ursulav

Well, the title more or less says it all, but let me say it again.

We want to do an omnibus edition of Digger. You guys asked (repeatedly!) and we think it’s a great idea!

The downside (and the reason we haven’t done it already) is that hardcover omnibuseseses require a big chunk of cash up front—we’re talking a big print job here, on the order of the Bone omnibus edition, and that does not run cheap. (Plus, of course, while people keep asking, we’re talking a spendy beast here and we want to make sure there’s enough interest to justify doing it!) Plus, if we get a LOT of interest, we can do all kinds of neat extras, like color inserts and cover embossing and extra stories and giant wombat balloons in the Macy’s Day Parade!*

So, in a couple of weeks, we’ll be Kickstartering! And we will have all kinds of neat goodies for sponsors (postcards! pins! pickaxes!) and also all kinds of mildly absurd goodies for sponsors (I believe at one level, I name a tree in the yard after you and put a little plaque with your name on it…) so watch this space for more information! You’ll be the first to know!

(Also, hey, Digger got nominated for the Mythopoeic Award, which is neat, too!)

*One of these things is a bald-faced lie.

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

WARNING: Biological Icky Bits Ahead!

Guess what I found!?

I’m a larva!

This peculiar devil is the larval form of the American Carrion Beetle! How cool is that? (They feed on mushrooms and dead bugs as well as rotting meat, so I hasten to assure you that I do not, in fact, have dead bodies rotting in the woods. At least, to the best of my knowledge.)

Spring sprung and was promptly batted aside by summer, so it’s hot and humid in the garden, and I am trying to stay ahead of the stiltgrass with copious amounts of mulch, because the flamethrower is questionable in a dry pine wood and would also take out all my nice jewelweed that has established so marvelously.  Thinking of trying to fight it by transplanting in Virginia knotweed, which is an aggressive loon of a plant, but native, attractive, and host to a couple of butterfly species. (I have the variegated form, “Painter’s Palette,” which comes true from seed and boy, is there a lot of seed!)

Other than that, everything is blooming, the pollinators are out in force, I had a Zebra Swallowtail show up the other day (an uncommon butterfly in this neck of the woods!) and the pond is full of frogs and predacious diving beetles. On the downside, the weird cold/hot/cold/hot weather sent most of the spring veggies straight to bolting, so I got no daikons, some very sad beets, and the tomatoes are already starting to come in. Lost a bunch of peppers, too. Sigh. But the cucumbers and squash are happy, and I am holding out hope that the peas will produce a batch before the heat exhausts them. (A lot of local farmers just gave up and plowed the peas under. Can’t blame ‘em. This has been demented weather.)

Craw-Bob is still in residence. Haven’t gotten a good look at him, but we’ve got the night vision cameras and just need to get them working with the house network. Mostly he’s a flash of movement into the hole as I go by.

The Patio That Shall Not Be Named has been graveled, sanded, mortared, and now needs bricks. I’m traveling at the end of the week, but hold out hope of getting it done before June rolls around. (All productivity must be crammed into this month, because June is solid travel and July and August will be miserably hot.)

I had a bit of a wildlife mystery this morning. Was going out to feed the birds and found—there’s no other way to say it—a pile of viscera in the middle of the path. Somebody had left their guts in a neat pile on the ground.

Being me, I of course immediately poked them with a stick. Yup. That’s guts, all right.

Guts and….earthworms?

For whatever weird reason, there were a bunch of dead earthworms in the pile as well.

I wracked my brain—had something vomited and lost guts and earthworms together? Was this some kind of weird version of an owl pellet?—until I realized that the earthworms were from INSIDE the guts. Our deceased gut-owner had been out eating earthworms, and had quite a solid meal, then something jumped him, eviscerated him, and presumably ate the tasty bits. (I would have thought the viscera WERE tasty bits, but apparently somebody was picky.)

My guess is that the victim was a large frog, but I’ve got no idea what the killer was. I tossed the remains out of dog range—hopefully either Craw-Bob or the carrion beetles will find it and start the clean-up process.

So that’s all the excitement around here at the moment. Guts! Bugs! Mulch! THRILLS! CHILLS! ETC!

Originally published at Squash's Garden. You can comment here or there.

So, if you haven’t already read Hyperbole and a Half’s absolutely brilliant write-up about severe depression, go forth and read. I’ll wait.

How ’bout that, huh?

I was talking to Kevin about the post (we’re both fans, and have both had our own bouts with depression) and as I was talking, I realized that before I had my particular breakdown, two people had said something to me—two people, one of whom I don’t know, one of whom said one word—and those two people had a profound impact on my experience with depression.

One was good, one was bad.

The first—the good one—was my doctor. When I’d gone in for my checkup after my divorce, when I was getting all the medical stuff done fast before I went off my ex-husband’s insurance, she asked me if I needed antidepressants.

I told her no, that I was fine, because it hadn’t occurred to me that what was happening wasn’t fine, if that makes any sense. Yes, I couldn’t sleep and was sobbing a lot, but I was getting a divorce! I’d moved out! Random sobbing and epic insomnia are normal in that circumstance! It’d be weird if I wasn’t miserable and irrational!

That’s what I was thinking, anyhow. I don’t know how coherently I expressed any of that, but she looked at me over the clipboard and said “Uh-huh. Well, call me if that changes, and we’ll get you started on something right away. It’s a lot easier to start it now than when you’re at the bottom of a hole you can’t get out of.”

I can’t say that this phrase saved my life, because I’ve never had suicidal tendencies (the closest I ever got was a profound hope that the atheists were right and I eventually wouldn’t have to deal with this any more) but it sure as hell saved me a lot of time and grief.

It normalized everything. It made it a medical problem. It still took me awhile to figure out that a lot of things were probably linked to depression (insomnia, say!) but when I finally broke, at some point what I thought was “Oh, hey! I’m at the bottom of that hole she warned me about! I will call my doctor. She will fix it.”

(And may Ganesh give her every blessing known to nurse practitioners, because she handled it like a pro. “Oh, no! Okay…okay…yes, that’d be anxiety.” (I believe I said “Oh! Is that what that is? Neat!” because even in a hole, I am still fundamentally me.) “Now where are you? Let’s find the nearest pharmacy, and I’ll call in what I can over state lines. Come in as soon as you’re back in NC.”)

If she hadn’t said that one sentence, I would have floundered around for ages, trying to do the brain chemistry equivalent of fixing a broken leg through the power of positive thinking. But she did say it and so when I finally realized what was going on—”Hey! This is a nervous breakdown!”—I didn’t go through any of the stages of trying to figure out how you treat that or was it bad enough or whatever, because she had set the stage.

Thank god.

The other person was…well, less helpful. And I don’t know her name and couldn’t pick her out of a line-up, but I still feel a vague bitterness toward her, because when I was newly moved out of my house and away from my garden, I went to a local garden center to ask what I could grow in pots in the shade of a building–real, true, deep dry shade, in permanent shadow.

She curled her lip and said “Plastic.”

I know I tried asking a few questions, and maybe she suggested ivy or something, but it ended quickly and she walked off with the you-are-wasting-my-time air. And I, in innocent despair, believed her and went home and didn’t garden again until I moved in with Kevin.

I know perfectly well WHY I believed her—I was depressed and getting a divorce and leaving one of the cats with him and it made total sense that of course something else I loved was going to be taken from me, because that was just how life was going to be. But I do wish I’d cracked a book open, because, as it happens, she was incredibly wrong.

I mean, jeez, I had flowerpots, I could have done ferns. Impatiens. Sedges. I could have grown moss, if nothing else. If I didn’t feel like watering, there are epimediums and cast iron plant and any number of things. Meehania will grow in a dark closet. (Fine, that’s obscure, I can’t blame her for missing that one. But I could have taken up growing mushrooms, for cryin’ out loud!)

There’s no knowing what road you don’t walk down, of course, but that definitely slowed my recovery. Gardening is what I DO. I say “I’m a gardener,” as often as I say “I’m an artist.” Gardening is where I feel the most like myself. (Art is where I don’t actually notice myself, if that makes any sense.) If I’d been digging around, I think I would have been much more resilient. (And by “resilient” I may mean “would have put grow-lights all over the living room and been living in a jungle” because if that had occurred to me, I expect I would have done it in a heartbeat.)

Plus there’s that one soil bacteria that gives your serotonin levels a boost, which is not to be sneezed at when one is fighting chemical wars inside one’s skull.

So I don’t know. Life is better now and both these things have largely faded, but Hyperbole reminded me. Much like single pieces of corn.

(Mind you, at the time I found duck decoys pretty damn hysterical…)

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

Not dead, just very busy!

I am running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to write a book, edit another book, do art for an anthology, prep for two cons and one gallery show, and get mulch down before the Japanese stiltgrass Eats The World. (Nasty weed. Nasty, nasty weed.) And also I just made major progress on the Patio That Shall Not Be Named, which will soon be ready for a layer of gravel. Woo!

In lieu of anything clever, have a painting.

Saint of Bulls, mixed media on board, 8 x 12. My scanner hates blue, he’s actually more turquoise and has stronger contrasts, but eh, what can you do?

He’s going to Anthrocon, and I actually kinda hope he doesn’t sell so that I can use him in the gallery show, which is the great trap of shows—”AUGGH! I love money! But I need to fill this wall! But money! AUAUUUGH!”—and then when you say “But ALL MY ART SOLD! What will I doooooo!?” you get no sympathy from anyone, except occasionally other artists.

Ahem.

Now I have to go mail things and maybe get some gravel. I will be sane again after Anthrocon. For a value of sane.

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

Whew!

Spent the weekend in New York, courtesy of Dial books, who flew me up to do a little media training in prep for a book tour later in the year. (I am apparently doing a book tour this fall!) I’ve never been to NYC before, and brought Kevin along to keep me from getting lost or being eaten by wolves. (He used to live in Queens.)

It was pretty awesome. I don’t think I could live there, but still some amazing stuff to see. We went to the natural history museum (greatest thing ever!) and then the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Probably we shouldn’t have tried to do both of those in one day, as I spent the rest of the weekend with feet like hamburger, but it was still worth it!

Our hotel room was approximately the size of a shoe box and it was WHITE. White walls, white marble, white furniture, white curtains. And blue carpet, which only made everything whiter. It was a sort of 70′s vision of the future, ala Sleeper.  Great bathtub, though.

The food was amazing. (The cost of drinks was…equally amazing, although not in a good way.) We hit a couple of the required tourist spots. We went on the subway and were smooshed in crowds. Crazy people yelled obscenities at us. (I am told that this is all part of the authentic NYC experience.) We did some recreational shopping. I bought a beaver skull.

It was particularly awesome to meet my editor at long last–eight years we’ve been working together!–and my art director, who does all the Dragonbreath layouts, and the whole crew at Dial who make it all happen. (The number of people required to make a children’s book as absurdly successful as Dragonbreath will fit into a conference room with free muffins, but only barely!) I got to meet all the people in marketing who handle the Dragonbreath account and the salespeople who sell to Barnes & Noble and Amazon and the indie bookstores. A couple of Penguin VIPs even showed up to say hello and to get books signed, so that was pretty awesome too.

All in all, great trip. I’d love to go back, since there’s so much more in NYC to see, but I was glad to get home to Ben and the beagle (one of whom is sleeping and one of whom is currently clawing at a plastic bag to try and get my attention.)

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

Well, as of this evening, it is now theoretically possible to play Act I of Cryptic Stitching from beginning to end, following any of the three paths.

More content needs to be added to flesh out some things, and StoryNexus hasn’t implemented an art upload function (although it’s supposed to be in the works) so I’m not sure when I’ll be releasing Act I. However, at the moment, I could use some playtesters!

I’m looking for about a dozen people who are willing to spend a few hours poking the thing and give me some feedback. (I’ve got a few who are completely invaluable, but they have lives and stuff and the more eyeballs, the better.) I’m looking for typos, baffling bugs, wander-around-not-sure-what-to-do-now-itis, etc.

What I’d like to do is just set up an LJ page where people post bugs, rather than possibly get a dozen identical e-mails. (This isn’t a closed page, I just can’t imagine it’s terribly interesting.) Plus, useful clearinghouse and whatnot.

So! If you’re willing to sign up with StoryNexus (or have an existing account) willing to post to LJ with bugs or comments, don’t mind that the game has no art yet, possess a certain degree of patience and can play on a computer or a tablet with mouseover support (mouseovers are very important to this engine) and ideally also have a twitter account for when things break RIGHT THIS MINUTE…well, say something in the comments, I’ll grab some volunteers! (Uh…leave an e-mail address, with the (at) thing so there’s no spam? Alternately, if you’re not comfortable with that posted in public, DM me on Twitter, I’m at @ursulav.)

Familiarity with Fallen London and other StoryNexus games is helpful, but I’d also like some people who don’t know it at all so that I cover the spread.

And now I’m gonna go make mac & cheese.

UPDATE: Okay, that’s a bunch of people! Thank you all–closing it up, and will e-mail those of you who’ve been kind enough to offer! (If you are in absolute black despair that you missed the call and cannot wait, shoot me an e-mail and I will see what I can do. I promise, though, all you’re missing is seeing how much crap lies behind the curtain.)

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

I figured we were probably well into migration season, since the Juncoes are gone and Thrush-Bob, the Hermit Thrush that overwintered on our deck, has left for more northerly pastures. (We wish him well. Likely we will never see him again, but I like to think that his steady diet of mealworms over the long winter have made him a big, sturdy thrush.* Go, Thrush-Bob! Have a zillion fledglings!)

I was peering out the window at some birds bathing in the pond—pair of Chipping Sparrows, a cute little common sparrow—and I saw something small land on the far side of the pond, next to a clump of spiderwort.

If I hadn’t seen it come in, I would have missed it entirely—a very drab little bird. Grey head, white eye-ring, yellow breast. By that I knew it was a warbler, and Sibley narrowed it down the rest of the way. My garden had been, at least for a moment, host to a Nashville Warbler. (No, they don’t sing country, so far as I know.)

That’s bird #60 on the yard list, which is not bad at all, and a lifer for me.

What I always think in these cases is that I would never have seen it if I hadn’t looked in the exact right place at the exact right time. So I wonder how many birds are passing through the garden unspotted, unidentified, and unrecorded. Which is the sort of thing that can drive a birder crazy, if they think about it too much…

*The cats are sad that Thrush TV is now off-air, and can be found mooching around the windows, hoping for re-runs.

Originally published at Squash's Garden. You can comment here or there.

I’m always scared to post things like this for fear I’ll horribly mangle it and make things worse. Nevertheless, I’ll try, and if I screw it up, I’ll apologize and take my lumps, because this is the sort of thing that doesn’t go without saying any more.

I have some readers and fans who identify as Muslim. Maybe not a huge majority, but I know there’s at least a couple–and there may be a lot more than I know about, because it’s simply never come up. (Why would it? We talk about crawfish and wombats and eating lousy food.)

You sure don’t need me to tell you that there’s horrible crap that gets said on the internet at times like this. The very best of humanity is what made people run toward explosions a week ago—the internet and a lot of our senators aim a lot lower. It goes on all the damn time, but it’s going to be really bad for the next little while.

I’ve avoided talking about all the crap going on in this space because A) I know nothing more than anybody else, have no insights, and don’t presume to be an expert, and B) have nothing to say that’s not trite or repetitive, and if you’re here, odds are good you’re looking to talk about something else.

But I just want to say, since we’re gonna hear some vile, vile shit coming out of people’s mouths in the near future–guys, you can be in my life-raft, any time. We’ll figure out the short wave radio together and take turns fishing with hooks made out of toenail clippings, or whatever the hell it is people do when they’re lost at sea.

You’re not a them. You’re part of my us. I’m glad you’re here.

(Note: We’re all kinda raw, so be very nice to each other in the comments. If Mister Rogers would not say it, you should probably think twice before posting. And if anybody start offensive pontificating, I will not hesitate to ban them so hard that their Facebook account will feel it.)

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes you sit with your fingers over the keyboard, and you KNOW somebody’s gonna get mad at you.

Ideas are like potatoes. No matter how many ways you turn your idea around, looking for the best possible angle, it’s got lumps and somebody out there wanted cauliflower.

I’m gonna talk about self-publishing for a bit. And webcomics. Because, as my dear buddy Otter wrote yesterday, the parallels are so damn obvious that I feel like an idiot for not having seen it a mile off.

There are a lot of rational people on the internet. There are also a lot of zealots. And if you say anything about self-publishing that is not “Oh my god you guys, this is totally the way to fame and success!” there is a tendency for those rational voices to be drowned out in the howling for blood.

(Chuck Wendig did a post a week or so back about this, where he said, in essence, “There is no one true way. Research and make the choice that’s best for you.” Only on the internet would this be a controversial statement that people would argue with. If he’d managed to tie in breastfeeding somehow, the servers would have actually caught fire.)

Nevertheless, here I go.

Y’all remember webcomics?

Sure you do. They were comics! On the web! Usually free! People invented all kinds of ways to try to make money off them, some of which worked (merchandising) some of which didn’t work so well (pay walls) some of which worked in certain specific circumstances (ads.)

I’m sure you remember it. Every major news outlet in the world ran an article at some point saying “Oh my god, they have comics on the web now!” usually in tandem with “Oh my god, did you people know that they have comics that AREN’T FOR KIDS!?” and then people’s heads exploded. (My comic was actually mentioned in one of those articles, which happened to be in the New York Times. My mother wanted me to get their quote tattooed on my forehead.)

If you happened to be involved in the webcomic world around six or seven years ago (as I was) you saw great optimism. We cherished our great success stories—PA, Kurtz, all the people who quit their jobs. “Hey, the S*P guy said “If you want the comic on time, pay me enough to quit my job, and his fans DID!” We sneered at Marvel as a dinosaur that would die under its own crushing lack of innovation (and then cheered whenever a webcomic got a big publishing deal, because…um…people are complicated.) We told ourselves that traditional comics were scared of us. We relished the fact that newspaper comic pages were going under* (even as we felt very very bad for the very nice people who had their comics in newspapers) because WE weren’t with them, and WE were the wave of the future and soon everyone would realize that it was a BOLD NEW WORLD and any webcomic could succeed and it didn’t have to be about superheroes, and we found our niches and our fans.

We told people who wanted to do comics for a living, professionally, that the best thing they could do would be to do a webcomic. That it would be advertising for their talents. That it would get their stuff out there.

About once a nanosecond, somebody showed up on a webcomics board and said “My comic’s been up for six weeks, I’m not making any money, what gives?”

And then someone would have The Talk about fan bases and advertising and taking time and quality products and getting yourself out there. And that person would either quit in disgust or they would knuckle down and do the work. We would discuss guest comics on other comics as method of advertising. We would talk about whether it was worth it to buy ads. (We would talk about whether it was worth it to sell ads, for that matter.)

We had review bloggers. They were, briefly, rock-stars, and then people rebelled about who-died-and-gave-you-the-right-to-gatekeep and fans engaged in character assassination because of What They Said About Our Charlene’s Comic What Is On The Internet and it all eventually found its own equilibrium.

We had flame wars. Oh, the memory of those flame wars is glorious. I could toast marshmallows over the embers of replies to anything Scott Kurtz ever said.

And every forum was full of signatures with big, hopeful .gifs and people ended every sentence with “CHECK OUT MY WEBCOMIC!”  And we had to have The Talk about how we do not make forum posts just to plug ourselves because that is cheap.

Is this starting to sound familiar to anybody? Maybe just a tad?

It was a smaller scale. There have never been as many comics as books—probably because throughout history, fewer people have believed they could draw. But it was the same world.

This is not me slamming self-publishing. Are you kidding? I was one of those webcomics people! I have a rocket ship on my mantlepiece and an Eisner nomination and a nonexistent tattoo of the New York Times quote because of my webcomic, which quite frankly makes me one of the teeny tiny upper percentage in terms of critical recognition in a webcomic. (Seriously, I think I’m behind Girl Genius and…uh…apologizing to Howard Taylor a lot…) I am a huge raving success story about the power of putting a comic on the web with no gatekeeper and no editor and a complete inability to spell the word “separate” correctly on the first try. The day may come, if I can hack the work (and it won’t be for a long time, so don’t get excited) when I may do another webcomic, because webcomics are glorious.

It was a brave new world. It was the Wild West. It was awesome.

I should also mention that I have made, in total, probably around $20K from Digger. Spread over nine years. And for a webcomic, that’s considered pretty damn fine commercial success (and it’s worth noting that probably 90% of that is because a rockin’ little small press named Sofawolf did print versions. They did all the work, and I love them for it forever. I am frankly sort of amused that people are making a big deal out of the fact that there’s a self-published thing on this year’s Hugo ballot, because they were nominating Digger as a self-published work. I had to ask specifically that Sofawolf’s name go on the ballot with mine, because they do a damn fine job and they deserved to be there too.)

Once we settled the Wild West and put in railroads and people stopped dying of dysentery, it turned out that webcomics looked pretty much like everything else.

A couple of people made a LOT of money.

A lot of people made a little money.

Most people made almost no money.

I repeat, is this starting to sound familiar to anybody?

This is not me slamming on self-publishing. I would have self-published Digger if Sofawolf hadn’t stepped up. I have many friends who self-publish comic collections, books, all kinds of things. Many of them do very good work.

None of them are rich from it.

If the day comes when I have a book I love (and it will come) and my agent cannot sell it (too weird, wrong brand, whatever) then I will self-publish it. And I will try very hard to do good work.

And I will not get rich from it.

And that’s okay.

There are fewer webcomics now. The hyperbole has died down. People still try, and fail, and get grumpy and quit. The big names are mostly still big. It is still possible to get a decently good following and, if you work your ass off, either make a living from it or make enough to supplement your day job pretty nicely.

Is this starting to sound…oh, never mind. You get the point by now or you don’t, and you agree with me or you don’t.

But it wasn’t the road to glory and free money for everyone who could put a word bubble over a stick-figure And the secret to success WAS putting stuff out there, as it turns out—but it was also putting GOOD stuff out there, not firing a shotgun of crap at the wall and hoping something stuck. And you had to be consistent and reliable and do something special and not just try to be the next Penny Arcade/Kurtz/whatever.

And your art had to not suck and your writing REALLY had to not suck, or people ignored you. You couldn’t say “Real fans will read it and not care about your super-Nazi grammar and format issues!” because as it turned out, they wouldn’t. (I stopped reading multiple things because the comic artist would cram words right up to the edge of the word balloon and it made my eyes hurt.)

Anyone who tells you that they know the future is lying. But I’ll give you my best guess, if you want it, and it’s worth exactly what you’re paying for it. If you don’t like it, ignore it. It doesn’t actually make a difference to me, or frankly, to the future.

In a couple of years, the self-publishing hyperbole will die down. People who got excited and then disappointed by their lack of instant success will go on to the next thing. Some people will knuckle down and do the work. Some people will figure out how to make a living or to supplement their day job pretty nicely.

And a couple of people will make a LOT of money.

And a lot of people will make a little money.

And most people will make almost no money.

And the song will remain the same.

*Okay, only some of us. We weren't all total dicks.

Originally published at Tea with the Squash God. You can comment here or there.