Happy (belated) Valentine's Day!

I'm still waiting on my flowers and candy- Josh was going to go out yesterday to get them, but I was feeling really crappy and didn't want him to leave, so he's going to get me discounted ones today, lol.

I didn't have the money to buy him anything and I haven't felt up to making the D&D plushie that I've been meaning to give him (I'll work on that this week), so I drew him a picture. I felt like a little kid giving a drawing as a gift, but I worked hard on this and he seemed to like it. :) I still want to get a frame for it so he can hang it in his room.


The dragon on the left is supposed to be Josh (it's in his color of choice of teal), the dragon in the middle is our cat, and the one on the right is me (notice all the ear piercings, lol). At the bottom I wrote lines from my favorite of Shakespeare's sonnets (#29)- it's also the one that best fit a picture of dragons.

I spent two days on this- first I had to sketch out the dragons (that took me a very long time), then I traced that onto the paper, inked it, colored it, then glued some glitter so that the "gold" shone.


And since I'm still on a WTJ kick, here's the latest page I did:

Yeah, I carry a lot of stuff around- and this isn't even including the yarn, crochet hooks, roving, and spindle I usually carry, too.

Here's a picture of what everything in my purse looks like (minus the cell phone. By that point it was back in my pocket).

The black thing in the back is my cat's butt. It's not something that goes in the bag, but it's something that's always in the way when I try to take pictures, lol.

More adventures with my WTJ

I was going to post a picture of the drawing I did for Josh for Valentine's Day, but for some reason it didn't scan right so I'm going to have to wait until tomorrow or something. I already gave it to him because I didn't know where to hide it so it wouldn't get wrinkled.

I do have pictures of my Wreck This Journal, though! I'm having so much fun with this, although I still can't bring myself to smear food in it. The thought that it might attract bugs really grosses me out. Anyway, here are the three most recent things I've done to the book:


One of the pages said to write/scribble on the edge of the pages, so I did. The top and bottom have a leafy vine design (because I draw leaves on everything. My name is quite apt), and the long side has my nickname, some stripes of my favorite colors (green, black, and hot pink), a star and another leaf. The long side and the bottom are in permanent marker, but I did the top in washable marker to see what would happen the next time the book gets wet. I predict a smeary mess, lol.

As you can see, the book is already getting hard to shut and I have to tie it closed with random leftover yarns. Eventually I'll tie it with matching yarn or ribbon, but I'll wait until these ones fall apart (soon, at the rate).


The "white things" page is my favorite so far. I decided to take it literally and drew in Gandalf the White (yeah yeah, I know he has a hat as the Grey, but I wanted to give him a hat here), the white tree of Gondor, Dwight the White (he's a character in our Dungeons and Dragons game), and Skandranon (the white gryphon). That was my first time ever drawing a gryphon, so it came out better than I expected, lol. I also taped in a random plastic skeleton that I had in my desk.

I still want to draw more white things/people from fandoms I like, but these were the only ones I could come up with so far. I may draw a picture of myself in my Whites (Heralds of Valdemar costume), but I'm not sure. I'm also still on the lookout for more random white things to glue in. :)

And the last page I've done, the "scratch" page:

I attacked this page with Sting (finally, a use for the sword on my wall!) and wrote "Frodo lives!". Then I attacked it with a pin and scratched in the elvish for "immortal spirit" that my friend translated for me years ago. (I'm going to get that elvish tattooed some day.) ...Actually, now that I think about it, my elvish phrase and the "Frodo lives" fit together quite nicely, lol. It's hard to see, though. The light in my room today is terrible, but using the flash just made it even harder to see.


And last, I want to share this goofy drawing that Josh did:

This is what happens when you mention wanting to sketch a White wizard or two to your goofy fiancé and he's in range of a whiteboard and marker. When I mentioned that Gandalf the White doesn't have a hat, he crossed it out. Then he drew Grima to differentiate between the two wizards, then added a hobbit with a shotgun, sunglasses, and shot glass. Honestly, this is the kind of thing that goes on in Josh's head. It's best not to ask. ;)

This journal is so much fun!

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I've still been feeling icky, and the weather keeps changing from cold to warm, so now my back is hurting badly again. Hopefully once spring gets here for real, it'll settle down and I can get back to working on art and my shop. :) So anyway, I've just been slowly working on my Prachgan square for Sourcery (I'll post that tomorrow) and reading a whole bunch.

But I'm all sorts of happy because my copy of Wreck This Journal finally showed up! I was a bit overwhelmed at first by the vast amount of blank pages, but after numbering the pages, sticking in some fruit stickers and gluing in a plastic skeleton (for the "stick white things here" page) to get me started, I finally got up the courage to make a mess. This book is so much fun!

Here's what the book looked like fresh:

It didn't stay that nice for long; the pages are already messed up and the cover won't stay shut- I have to tie it closed with yarn.

Here's the "number the pages" page in all its colorful glory:

My only annoyance is that the paper is too thin; my markers keep bleeding through the pages. :( And I already screwed up the "leave this page intentionally blank" page by putting a number on it, lol.

And here's the start of my mess- the "spill coffee" page:

It's actually a "spill tea" page because I don't drink coffee. Unfortunately, it doesn't look this cool now. The left page is the back of the "burn this" page, so it's partly missing, and the right page has soot and some smeared marker on it (from said fire disaster), and the tea dried lighter in color. I'm going to freshen it up with more tea (and Josh's coffee) later. I also crossed out "coffee" and wrote in "tea".

And the last page I've done so far is the aforementioned fire one. This is what it looked like before I burned it:


And this is after the fire and after being squirted with water to keep the flames from spreading:

The burned part keeps crumbling apart, so the hole is going to get bigger (you can already see the "spill tea" page and its arrow behind it). On the right page all the markers ran when the page got wet. I guess it looks pretty cool, though. :)

The left page is a quick drawing of a dragon blowing flame onto the next page. It's not that great of a drawing (the original that I based it on came out nicer. I just didn't want to spend a lot of time drawing something that's probably going to end up destroyed by more dunks in water), but hey, now my book has the first of probably many dragons. ;)

This is what my original drawing of the dragon looks like:

This one is safely in my sketchbook, away from water and fire. ;) This is a photo rather than a scan so the shading isn't as obvious here, but I like how it turned out, even if the fire does look like confetti (thanks for pointing that out, Josh, lol). I just finished reading one of the "Dragon Jousters" books by Mercedes Lackey and the current D&D storyline involves lots of wyverns and dragons, so I'm on a dragon kick again. I'm predicting lots of dragons in my sketchbook and Wreck This Journal.

Another book review- According to Their Deeds

Here's the review of the latest book I received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program (well, I won a January book, but I haven't gotten it yet). This book is According to Their Deeds by Paul Robertson.



The copy of "According to Their Deeds" that I received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program was an unedited advance reading copy, so I'm going to assume that all the grammatical errors and the like are going to be fixed when the official copy of the book is released. That said, it drove my English major self crazy and I kept wanting to attack my copy with a pen and some Wite-Out, but that's just a quirk of mine and has nothing to do with the quality of the story.

Speaking of the quality of the story, I thought it was creative and well written. I really enjoyed the fact that it took place around a rare books shop and its dealer, and I thought it was great that Robertson made quips and references to the classics throughout the story, usually as told through the main character, Charles (the aforementioned book dealer), and connected those literature references to the storyline. I think that giving Charles those lines helped give his character substance and personality, and it was intellectually amusing, in a punny way. The other characters weren't nearly as developed, though; for instance, I would have liked to have seen more depth given to the wife, who we see only through Charles' eyes as the epitome of perfect, and Angelo, their employee and ward. Angelo is an interesting character, so I wish that Robertson had gone into more detail about him; even at the end of the story, he still seems like something of a mystery.

As for the story itself, I enjoyed the plot and the style that the book was written in; there was a lot of dialogue, which I felt suited the wittiness and intelligence of the main character, and the intelligence of most of the characters, for that matter. I would have liked to see a little bit more detail given, though, especially in regards to the secondary characters, who could have been a bit more fleshed out. Overall, though, this was a good, enjoyable read, and I'll recommend it to those who like mysteries- especially if they also know something about literature, since that knowledge makes those puns that much better.

I'll give this 4 stars out of 5- even though it had some things that could have been improved, it's great as it is. :) To see more reviews from LibraryThing members, go here.