weekend

Stuff I doed this weekend:

Worked on the roughs for my contribution to my anthology. What I outlined as 8 pages currently occupies 19 pages of rough layouts, and will probably end up being 21-22pp. Working in a digest size just throws off my calculations! I might try to edit it down a little in the process of going from roughs to finished pages; I’ll see how it reads. It’s only a rough draft of the dialogue right now, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there end up being panel rearrangements along with reworking the words.

Went to Jason’s and talked about his plans for the future of Foolscap, a somewhat moribund little Seattle con he’s going to be the chairman of for next year. Then we played “Netrunner” a couple of times. The first time I died after the second time I threw myself at his ice; the second time came down to some very tense headgames when we were both one point away from the win and he had two systems that may have been traps and may have been points. He won – but then again I’d gotten to a point where I was spending several turns just taking money from having the “Great Work” card in play, and had all but maybe 10 of the money tokens available in the game! I declared that this meant I’d basically retired from console cowgirling after my startup went big, and was keeping a hand in for amusement. (I also had fun spinning tales of what taking money from a “day job” card entailed.)

Went to an actual concom meeting for said con.

Went to a Metafilter meetup. Got there late, joined in on the tail end of a game of “Cards Against Humanity” which… wow. I think that game loses you purity test points. Good stuff for playing over a few intoxicants, and one of the very few games where having art on the cards would probably hurt it. I think Erin was threatening to bring a copy to Rainfurrest or something?

Also I need to remember to get Nick to take a reference photo of me for one tough pose in that anthology story when he’s over here this weekend,

and also

After wallowing mindlessly in a pit of Gantz, I grabbed a smaller sketchbook and started roughing out pages for my contribution to the anthology I’m doing. Which is why I made the post about the Andrew Lang [COLOR] Fairy Books; I was skimming through them looking for inspiration for the title, based on the half-remembered fairy story I’d cross-bred with a setup swiped from Xxxenophile. So far I’m up to the end of page 2 of my 8-page outline, which is turning out to mean I’m up to page 4 of my actual thumbnails. Not surprising, really, given that I’m using a small format.

a productive walk in the park

Well. That was moderately productive.

I’d decided that today I was going to finally hash out the plot for my contribution to that anthology I’m putting together. A couple weeks ago I’d decided my original idea just wasn’t working – it kept on wanting to be too adult – so I decided to revisit the characters from “The Eurydice Variations”. I knew when I finished that that these two felt too full of potential to not come back to.

I stared out the window of a bus, and came up with the beginnings of something involving them running a scam at a casino run by Hermes, to buy the freedom of a person who’d been turned into a tree in lieu of settling their debts. There was also going to be something about a crow who worked at said casino. This morning I did some brief research that ended in me buying a copy of a book about confidence men of the early 1900s. I put that on my iPad and headed out to Ravenna Park with the sketchbook that had all my initial notes for this story.

But what developed after reading about half of that book was also too adult for the anthology. So I put it aside, and wandered through the park some more, pondering what other stories I could riff on.

Ultimately I ended up thinking of one of the stories in the Foglios’ “Xxxenophile”, taking its setup, and going somewhere G-rated. Well, probably more PG. But not the R that the first two stories I was playing with were insisting on being. This one came together pretty quickly, and will probably be like 8-12 pages.

And then on the way home I came up with yet ANOTHER story, because I wanted to know just how this pair of wandering magical rogues got together. Looks like I’ve got fodder for anthologies for a while – these two are pretty good at writing themselves!

plus they give me an excuse to draw a sexy monster babe AND a bishi dude who goes around with his shirt off all the time.

Also I am now thinking that an interesting storycrafting exercise might be “take a book of mythology, come up with five crazy riffs on these stories”. I’m pretty sure I’ll go strange places.