I'm here. More or less. I spent the past month basically just working my ass off--grading essays for Rob's online classes, plowing into a new freelance project (which was awesome but made me very busy) and working on my novel revision. The novel revision is now largely done, I'm pleased to report. I did the first big pass through the whole thing, moving major scenes, rewriting some new ones, tightening things up, and generally being attentive to those items that the editor suggested I look at. Now I'm at the point where I'm re-drawing the two cartoons which appear at the beginning of one of the chapters, and I'm planning to do two more.
I just wanted to be sure that they're as well-done as possible--I felt like they were a tiny bit untidy, that I could draw them better. And, should the novel get published, I'd really like to see them make it into the final version, rather than having someone else redraw them. As an artist that idea makes me feel pretty squicky, though I realize it's pretty much par for the course to have little or no visual input into one's published work.
Still, I hold out a vain hope that I might have SOME input someday. I used to want to be a book cover artist, actually, for quite a while when I was in high school. If I'd ended up in a different type of art program, I might have, but the Berkeley program was very fine-arts oriented, which means that if someone uses the word "illustration" to describe your work, it is actually an insult. Conversely, if your work is both a) monumentally large and b) incomprehensible to anyone but you, you will thrive. Just kidding. Kinda.
Anyway, I finished that bulky part of the revision, and have one more pass to do wherein I will try to look for anything I missed, and judge how well it's flowing now that I screwed around with the timeline of the story. And after that, I will reward myself by playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii, which has been waiting patiently for me for several months. Though I've also heard rumors that we may be purchasing Rock Band 2, as though I need any more irresistibly fun time wasters in my environment. Oh well. I should learn to say yes to more fun things now and then, anyway.
