The girls think that’s a terrific joke. Well, Anna does. Lucy, who has a brilliant imagination but refuses to allow any blurring of the lines between fact and fiction, just insists (loudly), “You’re 38, Mom! 38!”

I gave myself a birthday treat this morning by taking the toll road to work; it costs me $4.50, so I usually try to avoid it unless I hear about an unholy traffic mess on the regular route. The toll road is much more relaxing, not just because there’s less traffic, but because it winds through the Santa Ana Mountains, so it’s a nice break from the urban landscape. It would be even nicer if the hills were shrouded in green, as they usually are this time of year. C’est la vie Californian! The drive (and the chai I stopped for before getting to the office) made it worth getting blinded by the rising sun.

I count the brilliant gold of that early sunrise one of the unanticipated gifts of the day, along with getting to hear Big Country on the way home from work (”In a big country dreams stay with you…”). My gifts to myself, besides the toll road drive and the chai, are a new journal, some liquid acrylics, and my very first jar of gesso ever. I have decided to start an art journal for myself, a chronicle of my 38th year. It’s hard not to be inspired, entrenched as I have been in the lives of other artists the past few weeks. The book I choose is a slim, hardcover sketch book, and the paints I choose are a brilliant gold — the gold of the sunrise this morning — and a couple of different violets. Because I like violet. I’m looking forward to experimenting and finding out what other colors are living inside me.

My last present to myself is this, a self-portrait. There are not a lot of photos of me around, because I’m usually the one holding the camera — and I wasn’t really eager to give it up, when I was fat, because I just hated seeing myself that way. Now that I’ve lost the weight (or most of it, anyway…still a little left to go), I am getting used to seeing myself through the lens. I’m not sure what I think of what I see, other then a photo is gives an entirely different image than a mirror. Why do you suppose that is?

Other presents are yet to come, after a trout dinner and strawberry pie! Yummmm!

ATC Rainbow 2,
originally uploaded by Cartazon.

Spring is never very showy in Southern California. Because of the climate, we have green and blooming things all winter, and instead of the great explosion of color that comes in more northerly regions, there is instead a gradual increase in abundance that sneaks right past you. It’s a little disappointing, really, because the shift from winter to spring in the world can signal the mind and spirit to make it’s own internal shifts, often needed after a long, dark season. Renewal, and so forth.

But we do have our own seasonal sensations here in California, even if we have to look a little harder (past all the tract homes and freeways) to find them. The most remarkable Spring sight for me has always been the annual Greening of the Hills, when the surrounding slopes put on vivid, living cloaks and remind us that the circle of seasons continues. The transformed landscape touches something within me, doubly so because it is so transitory. In less than a month the green gives way to summer gold, rich and beautiful in its own way but without that powerful, creative magic that the green of Spring possesses.

Unfortunately…unfortunately. It has been such a warm, dry winter here this year that the hills, which should be verdant as I write, are yet crusty brittle brown. I doubt even the rain today, which lasted all of ten minutes, will make much difference to the parched hillsides. Forget spring, entirely — we’re speeding into a fantastic season of drought and fire. Already — in March! — there has been a wildfire, destroying nearly 2,000 acres of hillside not far from here. If it’s a sign of things to come, we can forget summer gold along with spring green. Instead it will be blackened hillsides and ash gray skies that color the coming season.

I’m feeling a bit morose, obviously, not the least because of a cold that’s lasted most of a week now. I’m not sleeping well — I keep waking up thinking I’ve overslept my alarm, only to discover that I still have three or four hours left. I’m so tired I’m about to drop over right here — only the fact that I’ve got to pick up a kid from school in five minutes has kept me from curling up for a nap.

I can’t help thinking how much better I’d feel if it was actually spring.

My husband brought me a copy of On the Origin of PCs, the printed prequel to my favorite webcomic, The Order of the Stick. It was fun learning a little backstory about the characters, though none of the strips made me laugh outloud as much as this recent one did.

Honestly, my favorite bit of the book was in the preface, presumably written by one of the supporting characters in the story, Redcloak. After explaining exactly what PC and NPC means, for those readers who aren’t familiar with gaming terminology, he makes this hard-to-argue observation:

Heck, as far as I’m concerned, the presence of players is a necessary evil at best. I think most gamemasters will agree that their world functions significantly more smoothly before the PCs ever show up.

Truer words were never spoken!

I started reading Order of the Stick because of the roleplaying jokes, but I have found the story that has developed over the past 450+ strips to be quite intriguing, and the commentary the author, Rich Burlew, provides in the printed volumes is useful and enlightening, from a storyteller’s point of view. I wish I had No Cure for the Paladin Blues, the second collection, on hand to quote some of the more interesting passages, but alas my mate has taken it off to Indiana with him. I’ll have to try to get back to it another time.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting link to a blog post with some thoughts about creating and fulfilling reader (or viewer) desires in narrative, the main point being that it is the job of the storyteller to defer satisfaction, which not only keeps the audience intent but makes it all the more satisfying in the end.

ATC Rainbow 1,
originally uploaded by Cartazon.

Lucy just finished reading A Wizard of Earthsea. I got a little thrill when I saw she was reading it, since it is one of my favorite books, ever, and I’m glad to say that she seems to have enjoyed it as much as I did.

I asked her if she was going to get the second book, The Tombs of Atuan — I know she’ll like that even better, if only because the protagonist is a girl — but she doesn’t know if it’s in the school library. I’m sure we have a copy in the house somewhere, so I know she’ll get to it eventually.

In the meantime she’s brought home another fantasy classic, Dragonflight, the first book of The Dragonriders of Pern series. It is very exciting to me, to see her discovering literature that has been a passion for me since I was her age. At least we’ll have something to talk about as she ventures into her ‘tween and teen years!

After a few technical delays and the kindly intervention of my webhost, I finally got the LiveJournal crossposter plugin for WordPress working. So if you’re reading this on LiveJournal, please go read this post from a couple days ago, in which I ’splain the whole point of using the plugin in the first place.

My life is like a big novel, when all the little subplots start to come together into one big story…

Okay, so maybe that’s a little exaggerated. My life is not nearly that dramatic, but I have noticed some parts of my life that were previously separate starting to come together in ways I had not ever anticipated.

I have just started a new job as a part-time associate editor for the company for whom I have been freelancing for nearly a year. Stampington & Company, besides producing their own rubber stamps and artists’ supplies, publishes a number of very fine magazines on papercrafts, mixed media, collage and various other crafty pursuits. It has been immensely satisfying to combine my vocation (writing) with my hobby (crafts). Yes, I am a lifelong crafter, having dabbled in a little bit in everything but most especially in papercrafts (rubber stamping, cardmaking, etc.), at least in the last few years. But I never thought to write about it! The opportunity I have now, to bring these two halves of my creative self together is liberating, to say the least. I feel more satisfied, personally, and engaged, professionally, then I have in years.

But the dovetailing continues.

The particular project I have been brought aboard to work on is a special publication meant to showcase some of the excellent artists’ blogs out here on the web. Once I got over my doubts about whether or not people would actually pay for such a magazine (and I do think they will, once they see what we’ve got planned), my biggest questions were, 1) how to decide which blogs to include, and 2) how to produce 15-20 articles about the blogs that didn’t all read as some variation of “I saw all these other blogs and so I started one too.”

The answer to the first question was really pretty easy: we’re an art magazine publisher first, and so high-quality images are the top thing I’ve been looking for in potential blog candidates. The answer to the second question hit me almost out of the blue after three or four days spent clicking through blog after blog after blog — and it all came down to the same topic I’ve addressed here time and time again: narrative.

In my search, I have found that the blogs that really captured my attention have an innate sense of storytelling present. I don’t necessarily mean long written narratives about some meaningful event; it could be as simple as a short caption to an evocative photo, or a series of pictures showing a work in progress. My realization was that, in presenting the blogs we will choose to include in the magazine, we need to find the narrative core of each individual blog and put on paper, so that, yes, readers are willing to pay their $10 to bring it home so they can curl up with under the covers, just like they would a good novel.

Life is about stories, I tell ya. Even when you’re not expecting them, you find them shaping the world around you.

In order to urge on this confluence of the themes in my life — writing, art, narrative — I’ve decided to make a few changes around here. I’ve been keeping two blogs for some time now (three if you count the journal at my DeviantArt account) and I’ve begun to wonder if this division isn’t the reason why all of them suffer from neglect. It’s time, I think, to unify my public face by unifying my blogging efforts, to stop compartmentalizing my thoughts and create a more cohesive vision of myself. So from now on, all my blogging will be done here, at Artifacts, and I’ve installed a useful little plug-in that will forward all my posts automagically to my LiveJournal. And from now on, I won’t reserve this blog for only posts that suit my writerly interests; it’s going to be a cross-purpose journal, and hopefully that will mean it will get used more often.

I don’t know exactly where this is going to lead, or what might show up here in the long run, but I do know one thing: The big story is just getting started, folks! Stay tuned for the next chapter.