Journal of a Something or Other

I tend to feel like I don’t make enough or do enough creative work. Compared to the output I used to do, I don’t. I try to remind myself that it’s okay! I work a fulfilling, creative job and sleep more and am pretty much happy. But it bums me out, especially since so many folks I know are constantly pumping out notable, awesome work. So when I sat down with my Flickr archive for this year (because Flickr has been my memory bank for years now), I didn’t expect much. This was the year I stopped doing focus months, I mean, how much could I have done?

Turns out? A decent amount.

January
Focus month: Branding Ma-Mé. I built and did the branding work for a friend’s site. It was super fun and I got paid for it! I like making other people’s ideas because I just like making stuff more than thinking of what to make.

Non-focus things made:
• I painted a painting that I then slid behind a bookcase, because I couldn’t throw it away, but why keep it?
• A TARDIS piñata for a dear friend. This has been re-Pinned on Pinterest about a million times.

February
Focus month: Airbrush! I have an airbrush and love it, but spent this month really learning it.

Non-focus things made:
• Rebuilt arbour in yard.
• Murder-wall anniversary present for Chase.

March
Focus month: Mending & old work. Cleaned a bunch of stuff, got rid of a bunch of stuff, a really great feeling.

Non-focus things made:
• I did get a wig that is now my web avatar wig. God, I love this fake hair.
• Wrote a short-short.
• Finished serialising the first draft of The Audacity Gambit.

April
Focus month: Chase’s show production, in which I showed you nothing.

Non-focus things made:
• Nothin. But I did start using Instagram.

May
Focus month: Embroidery. Which was fun, but not a lot produced.

Non-focus things made:
• Taught myself eggshell veneer.

June
Focus Month: Another writing month. Editing The Audacity Gambit and working on the second book!

Non-focus things made:
• Made a sky bison costume for a cat.
• Shot a cover for TAG’s Draft 2 Lulu print.

July
Focus month: Animatic. Which got extended, due to summer fun.

Non-focus things made:
• Swatched my insane nail polish collection.
• Helped manage my workplace’s move to a new place.
• Made Chase a hell of a cake for his birthday.

August
Focus month: Animatic, still. Which didn’t end how I expected. I decided to stop doing focus months.

Non-focus things made:
• Research for a friend’s Halloween costume.
• Ridiculous Adventure Time/Breaking Bad drawing.
• Modified a department store ball-jointed doll into a dryad.

September
•We bought a car, wtf.
• Built rig for San’s cape from Princess Mononoke.
• Wrote lots of TAG book 2

October
• Got my first hand tattoos
• Made Princess Mononoke costume.

November
• Worked on a thing I hope to show you guys soon.
• Made a ridiculous cake

December
• Shot photos of cats in both old west and Avedon’s In the American West styles as presents.

So, a decent amount of things, I think? And through all of it, trying to keep my nails sick.

Not a bad 2012, let’s hope for more in 2013!

Oop, it’s been a bit. Without the monthly focuses to keep me shame-tied to blogging, I’ve forgotten the habit. Though, to be fair, I’d been out of the proper habit for a while (which is true of most folks, it seems). What have I been doing. Hmm.

A big chunk of October was spent making San’s mask and cape (from Princess Mononoke) for a friend. I am a huge costume nerd and since they never drew San’s cape as actually attached in any way, that’s how I made it. It took an interior frame and counterweights, but it can be worn comfortably and easily, without exterior rigging, and look just like it does in the movie.

I wrote, but not as much as I should.

I got new tattoos, as part of a slow process in making my hands look amazing (nail art and tattoos are probably the best combo) and myself less employable outside the west coast.

That was a good night. I got ink, some froyo then Chase and I went to see a pick-up (I mean, exhibition) Blazer game. That’s what we did instead of listen to the last debate, because that shit is easier to read about after. I like the crime-solving kind of forensics, not the speech ones.

Internet life has been a little weird because first an act of God ruined my mobile,

Then Chase’s, which I switched to (as he uses his phone mostly) decided to up and die. At the same time, The Old Reader happened. Google Reader was super important to me and I keep poking around The Old Reader feeling the same kind of discomfort as visiting the place you grew up in—it is very similar but not the same, the same people are there, but not all of them and the dynamic is just a bit different

Plus my computer is shittier and The Old Reader is slower, so the 70-100 posts I’d see in a day is too much for me keep up with. I want this part of my online life back pretty badly, but there are some trust issues.

But at least I started reading again. Weird that I even stopped for like, months, right? I used to read a book or two a week. Honest books too, not just pulp. But writing while reading is hard and I was reading articles and doing crosswords and I don’t know. It got weird. But then the wonderful Jon Morris of Oh That Paperback (and like, one million other things) sent me a box of beautiful mass markets and a handful of 1970s’ Analogs. And you can’t turn that down, not an addict like me.

From here it gets less fun and less pictures.

(more…)

Folks, you’re gong to need to indulge me. Having finished the edits of The Audacity Gambit, I need to decompress and talk some process.

At the start of this year, when I started this focus thing, my focus was writing—specifically, getting some significant headway into a book. The longest finished piece I think I’ve ever written was a little over 4,000 words long and itself a product of that focus month. One of the standard definitions of a novel is 40,000 words—ten times that.

But I had an idea that I wanted to mangle out that long. Your regular idea, born of several obsessions and personal themes. It wasn’t like I hadn’t written things of total length. There was that weekly webcomic I had for what? Two and a half years? I could finish a story (let’s ignore Anise and Slow Build here), I wasn’t going to let word count stop me.

A dear friend of mine had recently finished her first book and another has been serialising theirs for a while, so there was encouragement that it could be done. I could so do this, however daunting. In the three-ish years since I finished that comic, my outlining process had changed significantly. Back then it was constantly evolving outlines, sub-outlines, plotted timelines and so forth, each more detailed down to the script. For this story I made the loosest outline possible. I barely knew how it’d end (and don’t worry, spoiler-fearers, what you see below is an old version, not the outline I ended up using for the end).

But I got a big chunk of it written in January, enough to put in the can and start updating once my lovely first reader had edited it. And once I had a title.

It was the title that really pushed back the first update. I hate naming things, because there is a stupid amount of weight involved in a name. Since I was focusing on tropes, I rabbit-holed TVTropes, looking for some one thing to click in my head. I couldn’t tell you how exactly I decided on “The Audacity Gambit”, but I do know that I love the idea of audaciousness. There’s a sense of foolhardiness to it when applied to bravery.

So, it was named and began updating and I started again that weird cycle I’d set aside years before—of building up and depleting an update queue, then building it back up—a flurry of behind the scenes attempts to not fail an invisible audience who in theory expected a regular schedule. I serialised it as I wrote because I’ve learned over the years that promising the internet regular updates is enough to shame me into keeping up a working pace. It also meant I’d get intermittent feedback from folks who have opinions I value. It’s encouraging for me to have that while I’m writing.

I wanted to finish the damn thing by the end of the year. And I handwrote the last line in early December (the majority of the first draft has been written by hand since the summer). Not too long later I typed up the last chapter and passed it on to my first reader. It’s all queued up and will run until March 11, 2012. Less than a year of weekly updates, but not a bad little run.

I look forward to not thinking about Audacity Gambit for a couple of months. Then I can read the thing from start to finish and run another series of edits. I don’t know what all I’m doing with it once it’s all done, but something written and edited in pieces like this needs another inspection as a whole.

Here’s where The Audacity gambit was written:

• On the MAX light rail, when I commuted from the suburbs into the city for work.
• During the second half of C.O.P.S. classes, since I didn’t always want to attend a critique class.
• In two coffee shops, Tiny’s SE and Press Club. I finished the thing at Press Club (and drafted this post there, even).
• During my smoke breaks at work.
• At the laundromat (which is where I am typing up this post). I actually don’t know what I’ll do while I wait for my laundry now.

This is probably boring, as most introspective looks at process are, but I’m still coming down. I wrote a book guys! At 38,000+ words it isn’t technically a novel, but who cares. I am warning you, expect a nerdy, meandering look at themes and junk that I had to look up in the future.

Anyway, why don’t you (if you haven’t yet) try reading The Audacity Gambit? It updates Sundays at 9pm and all the entries are linked to here.

This month is my birthday month, so the focus is going to be something I am so all about: nails.

Sometime between 2006-ish, when I was still scared of the makeup aisle and spent evenings pretending I wasn’t following white rabbit hyperlinks about drag, false lashes, makeup and hair falls to the summer of 2009 when I started painting my nails about once a week (though I didn’t start doing it regularly each week for a while), I got over it. “It” being my gender presentation and self-perception. Which is so complicated and all I want to do is explain why getting my nails did is so important to me. Like, Jo’s hair in Little Women important. It’s the thing I’m vain about.

Anyway. I like bling. I like shiny things and the LA look and the crumbs of makeup that I still carried from the mandatory girl-kit of my late teens included a pair of silver false lashes. This month is about nails, not lashes, I know, stay with me. Lashes and nail polish both are something that complete a character, when you’re acting or in an editorial. They’re more decidedly costume and they can be fabulous. And I figured out I could do fabulous. That wasn’t girly, when I still cared about if something was girly, it was just fancy.

I literally dipped my finger into painting my nails. I used to use a little mobile internet thing and grew out the nail on my index finger a bit so I didn’t have to use the stylus. The rest of my nails I kept very short. I started painting just the longer nail, for strength and because it was fancy.  Sometimes I would do them up a little more for events.

Early summer 2009 Chase and I were in a new apartment, a place with no memory of former roommates, I was figuring some stuff out myself and part of that was a style direction that sort of wove the sunshine fashion of 1980s Miami with the rather sick street looks of LA. I found a blog called The Boobs (now over at The Boobs LA) that would post image dumps of hella nails did, with 3D pieces and sick bling. A couple months later, I was already starting to amass a collection of polish. It helps that Chase is a total enabler.

And now, almost two years later, I’ve been doing my nails every week. I’ve grown them out crazy long on my non-dominant hand, learned to square a femme habit with the rest of me and fallen in love with the tiny canvases that adorn my hands. I have dozens of nail polish colours, an airbrush and a legit obsession. My nails may now be trimmed down now for boxing, but they’re still fab.

So. This month I’m focusing just on the thing that I think I love the most. I want to do at least four different sets of art nails on acrylic tips and get shots of them, like extreme versions of ones I’ve done for friends.

I have a nerdy thing I do where I screenshot nails in a film and then try to replicate them. I’ve already done Ginger’s nails in Casino and I’ve got a file of stills of Nomi’s nails in Showgirls that I need to delve into. Any tips as to other notable movie nails would be awesome.

Other than that it’s kind of up in the air. It’s gonna rock. Local friends who’ve been wanting their nails did should shoot me a line for surely.

Now for the kind of impressive grid o’ nails did from my Flickr:

Don’t worry, there’ll be a post on how awesome my new apartment is and what I’ve sewn for it.  But I owe somebody a story, and surprisingly I haven’t written this out before, so here we go.

I like makeup. It’s costuming for the face. When I was little I loved playing with the disco-era palettes of my mom’s eyeshadow, tiny trial-size lipsticks, bright paints in tiny containers. It was costume, the finishing touch of playing pretend.

In middle school I was told I should start wearing makeup—foundation, coverup, that sort of thing. I don’t remember when and it doesn’t matter, but after that makeup was something I had to do because I was a girl. Like the inevitable training bra, I wasn’t going to escape these female milestones.

Some point later, for Christmas, I unwrapped an angle brush and two palettes of eyeshadow. One was blues and greys, one was black. I had levelled up. It still wasn’t awesome, since it was something I had to do, but it was more fun than the rest of it. It was colour and drama. Not just coverup.

I was dutiful, but I was not the girliest kid. I resisted plucking my eyebrows until my late teens, because oh my gawd the effort of hair maintenance is absurd. And I was busy discovering this thing called rock and roll, working in the darkroom, or recording Lone Gunmen episodes on super long play. I also spent time in the library, browsing the 700s (the Arts). That’s where I found Kevyn Aucoin’s Making Faces. It’s one of the best makeup introductory books I’ve found, and there’s a bit on sculpting eyebrows that explained everything so simply I finally tried it. I didn’t have to thin them, just refine their natural shape!

There was a short-term, weird, hyper female spurt after high school that was the result of getting to redefine myself while still trying to remain within social bounds— which can be glossed over here, because for various reasons I don’t really remember it and all it did was further reinforce where I went next. Because girly stuff for me has always been drag. It’s pretend, like my social skills. A thing I do because I want to or feel like the situation calls for it. Which—please note—is how I feel about it now, not how I approached it then. Back then I was holding on to the girl stuff the same way I was still carrying around my expired driver’s permit, I didn’t know what to do with it, but it was sort of like something people are supposed to have. So I kept it.

Anyway. Time wore on. I started working theatre tech instead of being on stage. I watched the art buildings at night and built up a machismo with my dudely art friends. I stopped using makeup. It was in part because I didn’t have time. But I had the excuse not to do it now. I was in the theatre basement, sorting dusty heaps of set pieces, or mucking about on ladders or staying up late throwing paint on canvas. Makeup, like clothes that weren’t meant to get dirty, was a senseless effort. It was wonderful.

I would use the black eyeshadow to line my eyes sometimes, y’know, because it does work to take the edge off the glare of the sun. Like kohl, or the smudges on football players. Totally not femmy.

So I found myself, years later, hovering at the edge of the makeup aisles at Fred Meyer, hoping no one saw me. Why I decided to buy makeup again is a whole ‘nother thing. Let’s just focus on the point here, terribly macho me, not wanting to look at the mascara display because there was a woman in the aisle.

“This is ridiculous.” I am thinking to myself. “You are a female-looking person in a makeup aisle. Nobody will question your presence. Even if you weren’t readable as female, nobody would care. It is Fred Meyer. You are creepier walking up and down past the aisles. You are creeping this poor lady out.”

The woman finally picked her eyeshadow and wandered off. I was free to enter. I knew I wanted blue mascara. That only one brand offered a decent one. I knew what I wanted because I’d been thinking about it for weeks and only got the nerve up to buy it that day. Once I find the right display, I cursed all package designers for tiny lettering and had to stand there, sweating in terror at being caught (doing what? damned if I know), while I try to find “Midnight Blue”. As I grabbed at it, I spotted a coupon fluttering nearby. A free lipstick with any purchase of that brand.

This, I think, tells you a lot about me. Freaked out as I was, I was not going to deny something free. I blindly grabbed at the lipstick, taking the first tube that fell under my flailing hand and booked it to the safety of the dairy department. Where I swaggered a bit, battle won.

It turns out that the colour of lipstick was a perfect nude tone for me. Not that I really have reason to wear it much, I’m not a lipstick person. I realised, when I was putting away my makeup after we moved, that I have an ungodly amount of lipstick for someone who is not a lipstick person. But it’s costume, that finishing touch. And I am glad to have it there when I want it. I also found those two first palettes of eyeshadow, which I threw away. They were over a decade old, um, hella gross. And it’s not like I don’t have a fuck-tonne more shadows to play with.