FACT 163 – the high life

or, at least, a life where you don’t get to relax that much. (>_<) nonetheless, i have been making efforts to reduce my stress level. last month, as you may have guessed (^^;) i engaged in that crazy-seeming (okay, not just seeming, it is crazy) feat of literary abandon, as they call it, NaNoWriMo. i wrote about a small group of scientists who build an android that’s so lifelike, even they begin to forget it’s a machine. it’s like pinoccio w/ a scifi twist. i got to 56000 words and decided that was enough, i’d neglected to fill enough plot holes that any reader unlucky enough to drive his readermobile over my story would break his neck inside of 20 minutes. in order to recover from the stress of this realization (yeah right, as if it’s ever been any different any other year…) i’ve been turning to the photos in my etsy shop and my artfire shop. i’ve gotten a slight up-tick in views, which is always nice, of course, and the items that i’ve updated the pictures on are the items i get more views on. it’s not a whole lot, but i do notice a sizable uptick in the number people clicking on my pictures out of the site search, so maybe all this time i’m wasting on clicking the shutter isn’t really wasting after all. (^_^) you be the judge: before: after: before: after: before: after: yeah, i think i’d better keep clicking. (^_^) i’m retaking shots of all my books, so (hopefully) my shop will be totally made over by the new year. it’s hard for me to find a happy medium between shots that are so experimental as to be unintelligable and shots that are so boring as to make them unclick-on-able, so i’ve been erring on the side of bizarre angles lately. i figure online selling is entirely visual, so i’d better make my pictures interesting. if people wanna click, they’ll click. in the meantime, i just want my shop to look awesome. plus, i like the bare sort of pictures i’ve been making lately. i like geometries, shapes, big blocks of color, and the pictures i’m taking lately is all about big blocks of BOOK against big sheets of WHITE. (^_^) in other news, i’ve been working on another arthouse co-op project. i signed up for the sketchbook project a couple of months ago, and haven’t touched the poor thing since. (^^;) my theme is “This is not a sketchbook” which is fine, because i don’t sketch. (^_^) i was going to fill it with some words of some kind, but lately i’ve been making a lot of paper, and so i thought that might be something cool to work on for the sketchbook project. so i’m making a bunch of paper of different kinds, and then i’ll mount squares of each one onto watercolor paper and label each one according to what they represent. so like, i have a nice blue one that looks just like denim, and i’ve got one that’s a nice blue with white chunks in it like clouds like the sky on a summer day. it’ll be like a tour of the world through paper. (^_^) i have of course a crap ton of paper left to make, and it has to be mailed out by the 15th, which is wednesday, for those of you keeping track. yeah. nothing like a deadline to get me up off the couch… and then i’m going to sign up for the next fiction project. (^_^) ps. for those of you who are here looking for tips on papermaking, here’s one: i use screen printing frames for a frame and deckle (like this: dick blick frames). i got two of them and removed the screening from one of them. that screen is perfect for straining paper pulp, because the screening is designed not to stick to wet things. when i used other types of mesh, the paper pulp would stick to the mesh, but it pops straight off of the screen printing mesh, and doesn’t stain easily. then you use the frame from that one as your top frame and the one with the screening still attached as your deckle. hopefully i’ll use my brain and take some pictures here tonight. we’ll see. (^^;)