I've altered the DOUBLE BLIND icon for LJ, which no one will notice but me, except that maybe this time I had a harder time fighting the lighting/spotlight feature in Adobe. All I really wanted to do was change the Ace of Spades to an Ace of Hearts because DUH it should have been that all along. I also, because I could, altered the Curio page. The main Curio page is still this


But I also played with the "cover" that I've posted on the NaNoWriMo site (along with the blurb which I already suspect is inaccurate), and here it is, for your viewing pleasure.


What I love about that mock-up are all the little inside bits. That's the Bellagio fountain, which is a scene, and the dice are important, as are the chips vs. the dice, and the Ace and the Joker are deliberate. Le sigh.

Current word count is 70k something. I want to finish the scene I'm in, then I want to get into the last act, which I feel like I should have been in about 15k ago, but this is what edits are for. The story has not at all behaved as I thought it would. I thought it was going to be Ethan whom this brought to his knees, not Randy, but looking back now it's amazing I thought it could be any other way.

I also got edits last night for Hero, which means I am now officially two projects at once. Add in Anna's birthday this weekend with parties on both Saturday and Sunday, and we're looking at a whole lot of not writing between now and Monday. Which isn't my favorite thing in the world, but we'll cope.

That's the state of the me. Now going to admire my cover a bit longer, then get back to work.

I guess this means it's more than a lark. Frankly, I want to know what some of these images are going to be in story form.

It's a pretty bare collage, but this is the WIP I'm going back to.  Found the model for Sam on Tumblr and was inspired.  Also, it makes a nice desktop.

(Click to make big)

 I got Curio 5 free from Greg and George BECAUSE THEY ROCK, so you knew I had to play.

The latest version of the TWA character collage:

And this one sometimes I'm not sure I like: it was actually made entirely in photoshop.  I think it will only make sense if you've read the book.  You'll have to let me know.

So, I've been working my tail off, almost all on writing.  This is what I've been doing.

And now I can't possibly say another word, because it will all escape.  But this is what I have been trying to say.  Don't know why it took me so long.

Just so it's clear, I post these because it pleases me hugely to do so.  It's okay if I'm the only one who finds them fascinating--that would make a lot of sense, actually, since I create them entirely for myself.

Yet it's so HARD not to share them, because in my head they're the same thing as the story.

Anyway, I published the whole project to .mac, so you can bounce between the seven pages without having to constantly click and load, just in case.  And in a more selfish note, it gives me a link to it I can't lose.

Here is the STB cast Curio page, where you can see, CLEARLY, that I have too many people.  But you can see what they look like, too.



If they have a gray shade over them, they're dead.  That helps some.  Well, Mark is deployed, which helps, too.  I can't kill him because he has to have a proxy vote.  And Hannah isn't really around, just mentioned.  Also Tom is just in one scene.  He felt important for Sam, but I could knock him out. 

All I can say is that this is a VERY LONG STORY WITH A LOT OF PEOPLE.  I think it is trying to kill me.

Don't look, Dan.

Well, okay, you'll look anyway.  I'll just lie back and think of England.

I made this last Thursday, but I've written a ton on this story since I made it, and I think it's pretty and it says better what I'm doing right now than anything I could write here.  Mostly because I used all the words in the story.

Anyway.

Okay, I owe a huge, HUGE, HUGE thanks to deviantART for all these which follow, and to that end, if you follow the link on the name you can see the HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE image on my .mac account, which, if you click the individual images, will take you to that artist's page on deviantART.  And you can buy a lot of these, or request them. 

Also, on deviantART my handle is (of course) amazoniowan, and you can view my favorites.  Like the self portrait of the very yummy Coolboy.  Rrrrrrowl. (Warning; I have a lot of nudes in my favorites!  Not work safe!)

And if any of the deviants I used see this and say GET THAT OFF YOUR BLOG, you of course have but to ask.  Though I encourage you to remember that Curio pages are magic, and you just lent me some.

If you go image crusing on the .mac sites, be sure to hunt for layers.  I do love my opaque.

First, two concept pages for in-process stories which will likely not happen yet this year, but that I dearly miss:

The Bastard of the Opera, set in Prague in 1818.



The Kiss of the Sea, sometimes also called When the Mermaids Sing, but generally known by me as "the mermaids":



I'm starting to have suspicions about those mermaids.  They're tricky, sure.  That I knew.  But today I'm looking at this and thinking, hmm.  All girls. . . .


These next two are deep character concept pages for Madeline and Jonathan, respectively.  I'm going to run them behind a cut because I used a lot of nudes (there's one in the mermaids, but you have to hunt for her).

( cut for the witch and the king of pain )

I spent my evening answering emails and then writing a long, self indulgent email that was really a story babble and not much more, spoke to my mother and then, at last, settled down with Dan on the couch and watched episode one of The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell.  I've seen TPOM before, twice, actually, and it's seminal--you all should get it any way you can, from Netflix or the library or through a store window, however you need to, but do see it.  Campbell is one of my heroes.  He appeared in my life when I really needed to start rethinking my spirituality, and he helped me be brave enough to try new thought boxes and led me to a release I really needed. 

The episode we watched tonight was on heroes, about how we all are the heroes of our own lives and how we need to look for hero models because that's what helps us find our own hero path.  He ticked off countless examples, some you'd think of and some you wouldn't, but also spoke of how a baby being born, traveling from a water world of amneotic fluid to that trip down the birth canal into being a breathing, living mammal is a hero's journey.  He talked about dragons, about how our egos can imprison us to our desires and to the systems which could work for us but instead we let contain us--every sentence was an ephiphany, which is why once you have seen Campbell once, you will understand that you will need to view and read him AGAIN.

But as I was getting ready for  bed just now, brushing my teeth and washing my face, bemused and a little irritated that my face seems to be losing weight but nothing else, telling myself not to get married to the thinner face look or get hopes up for the belly because this is all hormones--as I do all this "A Coral Room" is running through  my head, beacuse in that indulgent email referenced above I quoted the whole thing, along with a million other songs from Aerial.  And I was thinking about the little brown jug, which always makes me so sad.  I was thinking about what a brilliant song that is, how brilliant the whole album is.  It occured to me that Kate Bush is my hero, even though I've only known about her since August (love to Mikey).  I thought about my other heroes, all writers and artists and creators.  I thought about how Doctor Who will start up again soon, thought of rereading Bujold again, thought of what Practett I wanted to reread next.

I read Rox's blog, which is so delightfully Rox and full of knitting projects, which I also love.  I was thinking of that, too, as I brushed my teeth, about how I, too, had been perplexed by the non-matching sock stripes, and then enjoyed seeing how it turned out, that yes, there was a reason for the mystery, but I was pleased to see it turned out well.  I laughed at the moping dog who did not get his walk, and admired the chair upholstery Rox was chastising herself for not Scotch-guarding.  I kept thinking about it because I'd just seen Rox, and it made me think of yarn shopping with her, and it made me want to re-attempt a sock, and to succeed this time.

I read Jenny's blog and how she showed her editor her Curio projects and that the images did translate even to word-focused people; I thought, to myself, see, I told you it would work, and then thought of my own Curio projects and the story which had prompted the long, fussy, broody email.  Well, perhaps not broody, but it was born of a brood, and I plan to brood tomorrow over it. 

I read Karen's amazing post about her son, which I had received as a Cherry Forum PM first, and urged her to share it because it was amazing.  I read the introductions to the voice class I'm taking, still reeling from the two exercises I attempted tonight and the things I learned.  I glanced at Stardust on the way to bed and wanted to finish it, and thought of the playdate tomorrow with one of Anna's friend's and mine, and wondered what fun artist stuff and otherwise we would talk about.

And then I realized that I am surrounded by my heroes.

I spend so much time worrying that my writing isn't good enough.  That I can't serve the story, that I'll never flush it out.  I see the dragon at the face of my cave and I'd just as soon stay chained to my rock, thanks.  I don't want to be eaten or burned alive.  What I'm fearing, I know, is that I am not worthy to remain amidst my heroes.  I fear that someone will come and remind me that I am a fraud in the middle of authentic greats.  I fear that this magical world that I love, these people I admire, this work that makes my soul sing will vanish or be revoked because someone will discover I cannot possibly belong here.  I spend far, far too much time worrying about this, and I become the dragon myself, hoarding myself lest someone see my treasure and call it garbage, and lest someone see that the virgins I have trapped safe inside are thin and pale and ugly.

It hit me, while I brushed my teeth, that it is not the product that puts me in the company of my heroes, but my struggle.  It is doing the good work that makes me an artist.  It is that self-indulgent email, the voice class, the determination that I will wake early tomorrow and listen to Aerial on repeat and let the story lead me into frightening corridors with demons waiting for me at the end--it's that which makes me a writer, that which makes me an artist.  It's that which makes me a hero, right here, right now. 

I am not a writer because I finish works.  I am not a writer because I write to a certain level or even because I please myself.  I am a writer because I show up and because I bleed and because when the Muses open a door, I go through it instead of shut my eyes.  My bliss is writing and creating.  My bliss is laying out a tarot spread to try to figure out a sticky spot in a sequence and realizing in a weird way that this works, and being amazed and transported by the realization.  My bliss is a Curio page that illuminates the story for me, and that when I share it with my fellow heroes, they see it, too, and they understand me.  My bliss is discovering clever passages, discovering trouble spots I need to smooth out, and even discovering impossible snarls that I do not know my way out of.  Good work is my bliss.  Good, hard writing work that makes me sweat and makes me tired, that makes me cry and stay up late and makes me ignore sunshine and cookies and company so I can pursue it more. 

I'm a hero, in short.  And I love my work.

Good night.

So, I have a pact with a few buddies that the Ides of March would mark a return to higher production on the writing front; so far I'm a day behind, but that's because I'm trying to write a letter to legislators and had a little something I had to ship in the mail. However, I sat down this afternoon to get started or answer the emails I actually still haven't answered because the first email I read was this:

Hi Heidi,

George and I were reading through the latest Curio-related blog
postings on CherryForums and came across your tutorial on how you use
Curio. Your enthusiasm for Curio and efforts towards enticing others
to try Curio has blown us away, therefore, we would like to give you
a free upgrade to Curio Pro. Please accept this license key with our
gratitude and enjoy fullscreen mode.

Best regards,
Greg

SNOOPY. DANCE.

So now I am a hip kitty and have all the features I didn't really need but still coveted, and some I didn't know I wanted until I had them. Like "presentation." It turns your project into a page-by-page full screen slideshow. HOT DAMN. Talk about refueling the fire.

And fullscreen? LOVING IT.

So to celebrate I of course blew everything else off except for a Skype call to Someone Very Pretty (waves at London), and I have now made two more pages. And since I can now export to images (maybe I could before, but I don't think I was able to do it quite like this), cut to see what I did today.

A lot of people have been asking me how to do stuff on Curio, more than just "OMG, Curio, look what I did!"  So I'm going to make this post a link to a huge honking example gig with images and links and steps.   I'm linking to the blog I made while messing around on .mac, which I don't encourage you yet to read regularly because I think that may have been an oddball Mercury in Retrograde idea.  However, their WYSIWYG is better than LJ for loading big old screenshots, and plus, it's fun to have variety. 

So if you want a step-by-step to Curio, go here.  If you don't, just keep on trucking.

If you have questions and want to leave them in the comments, you'll get faster answers leaving them here because I get email alerts from LJ, and I have no idea about the .mac account thing.  Or, if you know my email from one of the lists or want to PM me in the forums, go for that. 

Or whatever.  But there it is, the big fat Curio exposé.  Enjoy.

Today I finished editing the first half of chapter four in ATOS and got half-way through the second half.

But through all of that Will kept dancing in my head, and I kept seeing parts of STB explode open around me, which is VERY DANGEROUS because I am only on chapter four of the polish-polish-polish ATOS, so I went into Curio and made this.

Now.  If you want to know why I take so long to write and why I'm usually right on the edge of insane and why I have a hard time finishing one story because another one calls me, THAT IS WHY.  Because that page is just a fraction of what I'm carrying inside my head all the damn time.  Then sometimes one of them gets Insistent.

God bless Curio.  Because now it's out and I feel better, and excuse me, but I think it's a pretty page.

I can't bear to blog, even though I have tons I should be blogging, because I keep doing this. 

Curio, Curio, Curio.

I LOVE CURIO.

Dan has tagged me and I will blog that later, but in the meantime, CURIO CURIO CURIO.

And laundry.  Gag.

Don't even click if you don't have a Mac.  Really.  Don't.

But this is Curio.  And this is what you can do with it.  Granted, to publish it to .mac you must HAVE a .mac account, but you can still publish it to pdf even without the .mac.

I love being a Macgirl.  I really, really do.

Curio.  Brainstorming software.  And all this is without the Waco tablet.