Funky Cat Studio

Concerning the Teeth:

I can’t remember if I did any blogging about my teeth here. The basic thing is this: I look like I’ve been using meth for the past 30 years. AND I’m only 26! AND its really happened over the last 3 to 5 years! :-/

I’ve finally found a dentist and we’ve been having meetings left and right lately. Tomorrow we’re meeting up again. They want me to sign some consent forms and whatnot to arrange for a procedure on the 8th (yes, a Saturday, yay!). They want to yank one tooth and do something to another and clean some of my front teeth to get a good look at them and decide what to do with them from there.

I’ll be under IV sedation and it will be expensive as hell just because of that :-/ Its interesting- the same stuff they are going to use to IV sedate me is the same PILL they used a little while back to get impressions and stuff. Basically its Prozac type stuff? Interesting!

Concerning the Writing:

As far as that damn poetry book goes… it would have been out by now if only my FIRST and TOP artist of choice actually finished the job! So a little while back I asked my ex to do it. He got a start on it but I haven’t heard from him in awhile. I’m tempted to poke through the lulu forums and see if I can find someone to do some charity work for me. But I’ll ask the ex how its going before I get too excited about moving on again :-p

As for what I was working on for NaNoWriMo… (book #4 of Rayna’s Story/Blood Rose…). I have still been writing on it! I’m currently at 73023, w00t! If I had kept up my NaNo pace after I hit up the 50k, I’d be at 80, I’d bet.

I’m still completely psyched about finding out a bunch of stuff I’ve been wondering about for the longest time now. Now I don’t even remember what those things are, but they’re all in the story and in notes and stuff. A few things have been confirmed that I’ve suspected for awhile. That’s always fun.

But its really mind blowing to see all this stuff falling together! Its like… you sit there and worry, asking questions, running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to figure things out and nothing makes sense then suddenly BAM!

I call it the “.zip file effect” even though I need a better term.

You know, the .zip files for computers where you put a bunch of files in a folder and compress them all together? And then you uncompress this little file and BAM! there’s all these files and all this information!

Its like… constipation…. LOL and it feels soooo incredibly awesome to get it all out :-p

Not that I would know… but I can assume it feels good to get unplugged, eh? eehhh?

So yeah, that’s what’s going on. I’m still not sure if I want to LuLu publish my Blood Rose series/books or if I want to go traditional. I don’t know why, but I always want to lean Lulu *shrug*

OHOHOH! I almost forgot… I’ve been doing drawings of various areas/things/characters… here’s some stuff I’ve had… some new, some not:

• a very very light sketch of umm… the view of the back of the ship, looking at the captain’s quarters
• a very decently done inked drawing of the crew’s quarters
• a loose sketch of the temple Risser on Arias
• a loose sketch of the galley of the Blood Rose
• the room everyone is staying in in a “hotel” type place in The Flower building
• a world map. including separate maps for each body of land, minus the two really huge ones (they’re all on the same scale! yay!)
• a rough sketched out idea of the placement of the islands for Arias
• A general, very lame ass sketch of what the Captain would wear on a normal day (she’s unarmed, de-headed and legless)
• a very lousy anime drawing of Geo (I think he’s missing one hand)
• an almost decent sketch of someone who I think is Rayna, with short hair. I need to go and make her hair lots longer…
• I think that’s it… O.o

Blahs

So yeah. Good times. Well… some good times. It seems that all the good times I’ll be having for quite awhile will be with my characters. I almost feel myself starting to live through them. That’s not particularly a healthy thing, I’m sure, but I honestly don’t care! My characters are cool! Or at least their lives are interesting. Some of them are young and they get around. Even the older ones get around. They’re full of life, problems, flaws, talents…

Sometimes I’ve been finding myself lately thinking about “settling down” and finding ANYONE who will marry me and I’ll just be the little housewife whose only worry is what to make for dinner every night. I won’t even worry about weather he’s having an affair or not, I swear! As long as I don’t have to worry about anything. I’ll sit on the sofa eating bonbons, watching TV all day. I’ll give up my hobbies so I don’t have to worry about buying my supplies and such. The only things I’ll have to by is food and other basics. I’ll even join some stupid ass religion and do what they say if it means I don’t have to worry :(

Current Mood: grateful

Having finished NaNo ‘07 early, I was still motivated to work on my series in one way or another. I’m still writing it, but I’ve also got a blog specifically for the world I’m writing in (info an all characters, plots, countries, EVERYTHING you’d want to know). That particular page is protected, and for my eyes only.

And my roomy’s eyes, too :)

But there is always my WRITING blog. Which isn’t being used as a blog, but more like a normal web page … so my WRITING PAGE has a general breakdown of some of my characters and thoughts and inspiration and I’m sharing links to where my research takes me.

My writing page also will have infos on how my poetry book is coming along, but really… its just the cover that needs finishing. >.<

And I’ll be touching on my other writings. Yes, you’ll see my Flash Fiction is listed as a section there. Run in terror :)

So yeah, I have all sortsa stuff here at Resirem.com. Just take a peek to the right where it says: “My Other Stuff”. Probably the most neglected right now is my Family Tree site (haven’t had the chance to play with it) and Council of Shadows page.

I’m feeling creative doodles coming on now…

Yeah, I’m still alive! I’ve been working a little on Rayna’s Story, but its proving to have its roadblocks, and some things not quite adding up. I’ll get it ironed out though! I still love the idea of starting from “the beginning”. Its kind of fun. I’ve learned a lot, and found some important things.

I was in Eugene for three weeks and was able to get some writing done there. That helped out, not having too many distractions around me.

Oh, and as far as the poetry book? Really its all just waiting on my artist to finish the cover. He’s been bombarded by things recently. I figure since he’s doing it free for me, I don’t have much right to complain… yet ;-) The only things I need to do other than that is to number my pages, insert any of those blank filler pages in the front/back… and do a mini-me page in the back somewhere with a pic.

The page numbering thing was set to automatically number. But that meant that it would count any blank pages needed in the front/back, the title page, the ToC… wtf? So yeah, I gotta do it manually, and I’m not happy about that >.<

I. Am. Stoked.

STOKED!!!

The artist who is doing the cover work for my poetry book finally got a hold of a scanner. He e-mailed me what he did and ZOMIFG! Its awesome. Its better than I… like wow.

See? excited!

As for the guts of the book, all I really need to do now is the title page and figure out what, if anything, I want for the author page. You know, like how they have some black and white photo and a little paragraph…

*SQUEE!*

Also, I was thinking about having a bit of audiance participation for the book. Like the Domiknitrix book, she had a password for some extras from the site that you could only get if you had the book. So I may do something fun like that.

So I figure I better post about the woes I have been having, working on my poetry book. Fred has some interest in how its going, so this is how its going (I’ll do my best to remember details):

I started putting the The Book together a few weeks ago. I downloaded a “template” of sorts to work with from Lulu’s site for the size of book that I wanted to use, which is 7.5″ x 7.5″. The template, is perfect for me, being the lazy, Linux user that I am. I believe I started working with the .doc format.

Yeah, I forgot to clarify, I started out on Ubuntu, with Open Office (OO, from now on).

So I just started pasting all the poems I wanted from various files into my Master File (this is fun, wee!). Eventually I ran into a sort of oddball formatting problem. I’d past a poem to my MF, it would come across as looking like it had double or half sized spacing between lines. No biggie. I can just delete those extra spaces later, right?

Wrong! I tried every method I could think of to get rid of the Unwanted Spacing Attributes (ahah… USA! hehe). I got tired of that and decided to give it a rest for a few days, and use my housemate’s puter (XP, and Word, I believe). I can’t remember when I fixed the USA problem, but I think what I did was paste the afflicted poems into a notepad type program, fixed the spacing, then pasted them back into my MF.

Yay, no more annoying USA!

When I was done pasting poetry from digital files, I dug up a pile of wayward, handwritten poetry spewn about my desk, the floor, the walls. You know what I mean, writers ;-) So I picked out some that needed to be in the book, and just hand typed them into the MF.

Using the XP computer (because my Ubuntu puter was difficult working with, because of an annoying monitor issue and it took me many DAYS to get that first part done)… I fiddled with formatting, how and where I wanted the titles, my font, the size, etc. I spent an all-nighter working on it, then an hour here and there fiddling with it.

Finally, I decided it was time to upload it to the Lulu site, to see how it would turn out. I had some areas needing “filler” poetry, but that was just a matter of typing it in.

Here’s where it got interesting: I uploaded it, and Lulu, in its Infinite Powers, converted my .doc to the acceptable .pdf, but not only did it do that, it decided to RESIZE the whole damn project! Into… 11″x7″ or something crazy like that. Grr! >.<

AND! Not only did it change the size, it changed my formatting! It scooted everything together! I had 3 spaces between each poem, but it pretty much stripped all that out. I think it also changed my font and font size. Double grr! >.<

So I decided to just give it a rest for awhile. And then, sometime last week (a weekish later), I decided to try converting the MF to .pdf, which meant sending it back to Ubuntu, “recovering” the file (wtf?) first. Looking at the PDF after that, on my end, the PDF looked GREAT. It looked like it was supposed to, sizing and everything.

I uploaded -my- PDF to Lulu, and it recognized the correct 7.5″ x 7.5″ right away. It didn’t let me preview it afterwards, which made me O.o for awhile. But I figure its because I don’t need to preview something that wasn’t converted on their end. It looked fine on my end, it was just a straight across upload.

So yeah, that’s pretty much been my adventure so far. I think when I “recovered” my MF from the XP computer, I had to do some reformatting, so I did loose quite a bit of work, but its no biggie.

Right now my issue is trying to figure out how I want to present the poems. I had originally had it so that the poems fit on each page, as in… they didn’t run from the bottom of one page, then to the top of another… I didn’t want to break up the flow. And I have, like I mentioned, 3 full line spaces between each poem to equal everything out. Unfortunately, its not looking too great that way. Its kind of akward.

My other option, besides just scooting everything together and allowing the poem flow to break up (which is a common way to do it, I just don’t like it), is to put one poem per page. I REALLY like that idea, but what of my itty bitty short poems? That, and it would take up more pages, and cost more. Heheh… honestly though, I’m not worried about the cost part. Saving paper, sure… but… I don’t know.

I’ve looked at the poetry books I have on my shelf, but that hasn’t helped me make up my mind one bit. Any advice or encouragement would be just spiffy.

Hmm. I just went and looked at Jewel’s Night Without Armor poetry book. Her stuff looks good with one poem per page. Some of the longer poems run over to the next page, but its done so that the poem starts on the left page and ends on the right… no having to turn the page. I don’t think I have any poems that long, after editing some of the longer ones already :)

Okay I’ll be shuffling along now.