JanerBlog

My Husband is the Awesomest

So Paul is a darn good designer, and recently, he's had a couple of really major coups. Some of them are still in the pipe, but here are a couple I can tell you about.

First, a while back, Thomas Dolby had an open contest on his blog to design the tee-shirt logo for a one-shot concert he was giving in London. Paul won, and you can see the logo being used in the concert here and here and here.

And secondly, Paul's a regular visitor to Warren Ellis' Whitechapel Message Board, where each week, Warren posts a new "Remake/Remodel" challenge, where artists and designers take a crack at re-imagining old, forgotten (and usually public-domain) characters. Paul usually does at least one design a week if not more, and his submissions are usually really well received. Fast forward to this week, when Warren gave the following challenge:

You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called SUPERMAN. It is issue 1 of this book.

You have been told that Superman is a man who dresses predominantly in a shade of blue, and wears a red S symbol. You know nothing else about the character.

The cover must include a logo and the text THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE DARING EXPLOITS OF THE ONE AND ONLY SUPERMAN.

And that's it.

It's up to you what kind of company you're at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of Superman. What era you're in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.

You have one week. Go.

The story's received quite a bit of press in the last couple of days, and guess whose image is getting shown far and wide?

Yup. He is my husband. He is full of awesome.

Watching the Olympics, part 2

Me: Yay women's speed skating!
Announcers: Oh noes! The ice machines are broken! The speed skating track is ruined! Delays! Spare machines brought in from Calgary!
Paul: This is Canada. They had to go all the way from Vancouver to Calgary to find a zamboni?
Me: They should've started with the neighbors' garage.
Paul: Or Home Depot. Cryin' out loud.

ETA: Actually, the better punchline would've suggested Canadian Tire. Our USA is showing.

Beyond Victoriana

Man, I am so behind on my blogging; the more posts I write tonight, the more posts I remember I've intended to write for a long time. This one is probably the most overdue: The Beyond Victoriana Project.

This series is so incredibly amazing and I am so, so happy that Ay-Leen is writing and sponsoring them. It's a fantastic resource, and shows the vast, beautiful, fantastic possibilities that the steampunk genre can encompass -- but only if we stretch the fandom to allow room for more than just the basic Brit-centric faux-Victoriana, and be welcoming while we do it.

Here's an index. Go read! It'll crack your imagination wide open.

Skiing with Dan

Dan: Okay, here's a map. We're here. We can take this trail or that one. That one's prettier, but it's going to be harder; you may have to take off your skis for part of it.

Me: That's okay. The scenery's more important than my dignity.

Dan: In fact, I think I can see on this map where you left your dignity. Back there at the bottom of the hill.

Me: I usually don't fall unless I intend to. It was either that or run into those saplings.

Dan: Yeah. You made the right call, provided you don't mind the bruises.

Me: I don't mind them much, but sometimes they freak Paul out.

Dan: Just tell him to use them as a Rorshach test.

Me: Yeah, but then he'll want to make drawings out of them. When Paul's drawing on my ass with a Sharpie marker, I'll know who to blame. "Hey look, this one's an alien!"

Dan: An alien that gets more jaundiced as the days go by.

Me: ... from the flu we gave him when he tried to invade.

Dan: ...

Me: I am so blogging this when I get home.

The iPad Meh.

First thoughts on the iPad? Meh.

It's basically just a supersized iPod Touch No OS, so it can't run programs, which pretty much kills any desire I have to own one -- I was hoping for a pressure-sensitive machine that could run Photoshop and Manga Studio. It'll be a great media-player, and very likely a Kindle-killer. A lot of other people will like it very much. Me, personally, I don't like having a lot of separate gadgets. I like having one gadget that does everything. And right now, for me, that gadget is my Fujitsu convertible tablet laptop. I love the damn thing so much it's a little ridiculous. There are things I'd change about it, like giving it more RAM, a bigger hard-drive, and making it about three pounds lighter. All these are minor quibbles, and it has an awful lot going for it, starting with the hot-swappable hardware bay: it holds a cd-player, a spare battery -- this is the option I use most often; with both batteries fully charged, I get close to 5 hours of drawing time -- or an empty spacer if I want to shave off a pound or so. If I want to get all crazy-nostalgic, it even came with a 3.5" drive.

It does everything. I did all the touchups for Clockwork Game on it, and I'm learning how to draw on it from scratch -- it even takes SD cards, so working from photo reference is a snap. I do all of my writing on it. I programmed my website on it. I read books on it, so having a separate machine specifically for ebooks is redundant. I watch movies on it, and use it in my office as a spare TV, by streaming Hulu and Netflix. Best of all, it's downright *cuddly*, and I really enjoy working with it. Again, my only complaint is that it's a little chunky -- but so am I, so there you go.

I never thought a piece of hardware would turn me away from my long love affair with Apple products, but Fujitsu makes a damn fine tablet -- and Apple's gonna have to turn out a much more universal product than the iPad to make me give it up. I still have (and love) my iMac, but the iPad leaves a lot to be desired.

Creation

EEEEEEEEEEE PAUL BETTANY AS CHARLES DARWIN BE STILL MY SQUEEING HEART

ConFusion

I went to ConFusion yesterday, just the one day. the highlight of the afternoon was getting the chance to speak with Peter S. Beagle for a short time while he was autographing. He had a chair set next to him, and each autograph-seeker would sit down, drinking in his soft storyteller's voice, best appreciated side-by-side rather than across a huckster's table.

He spoke touchingly of his heroes, some of whom I'd heard of (Harriet Tubman, King Christian X of Denmark and Eleanor Roosevelt), and some I hadn't (Hugh Thompson, Jr. [Beagle wrote Thompson a letter, and when an editor wanted to include it in a book about Thompson, Beagle had the opportunity to speak to Thompson on the phone]). I'd just purchased his first book, and while I was waiting in line, I'd read the first chapter, which began with a raven fetching a ring of baloney for a man named Mr. Rebeck. Seeing both together on the same page, I couldn't resist asking if Mr. Rebeck was named after the man with the sausage-machine, and Mr. Beagle said the version he'd learned was about Mr. Dunderbeck, but that he'd heard it sung both ways. He sang a verse for good measure, then told me about his dear aunt who'd taught him the song, how much he loved her as a boy, and how well and beautifully she lived her life.

I ceded the chair to another friend who had a writing question for Mr. Beagle, but I left feeling that despite its brevity, I'd had a very intimate and deep conversation with an artist with a deeply kind and loving soul -- and also that everyone else who sat in that chair would say the same thing. When I related the story to John Scalzi later that evening, he said, "Ah yes. And that's the magic of Peter Beagle."

And so it was.

On a vaguely similar note, Virus sent me this lovely story about a man searching for Kurt Vonnegut.

New look, new url

A few years ago, a domain name speculator bought the FieryStudios.com sitename and -- if I recall correctly -- tried to get me to buy it from them for an inflated price. I waited them out, and a couple weeks back it became available again, so I snapped it up for the next ten years. Take that, jerks.

To celebrate, I finally took some time to spruce up the old thing, and good heavens, what an embarrassment. Tables, bad code, quirks-mode-inducing DTD declarations, and some code snippets that I swear go back as far as 1998. Yes, I've had a website for going on twelve years. You kids get off of my lawn.

Anyway, it's up now, and should be reasonably bug-free. Shout if you see anything wonky.

Skiing the Nature Center

Spent a lovely afternoon skiing today. Went to the Kalamazoo Nature Center with my buddy Dan, and got in at least two hours' worth, maybe a bit more. The sun was shining, the snow was just perfect, and we arrived back at the car just as the last pink light was fading from a mackerel sky. Saw lots of birds, starting with a big blue heron hunkered down by an open stream. We flushed an enormous hen-turkey -- probably a good twelve pounder -- and marveled at the heavy thump of her wings as she got off the ground. A large flock of Canada geese went past, low and loud enough that we could hear the whistling of their feathers. Best of all, I saw my very first Pileated woodpecker. I've been wanting to see one since I first read a story about them in Ranger Rick magazine when I was about seven, but have never been lucky enough until today. They're enormous, just a bit smaller than their more famous (and likely extinct) cousin the Ivory-billed woodpecker, and really impressive to see in flight. They have a lovely laughing call that we heard several times as we skied through the woods.

The mice were busy on the prairie preserve, and there were plenty of footprints with little tails dragging behind, moving between switchgrass and wild rye to harvest seeds. The deer were out -- we didn't see any, but did see plenty of fresh tracks, and the turkeys had been following the freshly-broken trail left by the snowshoers and skiiers (They're no dummies, Dan remarked). As we left, we passed three young guys in Carhartts, armed with snow shovels and sleds heading out to get in some crazy night sledding, which reminded me of all the crazy night sledding we used to do in Ypsi: sled shrapnel and stolen Taco Bell trays and Russ up to his shins in the Huron chasing after his saucer sled and Eric getting three seconds of hangtime before coming down right on his coccyx.

Good times.

And then I came home and made three kinds of cookie dough, for the big annual bakefest tomorrow. More on that, later.

Help Pam Noles support the Interstitial Arts Foundation

Work's been kicking my butt lately, so I'm a day or two late on posting this, but this needs to get signal boosted:

Pam Noles (who is Black, Geek, and Fine With That), has quilted the most amazing wrap skirt and is donating it to an auction for the Interstitial Arts Foundation:

In addition to being gorgeous and twirly and a genuine hand-sewn work of art, it's also inspired by a short story, "Berry Moon," by Camilla Bruce. Those of you who know me well know how much I dearly love cross-pollination like this. Songs written for poems written for artwork based on photographs. Fabric Arts made for short stories. Dancing about architecture. You know the stuff: It's wonderful, and inspiring, and it makes the world a much better place.

As if all that weren't enough, Pam will custom-size the wrap-skirt's buttonhole for you.

So what're you waiting for? Go forth and Bid! It's for a good cause!

Why I love steampunk

So I like steampunk. But I'm not Steampunk, in the same way that I own cats and a dog, but I am neither a Cat Person nor a Dog Person. Similarly, I admire a lot of the hippie/crunchy/locavore aesthetics, but I don't really fit into any of those subcultures, either.

But I do have a deep and abiding love for steampunkery, though far more for its punk aspects than its fascination with Victoriana. The DIY aspects. The idea that with a pile of scrap metal, rudimentary tools and elbow grease, you can make something that'll power your house.

See, I grew up with folks who didn't just believe in that ethic, they put it into practice. And I finally uploaded some photographic evidence. This is one of my grandfather's steam engines. Notice I said one.

Here's Grampa posing in his driveway, circa 1979. The barn in the background was moved there overland to replace the one that burned to the ground. The toolshed, which you can see in the upper left of the picture, was built with the 18" support beams left over after the previous high school's gymnasium was torn down; there was a family joke that you could drive a tank on top of the toolshed roof and not fall in.

That CASE eagle logo was a familiar sight in my childhood. When I was in grade school, Grampa and dad got their hands on the boiler (the big cylinder part, and the large vertical part into which you throw coal) of another Case and built an outbuilding around it in the backyard, with the logo visible through the front window. They dug a trench between the outbuilding and our house, ran hot water pipes between, then outfitted the house with finned-tube baseboard heating. Every autumn after that, us kids spent a couple of weeks with my dad out in the woods, cutting cordwood to heat the house. I was the only kid I knew who came home from school and started a fire so she could take a bath that night.

Grampa again, this time in front of his wood shop. Behind him, you can see the top of the Giant Stride, a diabolically fun piece of playground equipment he built for us grandkids. It was basically a big flagpole set into cement, with a four-armed spindle on the top. From each arm hung a rope with a little three-rung ladder on it, just big enough for a kid to sit in. We'd get that thing going fast enough that there was usually an even-money chance somebody'd clip their ankles on the windmill. Good times.

So that's a tiny fraction of my steampunk lineage. No wonder I grew up to be a do-it-yourselfer -- self-publishing's a walk in the park by comparison.

My mother, the computer nerd

Last night, I spent about an hour and a half on the phone with my mom, helping her get rid of a particularly nasty bit of malware. There was swearing, dropped phones, and a lot of frustration on both ends, but after battling through several rounds of obnoxious pop-ups (Her: "Augh! PrOn everywhere!" Me: "Just close the windows, unless it's good prOn. In that case, save it to your desktop.") mom finally got some antivirus freeware installed, and nuked her very first virus all by herself.

I haven't been this proud of her since she first called to tell me she'd used Snopes to shut down an argument at work. Personally, I think she deserves a Nerd Merit Badge. I know I'm getting this one for myself.

Signal Boost: Project POORCRAFT

Hey, everybody: my buddy C. Spike Trotman is starting up a brand-new project and needs your help! It's called Project: POORCRAFT and it's going to be a guide to living frugally in urban and suburban areas, told in comics format. But don't take my word for it; head on over to Kickstarter and hear Spike tell you about it herself.

Tell it, Joey

Joey Manley, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't even consider myself a webcomicker. I'm a graphic novelist who publishes her betaware on the web.

Or used to. And hopes to do so again soon.

That perfect blend of creepy and awesome

How to make a mummified Fairy

Well, here's a first.

Yes, you read that right. Heinrich Uhrmacher, a fictitious watchmaker who fictitiously died in 1685, just got un-fictitious junk mail from Google. Google's never written me before. Should I be jealous?

SPX 09 Con Report

Home from SPX and soooo tired... but if I don't do the con report tonight, I'll never get to it, so here goes:

Had an absolutely fantastic time, as always. SPX has always been my hands-down favorite show, and this year was no exception. I got the chance to hang out with old friends and new, sell a metric butt-ton of steampunk jewelry (and even a few books, too!) and talk shop with a bunch of creators. I'm ashamed to say that I didn't vote in this year's Ignatz awards because I hadn't read enough of the participants (bad artist!), so I'm hoping to do better next year. This was also one of the best shows I can remember for sheer quality of available books -- I was blown away by the offerings, of both traditionally-published graphic novels and gorgeous, innovative, risk-taking minicomics, and I bought more stuff this year than I can ever remember buying before.

There was one other fun thing that happened -- Paul and I marked our 5th anniversary on Saturday. What better way to celebrate than by selling comics and surrounding ourselves with fans and friends alike? Thanks to everyone who stopped by to wish us well.

I didn't take a lot of photos, but here're a baker's dozen to look through. The captions will have to suffice for the remainder of my con report, as I am mighty tired.

Steampunk Jewelry

Here's the steampunk jewelry I'll be bringing to SPX this coming Saturday. I don't have any new books to sell, so I need to have a little something extra on the table.

I've run out of matching gears, matching dials, and pretty much everything else good-looking, so this is probably the very last batch of this type of jewelry I'm going to make for a long time to come. Each piece is unique, and is pretty much impossible to re-create. They also tend to sell out really fast at shows, so if you're thinking of buying one, I encourage you to stop by the table early in the show.

Geneology

I found this little bit of trivia last night while doing more research. If this is the right record -- which it sure looks like it is -- it makes the story even sadder than it was. It means that Schlumberger lost two sisters and a brother after he left for America -- and probably never even knew they died. He and Maelzel were moving around so much it was probably impossible to get mail.

Cures scurvy, the common cold, and lazy shoggoths

So I finally figured out what was wrong with my sourdough starter, also known as Olmer the Shoggoth. For the last year, it's been turning out these sad, flat loaves. They taste just fine, but they're really uninspired, with a dense, clammy crumb. Lately I've been forced to spike the dough with a pinch of storebought yeast to achieve the leavening I wanted -- which ticks me off, because frankly, that's cheating and defeats the whole purpose of having a sourdough starter.

After a bit of googling, I discovered that starter bacteria require a pretty acidic enavironment to grow and multiply properly. Our water is very, very hard -- to the point where I have to actually scrape off calcium deposits from the sinks and fixtures. Turns out that I'd been slowly alkalizing my bacteria! One website suggested that I crush up a Vitamin C tablet and add that to the starter at feeding time. I was skeptical, but I tried it anyway. Three days later when I opened the jar to check on it, Olmer was happy and bubbling and percolating again, so I immediately split him in half and started baking.

Here's the results:

Pretty, huh? All I use is flour, water, salt and shoggoth.

Screw it, I'm writing fiction.

After wibbling and wibbling over an upcoming scene, and talking to both Jim and Pam about it, I've decided to proceed with a scene I've written, as-is. It involves using Goethe as a sounding-board for Kempelen. We know for a fact that Goethe did see Kempelen's machine (he wrote Charles-Auguste about it) but I have the scene taking place at Kempelen's house -- and it's far more likely that Goethe was only one of the countless thousands who strolled past the machine when it was displayed in Frankfurt and Leipzig during its 1783-85 tour. It's highly unlikely that Goethe was anywhere near Vienna at the time, and Kempelen was old enough that he wasn't really traveling anymore. Still, there's not a historical figure (or character so far in the story) who is better suited for the conversation, and what the scene needs to accomplish: a discussion of the unification of art and science.

So? Screw it. I'm throwing the facts under the bus on this one and going for what the story needs. The audience needs to see the speaking machine demonstrated, the story needs a parry-riposte on art versus science, and von Kempelen needs to get off the self-pity pot. I'm writing historical fiction, so there.

And to soothe my conscience, I've updated the parameters of the About the Story page:

Clockwork Game is a mostly-true story, a dramatization of actual historical events, retold with as little conjecture as possible. I have, however, taken what I consider small liberties to make the story flow more smoothly. I have condensed certain events, and occasionally places, into representative moments that capture the spirit of the story more than the true letter of its history. Some characters, whose names and histories were lost to the predations of time, had to be created almost entirely from whole cloth. Strong--but not ironclad--proof exists for the actions depicted in certain scenes. And, of course, dialogue and personalities had to be invented, based on whatever writings were available.

All this being said, I am doing my best to remain faithful to the facts and personalities of the individuals, and will note any purposeful deviations, and my reason for doing so.

Man, I take this shit way too seriously.

Edited to add: Know what the dumbest thing is? Another week after I wrote this, I deleted Goethe from the story entirely. He's gone. And know what? The story's much, much better for it.

Ohwha Tanerd Iyam

For Christmas, I bought myself a few indulgences -- a couple picture books that are historical trivia/glossaries/companion pieces to the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin books, a couple more reference books about The Turk, and this, which I found on eBay. I'm going to find a wee tiny frame for it. Does anyone else want some pretty, cancelled stamps from Slovakia? I'm not a collector myself, but if you are, speak up and I'll send them out.

(Slovakia also struck a coin with Kempelen's face on them, and Hungary did one with the Turk on it, and I'm chasing both on eBay right now. What a colossal nerd I am.)