Artist-in-Residence and New Card Design

I forgot a couple of things in yesterday's post. First, here's the poster for the artist-in-residence, Jenner-Brooke Berger:

And, my latest card design, which you may recognize from the cover design I posted a few posts ago:

It'll be two colours, but I'm going to hand-roll the ink with a brayer so I can get a sort of mottled effect something like that in the above image (which was done in Photoshop, of course).

Letterpress & Bookbinding Update

Hey, look, a post that's not about writing! First, here's the finished poster I wrote about last time (this one's not quite registered right, which is why I still have it):

So lately I've been teaching an Intro to Letterpress class, focused primarily on metal type, for Extended Studies at NSCAD. We just finish week 4 of 7 (Thursday evenings) and I think it's going great. Everyone seems to be getting the hang of things, and we're at the point I like best--when everyone is working away on their own and I can drift around the shop and help here and there and advise as I'm needed, but I don't have to speechify in front of them and I'm not running around like a madwoman trying to be everywhere at once.

One project I'm having them do is setting a page--it can be anything they like, long or short, big type or small--that will go in a class book. We'll print lots of copies so that they each get 2 or 3 to take home (and I get a few, too), and everyone will have a nice souvenir of the class. With luck and time management, they'll each have a small project or two of their own as well (in fact, a couple of them already do).

Of course, I have forgotten my camera every single class. And I forgot my camera earlier this week when I did a four-hour bookbinding workshop for a foundation print and paint class. I showed them how to make a simple accordion book with a hard cover, that they can use for the small prints they're doing in class. And because it's so simple, it's also very customizable, so hopefully they'll be able to make them to their own specifications for other projects down the road. At the very least, I inspired several of them to run out and sign up for a whole credit class in book arts. Maybe one or two of them even signed up for my letterpress class.

For things coming up, I'll be helping an artist-in-residence (joint project between NSCAD's Dawson Printshop and the Eyelevel Gallery) to print some posters next week. It could be very hectic as time is short now. I also have a job printing diplomas, but time is also getting short on that and there are apparently some hang-ups on the design end of things (which I have no part in--I'm just the printer), so it could still fall through. They'll have till the end of next week to finalize everything or else there won't be time to process plates, print, dry and deliver to the other side of the country. I'm still hopeful that it will go ahead, but if not, that's how it goes.

And finally, more classes. Extended Studies at NSCAD has asked me to teach the Intro to Letterpress again in May/June (info here), since we had such a good turnout this time. And I'll be teaching the Intro to Letterpress credit class in the fall (info here) so Joe can do two Intro Book Arts classes in hopes of filling up an Intermediate Book Arts in the spring. It'll be my first credit class, but I hope the first of many. I'm very excited and hope I get enough registered for it to go ahead.

And that's it for me in letterpress and books this week. Next post should be on natural history things around my neighbourhood.

Writing Wednesday: A Week Already?

Wow. That week went by fast, and I managed not to post any non-writing posts, too. Sorry about that. I even have non-writing things to talk about. Soon, really.

So in writing news, on a long drive home one day I realized that "Brother Thomas's Angel" is not finished yet. It needs at least another long part, this time narrated by the angel. I know most of what needs to happen, and I've almost got the angel's voice down. But I have not managed to write any of it yet. Still, today/tomorrow's to do list is almost all crossed off, so I hope to make a really good start on that in the morning, if I don't get to it tonight (fading fast now, though, and thinking about bed with a book and then zzzzz).

I also heard the latest on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award late yesterday, and The Secret Common-Wealth didn't make it to the next round. Oddly, it's kind of a relief. I have other plans for it that I can now carry on with.

And finally, as I write this "Three Variations on 'Sleeping Beauty'"--a mini-collection of three short fairy tales that together barely equal the word count of a hefty short story--is processing at Smashwords and awaiting approval in the Kindle store. The iBookstore will follow eventually. I'll post links here next week, probably.

Oh, and speaking of iBookstore, "Come-From-Away" and "Burnt Offerings" are both available there now, with "Hollow Bones" to follow shortly. I don't have a direct link, but go to iBooks on your device, and search for "Silvester" in the iBookstore and they'll come up at the top.

And one final thing--really--I have an official Niko-Silvester-the-writer page on Facebook now. If you go and "like" it, I'll be posting free story coupons soonish. I'd like to offer free stories in exchange for a review on Smashwords or wherever.

Writing Wednesday: Novella Length!

Heh. In case you were worried, this post is not going to be novella length. Actually, nothing is novella length at the moment, but the story I've been working on for . . . a month? maybe, is getting pretty close.

According the the SFWA (Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America), to which I do not belong, the official lengths for stories is as follows:

• short story: less than 7500 words
• novellette: 7500 to 17, 000 words
• novella: 17, 500 to 40, 000 words
• novel: more than 40, 000 words

Personally (and I am aware I am currently firmly in the "nobody" category as far as writers go), I prefer the term "long story" to "novelette" because it's more obviously related to "short story" which it is essentially just a longer version of. I'm also pretty sure most other bodies with any claim to being "official" specify that a novel should be at least 50, 000 words unless it's YA, in which case it can be shorter. But what do I know?

Anyway, there's no real reason for this rambling, except that I just finished transcribing "Brother Thomas's Angel" from my longhand notebooks, and it's just under 13, 500 words. So approaching, though not yet at, novella length.

But the thing is, though the story is finished in the sense that it has a beginning, middle and end, the characters grow somewhat and the central problem in their lives has reached some resolution, there is still more to tell. The problem that *seems* to be the central one (but isn't, exactly, though it is a big one) does not get resolved. And I think the secondary main character (the angel of the title, who may or may not really be an angel) needs to narrate.

So the story is finished for now. Until I start writing the next bit. But I think I need to write some more of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective first.

But before I do that, I have an article about anime and folklore to finish up and hand in.

And for anyone wanting to read about bookbinding and letterpress and the beasties in my woods, I apologize. I'll post about the stuff later in the week.

Writing Post Not On Wednesday Again: Finished, Sort Of

So this time I didn't write about writing on Wednesday because I didn't have much to report. I had a rather unproductive week, I'm afraid. But since then I've finished the longhand draft of "Brother Thomas's Angel."

Incidentally, I don't really recommend writing longhand. Some writers, like Neil Gaiman, for example, write a longhand draft first and then do initial edits as they transcribe that draft to a word-processed one. That's what I always used to do. Until I had to write some stuff under deadline and simply didn't have time to do it twice. And I discovered that I don't write any differently when I compose on the computer. But besides simply writing speed, there's also physical health to think of. I essentially have permanent tendonitis in my right wrist from many, many years of madly scribbling longhand. I've been writing since I could hold a pencil and make the shapes of letters, and it's hard on the bod. My wrist has a noticeable bulge on the top where the tendonitis has formed a ganglion. I could have surgery, but it doesn't bother me much most of the time. When I refrain from doing everything longhand. Typing has its own problems, of course, but they're generally not as bad, and are more easily preventable.

But anyway. A draft of my latest story is done and I'm working on transcribing it. I'm not really sure how long it is, but I'm almost at 2000 words, and I still have a long way to go. It may be a novella.

On the print front, I submitted a few stories to magazines recently and got a couple rejections back (not unexpected ones). I'm still waiting to hear back about two stories.

And in ebooks, I haven't put anything else up yet, but I'm working on covers for a trio of short stories based on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale and for part one of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective (the serial novel based on my in-limbo comic The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring). The individual parts of Aeryn will probably get simple typographic covers and then when the whole novel goes up it'll have a more elaborate cover and will also be available in print from White Raven Press. And it'll be under a pseudonym. Not because I am trying to hide authorship, but because of the way it fits into a larger body of ongoing work that includes printmaking, metalwork, bookbinding and whatever else.

And I think that's it for fiction. For non-fiction, you can read my latest article for Mania, "Laputa, Atlantis and Floating Islands: Ancestors of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky," here.

Books and Letterpress: Writing, Poster, Class

Writing Notebook
I recently used up all the pages in my writing notebook and found myself in need of another one (if anyone's curious, I usually have three or four separate notebooks on the go for different things, plus at least one sketchbook for drawing--currently I have a fiction notebook, a less-used non-fiction notebook, a bookbinding notebook, and a notebook for one of my side blog projects).

As a bookbinder, I of course wanted to make one. Usually I have several on hand, but none of my current stock was a good size or structure. I like simple, utilitarian hardcovers within a general size range for my writing notebooks. Finally, after digging around, I found one that would do in a bunch of sewn-but-not-covered unfinished projects. It's a little smaller and a fair bit thinner than I would have liked, but with no pages left and a story half-done and insisting on being written longhand (not something I do that much anymore, as my gimpy right hand/wrist can't take it), I couldn't be too picky. I ended up starting to write in it before it was done, anyway.

I have a small stash of those lovely craftsman-esque brass moths that I haven't done anything with (partly because I don't like selling things that aren't all my own work), so even though it would get away from the entirely utilitarian, I added one to the front. The cloth is a polyester (I think) bookcloth that looks like silk, with just a touch of coppery bronze in the black. For endpapers, I used a burgundy with a gold pattern that reminded me of William Morris's work.

Poster
My latest print job was a poster for an Art Gallery of Nova Scotia event. It's two colours in hand-set wood and metal type, and meant to look like an old boxing poster. Here's the fist colour on, about to be run through for the second colour:

And here's the type inked up in red for colour number two:

And finally, the Dawson Printshop's Vandercook Universal I proof press with the red type and the paper about to go through its second run:

I don't have any images of the final product, but I did keep a copy for my portfolio. It's still in the shop, but when I bring it home I'll try to remember to post it here. This was a fun job, despite some frustrating and time-consuming difficulties with the first press run, and the client was very happy with the results.


Introduction to Letterpress
And finally for this past week, I taught the first of seven evening classes for NSCAD Extended Studies in Intro to Letterpress (metal type). It's another great group and I don't think I bored any of them too awfully much with my babbling. Next week they'll be setting their own type and from there on it's setting and printing all the way, with as little talking as I can get away with. I didn't think to take any pictures, but maybe I'll manage it this week.

Ichthyosaur
Oh, there was one other thing. Several of my art prints (some litho, some intaglio) have been in a show in Brooklyn called Retrofuturology. The show ended recently, but I got an email from one of the organizers, saying their group wanted to buy the little Steam Ichthyosaur. This means I have only one left for sale (plus two that will be bound in an artist's book). The other three pieces should be on their way homeward soon.

Writing (Not) Wednesday (Anymore): Angel and ABNA

Not counting the last few days, since B is home and distracting (sorry, dear, but you are), I've been writing pretty regularly, pecking away at a new story based on an old idea titled "Brother Thomas's Angel." It was originally going to be an urban fantasy short story, but I'm not quite sure what it is now. Except not finished. It's turned out to be rather longer than I had expected, and I've been writing it longhand (not the best idea in the world, but I like writing in bed), so it's also taking longer than expected to finish. But it's getting there and it feels good to be getting close to done. It'll feel even better when I have a new, finished story in my hands.

And a bit of a surprise the other day. Just over a month ago, I entered my short YA (or maybe middle-grade?) novel The Secret Common-Wealth in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, in the YA category. I meant to go back and write a better pitch, but completely forgot about it, until a few days ago I got an email saying the 1000 entries from each category had been chosen to advance to round two and I should look at the official pdf and see if I'm on it. I entered A Madness of Kentaurs last year and didn't get past the first round, so I expected the same this year. Much to my surprise, my name was on the list. Round two is over in another month-ish and will be judged on an excerpt (round one was judged solely by the pitch). My plan is to forget I entered again. The contest is, of course, to Amazon's benefit because you enter my getting a Createspace account, and every participant gets a coupon for  free proof from Createspace, in case you might want to self-publish via POD. It's also to Penguin's benefit, because they can use the process to sort through some slush and find them something (or perhaps more than one something) good to publish. The "prize," besides the honour of winning, is a standard publishing contract with Penguin. Curiously, the summary of the standard contract made no mention at all of electronic rights, which are a big deal right now what with e-books becoming ever more popular.

And finally, speaking of e-publishing, I've got another short story up (or it will be very soon) at Smashwords and Kindle via White Raven Press. This time it's "Hollow Bones," and the cover looks like this:

That's one of my linocuts on the cover.

Book & Print Friday: Posters, Intro, Secret Possibility

Alas, I can't think of anything to alliterate with "Friday" that means "books and letterpress printing."

As usual, I have a big backlog of half-finished bookbinding projects. I started working on a larger version of my "steambook" blank notebooks, but I need to get some longer eyelets to finish them. Alas, I'm on a somewhat restricted budget at the moment, so ordering those will have to wait, especially as I want to order an etching tank from the same retailer. I do have the fish skins now that I needed to compete the other 2 of the edition of 3 of my little book of improbable fish prints, so I hope to get those done shortly.

In the "things completed" category, I've finally finished all 9 in the edition of Waterlily books I printed over a year ago. They're letterpress printed from hand-set metal type with three classic Japanese haikus about water, hand-folded into origami lilies and hand bound in hard covers with chiyogami paper on the covers. I haven't managed to get them listed in my Etsy shop yet, but it's on the to-do list.

As for letterpress, I haven't done much since the holidays. I have polymer made up for a fox and bamboo card (that's the digital proof, below), and I will be using the sea things plates from my calendar (which is nearly sold out) to print cards on watercolour paper that I will then hand-colour.

Next week I start teaching an Intro to Letterpress class for Extended Studies at NSCAD. It's Thursday evenings for seven weeks. The last class I taught (on wood type) was an absolute blast, so I'm really looking forward to this one. It will necessarily be a little bit more technical than the wood type class, but I still plan to focus on printing printing printing. I'll probably be teaching the same class again in May/June, but I'll post again when I know for sure.

And finally print jobs for other people. I originally had a job lined up for a repeat customer to be printed in early January, but they ended up needing it much earlier--right when NSCAD (and thus my printing space) was closed and I was on my way out west for the holiday. Fortunately, I know some other letterpress printers and was able to pass the job on to Micheline Courtemanche of Betty & Bing. For the immediate future, I have a small run of posters to do next week from hand-set type. It should be fun, even thought the timeline is a little tighter than I'd like. And I have one other potential job that I'm pretty excited about, but which may not go ahead, so I won't say anymore. Well, I will say it will have me printing on St Armand handmade paper, which is one of my favourite things to print on ever.

And that's it for the moment, I think. I used up my writing notebook two days ago and have to make a new one. I found one in my stash that's sewn, but has no covers yet, so I've been writing in that. Maybe today I'll get some time to put a cover on it.

Writing Wednesday: More Goals, e-Publishing, Words

Hey look, it's my first Writing Wednesday post. If you come here to read about books or letterpress or craft or the birds in my backyard (which probably occupy most of the photos I've posted in the last year or so), go ahead and skip this entry. The next one, in a few days, will be all about crafty things (and maybe a bird or two).

First off, some announcements. Two of my short stories are now available as e-books for $0.99 each from White Raven Press. At the moment, they're only available via Smashwords, but eventually you'll be able to get them from Barnes & Noble and Amazon as well, and maybe iBookstore. There are a bunch of different file formats, so you can read them on just about anything, from Kindle to iPad to Nook to Kobo to your computer screen.

"Come-From-Away"  
Newfoundland is thick with fairies, if the old stories are to be believed. So what happens when a graduate student from away follows an old folklore text to a peculiar rock formation known as Puck's Chair? Will she return a poet or a madwoman? Originally published online in a little semi-pro zine called Fables in 2001 or 2002.

"Burnt Offerings"
 Frank Swann is a celebrated poet who only ever writes a single copy of each poem. He holds his audience enthralled as he reads it to them, and then he burns the original, destroying the poem forever. What compels him to destroy his work, and what would happen if he stopped? Originally published in Quantum Muse when it was a semi-pro market in 2001 or 2002, it's a sort of sequel to "Come-From-Away" in that it shares a character, but both are stand-alone stories.

Friends who want to read these but don't want to shell out the 99 cents let me know and I'll see if I can figure out the coupon system for Smashwords. If you want them in print, you'll have to wait until I have enough stories for a collection, at which point they'll be available in trade paper.

Also, I just got my printed copies of Fey: Drawing Borders chapter 1, and they look great. Two copies en route to the National Library as soon as I get them packed and get out of my hermitage to a post office. They're available from Indy Planet, and I hope chapter 2 will follow in a month or two (depending on how good my time management is). The whole story will eventually be available as a paperback, but first I have to finish writing and drawing it, something at which I am notoriously slow.

And now, a progress report. I've managed three straight days of an hour of writing, and on day three I did two hours. Then I missed yesterday. I don't know how many words that is, because I had a false start on the word processor and switched to longhand (the intention was to do it temporarily so I could more easily write in bed, but it sort of stuck). It looks like a lot of pages on "Brother Thomas's Angel," an old story idea I started over with. So far not a lot has happened--not even the discovery of Brother Thomas's body (his angel was discovered in the first sentence, fortunately), so it's looking like this is going to be a long one.

I also turned in my second "Creator Spotlight" for the anime/manga section of Mania. I'm not sure when that will go up. My second folklore/myth article will be finished by the end of today.

And finally, a few more goals and decisions. First off, I realized I've been sending the same stories out over and over again, and while I haven't actually exhausted every possible magazine and website that might pay for them, I think that might be contributing a little to me not writing much new. So, I addition to my writing at least 5 out of 7 days a week and producing at least one new story a month, I've decided I need to clear the deck. So as soon as the last couple stories come back with rejections (or, you never know, acceptances), I'll retire them all from print submissions, and have them come out via White Raven Press and e-books. Some of them, I think, I will release as chapbooks or artist's books because my dream has always been to make books--words, pictures and binding all.

Then I won't have any stories sitting around waiting for someone to magically publish them, and I'll have to write more. Some of them may be suitable for magazines, and some will go straight to e-books where they won't be required to fit a specific genre or mold.

And that ended up being a much longer post than I intended, so I'll stop. Next time: what's happening with Niko and letterpress printing and how are all those bookbinding projects coming along, anyway?

New Writing Goals

While I've always been pretty good at self-motivating, even I need goals and deadlines sometimes. So, I've decided to give myself some writing goals. Not just the usual general "work more on such-and-such" sort of thing I usually do, but solid goals I can actually make myself stick to. So here they are:

• I will write one new short story a month. Sometimes they will be very short, and sometimes more like a novella. Sometimes they might even turn into a novel, which will make the monthly goal a little unrealistic, but I'll deal with that if it ever happens. But every month, a new story.
• I will write fiction for at least an hour, 5 times a week. I actually think this is a fairly modest goal, but I figure it's better to start small and find myself exceeding the goal than to aim to high when I'm out of practice at regular fictioning. Sometimes this will go towards the monthly story, sometimes toward a novel, and occasionally I might switch from fiction to creative non-fiction, but it will all be personal work (as opposed to my paid reviews and articles).
• I will blog at least once a week, but aim for three times. Why three? Because I know different friends and followers read this blog for different reasons. Some are interested in my bookbinding and letterpress, some in other craft, some in writing and some in personal stuff. My ultimate goal is to do one round-up sort of post on what I've been doing in each of writing, bookbinding/letterpress, and miscellaneous craft/life in general. So expect more frequent posting from me, but mostly shorter posts. I will also try to post pictures more regularly, because everyone like pictures.

There are other things I'm aiming for, too, like getting my website properly updated. And I've decided to venture into indie publishing (or farther in, really, as I've done little chapbooks and artist's books from time to time over the years, under my "White Raven Press" name). I plan to start with those short stories that are sitting there on my hard drive. Some were published in small or semi-pro e-zines and others got very nice personal rejection letters from big magazines. I'm going to make them available in electronic format. My idea is to have one free one every month, changing it each month. The others will be 99 cents. Once I have enough of them up, I'll release them as a collection as an e-book and POD.

I'll probably go a similar route with the YA/middle grade books I have done, but I'll figure that out as I go along. I'm not planning on making pots of money, or any money, really (though that would be nice).

So, since this post is already longer than I thought it would be, I'll end with my immediate plans:

1. put together a simple but eye-catching cover for short story #1: "Come-From-Away," either photo-based (it's set in St John's, NL) or something I drew. 
2. Get the story formatted properly for e-pub. 
3. Get myself registered on the appropriate sites and publish away. 

If all goes well, it may be up by the time the weekend is over. Or it might not. But eventually, watch for "Come-From-Away" by Niko Silvester on Kindle, Sony eReader, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and maybe others. For free for a month, then for 99 cents.

Some Thoughts on Self-Publishing

I've been thinking about self-publishing a lot lately. I'm old enough to have a definite prejudice against it, at least for prose books--especially fiction. But I'm also old enough to have seen how self-publishing in comics produced some of my very favourite books. ElfQuest, for example, a series which won critical acclaim (and which had more influence than just about anything else on my drawing style--something I have been trying to overcome for ages (though not because of the quality of the original, simply because anyone who looks at my drawings can see the influence immediately) ), was self-published.

Back then, self-publishing was hard. Now, it's easy. For some people, it means that self-published books are even more a sea of crap than they ever were, which is perhaps a reasonable argument for sticking with traditional publishing. One the other hand, readers will read what they want to read and work of mouth is a powerful thing, so good books will eventually become known and bad ones avoided, however they were published.

So. Last month I released the first chapter of my still-unfinished comic series Fey on the print-on-demand indie comics site Indy Planet. I also made it available on the Comics Monkey site, which distributes to the wholesale market. Except for the copies I bought myself to have on hand, I haven't sold a single copy yet, but that's OK. I haven't promoted it either. I just wanted to get it done and out there. Indy publishing in comics has a longish and fairly well-thought-of history. At some point, I'll get organized and actually promote and see if I can sell some, but I want to get back into drawing it first, so I can be confident that it will, in fact, actually be finished some day. To that end, I'm almost decided on getting a table in artist's alley at this year's Hal-Con science fiction convention.

My aversion to self-publishing my fiction remains, but it's decreasing every day. There are a lot of downsides to it. For me the most significant is promotion. I can handle the writing, I can find people to read it and give feedback, I can make reasonable cover art, and thanks to this latest degree, I can even design a passable (though not brilliant) book cover. But promoting myself and all those other little tasks a traditional publisher is supposed to do. . . . Well, I guess I can learn. And I think I just might give it a try. The worst that can happen is my books rot in obscurity like thousands of others.

I started writing because I wanted to tell stories, and also because I wanted to make books. I learned hand-bookbinding, printmaking, letterpress printing, design and even photography for the same reason. And self-publishing will let me make my own books. If other people like them, that's cool. Heck, if I could make a living doing it, that would be great. But I won't count any chickens before I even have a basket to put the eggs in.

Things that got me thinking (more) about self-publishing:

• Kristine Kathryn Rusch's post on the changing business of publishing, especially the one on new writers
• Dean Wesley Smith's posts on the myths of publishing, especially the one on "Self Publishing is a Bad Idea"
• an email from friend and teacher Heinz Insu Fenkl in which he suggested self-publishing as an increasingly legitimate path for many writers

So You Think You Can Sew

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. I was away for a couple of weeks, then sick, then, well, out of the habit of regular posting, I guess. I've got a tonne of cool things planned for the next few months, though, so I hope to blog lots.

First, here is something cool I got for Christmas from my mom:

It's a Cricut Expressions die-cutting machine. They're aimed more at scrapbooking and "arts and crafts" (not in the William Morris sense) folks, but there's third-party software that allows you to cut your own designs. I haven't attempted that yet, though it is my ultimate goal, and being able to cut my own designs is really the only reason I wanted one. But I have tried the cartridge that came with the machine, and was able to make some little envelopes for some letterpress valentines I printed ages ago, complete with a heart on the flap. I didn't take any pics, but I'll put them in my Etsy shop soon.

Another cool-but-useful thing I got this year is a fancy new Dremel rotary tool (from BillyZ). I did have a no-longer-produced "Wizard" rotary tool made by Mastercraft, but this one is so far beyond that . . . Anyway, I have lots of little tasks that will be made easier, plus a whole pile of new ideas.

This particular model even has attachments that will turn it into a jigsaw and a planer (I don't have those yet, but they're on my list--right after the router attachment). I can envision wooden book covers made easier, plus little wooden boxes. I love boxes! I might have to make a trip to Home Depot for some wood soon.

And none of this is what I was going to write about when I started this post. What I was going to write about, and what the title refers to, is this:

Every once in a while I get it into my head that I can sew. Or that I can sew well, I mean. I've been puttering with sewing machines since I was six (or somewhere thereabouts) when my mother let me use scraps of fabric to make little purses and bags and simple Barbie clothes (that last one required the assistance of my older sister). But I'm not exactly gifted with a needle.

Anyway, my sewing machine (which I sold to a friend and then bought back when she moved away) had been sitting untouched for a year when I suddenly got Ideas (yes, with a capital "I"). So I made a pattern for a stuffed octopus (yes, out of my head--one of my other occasional hallucinations is that I can make 3-d shapes from my Ideas). Then I cut it out of some fabric I'm not likely to use for anything else, and attempted to sew it together.

In retrospect, a different order of assembling the pieces would probably have helped with some of the pointy seams, but it turned out rather well, considering. A few tweaks and I think it will be done. Alas, it takes to long too make up to be able to sell as a toy, though maybe with some different fabric and hand painting (or hey, hand-printing . . . hmmmmmm) I might be able to market it to the "art doll" folks. Or maybe I could sell the pattern, though I'd have to learn how to draw a pattern properly.

Things to fix: the part where the legs join the head needs work. It's fine and the front and back, but too difficult and not so nice looking on the sides. Not too difficult a fix, though (I think, maybe). Also, the legs. I like them, but I think I should have made the left and right sides different, instead of mirrored. Also more curl in some of them. Again, not too hard to fix.

Back at the Ranch

A couple of days ago it finally snowed and as soon as my load of laundry was done, I went for a walk. It looked like this out the front window when I left:

When I got back, the light was waning and my house was all glowy:

Tentacle and Carapace

"Tentacle and Carapace: a letterpress printed calendar of sea creatures" is my hand-printed calendar for 2011. I'm so glad I had it finished before the Halifax Crafters fair this year, as I sold quite a few (last year I only had a few pages done of my flying machines calendar and though I had them on display, I couldn't actually sell any).

All of the names of the months are printed from vintage wood type in the collection of the Dawson Printshop at NSCAD, where I still do most of my printing.

The days of the week and dates of each month are printed from polymer plates. The type is Eccentric, with Cochin for the subtitle on the front.

The sea creatures were also printed from polymer plates, made from my own drawings. (If you read this blog much, or follow me on Twitter or on Facebook, you may remember me writing about working on them.)

If you'd like to purchase a copy of the calendar, you'll find it on Etsy and ArtFire, or you can email me at anagramforink at gmail dot com.

Making Progress Slowly

 
The Halifax Crafters Winter . . . um, I can't remember what it's called this year, but it's the funkiest craft fair in town, and it's coming up very soon (next weekend) so I am in a mad frenzy to get everything done. I've spent the last couple of days working on a big batch of book jewellery, and it's still not done!

Here's what it looks like so far:

Those are the Japanese bindings, all done and ready for their hardware. It looks like such a tiny pile, now, but there are 26 pendant size and 34 earring size tiny books in there. Here are the English bindings, not done:

I'll be changing gears a little bit today, to print some more gift tags on my Kelsey parlour press here at home, and getting paper ready to print business cards and book jewellery cards in the Dawson Printshop tomorrow before the Letterpress Gang meeting.

As for cards, I've printed all I'm going to get done this year, and am just waiting on envelopes and polybags (fingers crossed that they will make their way swiftly from Ontario to here, or else I will be stealing bags and envelopes from other, non-holiday, cards). The calendars are printed and just need their final trim and hole-punch, which will happen tomorrow. They need polybags, too, which are also on order.

The other task this week is to build some kind of card display for my table, probably out of foam core (they make a nice black with black core that won't even need covering if I cut it well). I used to borrow the spinner rack from the Dawson Printshop, but I find that most people only look at what's in front of them, and don't actually turn the rack.

So that's what I've been doing. Phew! If I make it through this week, and next weekend, then I just have the Letterpress Gang Holiday Printers' Bazaar to prep for, but I'll mostly be using the same inventory I already have. I may try to print one more quick card in the intervening week, but I also have an xmas present for a friend that I want to get done so I can deliver it before I take off for the west coast on the 21st, leaving boy and cat to fend for themselves (well, technically boy will also fend for cat, but you know what I mean).

Octoberpus! Also, a Fox.

OK, I promised a sneak peek at the new calendar I've been working on, so here's a terrible iPhone photo of the October page.

Once I do the final trim I'll scan all the pages and take some artsy photos for my Etsy and Artfire shops.

The other big bit of holiday printing is this year's card design, the snowflake-catching fox. Here's a scan of the front of the printed card.

It's so hard to give any real idea of what a letterpress-printed card is actually like in person. Neither a scan nor a photograph can do it justice. It's something you have to touch. I love the tactility of letterpress, but it's so hard to convey to online customers . . .

Jewel Books and Jewel-Tone Thread

Sorry for the lack of updates. I can say I've been very busy, but when am I ever not busy? At the moment, I am working on turning this:

 Into a whole bunch of traditional European style tiny books for pendants and earrings, and this:

 Into a whole bunch of Japanese 4-hole bound tiny books, also for book jewellery. And, as luck would have it, and with perfect timing, today's mail brought this:

 6 new colours of waxed linen thread, perfect for traditional Japanese-style bindings (and other bindings with exposed stitching, like cross-structure and coptic). The green is not as bright as I had hoped (I just got the sample card with my order, so I was looking at computer screen images), but it's still a great colour I'm sure I'll use over and over. Of course, now that I have the sample card, I want one of each colour! And also, my thread box (a very nice wooden sliding-lid box that used to have a bottle of Alberta Springs whisky in it) is no longer big enough. So I shall have to be on the lookout for a replacement. Or an addition. Or else making a new one will go on my to-do list once the holiday rush is over.



And that reminds me--I went and signed up for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but after 3 days and only 750 words, I realize I have too many projects to finish and too many things to make for the craft fair to start writing a new novel, so once again I'm going to quit before I've really got going. I have the consolation that I've already successfully done NaNo twice. What I really need to get done is the re-scanning and re-lettering of issue 1 of Fey, as I got a nice letter from the National Library of Canada asking where their two copies were, since they gave me an ISSN ages ago.

Letterpress at the Homestead

While I generally have done most of my printing at the Dawson Printshop in Halifax, I've also been slowly working towards setting myself up to print here at home. My studio space isn't huge, and I have to do downstairs to get water (the tap in the photo below is currently non-functional), and since it's on the second floor, I can't have anything too heavy. Eventually I hope to build an outbuilding of some sort with a concrete floor and then acquire a bigger press.

What I do have in here is a small proof press--the bed is cast aluminum, I think--that I was given by a friend. My first experiment of the day was to attempt to print a random assortment of mostly wood type (given to me by B's dad in Pennsylvania). It was a not-entirely-successful attempt, and though I ended up with some usable sheets of printed paper, they weren't quite what I was aiming for, and I can tell I'm going to be doing considerable trial and error with makeready to make this press work as well as I'd like.

The problems I was having are, I think, a combination of issues with the press itself (primarily the cylinder and the fact that I can only lock up type on one direction, which is not the direction of travel of the cylinder, so the pressure of printing works the type loose) and issues with the type (being old type, it's all different heights, and being a random assortment, it's extremely difficult to get it to lock up tightly). Still, it was a worthwhile experiment, and I am not giving up.

I also have a little 5x8" platen Kelsey parlour press. I've had it for a while and puttered about at getting it running (all it really needed was rust removal and lubrication). I finally got serious a month or two ago, and today got the packing in and some gauge pins on. I still need to adjust the platen some more, but I printed up a whole pile of little holiday candle images which will be cut and folded into gift tags. I might ink up in red tomorrow and do some more. I also have a Santa and some holly I'm going to combine with "to" and "from" in type and try printing those.

Miscellaneous Things

My brain seems to be scattered all over the place lately. I'm about to head in to Halifax to teach my last wood type letterpress class for the semester, and I'm waiting to deliver two print jobs and get paid for another one. And I've had one binding job almost certainly canceled and one probably going ahead but I don't know quite when yet. And I have a craft show in early December to prepare for, holiday cards to finish, supplies to order and shops to visit for potential wholesale orders.

And if that's not enough, I'm still working on some copper jewellery, some ATCs, some ilustrations and various and sundry other things. Oh yes, if ever I have free time, I very soon fill it up with things to do.

Other things going on: a truck in need of repair before it's driveable and a letterpress workshop I'll do if the truck is fixed in time. An anime website/blog I started and am waiting to move to its permanent domain before promoting. Collapsing offshoot blogs back into this main blog because I have too many things on the go. I promise I'll write something that makes a bit more sense next post. In the meantime, here are the latest ATCs I did, with manga/anime as the theme (and yes, that's yet another version of my foxgirl).

Tsukiko has a Fox Mask

Yuki Makes Foxfire

Dragon Hurricane Oolong

Snowblind

I tried colouring with markers again, which was harder than expected at such a small size. Plus I'm not that practiced with markers. So I'm not entirely happy with the results. But the sketches were originally much larger than ATC size, so I plan to ink and scan them, and then colour digitally (well, except for Tsukiko, which I've already done).

[BFG] Recent Reading: And 2 Makes 50

One more book I forgot to put on last post's list, plus one I just finished.

49. The Encyclopedia of Jewelry-Making Techniques by Jinks McGrath (non-fiction) buy from amazon
    
    I got this one from the library partly because I just like to learn new things, but also because I had a new project in mind (yeah, like I need *another* new project). You can see a sneak peek over on Anagram for Ink. The book isn't really in-depth, but it has really good basic introductions without getting into too much detail (which is the problem I'm having with the other jewelery book I signed out), and the pictures are nice (and colour!). I may look for a copy, or something similar, to add to my own library.
50. The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas by Fuyumi Ono (fiction) buy from amazon
    
    This third book in the series starts off much more slowly than the other two, and it's rather more confusing at the beginning (partly because it uses a lot of substantial flashbacks, which I wasn't expecting after having just read books one and two). Still, once the various details began to come together, it became a wothwhile segment of the larger story.

So, now that I've reached 50 books with a few months left to go in the year, should I just keep going and see how far I get, or should I try for 50 fiction and non, plus 50 graphic novels? Or go on a reading frenzy and try 50 fiction, 50 non-fiction and 50 GNs? (I did that last one the very first year I tried the 50 Books thing, but I had a lot more time to read that year.)

Just out of curiosity, I think I'll list each category below and see how far away from 50 I am in each one . . .

Fiction

1. Zeppelins West by Joe R. Lansdale
2. Hannah's Garden by Midori Snyder
3. The Blue Girl by Charles deLint
4. Swim the Moon by Paul Brandon
5. Widdershins by Charles deLint
6. The Rosetta Key by William Dietrich
7. The Swiss Family Robinson by Jean Rudolph Wyss
8. Fitcher's Brides by Gregory Frost
9. Sunshine by Robin McKinley
10. The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser
11. Good Blood by Aaron Elkins
12. Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi
13. Once by James Herbert
14. White Cat by Holly Black
15. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
16. The Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and His Terrible Hatred by Carl-Johan Vallgren
17. The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Shadow by Fuyumi Ono
18. The Twelve Kingdoms: Sea of Wind by Fuyumi Ono
19. The Twelve Kingdoms: The Vast Spread of the Seas by Fuyumi Ono

Non-Fiction

1. Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet by Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell
2. The Complete Guide to Prints and Printmaking ed. John Dawson
3. Mangaka America ed. Steelriver Studio
4. Video Game Art by Nic Kelman
5. The Boilerplate Rhino by David Quammen
6. Animal Skulls: A Guide to North American Species by Mark Elbroch
7. The Decorative Illustration of Books by Walter Crane
8. How to Spot a Fox by J. David Henry
9. Anime Explosion by Patrick Drazen
10. The Nature of Coyotes: Voice of the Wilderness by Wayne Grady
11. The Encyclopedia of Jewelry-Making Techniques by Jinks McGrath

Graphic Novels

1. Mouse Guard by David Petersen
2. The Unwritten Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity by Mike Carey and Peter Gross
3. Samurai Crusader: Sunrise over Shanghai story by Hiroi Oji, art by Ryoichi Ikegami
4. Spice and Wolf Volume 1 by Isuna Hasekura, art by Keito Koume
5. Shaman Warrior Volume 4 by Park Joong-ki
6. Bone: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith
7. American, Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
8. xxxHolic Volume 9 by CLAMP
9. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle Volume 9 by CLAMP
10. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle Volume 10 by CLAMP
11. Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle Volume 11 by CLAMP
12. The Eternal Smile by Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim
13. Foiled by Jane Yolen, art by Mike Cavallaro
14. Shutterbug Follies by Jason Little
15. Hellboy Animated: The Menagerie by various folks, based on Mike Mignola's character
16. Slow Storm by Danica Novgorodoff
17. Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi
18. Lindbergh Child: America's Hero and the Crime of the Century by Rick Geary
19. Spice and Wolf Volume 2 by Isuna Hasekura, art by Keito Koume
20. Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper by Kazu Kibuishi 
 

OK, it seems a little unlikely that I can get to 50 of each, especially non-fiction, but you never know.