I now have a complete set of layout sketches for Brotherhood of the Black Flag: Volume One — Flag in Flames.
193 pages including chapter titles.
I think I'm in shock.
What am I going to do to amuse myself when the computer isn't available now?
I now have a complete set of layout sketches for Brotherhood of the Black Flag: Volume One — Flag in Flames.
193 pages including chapter titles.
I think I'm in shock.
What am I going to do to amuse myself when the computer isn't available now?
[amazonify]0889953724:right[/amazonify]
The anthology that I sold “Frozen Witness” to is available for preorder from Amazon…
There's a cover picture up and everything.
*bounce*
I actually did do a bit of filking at OVFF.
Although when I tried to pull out “Two Hundred Million Million Miles” friday night I so totally muffed it that I didn't dare try anything else that was not mine, or to touch the concertina again. Saturday there was longish quiet bit before I closed kidspace down in which I got out the concertina and managed to establish that I really can hit the right notes most of the time. A couple people passing in the hallway stopped to listen and even join in. Which gave me the confidence to use it twice in the Theme circles going on next door later that night, although neither time as in accompaniment. And
I thought I had only one chapter (and an epilogue) left to do of the Flag in Flames layout sketches, but when I started breaking it up into pages I realized that it was really two more chapters and an epilogue. So not quite as close to done as I thought. Not only that, but I need some fight choreography for the next bit, so I'm a bit stuck until my husband has time to help me with it. So I went back and came up with something for all the chapter title pages I hadn't done yet except the one that is supposed to show Barataria Base (which still needs to be designed).
The following rant was indirectly inspired by a conversation going on elsewhere in my friends list.
I have never felt particularly comfortable with feminist propaganda. It always seems to take something that was, admittedly, a little bit broken, and instead of fixing it — turning it inside out so it's broken in the opposite direction. The movie “Ever After” is a good example. My favorite Cinderella movie version is “Slipper and the Rose” (possibly in large part due to the music, but also because I fell in love with the scene where the Chancellor explains a few political realities to Cinderella.) Ever After was looking like it might be in the running, even without any singing and dancing, but it tripped at the finish line.
It had a wonderful heroine, strong, smart, spunky…
…and her love interest was totally useless.
At the end, instead of letting the Prince redeem himself by making at least one rescue, they come up with the lamest of all reasons how our heroine can manage to rescue herself yet again. Her father taught her swordplay and he was a great master. So what? He died when she was what, *eight*? He didn't have *time* to turn her into anything resembling a swordmaster herself. Why can't she be smart and spunky and let the guy who actually had the country's top fencing instructors teaching him for the past howevermany years be the one that's holds the villain at swordspoint? Why does she have to be best at *everything*? And since she is best at everything, what sort of a partnership is she going to be able to establish with the her not particularly competent prince? (And why would she want him, anyway?)
Blah.
Now for some DH and MH specific comments.
When people say that heroines should stop sitting around waiting for the heros to rescue them, I'm all for that. I'll jump on the bandwagon. Three cheers for proactive heroines!
But when they have a proactive heroine, one who genuinely drives the plot, saves the day, rescues her her beloved, the emperor, and her country, and they start going on about how that isn't good enough, that's where I jump off again. If driving the plot, saving the day and rescuing my beloved, my emperor and my country isn't good enough, this is not an adventure *I* am willing to sign up for. I *demand* the right to have someone hold my hand on occasion if I feel I need it, and if that someone is male, I refuse to apologize for that.
Yes Kiki is spunky and angsts less than Harry Potter. (Lots of people angst less than Harry Potter). And all her sister M-heroines are equally charming… equally spunky… equally…er… well, equally everything really. I find MH a very appealing character. All six or seven versions of her that I've seen. But I'm glad that there are a few other kinds of heroines out there… I like variety.
I *liked* Mulan. I don't see any problems with her character.
I just wish she hadn't got saddled with the wisecracking dragon and the very twee bug.
My husband and I have been working on the Cantata cover image, and think its ready for a big render. Which means that we need to get the pdf of the inside of the book ready, so that we know how thick the spine is, so that we know how big the big render needs to be, precisely.
Going over the proofs of Frozen Witness, comes first though.
Click on the icon to see a test render of the full wrap around cover image.
Well, I made it to Context and back safely, but the car started falling apart on the way home.
Or, to be more exact, it's been falling apart for a long time, it just decided to speed the process up a little. On Monday we nursed it into the shop and replaced the u-joints, part of the drive shaft, the muffler and the tailpipe. With OVFF coming up (this is the big family splurge of the year, we actually get a hotel room) it is not the best time to be shelling out bucks on the car.
Not that there is ever a good time.
But Context was a lot of fun, and I finally managed to meet
I'm now on my official October break from writing while I gear up for (and then recover from afterward) OVFF –which is next week. :gulp:
Pavane in Pearl and Emerald
Word Count: 44865
Last week did not go well writing-wise, although I did get some valuable background stuff done — most particularly my calendar, which made me realize that the dance *should* have been scheduled for the night of the feast. I must remember to go back and mention in the first entry that it was put off because of Orbuni's broken ankle.
This week's writing is going much better. I have every hope of making my quota in spite of the fact that I have a con to get to. (I only intend to go for Saturday. My energy levels are too low to risk the entire weekend, when I have OVFF coming up at the end of the month.) I have a much better grasp of what is going on, and yet somehow that isn't making things any less bewildering– there is just so much intriguing and social maneuvering to keep track of. And there is at least one major plot twist I haven't figured out yet — there is no way [spoiler] is going to sit by and twiddle his thumbs, so what excruciatingly almost-brilliant plan is he going to come up with?
For Flag in Flames I have finished Chapter 12 (of 18ish) of my page layouts, which gets me to page 24 of 40 in my script. I'm clearly more than half done this stage, and am starting to wish I had some way to get feedback on the layout sketches before starting on the actual artwork. I can't quite figure out how to go about that… I don't know of any critters.org for comics, and I'm not sure how much the quick sketch nature of the layouts would effect how well the story reads (not to mention that it's harder to email a hundred and sixty or more pages of sketches to a friend than it is a text file).
I am very much enjoying the sensation of being in the middle of two projects that appear to be progressing nicely. Sometimes I think I enjoy it too much, and that I'm not as willing as I should be to divert attention to the rest of what is going on in my life.
The science team looking at my story “Frozen Witness” apparently had nothing to complain about except that I had one scientist a “leading expert” in two different fields. So she's now just an “expert”. :shrug:
As a bit of silliness…
I slapped together a script that would keep track of the phases of the moons on Ialfa for me. Having done that much work, I decided it would only take me a minute to add in an our world equivalency equation, so if you want to find out what your birthsigns are you can head over to:
http://www.lshelby.com/Ialfa/horoscope.php
The length of the day and the length of the year are different there, so the dates it gives you do NOT match up to our dates. I, with a birthday in February, was born in the house of the Monkey. So is one of my daughters, although her birthday is in August.
Maybe someday when I'm in a mood to do some more cat-vacuuming, I'll expand the script so that it can create actual horoscopes. 🙂
I started doing layout sketches for Flag in Flames today, finished the page I stopped in the middle of last night (last page in a chapter), and I discovered that I didn't want to keep going, I wanted to sit there yelling “Don't do it, he'll kill you!” at one of the characters.
This strikes me as being odd for two reasons. The first is that I already *know* what is going to happen. I've known for over a year how this particular moment eventually evolves into an ending that I am happy with. And yet even knowing, even though I'm looking at very rough sketches many of which are little better than scribbles, somehow I am so strongly emotionally connecting to that *moment* that it stops me in my tracks, and everything that I know follows afterward is irrelevant to how I feel.
And if the disjunct between my reaction and what I know follows afterwards isn't odd enough, the second thing that strikes me as strange is that I'm convinced that if I was writing things instead of drawing it, I wouldn't have stopped. My heroes putting themselves in danger doesn't usually make me want to yell at them, it makes me want to write them back out of that mess as quickly as possible. I'm pretty sure I didn't stop at this point when I was doing the script.
Could it be that a picture freezes itself in time in a way that words don't?
That's a fascinating, and a little bit intimidating, thought.
I'm half hoping I'm reading too much into this, and the real reason I stopped was because I'm totally brain dead today.
No words on Pavane, and only half a page of layouts. Blah!
Pavane in Pearl and Emerald
Word Count: 40460