Bark Like A Fish, Damnit!

Wombat pendants!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:52:44 GMT

Nifty thing, new from Foxloft--a hand-carved Tagua pendant, in the form of our very own Red Wombat!

Wombat Tagua Pendant

I've got two of these pendants, one in a wombat and one in a wild boar and they really are cool and very wearable. (Also, Foxfeather is awesome. I've got to scan the walrus-and-radish she drew for me--made the rest of us look like rank amateurs. And she likes musk-oxen. Nobody who loves musk-oxen can be bad.)

We'll hopefully have some more pendants available in the future--I'm contemplating doing Biting Pears, although I'll have to tweak the design to go so small, and we're looking at some of the glass-pendant-prints in the near future, involving the Happy Barn Owl and Teeny Lovebird designs.

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 01:38:42 GMT

Cannot seem to get into the Christmas spirit this year. I don't know if it's the weather or what. There's just this sense of...Christmas? Yeah, I suppose it's coming. I forget about it almost immediately.

Otter, in similar straits, met me at Southpointe mall for lunch. In a last ditch effort to summon Christmas spirit, we put on light-up reindeer antlers and wandered around. Still didn't seem to help. Did Hot Topic, Banana Republic, and Victoria's Secret with antlers. Amusing, certainly proof that I have entered a stage in my life where I have absolutely no fear of making a spectacle of myself, but can't say it got the gingerbread pumping through my veins.

Finally went and mocked Christmas ornaments at the Christmas store. Highlights included the angriest baby seal ever, what appeared to be a squirrel being anally violated by a bloody snowman (actually, there were a LOT of terrifying snowbeings) and if I ever want the world's furriest Christmas tree, I know where to go. The lion ringmaster with whips and the pig on the Harley wearing classic sixties-into-bondage-leatherwear were...um...something else all right.

I was tempted by the black tree and the black ornaments--a goth Christmas!--but then I saw the price tags. If you think I'm paying 11.99 for a small black flocked box with glittery ribbon, allow me to disabuse you.

By that point we'd forgotten about the antlers, and as we bent our heads over something--My Little Pony Christmas or Baby Seal Hitler* or something--they clashed together. There was a pause. "Are you coming on to me?"

"I think we're fighting for dominance, actually..."

"Oh, well then."

If that couldn't get my Christmas spirit flowing, I suppose it won't happen this year. (Maybe I need snow. Living in Minnesota may have fused that switch permanent.) Perhaps next year.

*Shape and placement of the dark whisker patch were Highly Unfortunate.

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 17:39:21 GMT

Well, shitmuffins.

Kevin's contract with the city, which was supposed to go another six months or so, is getting cut as of the 23rd.

Leaving aside all concerns of money and everything else--dude, December 23rd is not when you cut people. That's just low. I realize they probably needed it to balance the budget, and they left him on a lot longer than most of the other contractors, but dude, that's kinda Grinch-like.

Last Call

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 20:10:57 GMT

Okay, gang, last call for print orders! This is your last chance--get 'em in this week or any hope of Christmas delivery becomes a faint, far-off thing, possibly with feathers. I'm shipping as fast as I'm getting them, but the post office is a beast beyond my control, and we are gettin' down to the wire.

And yes, I am a big softy, and if you come to me on the 23rd in a panic and offer to pay the exorbitant overnight fees, I will do my best for you, but it's hard on your wallet and my nerves, so if you've had any thoughts of art for Christmas, I beg of you, do it now! Do not delay!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 16:40:11 GMT

I put a deck-mounted birdbath out back last Saturday, although I wasn't sure if anything was going to visit it--I've had no luck with birdfeeders in the backyard, so I thought it just wasn't a high-traffic area. Still, open water when it's cold is important to the little birdies.

The red-shouldered hawk that I startled out of the birdbath a minute ago offers another possible reason for the lack of small-bird traffic.

Goodness! Never got a bird of prey at a birdbath before! I wish I'd caught him drinking, that would have been AWESOME. Well, more awesome. It was pretty damn awesome already.

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:12:50 GMT

Trying to clear space on my harddrive, and found these two teeny pieces from AC last year that I never posted...

Teeny Lovebird
Teeny Happy Barn Owl

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:26:25 GMT

So this weekend, in a fit of lunacy, I painted part of the kitchen.

There are three walls where the hallway lets into the kitchen--it would normally have been two walls meeting in a corner, but in an effort to soften matters and make space, the corner has been truncated, leaving a narrow diagonal wall in place of said corner.

Bored and in the vicinity of Lowes, I picked up a sample can of a warm yellow called "Cantaloupe Smile" and did the narrow diagonal wall with it. It looked pretty good, but after two days of living with it, I decided it was too dark to do the entire kitchen in--I like intense colors, but without another strong color to play off it, it wasn't quite gonna work. (There are solutions. They mostly involve painting all the cabinets, which I should be firmly talked out of. It may happen eventually, but not this year.) So I picked up a can of the next color in the swatch, which was "Whipped Apricot" (a much warmer, more buttery color than the name implies) and did the other two adjoining walls. Wet, it was a trifle insipid, but drying darkened it down a shade, and it's a very good color.

It's also a very cheese color. So now a chunk of the kitchen resembles a block of mild cheddar--or possibly an Edam--with a wedge carved off it. It still looks pretty good, though, and although I'd been thinking "accent wall" with the darker, because of the angle of the wall and the way the shadows fall, it's nearly impossible to tell it's a different color unless you know what to look for. It's subtle.

Subtle is not something I manage often, except by accident, so it gets to stay for now.

It also has the effect of making a ten-year-old-builder-beige wall look much newer and sharper, which is half the battle right there, even if I have to re-paint and touch up some of the baseboard later.

I have some other amusing plans for some of the weirder little bits of architecture, but we'll see how it goes...

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:33:19 GMT

My agent wrote to ask what walruses eat. I know better than to read anything into this--she's not the one who buys the books!--but I'm amused that Walrus and Radish aren't dropping immediately into the Ursula's Insane Ideas To Revisit Later When They'll Buy Anything file.*

*I know this file exists.

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:34:00 GMT

With wonderful timing, just as I finish the print orders--you can still order, but do it now! Next week is last call!--currently on the pile, and am leaning back going "Phew! Sixty some orders, done! I rock!"--my publisher dropped the art edits for Wurstbreath into my in-box.

Fortunately there's not many compared to the earlier books, and they're only having to cut and squeeze a little to make the layouts fit--Ninja frogs was heavily squeezed by comparison--so the work will only take a couple of days. (The last month or so, despite being so busy, has felt almost like a vacation, since I've just been waiting to hear back about this and the Batbreath manuscript, and haven't had any Dragonbreath in front of me to work on right this minute. If you were wondering why I was getting all these originals done, that's the reason.)

And now, to mail stuff and drop off stuff at the gallery, and then, perchance, to Wurst...

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:45:31 GMT

Still printing. It's that time of year. PRINTS WITHOUT END!

Ironically, I just got the call yesterday that I can drop off matted/bagged prints at the local gallery, too. So I need even MORE prints. But I shall do it! Only a fool passes up the Christmas rush!

So today I get to bag prints. Yesterday I alternated between video games, checking the printer, and painting vivid critters.

Vivid Fox

Digger Christmas Cards!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:37:29 GMT

If you're like me, you've completely blown off buying Christmas cards so far this year. (If you're REALLY like me, you have this vague delusion you'll make cards this year, because damnit, you're an artist, and then you don't actually do it and either wind up buying them at the bookstore or, more likely, blow off cards entirely.)

However, Sofawolf and Digger have got you covered. We have, for the first time, Digger Christmas cards! so that you, too, can have a very Shadowchild Christmas.

D&D Musings...

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:51:41 GMT

After wrapping up our scorpion battle--including the by-now-familiar Paladin Vicious Mockery, which was somewhat limited this time by the fact that I was insulting scorpions and after "Your mother was a pillbug!" and "I've eaten scarier claws in a seafood restaurant!" I kinda ran out of steam*--and our primal druid turning into ANOTHER scorpion to fight them, for what was either Hot Scorpion-on-Scorpion Action or Really Bugger-All Confusing, depending on who you ask--Kevin and I were lounging around the bedroom watching Top Gear and discussing our upcoming dungeon crawl.

KEVIN: I gotta figure out how to do the maps. At this rate, I might have to go to the NetHack model...
URSULA: We'll be fighting letters of the alphabet?
KEVIN: No, you'd be....hmm, y'know, actually that'd be kinda entertaining, we could do it alphabetically...pity, Beholders are like level 10...
URSULA: It could be a baby beholder! With its eyes still shut, like a pinky mouse!
KEVIN: ...
URSULA: And little wiggly eyestalks!
KEVIN: NO. You would keep it as a pet.**
URSULA: I will name him Mister Squinty.
KEVIN: NO.
URSULA: But we'd have to keep him. We couldn't live with ourselves if we killed a little baby beholder!
KEVIN: He'd get older. And more belligerent. They're not good pets!
URSULA: We'd find him a nice dungeon to live in when he grew up.
KEVIN: You'd have to release him into the wild, in a touching scene...
URSULA: Go on, Mister Squinty! Run free! Insomuch as you have no legs!
KEVIN: And you couldn't just release him into a dungeon, you know. He wouldn't know how to survive in the wild. You'd need to go on a quest to find...monster rehabbers.
URSULA: Seriously, if that's not already a campaign somewhere, it totally should be.

*Vicious Mockery is a bard power, which my paladin picked up by virtue of being a half-elf. It is his only reliable ranged attack and thus it gets used pretty much every battle, which involves me going off on a minute-long tirade over Ventrilo about the ancestry and sexual habits of the enemy. It's gotten to the point where the GM has started rewarding or punishing my delivery of the mockery--I get extra damage for a really cutting tirade, but I am warned that if I fail to bring my A-game, I will only be doing half damage. No pressure or anything.

**The chief piece of advice my last GM gave Kevin was "Never let Ursula's character have any pets."

General Ramblings and a Reminder

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:09:24 GMT

Yesterday, I was totally making art. I was ambitious. I Got Stuff Done. I did a Digger, mailed a fat stack of art, hit the bank, did some sketching, fixed the cover for Wurstbreath, and did the Klimt's Owl piece and a wee little quickie for FC, while playing D&D.

Today, I do not have to do most of those things, and have a lot more time to draw if I so desire, and instead my brain is congealed into a thin goo at the bottom of my skull and asking if it would be okay if it just played video games for awhile.

Apparently I am only productive when I have a lot of other stuff to do.

Fortunately, I may yet kickstart myself into productivity, as I have to run a bizillion prints still, to keep up with Christmas orders--REMINDER: If you want art for Christmas, please try to get your order in this week! You've got a narrow window the week after, if you're in the US, but that involves me staying up late and hooking my veins to the printer when I run out of magenta, and I stop being able to guarantee Christmas delivery outside the country very very soon now! Red Wombat Studio is ready and willing for all your Ursula art needs, but the sooner the better!

I've also decided to shut down shipping for the last two weeks of the year--you can still order, but orders won't be filled until after New Years, since I'll be spending much of that in Arizona visiting my dad and showing Kevin the Grand Canyon for the first time. So that'll be cool.

And now! To the printer!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 02:47:34 GMT

Playing D&D. It's Giant Scorpion Pinball!

Meanwhile, while waiting for my turn to come around, I'm working on a little Klimt's critter...

Klimt's Owl

And also, a convention sketch for a totally awesome fan: Devil Girl (nudity)

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:56:20 GMT

Well, shit.

Robert Holdstock, author of books like The Hollowing and Mythago Wood died this morning.

His books were mythic and tricky and difficult to read--he wasn't a comfortable author--and they left me with a nervous queasy unsettlement and fragments of spectacular imagery. The Hollowing was a powerful influence on what eventually became Gearworld. (I bought it probably fifteen years ago because of the John Jude Palencar cover...) If you imagine one of Lovecraft's is-this-really-happening narrators dealing with mythic archetypes instead of Old Ones, that's about as close as I can describe. (I suggest reading one before you go out and buy all of them--if you like it, you'll love it, but it's definitely not for everybody.)

My sympathy for his family, and also for all the fans out there who can no longer hope for a return to Mythago Wood.

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 16:25:01 GMT

This is less of an art dump and more of something I had a vague urge to paint last night...

Cock of the Rock (NSFW!)

(Non-DA Link. Still NSFW! Adults only!)

Art Dump Part Two!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:18:10 GMT

Wee Blue Boar
Cricket Hunter
Vivid Mouse

Today was a lazy lazy day for about two hours, and then I got bored and wanted to paint something...

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:29:56 GMT

I am all fat on turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and homemade mac and cheese. And pie. And wine.

It was a good Thanksgiving. Well, the beagle tried to climb on everybody and generally proved that we are the owners of a horribly untrained dog, which fills me with abiding shame, but I drowned it in pie.*

Now I kinda wanna go play old video games and roll around on the bed being fat and lazy.

Meanwhile, since you're likely also well-fed and feeling just slightly queasy from eating too much, it's the optimal time to inflict Mildly Horrible Sketches on you! Click to see the full view!

One of Natasha's incredibly popular vore pics is this dragon eating a unicorn. It's played off pretty seriously, but when she said "Okay, what do I draw?" I immediately said "A unicorn eating a dragon!" and...well...

It's the little heart that makes it.

Three different artists on this page, including Natasha's infamous nursing phalloi. I did the one in the middle, with much direction--"Do paws! They go nuts for paws! And add drool! Drool totally sells!" "EWWWW!"

You're really rather happy you don't know what the slurp slurp is going to. Trust me.

And finally...Natasha drew the one in the mousetrap, which involved a lot of "OH GOD, WHY WOULD YOU EVEN THINK SUCH A THING!?" and mine is the relatively more tame one below.

This is the tamer stuff. There are significantly more horrifying things in the sketchbook, but you'll have to buy Kevin a drink at a con and ask him. There's stuff I'm just not willing to post in public, and the thing with the hamster...and the other thing with the hamster...and god, the incredibly detailed zombie phalloi...*twitch*

*Someday, I'll go to obedience training with the damn dog, but half the trainers I've talked to go "He's a beagle," and look at me pityingly. I can't shake the feeling that if I was a hunter, he would be a fantastic dog, but that's not going to happen. What I really need to do is just shell out for some one-on-one classes with a good trainer. And also more hours in the day would be nice.

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:27:48 GMT

Blargh. Took a nap, had one of those weird complicated dreams that meander around and around, and at one point I was attempting to explain my feelings about the book Nation to my former stepfather and then driving around looking for parking and a minute later I found myself as a young boy playing a grand piano in the middle of a jungle, while a giant boar slept on the ground barely a foot away, and if I stopped playing, the boar was going to wake up and go rampaging. Which was an interesting visual, anyway, and one of those weird dichotomies where you're watching the scene from outside, and at the same time, you're staring down at your hands on the keyboard playing the Dies Irae and feeling a strange bleakness because you know you can't keep playing the piano forever and sooner or later the giant pig is going to wake up and devour you, which is of course one of those universal fears Freud was always on about.*

Now my mouth feels fuzzy.

*Possibly he might have couched it in different terms.

Great Googly Moogly

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:42:46 GMT

Okay, I'm reading about the dust-up about Harlequin (the romance writers, y'know) starting their own vanity publishing arm*, and as I go through the comments, every now and then one jumps out at me and breaks my heart into tiny little pieces.

These comments say things like "I know you have to pay to get published..." or "Up until I read this thread, I didn't realize you didn't pay to get published."

Oh sweet god.

You are all very smart people of impeccable taste--or at least, you're reading the blog, so I like to pretend--but just on the slim chance that any of you are not quite as informed on this topic as you could be--NO NO NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO.

The publisher pays you. ALWAYS. You do not pay the publisher. EVER. It does not cost the author to publish the book. The publisher does all that. They take the book and give you money. The only place you sign the check, to paraphrase, is on the back, is over the little line that says "Endorse here."

You don't pay to get published. The publisher pays you for the privilege of taking your book. You invest time and energy and printer cartridges. The publisher always pays you.

(This is also why you don't hire an illustrator--because the publisher hires them. And pays them. That is how it works.)

It's okay if you don't know this stuff. Don't feel dumb. Publishing is weird and arcane and I still take royalty statements to my buddy Deb and go "What does this mean?" and I still don't understand half of it. You're not dumb. Much of this isn't intuitive. You don't have to take my word for it--find the author resource online of your choice. and ask questions. There is no need to be embarassed.

I have produced...uh...if we count Digger volumes...nine books through four publishers. One of the publishers is a very respectable small press, one is a starting-out-but-getting-there small press, and two are big giant scary publishers with New York offices and budgets bigger than a third world country.

All four of them pay me money. Sometimes they pay me lots of money (at least by my standards, which are quite modest) and sometimes they pay me a couple hundred bucks. The big houses can afford to pay me mondo advances, the small presses can afford to take me to dinner.** This is fine.

The point is, they all pay me. I don't pay them. Ever.

The sum total I have spent on any book I have ever written was about two bucks worth of postage to send out the initial draft of Black Dogs, over a decade ago, and I did buy a decent pen in order to sign copies of Dragonbreath. (And by "decent" I mean like 2.99 for a pair. I am not a pen snob.) Then I lost the pen.

The only times money goes the other way is if I'm buying a couple of copies of Digger--I get free copies of each, of course, but sometimes I want to sell them at cons where Sofawolf's not attending--and in this case, they just slap the wholesale price against my royalties. This is pretty normal, and the only example I can come up with off the top of my head. (Okay, no, wait, I sent a print to my editor once because she wanted a signed art print of the Nurk cover for her office. Technically I paid for that, but I didn't stuff twenties in there or anything.)

I do not pay for those big publishing runs. Authors don't. There's a little under thirty thousand copies of Dragonbreath floating around out there. Total cost to me = $0.

If somebody is telling you that the authors do pay for these, they are either misinformed or...well...you're smart wombats, you can figure out yourself why somebody might have a vested interest in believing that you give people money for this sort of thing and who might not have your best interests at heart.

Now. Self-publishing. This is something else. If you are self-publishing, then you know it up front. (If you have to ask if you're self-publishing, there are problems already.) We can talk about this later and in lots of detail if anybody wants. Self-publishing is great for what it does well. I am a big fan of self-publishing. ( I myself have work in a self-published little anthology that our local comics group puts out every year, as a print-on-demand thing. You can buy it on Lulu, it's got some nice stuff in it, a couple of the members sell the occasional copy at conventions. I didn't buy any of the wholesale copies because I don't have table space in my usual con kit. Cost to me = $0. Profit if I HAD sold them at the table = maybe a buck or two. It's a neat little thing to have, but none of us are making money on it, and it's not a publishing credit I'd take seriously. I could talk about this longer, but we're already running long.) Self-publishing is kinda like merchandising. I would self-publish a webcomic the same way that I would get a run of T-shirts printed, I'd sell them at cons or over the internet, like T-shirts, and I would expect to make approximately the same amount of money.

So. To recap. They pay us. That's how it works. If you are paying them, then something is very very wrong.

If you're self-publishing, things are a little more complicated, but you should really only be self-publishing for stuff that self-publishing is good at. If you want to be a bestselling fiction author, that's not something self-publishing is particularly good at. If somebody tells you that self-publishing is good for that and you can make zillions if you give them your manuscript and a lot of money, they are predators and need to be ridden out of town on a rail.

Vanity publishing, which is what Harlequin Horizons is offering, is a scam. They take your money by the fistful and dangle this promise that if you pay enough, you can be a Real Writer. Well, Real Writers get paid, they don't pay. Nobody is so bad a writer that they deserve to lose money for it. If you just want readers, put it on the internet, if you just want a physical copy, go to Lulu, but please, PLEASE don't believe that writers have to pay to be successful. Please.

*There are lots of posts and comment wars. The fast and amusing one is here. The gist is that they're implying heavily to the marks that this is a Real Book with Harlequin and then turning around and telling their real authors, who are Not Amused, that no, no, it's not, nobody should think that, and the books won't actually be on shelves or anything, we just kinda found a way to make money off the slush pile. It is very sad and makes me very angry.

**And in no way shape or form should you think I'm raggin' on the small presses--I am deleriously glad they exist because a big New York house wouldn't ever publish Digger, there's just not the demand. Small presses aren't small because they can't be big, it's because they publish things where demand is small, but often very passionate. I do not know how many copies of Digger have sold, but I'm sure all for volumes are less than the initial, not-very-large-by-industry-standards print-run of Nurk. That doesn't mean Digger's bad, it's just specialized.

Art Dump Part One!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:46:16 GMT

Here's a couple of pieces from MFF...mostly little quick pieces. (No, nothing from the Sketchbook of Infamy. Yet.)

Scarf Llama
Fox with Fez
Tern and Tarpan
Goat and Goatsucker

Back from MFF!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:52:46 GMT

Whew!

Con was exhausting, as they always are, but pretty good. Sales weren't fantastic--art show was down for everybody, I'm told, and I have nothing to judge table sales/commissions against other than Anthrocon, which is my biggest con of the year, so by those standards, it wasn't all that hot--alas, without being a GoH and having them actually pay for my hotel room, I still can't quite afford to do it as a yearly con. I wouldn't lose money, but I'd be working like a dog for the weekend and the two-week run-up to turn a couple hundred bucks worth of profit, and my time is growing increasingly, terrifyingly precious, so it's not quite feasible yet.

I hold out hope for the future, though--they're growing like gangbusters, and I'll definitely try it again in a few years!

Practicalities aside, it was a VERY fun convention. Hung out with the artist cadre, got drunk with missmonstermel had sushi with drzarron and spent Sunday evening with dark_natasha who decided, with the extreme punchiness that one gets at the end of a con, that I needed to learn to draw vore.* I retaliated by deciding that she needed to draw phalloi, which she took to like a duck to water. We only had a couple of sketchbooks lying around though, so Kevin, who had never had a sketchbook before at a con and didn't really know what to do with it, is now the very proud owner of one that has things. Terrible, terrible things.** The con staff started coming up to the guest suite to see this sketchbook. (Personally, I think Natasha's phalloi nursing a litter of little...phallets?...was genius...) He is very happy. (A number of other artists who wandered in also contributed, but in the interests of preserving their reputations, I shall not name names.)

And we came home. Apparently the birds came out in force while we were gone--at this moment, I can see three kinds of woodpecker, including the big pileated, and so far this morning there's been a flycatcher and a kinglet and some random sparrows and a flock of juncoes and the usual more common garden birds.

Now, to get ready for Thanksgiving...and FC in two months...

*A type of porn where people get off on things being eaten by other things. And being happy about it. You see it in some furry art and a lot of R. Crumb drawings and hentai and barbecue signs and don't ask why people find this hot because I haven't a CLUE. Mind you, I don't get the inflation stuff or the macro stuff either, but hey, different strokes, haggis shortages, etc.

**Once you've drawn it, you can't undraw it!

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:49:14 GMT

Ladies and gentlemen, squids and wombats, it's That Time Of Year Again.

Christmas shopping time. Yup.

Prints are great! Prints are inexpensive, they're signed, and if you pop 'em in a nice mat, they look like you spent quite a lot of time and/or money and they're totally personal in that "I knew you were the kind of person who would appreciate penguin barbarians!" sorta way.

If you want to order prints--and I hope you do!--I beg you to get your orders in now. Today would be great! Tomorrow is also awesome! At any rate, before December is best! Head to www.redwombatstudio.com and order! If you have a print you want that's not there, drop me a line--I'll get it uploaded, or I'll get you a quote and we'll do it the old fashioned way by e-mail. Regardless...the sooner the better. Mail gets awfully backlogged out here come December, and it's much easier to guarantee arrival on time if you order before December.

I can take orders through the first week of December on print orders in the US--I really can't stress enough that for international orders, if you want 'em on time, order very soon! I beg of you! I'll do my best, but stuff gets SLOW at the border!

Thank you very much.

Slice of Life -- Timing Division

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:19:15 GMT

So I just heard a weird noise from the fish tank, turned around, discovered that the growth of hair algae had clogged the intake* and it was shooting air bubbles instead of current. I squawked, threw on a glove, and began fumbling in the tank, and at that moment, a car pulled up and the beagle started going off like a soprano foghorn.

Now, we're on a rural route, so the mailtruck is actually an elderly sedan** and this was an elderly sedan and I thought it might be the mail, and they might have my ink (I ran out of cyan AGAIN!) and I need it desperately before tomorrow, so I ran downstairs. With a latex glove on. With green goop stuck to it. Because I REALLY need ink. Ink is more vital to me than blood, and anyway, it's not like the mailperson's going to get MORE surly.

I shoved the beagle back with a foot, grabbed the knob with my non-gloved hand, flung the door open, and the rather startled woman who had been shoving pamphlets in my door for Jesus took a step back and said "Oh..."

My used glove and I confronted her. Gir danced frantically behind me, seeing a NEW PERSON. Perhaps he could go jump up on her! And then pee on her feet! Oh happy day!

"Uh," I said, realizing that she was carrying a Bible. Things processed slowly through my fish-addled brain. Probably a door-to-door evanglist. Probably did not have any cyan ink on her person. Damnit.

There was a moment while we both tried to remember our respective scripts. I don't know what she thought was on my glove--hair algae turns into streaky green goo when removed from water, but still has that vague algae look, and a latex glove is a latex glove. I looked not unlike I'd been giving a prostate exam to the Swamp Thing.

"We're just trying to talk to a few of our neighbors..." she said. I got the feeling that I had not been what she had in mind, but that she was willing to plow ahead and save my soul from Satan, or at least algae.

I looked at her blankly, wondering if my tank had exploded yet. "Uh?"

"About Scripture."

"Oh! Right! Uh. Sorry." I looked away, and made eye contact with my glove, which I was holding up at about shoulder level the way you do with a filthy gloved hand.

She also made eye contact with my glove. The glove said nothing, perhaps confident in its own salvation.

"I'm really busy right now," I said hopelessly. This hardly ever works, but I wasn't feeling particularly pseudo-Catholic today, and I never have anything clever to say to door-to-door evangelists. (I always want to, but it never happens. Sometimes I write a little mental script, and then I never remember it.)

Fortunately, I reckoned without the power of the glove. Perhaps deciding that I was dangerously insane, she said "Ah. Yes. Thanks for your time," and backed away. I went up and ripped goo until the intake was clear and the tank was saved. Gir was sad because he hadn't gotten to pee ecstatically on anybody, but hey, you can't have everything.

*I'm pretty sure my beloved Crab Bob is dead, because my hair algae has erupted, he's not worshipping the chopstick, and I'm sad and don't know if I want to replace him. I may be too soft-hearted for a reef tank. On the other hand, I better get one next week if it's bad enough that it's clogging the intakes.

**And our mailperson is really surly to me. Has been for like a year. I finally asked Kevin what was up with that, and he coughed a bit and said that he was under the impression that she'd quite liked his ex-wife. Small towns, man...

ursulav@metalandmagic.com — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 15:45:09 GMT

So last night, our D&D campaign discovered that the module designers had only envisioned two possible responses to being ambushed on a bridge by people with arrows and magic, who were demanding we hand over the map we took from the dead wino.

Apparently they expected us to either hand over the map or fight to the death. They, however, have not met OUR party.

Quoth the paladin (me), "Gnome! Hsst! Gnome! Pass me a flask of acid!"

"That's my last flask of acid," said the gnome artificer mournfully, slipping it into the paladin's hand.

"Right!" said Rooster (the paladin. Not his real name) pulling out the fake (and inaccurate) map he'd taken the precaution of making some days earlier. "I've got your map right here! And--" stuffing the rolled-up map into the neck of the acid flask, "--we get safe passage through the city or the map gets it!"

There was a very long moment while we all stood on the bridge with arrows aimed at us, wondering if we could jump off the bridge and run away if it all went south.

"By whatever gods you worship, paladin," hissed our primal druid, "this isn't working!"

"Shut up! It's totally working!" Rooster hissed back.

"How do we know you'll hand over the map?" called the enemy

"I swear on the name of the Order of the Silver Weasel, I'll give you this map when we reach the other side of the city unharmed!" (Rooster belongs to the Silver Weasel. In our campaign, they're the demon-fighting-and-also-too-embarrassing-to-hang-around-with-us arm of the Silver Flame.)

And then I rolled a 27 on my diplomacy roll. (Rooster is a middling fighter, a dreadful athlete, and even his friends think he's pretty dumb...but he can charm the sunglasses off a basilisk when he puts his mind to it.)

The session took a break while the GM tried to figure out what to do in this eventuality that had not been covered or foreseen. I took off my headset and walked into the GM's new office, where he was pacing back and forth and muttering to himself, so I giggled hysterically at him for a minute or two.

"Hey, it's a good plan! You gotta admit--"

"It's a brilliant plan. And I have no idea how you're gonna get the XP you need to stay on track if you actually manage to avoid this encounter."

I took myself off to make some hot cider.

We got our safe passage through the city. We got onto the other bridge. "Okay," said the enemy, "now--"

"Now all your guys stand over there and all my guys cross the bridge and you and I will stand in the middle and I will hand you the map once they've put their arrows away."

"DAMNIT!" came from the GM cave down the hall. And "Very well," said the enemy.

"Right, so I pull the map out of the neck of the flask and--"

"Roll a Dex check," grated the GM.

...I mentioned the bit about Rooster being a terrible athlete, didn't I?

"Oh, too bad," said our GM, wiping the sweat of sudden relief from his brow, "your hands are all slick from that long walk through the city holding the flask. The paper slips INTO the flask instead. And starts to dissolve."

"Oh god!" said the paladin, shoving the flask with dissolving map at the enemy spokesman. "Oh god, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that! That was an accident! I'm not malicious, just incompetent! I'm so sorry!"

And then he ran away, shouting apologies, while arrows and spells fell around him, which, with the luck of the dice and the kindness of the Silver Weasel, mostly missed.

"That was my last flask of acid," said the gnome sadly. "And you didn't even throw it in his face."

There was a brief moment when his own party considered stabbing him and shoving him back onto the bridge, as a goodwill gesture, but fortunately, it passed. It was a rough combat, but mostly for Rooster, since the assembled enemy horde believed that this had been some kind of Ultimate Dick Move on his part, and he received multiple arrows and fireballs as a result, each of which was greeted with: "I deserved that! I'm really really sorry!" Our gnome kept him alive, barely, with her snazzy infusions, in between calling up walls of acid vapor to assail our enemies. Our druid called lightning and turned into a large angry feline. Our fighter wandered around smashing things. Our thief did stabby things. Our paladin continued to apologize.

We were ultimately victorious. Nobody died.

And I still maintain it was a great plan and we at least fought them in a much better situation where we weren't surrounded, damnit, and it would totally have worked if my hands hadn't slipped but at least they think the map's been destroyed and shouldn't hound us in the future since the leader got away and my future crazy plans should NOT be dismissed out of hand just because of one lousy miscalculation.