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Leah America (US) seeks essays from people working in the sex industry for an anthology on the sex industry. Encourages submissions from current and former strippers, erotic dancers, phone sex personalities, hookers, or those with a promiscuous lifestyle. Length: 3000 words max. Deadline: March 31, 2008. Payment: one copy. No reading/publishing fees. More details...

I got out of bed to draw this late last night. I couldn't sleep. I drove for six hours yesterday. Do you find it hard to sleep after a long distance drive? When you close your eyes are you still behind the wheel? Weaving in and out of all that traffic? Putting your foot down on the accelerator and not taking it off? Not caring what's in your way? Feeling like you could just drive off the end of the earth? No? Oh. Right. Ok then. Oh.

This week I lost my marbles. No. Seriously, I did. And, not just because I went and did this drawing all over again. When I completed it first time round I knew that there was something wrong - the marble. Back then I drew it from my head, when really I'd prefer to have the subject there in front of me. Knowing that I intended to re-draw it I went and bought some marbles. It took me ages to find the perfect blue one, one that looked a little like an eye. After all, the marble is the punch line in this picture; it's the cherry on the cake, so it had to be right. So I selected the perfect one, bought the bag and then proceeded to lose them. Annoying. Very annoying.

This is one reason it's taken so long to complete this drawing - losing my marble. I spent hours on Flickr getting lost in stunning photos of marbles, but to me, the one in my drawing still looks contrived. There are a few other new additions to this picture, since the original; my favourite being the corn plaster. There are other things that became subject matter out of desperation to finish the drawing, like...erm...well I'll let you find them.

Anyway, you know the drill; click on image to enlarge.

by E. L. Konigsburg illustrations by Gail E. Haley, Mercer Mayer, Gary Parker and Laurel Schindelman Atheneum 1971 I would have hated this book as a kid. I would never have picked it up. I would have started the first story and felt alienated by the language of it, an almost disjointed voice. I would have jumped around and looked at the illustrations for the stories and would have walked

Just a quickie (well, it's all relative). Currently I'm working on a couple of time consuming drawings. So thought I'd put them on hold for the evening and do something quick. Something in colour. It's not great but it's something to post.

 

I wanted to blog just a little bit about each of my Capstone poetry books as I get my author copies. Each had its own joys and challenges (some more so than others!). I shared my basic process in an earlier post.

Here are a few tidbits just about this title.

Then There Were Eight: Poems About Space was my fourth book in the series, so Jenny Marks and I had a pretty good routine down by then. The photos were just stunning, and I enjoyed doing the research on the various space phenomena. My dad worked at NASA for his entire career, and space exploration and space science are fascinating to me.

I remember one thing that I questioned was that I didn't have images of all the planets. I think there are poems about 4 or maybe 5 of them in the book. I asked Jenny about it, and she explained that, with only 15 or 16 poems in the book, they didn't want 8 of them to be of planets. I think it would be too many similar photos. Not enough variety. Also, these books are for young kids and they were wanting the book to inspire them to learn more, to be excited about space. The book didn't need to serve as an encyclopedic reference of them. Of course, she was right. But it still bothered my slightly compulsive, completist, list-loving self to showcase only some of the planets!

For the first time in the series, we used captions here to explain the images. This had been my request. I felt that without them, each poem would basically have to name and define for young kids whatever was shown in the image. That would get old and non-poetic very quickly!

Here are a few poems from the book. The images shown are not the ones from the book. They're just similar, to give you an idea of what the poem is about. I hope you like them!



Great Red Spot

It's not a huge red ocean
It's not a desert form
It's twice as big as Planet Earth
And it's a great red storm

It's been around three hundred years
It's still around today
According to the weatherman
This storm is here to stay

     (at least until some future day
     still centuries away!)

Caption: The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is actually a giant hurricane.




Then There Were Eight

Poor ball of ice, we know you exist; but you're
Little and solid and we must insist on
Undoing the past, so though you'll be missed, we've
Taken you 
Off of the "real planet" list

Caption: Pluto was removed from the list of planets in 2006.



Here, Girl!

She rolls
   and roams
      and wags her tail
She never needs to see the vet


I love her
   silver
      shiny coat
She's my planetary pet!

Caption: The mars Lander explores Mars.

 

Originally, we were going to refrain from reviewing Harry Potter the Seventh. But then we began to feel so very, very left out. So here it goes: Harry Potter is a character that many of us have grown up with. We wanted his final story to end spectacularly. Alas, it was not to be. I suppose that Rowling, being richer than the queen and knowing that her legions of loyal readers would buy the book no matter what, decided that she could cop out on the final volume. This is incredibly sad. I wanted to like the book. Truly I did. But somehow, it didn't work.

I was actually racing with one of my cousins (of the non-evil sort) to finish the book (I won, of course), so I didn't realise how disappointed I was until I gave it some thought. And there it was, the awful truth: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is a creature of deathly boredom.

And OH! The epilogue. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, this was the worst. How could she make everything so...perfect? I shall refrain from saying anything more on the subject, for fear of being hunted down and butchered by a vengeful not-yet-finished reader.

Despite the fact that this Deathly Boredom was so...well, deathly, I feel that I must give it no less than three out of five daggers. Just because I grew up with the series. And the first three books were totally made of awesome.

--Avery Trelaine





Aislinn says,

So, unlike Avery, I am going to assume that everyone reading this had read Harry Potter and the Deathly Boredom, er, that is, Hallows.

SPOILER ALERT!! If you are one of the, like, four people who haven't yet finished, don't read this . . .

I'm going to do this by character, because... because because.

Harry-- Our dear main character was as much of an annoying angst-ridden idiot as always. Only this time, he was an annoying, angst-ridden idiot who was also Jesus. And has anyone else noticed that he's not that good at magic? No, seriously. I mean, who in their right mind would make him head of the auror department? (This is what he goes on to do-- JKR said so.) I was so depressed that he didn't die.

Ron-- Went from being kind of a pathetic loser to being entirely a pathetic loser.

Hermione-- Lost all her awesome. No, really. She went from being all "Get out of my way or I'll turn you into a moose" to "Oh, Ron, you're soooo clever! And also, I'm suddenly not nearly as competent a witch as I used to be!"

Ginny-- If Harry Potter dumped me 'for my safety,' I would most certainly not just sit around and wait for him to come back to me. Then again, I wouldn't date Harry Potter in the first place. Also, JKR tells us that Ginny became a professional Quiddich player, but then left her job when she married Harry. No, Ginny! No! Don't let patriarcial society keep you down! BREAK THE GLASS CEILING!!

Malfoy-- Most certainly did not live up to his potential. He could have been so awesome, but instead, he was just a whiney, incompetent loser. I would also like to take this opportunity to note that if Draco had, in fact, fufilled his potential for awesome, he and Ginny would have made a great couple. (Hey, don't look at me like that. It's true.)

Dumbledore-- The Headmaster was dead, yes. But he was in the book more than any other, except perhaps the sixth. I think JKR simply couldn't fathom writing a Harry Potter book without Dumbledore.

THE DEATHSTICK-- Yes, it's a wand, but it really deserves its own character listing. It had so much personality. And also, it's called the deathstick. And Voldy always said "Deathstick" last, like: "It is mine! The Elder Wand! The Wand Of Destiny! THE DEATHSTICK!!!"*. At which point I always burst into a fit of hysterical laughter (no matter how serious the situation was supposed to be).

*This is not an actual quote from Deathly Hallows. But it's pretty darn close.

Dissapointedly, cynically, thanking-God-it's-over,

Note: We know that this post is seeming to be spreading the HP hate. But really, we love it as much as all you crazy fangirls. Okay, maybe not quite as much. As in, we don't write any Dramione fanfiction. Or any fanfiction, for that matter.
But still. We love Harry Potter. We just hide it really, really well.


Twyla says:

Now for my opion of this wonderfulness. Well, I thought it was ok. I wasnt thrilled with it but there were certain parts I liked. It was pretty, ok very predictable. Especially the ending. The very very end, 19 years later, it was waaay to perfect and like *sigh* aw, how sweet. Lets all go to bed and have sweet dreams because everyone lived happily ever after. After all of what Harry went though, wouldn't he have some emotional drawbacks he needed to work on? Or insane fans he had to outrun?

After saying that, I give Deathly Hallows a 3.5 daggers out of 5.

--Twyla Lee

Click on image to view.

Yes, this probably does look familiar. One of my favourite drawings that I did in my Moleskine, way back whenever, was this spice rack drawing. I've wanted to rework it onto paper and frame it for some time and so Tim's birthday (see last post) gave me a good excuse to do just that. Something to spice up his life - his forty year old life! I like it, although it just lacks some of the spontaneity of the original and, of course, that gorgeous cream colour Moleskine paper.

View my sepia set on Flickr HERE.

This was going to be a sepia drawing, however, the subject had different ideas. It was crying out for black ink. I still feel nervous about starting a black ink drawing. Weird isn't it?

Oh, and the clue is in the title.

Warm weather, the dog days of summer, time to break out the shorts. Nothing more refreshing and cooler than lounging about, unencumbered, with plenty of free time to lounge and let the mind flicker an wander. The perfect time to snack on short stories and other collected short works. I am opening this one to the floor because while I feel I could cover this topic myself I've found myself more