Ojalá, Selah, Lateda

he place where visual art and words meet is very interesting to me. If you are familiar at all with my dad’s artwork the source of that interest is clear. (if you are not familiar with his work may I suggest a visit to www.capehart.org in your near future.) Whenever my family gets too loud and I feel the need to run away my favorite imagined escape is to a mountaintop convent in Italy where I take a vow of silence and do nothing but pray, read and illuminate manuscripts all day, well, and perhaps a bit of gardening, often in my daydreams I have a green thumb.

Lately I have taken to drawing myself interesting drop caps at the beginning of each day’s journal entries. Some days they grow and take up the entire page. Other days they are quite simple and stark. I have been through the alphabet twice and now let myself start with whatever letter suits my fancy for the day. My plan is to scan in the best ones and make them into nice clean vector files. Then I can use them to start out my blog posts, and perhaps even each chapter of my novel if I can get it finished. I spend way too much time thinking about how I might like to layout and possibly even illustrate the story since it is still incomplete.

ASIDE: I colored my drop cap “T” in Photoshop. It’s funny how when you’ve been using a program for over 15 years you sometimes find yourself doing things the old way even though there are new and improved ways that have been around for a while. I always feel so silly when my younger coworkers see me doing something the way we would have had to do it back in version 2 before there were layers. And somehow I had missed that [ and ] make the size of your brush bigger and smaller. Wow. So anyway, I thought I would share that when scanning things in and coloring drawings in Photoshop it is really great to add a layer on top of the drawing and set it to multiply. Then you can paint all the color on that layer and your original lines stay just as they were on the layer below and there’s none of that little white space you get when you try and use the paint bucket between the lines. It’s a good thing.

Anyway… Though I have the NaNoWriMo winner badge over in the right column I have not actually finished my story. I wrote faithfully through November and accomplished my 50,000 words. I printed those out and read them over Christmas break. I found that in the midst of annoying teenager dialog, strange scenes about eating pineapple, and characters that could quite possibly be bipolar I might have the making of a pretty good story. Maybe. I went back into it and started editing, fixing grammar and spelling and deleting the stupid parts. I discovered a place where I chickened out and didn’t write what I knew the characters were asking me to write. So I went back and wrote the scene that I was scared to write and then I kinda freaked out over what that meant for the rest of the story and left the whole thing alone for several weeks. Last week I drew what some of the characters might look like for IF’s “Pale” and it got me re-inspired. Saturday I started back up with it. I am going to try and make myself write at least 1666 words a day like I did in November until I can get to the end. I have added a new gimmick to my routine. I am crocheting a scarf for my daughter. When i get stuck and don’t know what to write next I crochet two rows and then come back to it. Last night it worked very well. I wrote over 2000 words and crocheted about six inches of scarf.

Soooo, I’m going to leave this because I have 1666 words to write elsewhere and I want to also find time to use above-mentioned photoshop technique for the image I’m working on for IF’s “Climbed.” I’m using a collage/drawing my daughter made in pre-K as the background and I’m very excited about it too. I would love to have it ready to post tomorrow.