When book geeks turn to crime

Please think good vibes at my music partner Jodi, who had a scary experience on the highway with her husband on the weekend when some kids decided to go racing. Jodi's car was totalled, but she and James were fortunate enough to escape with just a few scrapes and bruises.



Happy birthday to Amanda Snyder!

Here's a photo of Scott and Amanda at OVFF a couple years ago:



Jeff and I continue to unpack the contents of the last storage locker. One of the boxes we've unearthed is of some of Jeff's childhood momentoes, saved by his mom. These small swimming trunks, for example, were embroidered with Jeff's nickname as a baby before his parents finally decided on an official name. Interesting (and somewhat scary) to think that I could have been married to someone named Spike:



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ComicLife

Thanks for the all the kind Aurora congrats after yesterday's post, everyone!

As I also mentioned yesterday, I have a new MacBook. Jeff spent most of yesterday transferring some essential stuff over from my old laptop, like Microsoft Word, Textmate, AppleMail, Safari and Corel Painter. Everything seems to be running smoothly so far, and Eliza is definitely faster than my old machine.

One app that came with the machine is ComicLife. You can see one of my first experiments below. It's a fun program, but seems to be mainly geared toward those who want to import photos than cartoonists.

Click on the image below to see a bigger version:



You can import images into each individual panel, but you can't use ComicLife to modify an image that isn't in Comic Life format. I created the comic above by creating the layout, adding word bubbles, saving a copy of the layout and exporting it into JPEG format, opening the JPEG file in Corel Painter, adding the drawings of me typing and talking, using the Lasso tool in Painter to copy the drawing in each frame and pasting it back into the appropriate panel in ComicLife, modifying the image in ComicLife until it was the right size and location (you can't do much other image modification in CL), importing the photo of Jodi, Sibylle and Allison, editing the word and thought balloons until they were properly placed, then exporting the whole file as JPEG. At that point, I could probably have opened the file up again in Corel Painter and added finishing touches, like colouring in backgrounds, etc.

Sounds like a major pain, but even as I was going through the process, I realized that it would get easier with practice and experimentation with shortcuts. I'm going to be experimenting more with ComicLife, and will probably use it for the occasional My Life In A Nutshell and Inkygirl comics. Here is my PROS and CONS list so far:

Pros and Cons of Using ComicLife

(I've only played around with CL for a few hours so far, so this list may change)

PROS:

- If you use one of CL's pre-made layouts, it's dead easy to set up panels.

- Lots of choice of template layouts.

- Each layout can be modified and saved.

- You can save styles.

- Easy to set up word bubbles, thought bubbles and narrative blurbs in comic-style with a straightforward drag-and-drop process.

- Easy to do a quick comic, especially using photos.

CONS:

- Word bubble set-up is limited in flexibility. As far as I can tell, you can't join up bubbles, something I find very handy when there are multiple exchanges within a single panel.

- You can't import multi-panel non-CL files. It would have been handy to be able to create the artwork and layout in Corel Painter, then have the option of adding word bubbles or other elements in Comic Life.

- No image editing in CL except for re-sizing and placement.

- It seems to me that you'd have basically the same style as others who use ComicLife. I haven't played around enough with the program to say this with confidence yet, however, so reserve judgement for now.

Jeff says he'll divorce me if I start up another comic. :-D

FYI, my comics so far include: Will Write For Chocolate, Inkygirl, My Life In A Nutshell, and Waiting For Frodo (now complete).

Computer games, Photo Booth and songs about chocolate

My new MacBook also came with some games and Photo Booth. The latter seems to be pretty popular these days, judging from the number of distorted face photos I've been seeing everywhere online these days. Reminds me of the days drop shadows were all the rage (including one incarnation of Inkspot, of course). Hey, and I have a built-in camera! Not sure if I'll be using it much...I used to have a Webcam back in my Inkspot days but y'know, I'm not so keen to have strangers peering at me while I'm working anymore.

I'll probably try out the games but end up not playing them. It's not that I don't like computer games...I just tend to get WAY too obsessed with the ones I like, pouring many hours of my life into them. The last time this happened was with SimPeople. Other of my game obsessions include SimCity, Civilization, Myst, and Rogue (the ascii version). If my tendons were 100%, I'd probably indulge in the occasional game obsession. Now, however, I'd rather spend the "arm points" doing writing, illustrating and doing music.

Speaking of music, I wrote some more of my multi-voice chocolate song for GAfilk on the weekend, scoring everything out on manuscript paper. It's not like anything else I've written (well, except that it's yet another FOOD SONG, of course :-), and I'm having some fun with it.



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Camera Obscura at the Horseshoe Tavern

Above: Had fun at the Camera Obscura concert at the Horseshoe Tavern last night with Jeff and Ray. The group is a Glasgow band that Jeff and I found out about from Ray. Despite being jetlagged, Camera Obscura put on a great show.



Will Write For Chocolate has been updated! Column topic this week: "How To Write A Query Letter."

I have an eye check-up this afternoon; I've been having one every six months every since my disturbing detached retina incident a two years ago. I don't mind eye check-ups except that one of the effects of the eyedrops is that I can't read anything (including my computer screen) for a couple hours afterward. I -hate- not being able to read, even for a very short length of time. Yay for iPods!

Just finished reading another novel for young people:

The Foreshadowing by Marcus Sedgwick. Fast-paced, eerie, engrossing. Part of the pacing is due to the short length of the chapters; some chapters are only a paragraph or two, one is completely blank(!). I'm going to check out the author's other titles. This would be a good summer read for a teenaged boy or girl who isn't squeamish.

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My Life In A Nutshell

Came up with another book idea recently. Something's obviously kicked into high gear in the creative part of my brain since my life has settled down. I'm writing everything down in my daily writing journal, of course, the fragments and plot ideas and snippets of characters dying to tell their stories, as well as gradually piecing things together for each project in SuperNoteCard. I was started to get frustrated at first, having all these ideas I'm excited about and not being able to write everything at once. But now I'm realizing it's probably a good thing, letting these unwritten books percolate a while in the back of my brain.

I got another illustration inquiry, this time from someone who was doing a Google search for something completely unrelated, found my Blatherings, then discovered (and liked) my drawings. Reminds me that I still need to do an online portfolio of some kind. People also seem to be finding me through my drawings on Flickr, but I'd like to have something more organized and selective that I can point potential clients toward.

And then there's songwriting. I'm getting the songwriting bug again, especially since our gig at GAfilk is coming up next January. I'm working on a song that both Urban Tapestry and Summer and Fall can perform together. I've never written for five voices at once before (except on paper in my Counterpoint theory classes, which isn't at all the same thing); I'm excited about the challenge!

Sometimes I do think it ironic that I graduated from the University of Toronto with a B.Sc. in Computer Science but am now thoroughly immersed in the arts. There's a part of me that wonders if I should have more regret about not knowing what I wanted to do earlier in my life but y'know, most of the value of my university days came from experiences outside of the classroom. I have a much better idea of who I am and what I want now than I did back then, and there was no shortcut to this knowledge...I am the sum of my experiences, after all.

And I'm still learning. :-)

Just finished reading:

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner is the sequel to The Thief. I enjoyed the sequel even more than the first book, probably because the main character has grown and the atmosphere is somewhat darker. I am SO tempted to buy the third book (The King of Attolia) but it's only available in hardcover. Ah, temptation...

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Happy Canada Day!

Happy birthday, Canada! Allison and Judith have written great Livejournal entries about Canada Day.



From time to time, I'm going to start highlighting some blogs I like. Like But She's A Girl...[Femina Geekoides], a wonderful blog that Jeff told me about. The author is "a biologist, an Apple/Unix geek, an audiophile, an avid reader and film buff, and an amateur (in both the inept and unpaid senses) photographer." If you read anything from her blog, do read her About Me blurb. I DO so want to meet this woman in person someday. An excerpt:

"I apparently do not have the gene for interest in make-up, clothes or celebrities. Believe me, I've tried to be interested. I've even bought so-called Women's magazines', convinced that I can't be so psychologically different from the rest of female-kind. But eventually I realized that I just do not have any interest in them, and now I just head straight for the computer/hi-fi magazines aisle. This makes time spent in the hairdressers very dull."




She's funny. She's multi-talented. She writes well. She focuses on the positive rather than whining and making mean-spirited snide remarks about people in her life (a trend in many blogs these days, it seems). Even when she complains, she does so with good humour and cutting wit. She talks about books and technology and and and oh stop reading this and go read her blog instead. :-)



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