Questing

It’s not a good thing when the bedside alarm notifies you of a horrible headache first thing on waking. Go away stupid headache, what other medicine do I need to give you?!

Had a great time last night, made new art! Talked promotions with Kim, showed off go gaia. Viva le Chibis!

Creepy version of Briar, my main character from my Nano Novel
It was fun to get one last art piece through the digital door before the year ends.

Ace and Jess brought us all Studio AntiThesis Ornaments! Very Swank! What a very cool surprise!

Working on massive Christmasy post, thought I’d grab last night and put it up and not make one ginormous posty.
No word on Dad yet.

p.s. yah, check came, must run to bank.

Listen, I promise to update you about all my holiday adventures, but I really really need you to pray for my father.

He’s been sick since October, really sick, and has lost lots and lots of weight, which is good, but not a good way to do it. He really can’t eat anything solid, and is generally miserable, and the worst thing is, the doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with him. He hasn’t worked for the last 6 or 7 weeks, and one can only survive on yogurt and sherbet for so long.

Last week he went in for x-rays, and while nothing seemed to stand out, even to him(he used to be an x-ray tech), he’s still been sick. Yesterday or today he went in and they took a biopsy.

They are throwing around scary words like lymphoma. If the test comes back that is it, he starts treatment on Friday, if it’s negative, then they still don’t know what’s wrong and he goes into the hospital on Monday. We hope to get the test back tommorrow. sigh.

This is my Daddy, and he’s wasting away, and I’m worried and scared.

Please, please pray for him and my mother.

I was going to edit this into a nice big entry, but lost the energy. Still, wanted to note these things

• Page 5 of Tabloid roulette is up
• Did christmas crafty things with mom.(candles!)
• Opened new checking account at uwcu, yah!
• awesome role playing on sunday, we faced down an evil drow sorceror who
  had unnatrual command over an army of 50thousand orcs.(Vole and Co.)
• decorated tree
• Christmas concert at a local church. (w/Mom/Grandma)
• American forces finally caught Sadamn hussein

Friday: Book reading over at Andy’s, we polished off a whole Kage Baker Company Short story. It was a really good one, and I finished the pencils for the final two panels I needed for page five of Tabloid Roulette.

Saturday: Up early, cookie faire with my Mom, and then we hit the Michael’s craft store on the east side, getting crafty stuff for gifts, but we ran out of time to make the crafts, after realizing we were missing some things.
Then we had the Nanowrimo wrap-up party, where we saw many nano winners! (and some who will finish their ass-kickery soon!) It was so cool to talk with each other about the things we worked on and it was nice to touch base with people that I miss seeing every Wednesday night for writing. I still have lots to put into my novel, but I’ve made a good start, and have lots of framework to start with.
After that I joined Kim to scan and spend some time chatting about comics and cleaning up the page to get it ready for shading. I gave Kim her Christmas Gift, a cute mason jar of friendship tea, with a cute little spoon with a teapot on the end, and some lotion.

Sunday: Up early again, Manga Girls morning out! Joined Kim and Elly at Sofia’s mmmm, I had eggnog cherry crepes! So yummy! Then after a bit of window shopping (too early for the shops to open) we went back to talk about manga, how thoughts vs spoken word bubbles should be shaped and more cleaning and some toning tests. Then we left so Kim could fetch her hubby from the airport.

Woo!

Tuesday: Art night last night was awesome! Maciek is back from Hong Kong and showed us lots of pictures! And I finished all the toning/shading for page 5, and Kim had it all lettered. It’ll go live this Saturday! yah! Feels so nice to get back to the manga now. It just took me one night to do the shading! I feel really good about page 5, the panels do some storytelling, you can tell what’s going on with the action. feels very nice.

We had some rousing choruses of Bob! Bob!, and then K&M gave me my Christmas gift! OH MY!!! So Cool! They gave me the Mattel Barbie Catwoman! And it’s such a nice toy, very cool details, a whip, pretty costume, and just awesome! I can’t help that I’m a Catwoman nut, but I’m glad my friends remember and indulge me. Thanks!

eee!

I am Printing my Novel in it’s raw form!
This is the first time I’ve touched it since last Sunday.
EEEEE!

Nano Wrap-Up This afternoon at cool beans, be there!

I know my amazon wishlist is insanely huge.
So I made two smaller lists for giving out to people for christmas gift
ideas for us.

My listmania wishlist
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/LVMCENZDFOYQ/ref=cm_mpemr_lm/

Carlo’s (husband) Wishlist
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/2M1SD733QY274/ref=cm_mpemr_lm/

I just made his wishlist up mostly from what I think he wants, but most of
his things seem like things he would want.

heh.

So, a couple weeks ago, Jess asked if I wanted to go to the Womens Expo put on by the Anew people.
We went and had a blast.
We watched makeovers, got free massages, and makeovers of our own, tasted wines and cheeses and learned about exercises and fitness clubs, and signed up for a whole bunch of drawings.

There were also male models serving us chocolate capers and cakes, I wish I would have gotten their pictures, ooh, that was fun. They had one that looked like Richard Gere with distinguished grey in his hair, and a younger latin man with jet black hair cut in a severe fasion, and an older friendly man who told us that this job was good for his ego, though he usually got hired for commercials.

And we got to see one of the lady designers from Trading Spaces.

And, there were booths all over the place with cool products and foods to try. The WB was also there, and they had Buffy Trivia!
We won T-shirts! Buffy T-shirts! Yah for Free! Plus it was blazing hot inside the expo, so it was really great to change into our buffy shirts. My question was ‘What’s the name of Angel’s son’, which was easy, and her question was ‘Who tried to poison the students with rat-poison. ‘ which was a multiple choice for Jess. With a little clue she got the question and we both walked out winners! We also got free posters from them, I scored a nekkid chested Tarzan and a half-size smallville poster. I have no clue where/if I’ll put them up.

I’m still going through my bag of stuff, free samples and whatnot, but all in all, it was a wonderful time, and so much fun to hang with Jess. I think it’s so cool that I can still hang with my college roomie.

So glad she invited me to go!

I came home and took pictures of my makeover, and tada! a new Gallery of the Absurd!
Gallery of the Absurd Makeover: Ok, the makeover isn’t all that absurd, but I surely am.

Oh. I had such a nice night last night. I came home and played a bit of Kya: Dark Lineage on the PS2, which is a cute game, similar to Jax and Daxter, with beautiful Rayman like style, lots of color and swirlies and glowies. Then I headed over to Ray’s for Studio Anti-Thesis Art night.

When I got there, I thought I was the first to arrive, and I was, kinda. Ray had the iSight set up on his new g5 computer and was using it to talk to Maciek who is currently in Hong Kong! way cool! It was nice to see him and be silly on the iSight and hear about his traveling adventures over there, he also sent some really awesome pictures of the cityscape and some Hong Kong Markets. That was very cool.

Also, I got to get back to drawing on the manga that Kim and I are making, and I got two whole panels done! That only leaves two more for page 5! I was a bit frustrated at first that one was taking too long, but I really cleaned it up nice, and I’ve quite happy with the result. The last four Tuesdays I’ve been writing during art nice, so this was a very nice change. I really want to finish up at least all the drawing for page 5 this week. That would feel very nice.

It was really quiet without Maciek. *giggle* That’s what everyone apparently says about me when I’m absent. We are two chatterboxes in truth.

I got home pretty late, but I was flying from being all artz and productive again. Very excited to continue the comic. Also page 4, which is online now, and page 5, which I’m working on now, are really the best pages I’ve done for the comic. I can’t wait to get this one up and online too.

Some General Statistics That Might Be Of Interest
Title: Shroud
Single Spaced Pages: 98
Double Spaced Pages: 196
Total Words Written So Far: 50,192
Total Hours Spent Writing: 64.13

Avg Words Written Per Day: 1673
Avg Hours Writing Per Day: 2.14
Avg Words Per Hour: 783
Avg Morale Per Day : 7(scale 1-10)
My novel is one of : 3680 Nanowrimo novels
Day I wrote the most words: Saturday the 29th (4697)
(I broke this into two sessions of ~2000 each. 2000 before noon 2000 at Cool Beans, and the last 500 at home. )
Days I wrote the least words: 6th, 7th, 8th, (0,0,0)
(Though I did write some on paper, I just added them all together on the 9th)

I achieved 50k on the 29th, though much remains to be written, as well as edited and reworked.

Saturday night I woke up about three times, feeling anxiety over the fact that I needed to ‘finish’ and what was I doing sleeping. (Even though, of course, I had finished for Nanowrimo, though didn’t have time to validate until Sunday morning)

Even after spending a month with these characters and the story, I still feel good about it, so I’m hoping that means I’ve got a solid start.

This is the year I wrote my novel.