I have a new job!

I am super excited to announce that I will be working for Tyche Books as their Artistic Coordinator.  Tyche is a new genre press, dedicated to treating it’s writers and contributers fairly. Their first book will be an anthology of short stories, followed by a genre related non-fiction book called, What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank. I am busily working on a look concept for the non-fiction releases, and I think they are going to be lovely, and fun for writers and fans of fantasy and science fiction to read, collect and own.

While all this means I will have even less time to focus on my own painting, I am feeling really good about being in a position to work with amazing artists, who depend on their work to support themselves, to give them work and to help them get exposure. I hope that my own creative explorations give me a way to build better dialogue with those artists and put together beautiful books.

As long as I refer to myself as an accidental writer, I tell myself, I can miss submission deadlines, fail to be inspired by prompts, and not spiral into guilt about it all. Unfortunately, I’ve been hitting deadlines lately, finding ways to tweak prompts so I can find inspiration, and some days I feel more like a writer than a painter.

Unfortunately, because that means the guilt and internal pressure which hounds so much of my existence is finding ways into my writing life. “I can’t believe I tried to get clever with that submission e-mail. Now the editors will hate me forever.” “Is my style becoming stagnant? It is, I know it is, if I don’t freshen it, my work will become less and less publishable.”

At what point to I stop becoming an accidental writer, and just call myself a writer? If I get a few more stories published? If I manage to write the novel-expanded-from-short-story that one editor has asked for? Do I want to call myself a writer?

I’m experimenting with continuing to call myself an artist, and throwing writing in to the list of media I use, when people ask.

As an adolescent, I taught myself to crochet. I basically made it up as I went, and that Christmas everyone got hats. I knew I couldn’t do any of the fancy stitches, but I thought I’d done pretty well when it came to figuring out a basic stitch. Little did I know, my basic stitch was one of the fancy ones.

This summer, I finally sat down with someone and learned single and double stitches. Suddenly, lots of cross stitch patterns make sense. I don’t feel the need to do an intensive project with the technique (for that, check out Andrea Zittel’s single strand uniforms) but I feel competent now. I have one more tool in my arsenal of creation, and I can keep my baby’s feet warm.

Booties made on DIY Maven’s pattern — Wolf ears improvised by me.

It has been a long couple of weeks away from home. Traveling with a small baby isn’t so bad (though I feel bad having to put her in her car seat for extended stretches of driving) but being away from home is always a little tougher for me than I imagine it will be. I am in complete sympathy with dragons who must nest with their hoards at night; I take great comfort in being among my things, in the space I have displayed them.

The retreat was lovely. I got many preliminary interviews for the possible documentary project. I found myself far more interested in the interview process than in getting a lovely image, which is interesting. Last time I was involved with filmmaking, it was very much a visual medium for me.

After the retreat, I headed to Readercon, to meet up with other writers from Rigor Amortis and Broken Time Blues, and to get a feel for the world of writers and small press that I find myself bemusedly on the fringes of. I still feel like an accidental writer, and identify first as an artist, but I really love the people I met at Reader Con, and feel very much in harmony with them.

My relationship with filmmaking has been a distant one for several years. While I loved it intensely, I really disliked doing it for a living. Having to take projects that I wasn’t passionate about, and work with people who weren’t passionate about anything but money was disheartening. Add to that a body which rebelled (enough to put me in the hospital) at twenty hour work days; it just wasn’t a lifestyle I wanted to maintain.

Recently, a friend approached me with a project idea that really resonated with where my art is. It is a documentary project on women’s wisdom, and I am interested enough to dust off my old skills and get behind a camera again.

Fortuitously, I am on my way to a women’s retreat next weekend, which will provide the perfect setting for trying out interview questions, and getting a feel for the project. I am very excited.

Machine of Death is open to submissions for a sequel. Can’t get the crowd together for a Fiction Jam at the moment, due to life being crazy for all, but I did write a little piece.

I can’t decide if it’s a bad thing or a good thing that my first beta reader pronounced my story “un-publishable”. He meant the content was possibly too grim, even for a book about death. I made some tweaks, but kept the central theme. I like that I pushed someone’s boundary, regardless of what happens with the story.

As always, feels good to have written, but I do miss my Jammers. Writing can be a lonely art and getting people to beta read when they don’t have anything in the queue themselves can be hard.

Egypt stood up and showed the world that non-violent protest works.  Soon after, Bahrain set out to do the same.  It was bloodier, and they received no support from the international community; Bahrain is a small country, but militarily important to many larger powers including the United States.

For that brief time that the protests in Bahrain were splashed across the news, I was deeply struck by the power of the women involved.  They wear veils, and to my Western trained eyes that indicates a level of subjugation, but these women are powerful.  They are well educated, they are informed, and they stand up and protest for their rights in a way that American women have forgotten how to do.

And then Pearl roundabout became Martyr’s Square and the people of Bahrain refused to be put off by guns and a show of force.  They took back their space, not just bare handed, but with their children in tow.  I watched with awe as those powerful women in veils and their bright faced children filled that square, refusing to let fear hold them back.

While Egypt’s protests moved me deeply, Bahrain’s protests moved me to art.  I was swept up with a need to pay homage to those women who are still dreaming of a brighter future for their daughters.

I am pleased with how this piece has come out.  I managed to capture something like the expressions I wanted, and there is an energy bound by structure that I think works well for the subject matter.

The name of Made My Dreams Flesh comes from a poetry fragment I found in my files from, roughly, High School, “I made my dreams flesh, that they might play with me.”  It seemed to suit the living bubbles.

At first, this piece was just a girl, holding a bubble for air spirits to play with, but those air spirits turned into bubbles themselves, half formed in a fluid way instead of wispy winds.  Part of the evolution of winds to bubbles included the discovery of a need for a little weight in all the air forms — not physical weight, but visual.  A bubble can hold a reflection, whereas wind does not.

In adding reflections, the piece gained something more than layers of paint.  No more is the central figure offering a hollow orb, but one that is full of her own reflection.

The proportions on this one are more realistic, but they are still enlongated.  I worry that because she looks almost natural, she is adding to a societal perception of thin as normal.  When I take a figure further away from natural proportion, it becomes acceptably abstract.  It is hard for me not to stretch figures, as it is hard for me not to enlarge eyes — hidden truths about how I see the world.  To avoid that uncomfortable (for me) line of too skinny, I need to either fight my natural tendencies harder, or push the abstraction.