Hey, 2012 happened, what?!

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…

Also, Chase was a kitty for Halloween

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…

Writing The Audacity Gambit

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…

Focus month: nails

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…