blue and yellow, not pink

yes, I have been baking cupcakes. again.

no, this is not a food blog.

yes, I do have a lot of other stuff going on in my life aside from eating and drinking and merry-making. 'such as?' you ask. well, let me tell you.

we're working on chapter 12 of Starcustard. yes, really.

I am just about to email some old professors of mine and ask for letters of recommendation. first thing tomorrow. promise.

my dad is coming to town on Tuesday. we shall probably go eat ice cream somewhere. I hope.

also, there are various sewing, painting, and song-writing projects better left in the background for now. and of course I need not mention most of the mundane and regular things I spend time doing, like reading and yoga and laundry and sleeping. who cares about all that stuff?

but these cupcakes. they are beautiful, aren't they? I found the recipe over on smitten kitchen, which unlike mine is a real food blog--a very dedicated and cheerfully expert one. I wish the woman posted more often.

as it is, I have her to thank for providing this brilliant lemon-blueberry cake recipe in answer to the quest I sent myself on the other week. I needed to find something sweet and tart and perfect. these are it.

nebulae triangulum

I have been writing.

reading also, in short unfocused moments, but mostly writing. stumbling after the siren calls of all those notebooks and pens. my library books are being neglected. instead of automatically turning to plastic-sleeved hardcover spines and neatly printed pages, I am losing myself in a spiral-bound and blue-lined scribble-filled wilderness.

and?

mostly it's the black one. Starcustard. chapter ten has finally crawled out of its draft stage. you can read it over here. someday I may get my own little website up and breathing again, and you might be able to read it there too. someday.

these stories. they take up mere fractions of my mind, and yet seem so full. whole universes. entire communities. other consciousnesses. they all crawl around in their little compartments, kicking and pulling and stretching. what can we do? what can we do but give them a bit of two-dimensional freedom? some kind of on-paper existence. it isn't much. it might not be real. but hey, what else can we do?

after all, that sheet of paper or that screen may look flat, but it isn't. it's just the top layer, the one your eyes first meet. beyond the ink or pixels and light there could be anything. whole universes.

try not to get lost.

also:

Every now and then Jack and Bloy heard a distant zip and zoom above their heads and the sky lit up again, the red balls of flame burning with an unusual green. As they advanced across the snowy plain, bonfires, small and not so small, crackled into view.

starcustard chapter nine

soundtrack sidedishes

Will Smith is getting old.

I noticed this last night, stretched out on somebody else's carpeted floor, watching his performance in the most perplexing and morbid jigsaw puzzle of a film I've ever seen. I spent the first half of Seven Pounds in rather amazed confusion, the second in an almost paralyzing disbelief.

in the middle of this jigsaw awesomely putting itself together, we are invited into Emily's garage. in this shadowy refuge, she works printing letterpress greeting cards and invitations on a couple of old, beat up presses. behind these rare monsters we get glimpses of printing paraphernalia--paper, inks, and pinned up scraps. the idea of this was so lovely to me. I can't envy Emily her heart condition, and I wouldn't want to be looking after an ugly great dane, but I wouldn't mind access to a garage so equipped as hers. it is a relatively minor part of the film, but our hero in the shape of Will Smith spends all night repairing this woman's broken Heidleberg while Muse's cover of Feeling Good rushes around in the background. as I remember that moment now, it seems a little island of calm and normal purpose before the driving perplexity takes over again.

coincidentally, the internet has offered me this not completely irrelevant bit of trivia concerning the woman who plays Emily. Rosario Dawson once appeared in The Chemical Brothers' video for the song Out of Control, which Chris and I included in the first chapter of Starcustard, as the third optional music track--just as the slavekids are attacking the giant slug. how interesting.

dim the lights

we've had a lengthy intermission since act one.

now, after two years of starcustard starvation, mr. jordan and I have reconvened around our spacecauldron to formulate chapter nine, the opening segment of the forthcoming act two. it is so delicious to be writing starcustard again.

if you need to catch up, starcustard can be read here or here. or you can purchase the collector's edition. go ahead.

blood and fuzzy slippers

three years ago tomorrow, July 1, a space opera called Starcustard was born. three years. eight chapters. it isn't over yet, but we're being forced to take a brief intermission while i escape into another country. we'll be back. in the meantime, here's a little collectible of Act One. go look.

saying goodbye to Starcustard for eighteen months is not going to be easy. in a lot of ways i miss it already. no more throwing unfinished scenarios at each other. no more chewing on character descriptions. no more Gen. no more Tenua. no more slugs, no more slavekids.

our final revision of what we've got so far has been in its different ways almost as much work as the first killer round of proofreading, way back on chapter one. we've fiddled with a few scenes here and there, smoothed over some rough spots, and argued endlessly about font sizes and margins. at long last, Starcustard has acquired a style. that was the most fun part, playing with fonts and leading. i probably annoyed chris to no end with all my finickyness. but we pulled it together. it looks great, doesn't it?

it's got all eight chapters, page numbers, a foreword, and a list of all the music tracks in the front, so you can assemble them into a soundtrack if you feel so inclined. and on the penultimate page there's a little hint at what chapter nine will hold for us, the valiant authors, as well as for you, our patient readers. feel free to get yourself a copy. or if you don't mind reading the thing at your desk off a screen, take it from here.

mr. jordan celebrates the occasion also, over at fatmanintweed.

p.s. if you can spot the font discrepancy on the cover and title page, you're an extremely perspicacious individual. congratulations.

chocolate-loving walruses

so.... a while ago mr. jordan posted a fascinating description of an amazing new toy.

terrifying, isn't she?

not as terrifying as this:
i know she doesn't have a mouth or eyelashes, and no, she doesn't talk. but just look at those eyes. those wiry arms. little organza is going to glare at you and wave her twiggy fingers at you in an everso dramatic manner.

chris suggests i use the scraps of my stylish green fabric there to construct little offspring-slugs. but if i did that i'd want to build miniature skateboards for them. and sew hideous mohawks to their heads. and that just might be a little too much.

so we might say this is organza before she marries mr. nousu and populates his spaceship with grungy punk slugs. this is organza before she has access to endless gobs of cosmetics, bottomless piles of fuzzy slippers, and string after string of false eyelashes. this is organza as a slimy fat debutante, flirting her way disgustingly across the galaxy.

i'm going to stuff her in an envelope and mail her to the kid who dared to dream up such a monstrosity. maybe he'll introduce her to her sixteenth cousin four times removed, jabba.

falling stars

1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7

and then...

chapter eight.

and here's the soundtrack, kindly provided by sir chris jordan. the password is our favourite type of canned legumes: whateverbeans.

happy new year.

wax and string

lovely christmas. how about yourself?

I've been job hunting. which gives me place to mention this rarely updated but rather insightful collection of job hunting related material: overqualified

I've been reading. typography, like i said. and delicious amounts of fiction. devouring films with my siblings. improving my ability to distinguish the many flavours of jelly beans.

geeky brother has dismantled his homemade server (he's headed to Romania in a few short days), and so my lovely web portfolio is dead. sunk into the fluttery and over-populated history of short-lived websites. perhaps not for long... but life is so unpredictable.

and starcustard. a weekend of throwing myself off a cliff into a deep deep gorge full of starcustard. "indulgence is imperative." yes, I'm listening.

but there are a lot of things we won't be telling anyone with chapter eight. every cliff needs to be hung with loose ends, right?

rest assured they will be taken up again. they will make new knots. patience, patience.