Because artists are lame too. . .

Good news! My qualifications for L.A.M.E. (see last post) took a nose-dive yesterday! Yay! I wrote about eight pages of a new scene. Well. . . okay, I may have written a couple of those the night before, in a desperate effort to recover from lameness and save the day. Still, eight pages is eight pages. The scene is a bit "edgier" than I had set out to write, a fact which my Facebook status yesterday can testify to: "Laini is. . . writing a scene about a naked person."

Huh. First a graverobber, then a naked person. What the heck kind of book am I writing? But don't worry: the naked person will get his comeuppance. I mean, I am not the sort to write books in which nakedness goes unpunished! Such prurience. . . I shudder.

THE NAKED SHALL SUFFER!

Wow, I sound really weird. Okay, this particular naked person might need some lesson-teaching, but that does not apply to nakedness in general. I have no agenda there. (Jim says that, speaking of nakedness, I should link you to this Sigur Ros video, wherein naked people frolic in the forest. View responsibly.)

Anyway: scene written, left at a place I'm anxious to get back to and continue. Yay! Oh, and one of my tricks for avoiding L.A.M.E.ness? Not reading fiction. Fiction exerts too powerful a pull sometimes, like a riptide. You have to swim diagonally against it to get out, and there's a good chance even that won't help. Nonfiction, even really good, parasitey nonfiction, it releases you, lets you swim safely ashore and write your own book. So, I'm holding out against fiction, at least for a few days. I have to do this sometimes, discipline myself. Especially after the bad-habit-forming and delicious last month of Cybils-reading where I basically excused myself of all other responsibilities and just read books. I must unform that habit! (Short stories are a good substitute for novels too. Their spell can be powerful, but it is cast in short little spurts.)

So, after the last post, I was sensing a need for a new L.A.M.E. seal, one for the illustrators of the world! So here it is, though I went with "artist" instead of "illustrator" to preserve the awesome acronym. The problem? There was no paintbrush icon! So I kept the quill, and added a few extras just in case: the "mad monkey," and the "zombie hunter's tools." I didn't see a cupcake icon, or maybe I'd have gone with that. You artists decide which one you like best. Oh, and this particular color scheme, it is important to note, is called "zombie hunter." I mean, what else could it be?



If you would like to play with your own seal, go HERE. It's funny how I'm still not used to the "everythingness" of the internet. I went to google images searching for a generic seal, before it occurred to me that such a thing as a "seal generator" might exist. I mean, of course someone would have made such a thing! It's like when I was wondering, as I am wont to do, how many miles away the star Betelgeuse is. I knew how many light years it was, but I didn't know how many miles were in a light year, you know? (I do know that a light year measures distance, not time, but that is the extent of the knowledge of one who was inexplicably allowed to opt out of taking physics in highschool. Why did they let me DO that? Young persons out there, learn from me. Some day you will be wondering how far away a star is, or pondering what kind of gravity other planets would have, and what factors of size or orbit might determine that, and you'll wish they had made you take physics!)

Anyway, long story short, I googled "light-speed converter" or something and found what I was looking for, and the answer is: Betelgeuse is many, many, many miles away from Earth.

That is all.