surgery, and passed away this morning.

I feel very sad about this, although I didn’t know him directly. My friend talked about him a lot, and he seemed like a warm, generous, wonderful person. I don’t know if he had a known existing condition that put him at risk of this happening. He was 42 years old.

Happy Birthday, saraphina_marie!

From Reuters:
Four in five believe Web access a fundamental right
“A poll of 27,000 adults in 26 countries for the BBC World Service showed 78 percent of Internet users believed the Web gave them greater freedom, while nine in 10 said it was a good place to learn…Over 70 percent of respondents in Japan, Mexico and Russia said they could not live without the Internet.”
The Internet: it’s not just for geeky Americans anymore! I’m going to add translation buttons to my websites ASAP. I knew I had an international readership but I didn’t realize it was this significant a majority!

A vampire author pleads her case for health care reform:
A story from the health-insurance crunch
Who says women-of-color genre fiction authors don’t get any respect? Author Leslie Banks, who pens the Vampire Huntress series under the name L.A. Banks, introduced President Obama at Arcadia University and gave him a hug. She also had the chance to relate her own health care nightmare directly to the President, a story that many authors and writers–being self-employed–share. To Leslie from me: Thank you.

And, local news from my bucolic little rural town:
Police say Pepperell man brought chain saw into domestic dispute
Why I bother watching True Blood, I can’t imagine. I should save the $2.99 and just take a walk around the ‘hood! *wry look* (Yes, I have a well-used chain saw. It’s electric, though, so my capacity for mayhem is bounded by the length of my extension cords. Which, themselves, could be handily used for…never mind!)

This New York Times op-ed piece, by Edouardo Porter, appeared today:

Television Is Not Free and Does Not Want to Be

I certainly agree with this op-ed writer, but his article amused me for a different reason. It’s an excellent example of the way many privileged members of the middle class are so comfortably enmeshed in their assumptions that they’re completely oblivious of how many people have already found the alternatives that they’re invoking. I’m afraid that Mr. Porter defines “clueless.” Apparently, he doesn’t spend much time on the Internet.

“Imagine a world in which information isn’t free. Your TV set is fitted with a coin slot — or a PayPal account. Wouldn’t you rather pay 79 cents for an hourlong show to get rid of the ads?” he lyrically fantasizes. “Technology might move us inevitably in this direction…If we’re lucky, we’ll get a world in which TV is not free, but we will only pay for it when we want to watch it.”

Um…hello? Imagine, might, if, will get? Welcome to planet Earth, Mr. Porter–or Teh Interwebz. What he seems to feel is a radical and hypothetical future (did he write this in 1963?) is what I’m doing right now, along with thousands (at least) of others.

I turned off my cable years ago, and digital TV reception in my location is so poor, the confluence of a signal and something I actually want to watch is like winning the lottery. (It does happen, notably the Superbowl and one vampire-themed episode of a crime drama, but it’s pretty rare). When I want to watch a TV show, I download it, and I’m happy to pay per episode. I’d even use PayPal if iTunes accepted it.

The only radical element of Mr. Porter’s picture is the notion that all forms of TV will be “opt-in” and pay-as-you-go. Cable companies resist this mightily, pay-per-view notwithstanding, because they make more money charging hugely inflated flat fees for packaged services that for the most part don’t get used. Of course, if all TV is opt-in, viewership will doubtless fall drastically. It won’t be so easy to spend every evening vegetating in front of the boob tube (or flat panel) when you’re paying for each program you watch. I, for one, don’t think this is a bad thing. If Americans watch 153 hours of TV a month, as Mr. Porter cites Nielsen saying, that works out to an appalling average of slightly more than 5 hours per day. If people used half of that time to cook healthy food and exercise each day, the obesity epidemic would be history.

(I fear that Mr. Porter shows an additional level of naivete when he imagines that just because television is fee-based, it will be ad-free. We are so enslaved to the coercive juggernaut of marketing and advertising, we can hardly escape it anywhere we go. As long as we’re insane enough to base our entire economy on “consumer spending,” that will only get worse. Eventually advertising will probably be beamed directly into our brains.)

I couldn’t find a way to comment (although I’m registered on the NYT website), or I would have done so. Back to the future, Mr. Porter! TV programming may not be free of charge, but it’s been free of venue for a long time!