Cartoon Alert

While I have not been doing a lot of blogging here on aquafortis, I have started to get caught up on some blogging I was behind on for Finding Wonderland, the YA writing blog I contribute to. I had an interesting experience at a conference I went to a couple of weeks ago, which I'm too lazy to retype here but you can read about it on this post--basically, I took a gamble that if I submitted a chapter for critique (which you can sometimes do at writing conferences for an additional fee), it would be "good enough" to be chosen as part of the select group of 10 or 15 that would be looked at by one of the editors or agents speaking at the conference. And guess what--I won my gamble. It was everything I'd hoped, except for the pipe-dream part where the editor kneels and humbly asks me if they can publish my novel.

Another thing I've been doing, again associated with Finding Wonderland, is drawing cartoons again. Some of you might remember when I drew cartoons for the Berkeley campus humor magazine. Well, I stopped drawing cartoons for a while because I'm just not the joke-a-day kind of person (despite all the IGN columns), and because I'm really not a great cartoonist, despite being able to draw realistically. But I decided that our writing blog needed some more humor, and after reading this piece on how to become a B-list blogger, I thought to myself, our blog needs cartoons! So I started Toon Thursday. Check out the first and second ones here, complete with computer-added color in subtle shades of neutral. Yay!

I've also been stressing about not having enough time to redesign Rob's and my website. You can see the new idea I'm playing around with there, but I'm not sold on it yet. I want something cleaner and easier to navigate, and I sorely need to update my art samples. Plus I'm experimenting with Adobe GoLive, which is kind of fun. Aside from that, two of my friends are getting married this spring/summer, one in May and one in June. I'll be doing calligraphy and some other stuff (including sewing--yikes), so that's keeping me busy, too. And of course I really want to revise my YA novel now, but I'm good at finding ways of not actually sitting down to revise. As Cajun Man might put it--procrastinaSHON.