I wrote this song for my boyfriend who introduced me to Dungeon’s and Dragons.  I remember the first time he tried to get my to play, I imagined us morphing into overweight pimple faced nerds whose only contact with the world outside of our mother’s basements was going to the park on weekends dressed in homemade suits of armor to face off against other battlenerds in a pointless contest in which literally everyone winds up a loser.  However, I decided not to be close minded about it, and gave it a try.  The result was one part improv club, one part creative writing and one part board game night.  Honestly, I loved it through and through.  His boundless enthusiasm about the whole thing was infectious, and being a creative writer, I ate up the idea of inviting your friends over to play out story lines.   Before I knew it I was dabbling in Dungeon Mastering, ruling at rolling, and legitimately not caring how silly it sounded to people who ‘didn’t get it’.  If you have an ounce of imagination, and a secret desire to speak with a ridiculous accent (optional) you might actually like it.  In fact,  you might just find yourself falling in love with DnD… or in as my case, your DM.

This recording is quite simply one take that I recorded using my iPhone so it’s not exactly er, professional, but thats hardly the point of such a silly song anyway.  Hope you enjoy it!

http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf?audioUrl=http://www.filefactory.com/file/b5822e8/n/Fell_in_Love_With_You_Playing_DND.mp3

Since getting to a point in the creation stage of my novel that has me double and triple checking that things are consistent, and make sense I have to wonder, how did Stephanie Meyers miss that all important step?  Now I don’t want to seem like a jerk – an unpublished author with something bad to say about a published author seems a little petty.  However, the Twilight ‘saga’ (saga was always in my mind an ‘epic’ tale with big ideas, and heroic characters, so to me Twilight seems like more of an opera, the main themes being focused on interpersonal relationships and angsty drama rather than actual heroism but wtv.) seems to have been so badly handled I find it hard to believe that Meyers actually cared at all about her book.  If someone offered to make a movie out of my book I would of course be thrilled… but if the movie makers wanted to change an inherent rule of my book mid stream, well, there would be legal repercussions is all I’m sayin’.

In the most recent movie, Eclipse, the movie makers decided to change the ways vampires function.  No longer do they have to be ripped into gory pieces and burnt, but instead they have to be shattered like ice sculptures… and then burnt (the need for burning seems to depend on the whim of the director)?  Now I realize from a money making stand point they wanted to cut down on gore so that younger fans could come and watch the film repeatedly without their parents.  However, this is a decision that should have been made at the beginning of the first movie.  You don’t just change the way things work half way through.  I was thoroughly confused, and at first wondered whether the shattering was due to the fact that the battle was taking place on a cold mountain, but that seemed a little weak.  So I looked it up and sure enough the real reason was even more pathetic.

Now at the risk of overestimating the intelligence of pre-teens, I remember being 13.  I remember loving things that I have since come to see as idiotic, but if someone took something that I really loved (like a book series) and changed various aspects of it in order to suck more money out of me, I would like to think that I would have been furious about it.

A true Twilight fan would not stand for their beloved book to be torn apart and replaced at the whim of some director, let alone some movie studio.  Twilight fans unite, and tear those bastards a new one.  Look what they’ve done to your favorite book!  They’re basing the entire plot of the thing around whether the eight pack guy or whatshisnuts is better looking!  Is this really the point of Twilight?  Isn’t supposedly about love, sacrifice, and heroism!?  You shouldn’t let it stand, Twilight fan, don’t be as dumb and accepting as they think you are, use your pre-teen fanaticism for good for once, and stop spending money on this crap!!  You do know you can download it for free right?  You like the story?  Buy the book a hundred times, just stop allowing the movie studio to hand feed you garbage!

A final note, kids, if Twilight existed as a phenomenon in the Twilight universe, Bella wouldn’t watch it.  She’d be all ‘Ugh that’s so mainstream, I’m too depressed to get excited about some poorly made movie.’  And for once, she’d be right.

Love this song! I heard it yesterday and I swear my dream last night was one big musical number as a result.

Okay well that officially removes all excuses. I haven’t been active on this blog for nearly a year, mostly because I haven’t been confident enough with what I have had goin on in my life to publish it. Well, that’s changing whether due to an upswing in goings on or a down swing in self consciousness, time will tell I suppose.

Currently I am in a hotel bed avoiding the hours of tossing and turning sure to come. So why the blogsurgence? I’ve finally accepted that I don’t truly want to be an artist. Well not in the visual art sense. I would still love to learn more about digital illustration but the fact is whenever I paint/draw I get the feeling I want to be doing something else… Namely? Finishing my novel. So it stands to reason that my short lived stint at EC was probably the most productive time in terms of writing my book. Now I am on my final edit I can finally get some perspective on it and recognize against my nature that I have created something to be truly proud of.

That said, there is still a lot of work to do. It’s pretty hard to sell a 150,000 word novel, which means it’s time to get out the machete and start hacking until everything that remains is perfectly pruned with no unsightly off shooting branches.

Soooo what this means is that this blog will be getting an overhaul with some new writer-y themed swag, more info on my book, and whatever else comes to mind once I have my computer in front of me once more. I miss it almost as much as my cats, and I miss them almost as much as my bf… Oh who am I kidding I miss them just as much if not more than my bf which isn’t to downplay his importance so much as inflate theirs.

Right now I’m at the Surrey International Writers Conference, which is a huge part of why I am revisiting this blog. According to just about everyone here, I can’t avoid shameless self promotion forever so I would rather get some practice in and get the habit going now rather than later when people may actually want to visit my site.

This is not to say that my book will be a success or even be picked up by a publisher, but if there is one thing I know from all my many failu…ahem life lessons, it’s that preparing for failure is hardly the way to succeed. Maybe if I do fail this blog will seem sort of sad and delusional, but ah screw it, I’ll take the risk. More to come on the conference and the many awesome speakers I’ve had the delight of seeing thus far, plus a sneak peek at my work in the spirit of the book readings I’ve been privy to these last few days!

Well I have not managed to get this done on time and I am just kicking myself. A week and a half ago I was all cocky thinking I was ahead of the game. I was having zero trouble with inDesign and was really getting into the project. I left a few things for later thinking I was ahead of schedule but as often happens a million little things and a couple of big ones showed up to take away what time I had left. I only need a few more days at most to pull it off but I’m just p.o.’d at myself for not managing my time better. If youre ahead of the game, dont rest on your laurels, just get it done. A week, a month early isnt going to hurt anything, but leaving ‘just a few more hours work’ till the last minute and inevidably things will go horribly arry on you. Anyway this is my cover page since I cant seem to get my acrobat pro file working at the moment. I really like how it turned out. Ill be posting the whole book in… well… as soon as I can figure out what went wrong last night. Luckily with school all but over I have nothing else to work on so Im going to go full bore. With any luck I will have it posted by tomorrow but I dont want to jinx it lol, my house hasnt caught fire yet and with this run of luck it just might.

[edit] omg in class right now suzi just explained exactly what my problem was lol, a mixture of my computer refusing to read my acrobat file (which is likely due to the fact that I dont have some stupid flash driver or something, my computer is pretty junky) and me not clicking add ‘file url’ as i posted it.  what a silly little mistake, or at least i hope thats what the problem was, I thought the whole file didn’t work because id done it wrong.  i should have brought in what i had so i could try again with the school computers.  oh well.

I fell off my bike today on the way home from school.  I think I might have broken my wrist which is why I am attempting to type this one handed and it is taking longer than anticipated.  This is pretty lame considering it is my left hand (I’m left handed) so I am pretty much out of order.  It particularily sucks since I am not quite happy with some of the cells for my comic; I printed out a version but was pretty unhappy with some of the coloring techniques I used in photoshop, some of it looks a little sloppy in print.  I guess it will have to stay that way now.  Damnit!  At least I can use indesign with one hand, click drag click click drag drag… all the work falls to poor old righty.  Anyway dunno if I’m going to the hospital tomorrow, I kinda wanna go after class cuz I’m presenting a project…. actually, maybe I will just link it here in case I can’t get to school in the AM.

For those curious this is a song I wrote when I first let my predominantly indoor cat out of the apartment building after many weeks of training him to come back and meow by the door so I can hear him and let him in.  One of the issues with living in an apartment building, pretty hard to coordinate with your pets.  “Okay you can go outside but just buzz 10 to get back in.”  Right.  Anyway this is a video I made to go along with the recording for my creative process class.  I made it with Adobe Premiere Pro, and after only this one use I must say I am liking that program.  Really easy to use one you get the basic interface down, and as with their other programs adobe has great video tutorials for it on their site.   So that’s enough typing for me, time to attempt to sleep without rolling onto my wrist and making things worse.  Enjoy!  (edit: darnit why can’t I get this video working lol)

So I’ve been working on my indesign project for the last couple weeks, I actually really got myself too caught up in the art work involved.  I decided to make a comic book that relates to the novel I’ve been working on.  Basically I just finished my book and I am in the process of considering how to continue the story line to the next one since it’s basically a fantasy epic so it’s going to be at least a three book series.  I want to follow a character that basically gets ‘killed off’ in the main character’s eyes after the first book.  At the end of the book (without spoiling anything for the potential test readers who may see this ) there is a huge battle and this character, Ravin, is brutally wounded.  The battle takes place on a beach, so even though she is completely wounded she is able to basically crawl during the battle into the ocean.  From the main character’s point of view they go from seeing her still form lying on the blood soaked sand to being distracted to returning to see the blood stained sand, and a trail of blood leading into the water – no Ravin to be seen.  During the second book she will be a recurring character who hunts my main characters as they try to escape from their homeland of Cambria to Lorthon, a neighbouring country.  However the days following her near death up until she once again catches sight of the main characters is not going to be covered in my book.  So I figured I would take this oppertunity to fill in the blanks.  That being said, the comic isn’t going to make much sense to people who don’t know to story, so I have been trying to make it a self contained story but what I hadn’t considered was just how difficult this would be in only a twelve page publication, since she won’t be getting any real closure.  So I decided it would be presented as the first issue of a continuing storyline following Ravin, and basically examining her past, and her reasons for why she behaves as she does (since in the book she is a very mysterious character whose background never really gets explained.)  With that said my project might not appeal to everyone, but it has been a great character building excercise for me and hopefully if my book actually takes off one day it might be worth something to fans of the series as a curiosity, or maybe if I expand on the idea, as sort of extra reading for people who are curious about the character.  I would really like to see my book actually work out (obviously) and my long term hope is that I will be able to have a website where I might be able to add various tid bits of information about the world I have created, giving me a great spot to share the many short stories I have written that relate to character’s pasts as well as legend lore and political history.  It seems a waste not to share those stories since that is where the whole book began, and where my world began to take shape.  I didn’t want to add them into the book itself since it may come off as dry, I want to pull people in with the story line and then people who are curious about the world can check out the site and get an added layer of depth to their experience.  It may be too much to hope that someone would actually get that into a story that I wrote, but as long as I enjoy what I am doing I am going to continue to pick away at this very long project, and if only one person enjoys reading it, then it was well worth it.

A journey from reality to fantasy.  Enjoy the fragmentation process.

Here is my poster down on Granville Island surrounded by pigeons!  Too bad I got in trouble for posting bills on those poles, otherwise I would have left it there!  So as far as the critique went I was really shocked that people had such positive reactions to it.  I felt that I had simplified my idea until there was nothing left that could possibly be removed, but while I felt the concept was really clear as a result, I thought it might be too visually disinteresting.  Apparently this wasn’t the case.  My bf mentioned it might have looked better if the stick man had been more like the stick people on traffic signs, with thicker limbs.  I think that I agree, so if I make more of these I think I might explore that option.  I was really impressed with the stuff that our class was able to create so early on in our exploration of illustrator.  I was particularly drawn to Eunice’s and Erica’s posters, both had really good use of color and composition, and I thought that they tackled their topics in a really clever way.  That being said, I think that there was no clear ‘winner’ since every poster was so interesting and unique.  It was great to see people getting to into their causes, I think we all got to see a little more of each other and what is important to us.  Way to go guys!!

Stanley Park now has an official no kicking policy.

So I have finally caught up with all my work, and I have some images to post!  Hurray!   I ran into trouble once I got my adobe project to the doc… apparently I didn’t resize my canvas properly – I had thouht that the canvas would adjust to the image I pulled into it, but apparently things work the other way around, so one of my images (the first one I made) had a super low resolution, which was laaaame.  I resized it as best I could but obviously once printed it is going to look a little pathetic.  It still looks good on the computer, but yeah, not really a ‘success’.  At least I caught the mistake in time to alter my second and third image – since I still had the original images, so I just dragged them to a new file and spent a few hours fiddling around to get them back to the way I wanted them.  Silly me not keeping my originals for the first image.  I mean, I had the original photos but not the edited versions where I had done all the tricky part of selecting and isolating the things I wanted.  Oh well, at the very least I learnt my lesson, and won’t be making that mistake again!  Also apparently the DOC was really busy today so I wont be able to pick up the finished product until tomorrow after class.  I’m nervous to see how the poorly sized image will look, probably very ‘soft’.  I used the bicubic smoothing option when resizing, so I hope at least it doesn’t look all pixilated.

My illustrator project went much better.  I decided to keep it really simple since I was so nervous about using the program, and as a result it turned out really clean and bold.  My cause is stopping cruelty to urban wildlife, and after some research I found that there wasn’t even a real organization for it!!  There is wildlife arc which is a branch of the bcspca but they work specifically on southern vancouver island, and there isn’t anything for greater vancouver, which I find amazing since our city is crawling with racoons, coyotees, pigeons and the like.  Basically it breaks my heart to see animals being mistreated even if they are scruffy little jerks going through the garbage, or living in the attic.  After many times witnessing unneccessary cruelty to the pigeons on Granville Island I decided to focus on that for the poster.  Everytime I thought to myself this issue isn’t a big enough deal to use, I should do something about homelessness or (ugh) upass inequality I would see something awful happening to the urban wildlife in my neighbourhood on my way home.  There are a group of jerky teens who hang out in the park near my house, and just last week they were shooting potatoe guns at a family of raccoons.  A few days ago I witnessed from my window, them shooting roman candles at a skunk that had crawled into an old water heater that my neighbour threw out.  I couldn’t believe it!  The poor thing had no escape, and it couldn’t even spray them since they were attacking it from several meters away.  If anyone deserves to get skunked…  A few days after thinking of this cause, and this project I witnessed some small children kicking, and grabbing the pigeons outside the market.  Their parents looked on happily discussing how much ‘fun’ their kids were having with the birds.  It blew my mind that perfectly reasonable people might not even think of ‘vermin’ as animals.  I guarentee you those same people would not find it very ‘fun’ if they saw their kids kicking and harrassing puppies.  When I was a kid a boy I knew came to my house where we were playing in my backyard.  We couldn’t have been more than 7, and we were having a great time playing croquet.  A crow landed closeby and this kid gets a maniacle look in his eye as he runs up and swings with his croquet stick at the crow.  Either through sheer bad luck or freakish 7 year old accuracy he clubbed the thing in the head, cracking it’s skull and killing it.  I of course immediatly started to cry and accused him of murder, but his only response was that crows were ‘pests’.  He also told me about how his dad lets him help ‘poison the squirrels’ in their attic.  I’m sorry, but there are so many humane ways to remove pests from your house/garden these days that I find it comepletely uneccessary and awful to just kill them all indescriminatly.  In my opinion that kid was well on his way to being a sociopath.  Now maybe I’m just a bleeding heart but I consider all living things to be sacred and worthwhile.  I don’t kill bugs even.  While I see the necessity of say killing cows for meat, I do not think that gives people the right to abuse and mistreat said cow.  Basically killing animals or even just harrassing animals for personal pleasure is twisted and sick.  The difference is necessity.  As a species we are even startin to grow beyond the necessity for even killing animals for meat as new and better fake meat products are developed!  Why people would consider certain animals to be superfluous enough to simply kill them and mistreat them is beyond me.  Sure there are millions of pigeons, that doesn’t make it okay to boot one across the market.  Sure there are tons of rabbits all over Victoria, that doesnt make it okay to shoot them with crossbows as a group of boys did in my first year there.  There are better and more humane ways to curb the population growth of urban animals, the fact is these acts are simply for personal amusement of the human perpetrating them, and that is just plain old NOT OKAY.