Head shooting

So I am re-doing the entire book and re-submitting it to agents. Because that is how you get things done.

One of the things people like is to see that the person they are talking to is an employable meat-type human, and not a creepy sock puppet. I am getting older and squishier, but I am totally a meat-type human, so I posed for some pictures to put on my "about me" page. But a cat climbed up my body, so it looks like my shirt is attacking me.

I ended up going with the only one that wasn't blurry.

GOOD ENOUGH.

Also vegan: CAEK

And rum. And powdered sugar. It turns out you can make a totally regular cake without eggs or milk. Why are they even in there? Science and reasons, probably, but I can tell you this works just as well for a household "eat your dinner or you don't get dessert" dessert.

Finger snitches can attest.

I made mine from the Bake and Destroy cookbook, but here is basically the same thing, free and online so you can go make it RIGHT NOW.

6 min vegan cake 

• 1 ½ cups flour

• ⅓ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• ½ teaspoon salt

• 1 cup sugar

• ½ cup vegetable oil

• 1 cup cold water or coffee

• 2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

• 2 tablespoons cider vinegar

Mix all those things and bake it like a normal cake. Make a frosting out of powdered sugar and rum and a bit of shortening (evidently there is a non-hydrogenated shortening that vegans use, and coconut oil would be good too, but I used a tablespoon of crisco because I hate my arteries I guess). Eat that cake. Lose weight anyway, because it's basically the only thing you've been allowed to eat all day. When the family is eating meatloaf and gravy on buttery mashed potatoes with corn, you know what you get to eat? Corn. You get the corn. But now you also get cake!

Side note: I have lost 3lbs this week. Probably because I'm slowly dying of malnutrition. Tonight I've got a nice pumpkin coconut curry, though, so that's not too bad.

Well, shit

Vegan sweet potato and spinach soup.

It may look terrible, but it also has a viscous quality that creates spit-like threads that look like hairs trailing from your mouth to the spoon. 

It's fat free, though. And I definitely don't feel like eating anything else tonight. 

Also vegan: tea and Oreos. I can live off of those and iron pills, probably.

and I didn't even make a "b flat" joke

Sorry about that last post, progeny.

I am cured! Reading and music and industrious work is effective, and a change of perspective turns it around even faster. I got my perspective at the bottom end of a 500 pound piano, when I slipped on a wet patch of concrete and thought, "So this is how it ends. It will look good on a tomb stone, at least."



One of my days off is a weekday, and I like to spend the sunny schoolkid-free time outside fighting with the garden. On this day I was cutting back the lantana bushes while Zenny ate arugula. She doesn't like arugula, but she likes that there are plants in the garden that she can just pick and eat. She fought the birds for the strawberry harvest and won (3 nubby berries), but the cucumbers are still the size of caterpillars, so she's down to basil and salad greens. Time to plant cherry tomatoes and runner beans again, I think.

While I was keeping the jungle at bay, the man was forming a posse of his weight-lifting friends and meeting a guy about a sketchy craigslist ad. Sketchy ads are written by two types of people: axe murderers and nice elderly people. It isn't worth it to me to find out which is waiting for me at the end of a remote driveway, but there was a hypothetical free-if-you-can-haul-it piano involved in this scenario, so the man went for it. He came tap-dancing home an hour later with a glossy black upright piano strapped to the back of the truck. "His daughter grew up! He wanted a family with kids to have it!" I just stood there with my garden shears staring at that beautiful, impossible thing.

Musicians make a home more homely. My mother and aunts used to play Irish tunes on the tin whistle back in Newfoundland, and my grandfather played funny-gruesome folk songs on the banjo. We had an upright piano with a clacking metronome in the dining room, and I always wanted to learn better songs than 'Heart and Soul', but an instructor wasn't in the cards. Also, the neighbor kid took piano lessons and she was very smug about it, so I might have sworn it off to spite her. I'd learn by myself! And I'd be amaaaazing at it! And of course I didn't, and I wasn't, because I was 7 and only knew how to play 'Heart and Soul'. At that same time, 1,600 miles away in New York, the man was a skinny ginger kid with a scary German piano teacher, and he could bang out Bartók pretty respectably. Eventually, I joined the high school band and took up clarinet, and the man did the same with the guitar, but we've always agreed that our home should have a piano in it someday.

That day finally arrived, and his burly friends suddenly all had urgent appointments that didn't involve carrying pianos up stairs. We had only our terrible knowledge of physics, my shitty knees, and a lot of pigheaded determination to help us get it from the truck to the ground, and then around to the patio stairs and up into the house. I am always on the bottom end of these things, because the man has the arms for lifting and I have the thighs for pushing, so when I hit that wet spot while shouldering a piano angled on a set of stairs, I was pretty sure I was going to meet a cartoon ending.

Not this one. I get sidetracked with image searches.

But I didn't meet my end. Did you know that I can carry a 500 lb piano? Well, I can't. But it turns out I can avoid being killed by one just long enough for someone to adjust their grip and save me. It is not a skill I want to practice, though. We got the piano up the stairs. We broke the door frame. We didn't smash any cats, and the girl-child is sensible enough to stay well out of the way when we ask her to. We got it into the living room, and oh! This is a beautiful thing. We hooted and high fived and toasted with water and ibuprofen. 

Today I have a stack of piano instruction books and a lingering suspicion that I'm actually an undiscovered piano virtuoso. After all, I can still play Heart and Soul by memory. And Mike is maybe regretting pulling a piano off of me.

in the woods

It's hard to tell where sadness ends and depression begins. Everything is the same color in the dark. I was casting around for a new project to work on and nothing was coming to me. I picked up my knitting and the cat chewed through my yarn. The family went out to the Scottish festival and I stayed at home cleaning, because the vet cost a lot of money and 'clean doesn't cost anything'. There are worse things than getting depressed and cleaning, but I drew the line when we started to watch the much-anticipated first episode of the new season of Outlander, and halfway through I got up to hang laundry and then just went to bed. That shit will not stand. I don't get excited about many things anymore, and I have been running through the heather with Claire and Jamie for almost 15 years now. That nugget of happiness will not be pried from my cold harpy claws without a fight.

So I decided that the only way out was through. 

Firstly, I ordered every Walking Dead novel Kirkman has written since the Rise of the Governor (which I enjoyed more than the comic) and I have been soaking my brain in dead things. This is a tactic many of his main characters use to inure themselves against death - and ok, it actually drives them all crazy in the end, but still, LEGIT PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAINING. So far it seems to be working. My nightmares downgraded from pets and family dying to my person-for-whom-I-still-carry-a-torch throwing a serving platter at me. "This isn't even my platter, you're just making up excuses to have dreams about me! Fuck off and leave me alone!" Thanks, brain!

Secondly, I wrote a little rhyming story about my stupid yarn-eating cat, threw in a butt joke because my kids thought it was funny, and now I'm drawing frantic little kitties to submit to a children's magazine. If you can't find inspiration, plunge through the brush and something will eventually hit you in the face.

Then I brought my chewed up knitting to my library craft group and fixed the damn thing.

Lastly, the Terrible Thing... I am becoming a vegetarian. Maybe a vegan, because I don't really eat cheese anyway. Or a raw-foodist, which appeals to my laziness. One of those. I only ate fruit and bread today, just to be on the safe side, while I thumbed through food-woo magazines to see which seemed the least obnoxious. I have no ethical problems with eating animals, but I've lost momentum with my dieting, so I'm grasping for some fresh guidelines to get obsessive about. Also I stopped drinking a while ago, except for a couple beers on the holidays. And I'm thinking about weaning myself off caffeine. Something's going to break, folks. Hopefully it's my depression and my pant size.

That drawing of leif

My paws adjusted themselves.

go sit on your bed and think about what you've done

“If you trust in yourself... and believe in your dreams... and follow your star... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

Today I got another rejection from an agent.

I know these things are subjective. And that they have interns sorting the email queries. And that it only takes one "yes". And that if you throw a lot of mud at the wall, some of it will stick. And if you leap, the net will appear. And I know that is only 2 rejections out of umpty-thousand potential agents in the world. Be the squeaky wheel. Do all the things.

So I'm not wounded and quitting, but I am feeling let down and self-critical. I'm tossing all my illustrations on the hypothetical floor and stomping around ripping out the bits that don't work and lining up the things that do. Less of this, more of this. Then I started deleting my instagram pictures, deleted all my librarian comics, and had my finger on the "delete blog" button before putting myself in time-out.

I was sitting in sulky self doubt when my phone buzzed and my editor said the potty book was going to print. Now COME ON, SELF. I'll keep pestering agents, and I'll work on another book, and I'll do one-page pieces to submit to magazines. I'll paper the walls with rejections and have a body of work to show for it, and it'll all be worth it because it's time not spent fighting with people who are wrong on facebook.


But I might delete my FB app while I'm on the rampage. Once a day I peek at it for updates about friends, and it's like sticking your face in a fan. POLITICS TERRORISTS CANCER KITTY INFANTICIDE SPORTS GLUTEN. Nooooope. I am opting out, like a grumpy old person. I should tell my mother - she hasn't had an age milestone to celebrate in a while. Well, from me. She got bifocals last week.

I'm going to go write a better children's book now. Maybe re-write the one I submitted so it is in verse. And this time I will NOT rhyme, "doo doo" with "poo", like I did in the potty book. Although that seems to have been more successful. Maybe I will add some poo and see if that works.

morbid bibliomancy

It happened again. I finished another book, uploaded the images to my publisher, closed the project up, and existential panic set in. I started drawing a portrait of Leif, but I'm having a really hard time with it because it needs to look more like him than he actually looks (?) and my hands turned into monkey paws the moment I got the charcoal out. CAN'T ART, GONNA DIE IN JUST A FEW DECADES OR LESS.

Also I'm having nightmares about dead cats, which turn into people I love for just a split second, and this is not ok. I do not like dreaming about dead things, and the problem is that I have a pet cemetery in the corner of my garden now, lurking just out of view from where I hang the laundry. I am usually pretty accepting of the passage of life, but I usually don't have the evidence buried in my flowerbed. It always seemed to me that grieving should be gentler with graves to visit, knowing the bones of your loved ones are close at hand. Scratch that and sign me up for the pyre, progeny.

But don't put Frank in charge.

And what do I even do about this garden thing? Dig up the cats and bury them out of sight in a field somewhere under cover of night? That is a lot of work, and it would probably not help the nightmare situation at all. I am thinking I will get some bricks and build the garden bed up a couple of feet and dump a lot more dirt on top, so at least they are deeper down in my psyche than where they are now, within a foot from clawing to the surface. We are not expert hole-diggers. There were roots and pipes and rocks down there, folks. Some big bushes are in order.

My solution to having bad feelings is usually to keep busy. I went through our children's magazines at the library and realized that they take online submissions for short illustrated stories and rhymes. My brain downshifted, and I spent the rest of the day talking in verse.

Zenny had some bread bread bread
She stuffed it in her head head head
Down into her tummy tummy tummy
Because it was so yummy yummy yummy!

Yep.

Working through this thing.