This morning, I woke up around six. Something in the dim red dawn light on the building next to mine put me in mind of Niven’s short story “Inconstant Moon”, about a night when the moon is unusually bright because it’s reflecting the light of a sun flare busily burning out all life on the other side of the world. It ends a little before dawn.

I went to the bathroom, turned on the heat and sunlamp in the studio, and went back to sleep.

I woke up some time later. I lay in bed reading for a while. I think I got out around eleven or noon. I then sat in the comfy chair in the studio, continuing to read.

I hadn’t docked the laptop in its usual place last night, so I didn’t turn on music, as I normally do. Instead, I sat there in silence. The only noises were the birds outside and the very occasional passing car. Sometime after oneish, there started to be an occasional wave of cars – people driving around to their Thanksgiving plans, I supposed. I just kept quietly reading. After a while I thought about turning on some music, but decided not to disturb the silence. Despite a tail end of a song’s chorus that kept looping through my head.

I found myself avoiding Twitter.

I found myself looking at a story linked from Metafilter and declining to leave a comment.

I found myself pondering what I’d do for lunch and dinner, and seriously debating sort of fasting. All I’d had so far was a light breakfast of yogurt and honey, and occasional handfuls of trail mix.

I’ve got an invitation to a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place. I’m glad I have it; it makes my decision to not do anything into a conscious choice. Some part of me starts to feel lonely on these Big Social Gathering holidays if nobody invited me anywhere at all. But having an invitation to politely decline, from people I’d generally enjoy spending time with? That part is delightfully silent.

I seem to have settled into a sort of quiet anti-Thanksgiving. Not quite fasting, and deliberately remaining aloof from all social contact. It’s not by any means an indictment of what other people may choose to do; if a big feast with all of your tribe about you is what makes you happy, then rejoice in it.

But I’d rather just sit here all by myself and… pause, really.

I kinda should be working on stuff for the Rainfurrest website’s launch on the weekend. Or poking at Rita. But I feel content to quietly do nothing today. To find a moment of stillness in all the quiet of a day when most people are gathered with each other instead of scurrying around to all the tasks they set themselves.

To use the animal metaphor I’ve chosen for myself and shaped myself around over the years, I am having the most draconic Thanksgiving possible. It’s an absolute joy to sit here in my quiet, empty lair without having to spare a single thought to the social dance of all the mammals out there. And to let some slow, quiet thoughts drift through my mind instead of busying myself with a thousand little things.

Anyway. It’s about three thirty. I finally took a shower and put on something besides a robe. The sun’s dipped below the buildings to the southwest of my apartment. I’m going to set this entry to show up after midnight, and resume my quiet isolation. I’ll probably have a light supper after night falls; eating earlier seems to be against the spirit of whatever, exactly, I’m celebrating today.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as wonderful as mine was.

Oh my god. I just popped the plastic wrapping on the book about staircases I bought when I was in LA.

IT IS PORN.

Humungous double-page spreads of shapely staircases, their thrusting diagonals and sensuous spirals crossing the air in a veritable orgy of ascension. I may never draw a generic “staircase” again; this book has opened my eyes to the gorgeous specificity possible in the domain of stairs.

And I may leave a few suspicious stains on the pages of this book in the process.

So I was sitting there in the studio just reading this web serial about a supervillainess while some laundry cycled. I’d been hoping to get some progress on various things today but I just ended up sinking into the comfy chair reading.

As I walked between the apartment and the laundry room, I toyed with wondering just why the studio doesn’t feel like A Place To Get Work Done lately. There are two main guesses: the chilliness and the clutter. The chilliness, well, I run the heat a lot during the day, but this place isn’t too well insulated. The clutter?

I read a chapter from the point of view of a villain whose power is Making Plans To Put Things In Order. And then, a little later, a chapter from the point of view of a villain whose power is Calculating Orderly Probabilities Of Everything.

And then I got up and ran my own take on that: a spider-lady whose desire is to Clean All The Things and make things neat and orderly so there’s nothing to distract my from getting art done.

Here are some things that were sitting around the coffee table that Miss Fussyspider has since filed in out-of-the-way places:

A rather psychotic-looking self-portrait

Fragments of a comic about 47, the lizard assassin I ran in Skyrim for a while. This was some stuff I kicked around with Nick; the swamp kangaroo is his idea of a foil for 47, and this story would be set in a swampy town that constantly picks up and moves itself due to some absurd local horror. Hence the wheels on the buildings.

Eat your heart out, Ny Axxter.

I’m working on stuff for Rainfurrest 2014’s web site. There’ll be a lot of visual continuity with the poster I did for the con, so I decided to do a quick test of a character badge in the same palette and style.

I’ll probably be offering some badge commissions along these lines somewhere in the new year. What would your character class be in the Dark Future RPG version of Seattle?

Well that was perfect timing. I went to my tattoo appointment. We did a round of details, and declared it Done. On the eighteenth birthday of my dragon self-inclusion character. Really, I couldn’t have timed it better if I’d tried.

It’s not completely done – we still have to do the UV ink – but for normal vision, it’s finished.

Photos in a week or so, after I’ve healed up.

Eighteen years ago today, I received a new login on Furrymuck. The character name was “Peganthyrus” – a name I created by starting with the name “Peggy” and adding syllables to it until I had something that sounded appropriately draconic to me.

Peganthyrus ended up being pretty important to my life; role-playing as a skinny, snarky dragon lady taught me a lot about who I hoped to be. I don’t hang around on mucks any more; at one point I even proclaimed the character Officially Dead. But she wouldn’t stay away. I wear other masks, but the one I wear on a daily basis is pretty much her. If I’m going to claim any animal attributes, it’s probably going to be dragonish ones; it’s no accident that when I changed my name, it was to “Margaret”… which shortens (through a somewhat inexplicable process) to “Peggy”.

So it’s fairly appropriate that on the eighteenth birthday of my current identity, I’m off to the tattoo parlor for one of the last few sessions of work on my wings. Dressed, of course, in black leggings, and a tight black dress with a subtle pattern of scales.

I keep on thinking that I should have some kind of party for this. Maybe next year…

After spending a couple hours cranking on roughs for the Rainfurrest website, I suddenly realized something: cyberpunk is now as irredeemably retrofuturism as the Gernsbackian scientifiction future that Gibson did an extended takedown of as one of his early short stories. It is wrapped up with the late Eighties and early Nineties for me, full of that era's neuroses and dreams.

It's still fun to play with, don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't taste like the future any more. Real life's caught up with it in some ways, and utterly failed to realize it in others.

Though I do keep on feeling like I'm living in a Bruce Sterling novel now and then.

Oh dear. Standing in the shower, I had this incredible wave of desire to go back to Santa Monica and just sit outside a cafe on the 3rd Street Promenade, getting some art done.

Barring that, maybe I need to just hook up with some friends and share some office/studio space somewhere in town. I dunno. I just want to be out of the house sometimes, you know?

Luxuria Superbia is the most refreshing game I’ve played in a long time. So many eager flowers that just want you to please, please come touch them. Right there. Yes, there, there – wait no stop slow down – ohhh yessss.

Each flower has a different personality. Wants your touch in a different way. This one likes being spread. This one likes a spiraling caress around all those blushing petals. They all like being lightly, rapidly tapped when everything starts to go white.

This is the most explicit, obscene game I have ever played. And yet you could give it to a child. It’s just about pollinating abstracted flowers, after all. It’s totally not teaching you about putting your fingers – or other parts – into a warm, dark hole and being attentive to what makes it happy. Totally not about that at all.

Oh who am I kidding this is a game about a pretty lady who knows you coming up to you and begging you to put your head, hands, and hips between her legs and make her come so hard she sees God. Very recommended.