two interesting blogs about writing

Just stumbled on two interesting blogs that i wanted to post links to so I remember to follow them… I was reading Cleolinda when I should be doing schoolwork (putting off the 20-page paper I need to finish up), and followed a link to this blog entry about what-not-to-do as an aspiring writer–pretty funny story! This is Diana Fox’s live journal; she’s a literary agent and I think her blog would be interesting to follow.

Then from the comments on that entry, I found Jennifer Brozek’s live journal; she’s a freelance writer who’s just getting to the point of being able to support herself entirely on her writing, so that’s very inspiring! Plus she has kittehs ^_^

oog, major unreasonable fit of envy

I’ve just been looking around at all the mysterious boxes various super-special bloggers have been getting from the people making the Coraline movie and I am so excessively green with envy right now, I can’t even tell you! And then Billy insists on being all reasonable and junk, telling me things like “Well, since you’ve only been blogging for like two months and plus you don’t let anyone see your blog and plus you rarely write anything of consequence or interest to anyone, you couldn’t possibly have gotten one so how can you be jealous of something that you couldn’t expect to get?” which of course is just so irritating. Has anyone ever liked the voice of reason, ever? I doubt it.

Anyway, these boxes are so amazing! All handmade, and each one different & full of these wonderful little artifacts from the movie. I can’t do them justice; I’ll just post some of the pics I’ve found:

Here’s Fashionista Piranha’s:

Here’s the one Cleolinda got (love Cleolinda–I’m dying for her to finish her book The Black Ribbon):

Here is the one Geeks of Doom got:

Apparently each box came with a password for the movie website (www.coraline.com) to unlock some footage, too..(passwords so far are “stopmotion,” “buttoneyes,” “armpithair,” “sweaterxxs,” “puppetlove,” and “moustachio”). This is just the coolest promotion idea I’ve ever heard of. And the movie is another stop-motion one from Henry Selick, who directed Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach (squee! I just love both of those movies so much. Stop-motion is my favorite kind of animation…so much detail and richness in the settings and characters and everything, there’s nothing else like it). And I loved the book so much, and now the movie looks like it will be just *incredible*…yay for things to look forward to as school does its best to beat all the joy out of me, haha.

new piece/new idea for a series

Well, I’ve done pretty well this last week– one of my goals I’d made, once it became clear that without deadlines for classes I was completely dorking out on getting any art done, was to get some sketching done every day. It helps a lot when you’re in a dry spell for ideas to have a sketchbook full of stuff– even if none of it is particularly brilliant or inspired, at least it gives you a jumping off point. So I’ve been doing pretty well with that since we got back from our trip to the Bay Area; I’ve done a lot of new sketches.

Another goal was to finish a drawing every week (which sounded crazy to me at the time; my big, detailed pen and ink drawings take weeks to do…but I figured what the heck? Better to aim high and push myself), and ta-da! I actually did accomplish that too.

I had found a site I really liked with these lovely little watercolor paintings, very simple and small but with such great lines and so much personality that I felt like, jeez, this guy packs more interest into these simple things than I do with all my fussy, obsessive little details that take forever to finish… So I tried to keep simplicity more in mind, and (using some of my new sketches, yay!) did this painting, which I think turned out kinda neat. Here’s the pen and ink version of it, almost finished:

I ended up changing it a little after this point; I decided it didn’t need the rafters I’d been planning on adding. So the finished painting just has the stone walls go up a little higher. I’ll scan the painting in soon…And the cool thing is that this has turned into an idea for a whole series of paintings. I already have sketches for a few more, and vague ideas for some others…In addition to the Philosopher here, I’m going to have a Wisewoman, an Artist (of course!), a Shaman, possibly an Orator, a Despot (maybe Dictator or Tyrant? not sure yet), and I’m sure there’lll be more. They’re really fun to think up!

And here’s the site I was looking at: scott-c.blogspot.com. Very cool! Funny blog, too. I’ll have to keep up with his stuff, I just love it.