Happy Halloween!

Administration
Happy birthday to hotcoffeems and nukewolf!
Happy early birthday to aurelio1979, canuckgirl, linitheliel, and tww1fa!

Hello to new readers danzka and whaticannotsay!

FilterGlitch
What appears to be the case for azurelunatic and I is that people who are supposed to be on our filters have fallen off. I've yet to find a case where someone had been added to a filter who didn't belong here, so that's good, at least. It's just a pain in the ass going through filters with 200+ people on them and 400+ people not on them and trying to remember if this-and-such person had wanted on the pagan filter and whatnot. Checking the Atlanta filter is going to be a bitch, too.

What I have done so far today
Shower and maquillage, check e-mail, read friends list, balance checkbook, write checks for all bills due in the next three days (the rest will be written tomorrow), packed Elayna's costume bag with UNICEF boxes, bracelets, pencils, and spider rings for Elayna and albumlady's girls so we can dash out the door as soon as we get home, packed her backpack with the rest of the pencils & stencils, unloaded her Chanukah gifts, remembered to bring cider and Sally Foster stuff.... got to office, opened classroom doors, put cider in storage room, distributed Sally Foster wrapping paper and candy, gave perky UNICEF speech thrice (I have a box in the office), distributed faxes.

That's a lot to do before 8. I wanna take the rest of the day off.

Wearing
A witchy pirate princess Shadesong shirt and jeans; stealth pigtails.

Reading
At lunch: Dude, Where's my Country by Michael Moore
At home: holidays on Ice by David Sedaris + a fuckload of holiday catalogs

Planning
Tonight: Trick-or-treating with Miss Kid! Then off to sibylla's Samhain ritualthingie.
Tomorrow and Sunday: Starting NaNoWriMo. Also, holiday gift organization. I need a posterboard so I can see at a glance who I still need to cover. Vid's done, Elayna and yendi are mostly done... I know what I'm getting most people, even when I haven't gotten it already... I'm stumped on murnkay. I mean, I gave him a Baby Jesus Buttplug for his birthday. How does one top that?

So - you?

(no subject)

San Dimas High School football rules!

About Artists

I'm currently exploring an option - I'm not investigating any other possible artists unless that doesn't work out.

Throughout this year, I've had people suggesting artist friends to me. No one has suited my taste thus far. I'm not saying they aren't good artists - I'm saying they wouldn't be good artists for this project. If you want to know what I want for this project, look at the website! All art there is by xanadumalion.

Things I need in an artist, businesswise:

* Timeliness. If I ever get these pages in to Shooting Star - well, it will be a recurring gig. You can't take six months per page. I need decent turnaround.
* Honesty. If you can't do it, you can't do it; let me know in time to explore other options!
* For the time being - inexpensive rates or, ideally, just taking half the profit in lieu of pre-payment.

Things I need in an artist, artwise:

* An understanding of this world and this story. And, hopefully, a love for this world and this story.
* A talent for visual storytelling. There are plenty of artists out there who do great pinups, but who are wholly inadequate when it comes to believable visual character interaction. This isn't a set of posters, it's a story.
* Cleanness of line and attention to background detail. See X'ana's work. See also Terry Moore, Wendy Pini, Carla Speed McNeil... simple. Flowing. Background detail that helps flesh out the story.
* Willingness to take direction in order to Get It Right. I'm picky about what my characters ought to look like. I got a sample of Julia drawn from X'ana's pic on the front page of the Shayara site that just looked bizarre - I shortly figured out that she was drawn to be 5'6", 5'7". She's supposed to be five feet tall. There was just too much space between her piecesparts. If you're my artist, you will get exacting detail when you need it. What the legs on the table look like is up to you. What the character looks like is not.

I got spoiled with X'ana. She was interested in the story. And I sat down with her and just talked about the characters. Not just about what they look like, although she did get that, in excruciating detail. But to really draw Napalm on a continuing basis, you need to get to know him. Not just his long, wavy auburn hair and rangy frame and quick smile, you need to know his conflict over Lyric and jealousy of Johnathan and his secret love for '80s hair-band ballads and that he's cocky as hell about his powers, but the mask slips a little - only when he's alone or with Lyric. And she got to know him, to the point that he was talking in her head.

And I don't know that I'll ever find anyone as good as her again. But that's pretty much what I'm looking for.

*fidget* *fidget* *fidget*

It is 1:15.

In one hour we have a Halloween party. With cupcakes!

In two hours and 15 minutes I get to go home! And then out to albumlady's house! Where we wait til sundown and then....

Twickertweat!

*bounce* *bounce* *bounce*

It is my favorite day of the year and I want to go go go.

Now now now.

*fidget*

*bounce*

This is my favoritest holiday EVER. Because despite the shadow of leaving-Layne.... nothing bad has ever happened to me on Halloween, ever. Fourth of July I had a firecracker go off in my hand. Chanukah is eh; I never got anything I wanted growing up... Thanksgiving, I had to deal with extended family....

But HALLOWEEN. On Halloween I got to be Alice in Wonderland or a witch or Vampira in those awful tacky H'ween costumes we had back in the '80's, the printed plastic smock thing with the plastic-n-elastic mask - remember the smell of those masks? And my friends would come over and my dad would take us around - no matter what, Dad was *always* home for Halloween - and doors would open and we'd all yell "TWICKERTWEAT!!!" and get huge handfuls of waxy-smelling candy; like Elayna, I was allergic to chocolate, so I only got about half of it, but I didn't care - like Elayna, I never *finished* it, it was always too much. Dumping the bag out on the kitchen table and laughing with surprise and glee at how much there was, and swapping with my sister, I got her candy corn in exchange for my Snickers...

And now that I have a kid - she gets to do this! Running from door to door and laughing and yelling and beaming at the people who coo over her and give her handfuls of candy and, tonight, doing the same swap with her friend Kiersten that I always did with my sister, and she's SO excited....

How can this not be the best day of the year? :)

More notes

As I told sir_alf when he noticed me buying silly party favors for my Halloween party, I didn't get to have much of a childhood; I was mostly a freakishly somber and withdrawn big-eyed girl. So I'm having my childhood NOW. I give away party favors, and I wear silly socks every day. And I wear panties with silly sayings, or monkeys, on 'em. And I bounce. A lot.

And... it's Halloween to me. Yes, I'm pagan. No, I'm not Wiccan. And I'm not anything Celtic. So Samhain isn't really a holiday to me. Do I think there's power there, and that the veils are thin? Oh sure. In the same way that I think that the gods have power or that people will trust a luck charm if it's placed in a piece of malachite far more than if it's placed in a gum wrapper. All things have the power that we give them. And there are a lot of people who believe wholeheartedly that the veils are thin tonight - so they are. Belief is what makes things happen.

But to this little maenad and daughter of Kali, tonight isn't a religious holiday. Tonight is a night to be silly with my kid. :)

OMFG

Because I have out-of-town visitors, I only have 21 days to NaNoWriMo.

So I need to average 2380.95 words per day.

Why am I doing this again?

In other news - I just got THE BEST HALLOWEEN PRESENT EVER. It has to do with Shayara. And I'm not posting til it's 100% certain.

*squee*

Also, demetria23 brought me candy.

I go now, and I probably won't be back online tonight... happy Halloween!

Shayara Announcement

It gives me not just pleasure, but ecstatic glee, to announce that I have an artist for the eight-page Shayara story slated to be published next year by Shooting Star Comics. I can honestly say that this is the artist of my dreams - that no one else could truly do the characters justice. Note: This is a limited engagement for now; the only commitment is to these eight pages... I'd love for the artist to do more, but We Shall See what transpires. Either way, I get to have a sequence I'm very proud of drawn by the best person for the job.

The artist for the first Shayara story to be published-for-real is...

( Wait for it... )