Not dead!
I’m not dead! Just busy.
Actually, that’s a total lie. I am not busy. I am between busy-nesses, I have handed everything in early and waiting on editors and art directors, and so I am playing a lot of Skyrim….mmm….Skyrim….which is significant in having more cabbages per capita than any fantasy game ever made*, and working on various other projects that no one has bought yet, one of which is possibly brilliant, and the other one of which is totally self-indulgent and might best be described as “Look at me! I’m writing a story about a heroine who is way too much like me! Including her obsession with gardening and urge to laugh wildly during solemn occasions!” I suspect it may be tripe, but I am not worrying about that too much while writing it, because I am allowed to produce as much tripe as I want when I am off the clock. And the other one is definitely possibly brilliant, and would be in the same genre as Dragonbreath, and thus potentially marketable and has an armored riding quail named Mumfrey, which is just inherently awesome, damnit.
As I only get so many words a day-apparently-I bought bricks today so that I can do something useful in the morning, and I should probably figure out if I can make the leather thing I want to make, since otherwise I have a taxidermy mount covered in tinfoil and clenched in a vise on my workbench for no reason at all, and we can’t have that. (My first experiment with vegetable-tanned leather…we’ll see if I like how it handles. I have always wanted to make leather masks, and if the material does not make me cry, I may give it a try. But we’ll see.)
My editor called me today and told me that she holds me up as an example of terrifyingly efficient time-management, and I tried to explain that it was nothing of the sort, but if you do a comic for seven years, you learn to draw fast, goddamnit, and they’re very short books, and then I realized that I was trying to bludgeon the compliment to death rather than let it eat me, so I stopped and said “Thank you.” (I am not actually that fast a writer, but the one skillset I learned in life was not dithering. I can let a sentence go as a good and serviceable sentence without requiring it to wear a little saddle and win the Kentucky Derby. Books, in my world, are made primarily of good and serviceable sentences, surrounding a few polished jewels of prose-if you insist on polishing every single one, I suspect you get a book that appears to have been Bedazzled, or possibly Vajazzled if you’re writing that kind of book, and the glare becomes blinding, to say nothing of the smell of hot glue. Excuse me, my metaphor got out of hand, terribly sorry, will pay for all the damages…)
*You go raid bandit hideouts, and they have barrels full of food! And there are empty beer bottles on the ground! It’s like they actually eat food, instead of living on adventurers and easily portable treasures! WHAT MADNESS IS THIS!?
Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.