So.

What I am trying to say is that from now till Friday I am blocking all my usual web venues except Twitter (which I need for Accountability Tweets, although I’m hoping to limit my use outside that). After that… I’m not sure. I have a hunch that I need to cut out distractions and focus a lot harder on finishing my very last semester (fourteen weeks left! :O) strong and focused. I’ve taken school-driven web breaks before, and if ever a semester deserved it this is the one, because there will not be another one.

Thus, you might hear from me again Friday. Or you might not hear from me until May. Or some point in between. I’ll still be on Twitter a bit, as I said. I’m always available via email, though it can take several days for me to reply (also, I do have notifications turned on for a lot of sites, though this is a less reliable way to get hold of me).

Catch you on the flipside. Stay discolicious, spacechums.

–Camille LaGuire

This makes me feel about a million times better about my compulsive need to draw comics and half-comics and demi-comics and weird semi-illustrations and things-where-I-play-expressions-off-each-other-with-disembodied-faces. I have always secretly felt like this makes me a Bad Person who is Lazy and needs to Focus on Making Illustrations or Something Legitimate Like That.

Which, well, may still be the case to a certain degree. But for me, drawing those weird “lazy” things is an integral part of how I play and replay scenes in my head and grow characters. It’s nice to know that someone else does this (albeit apparently without sketching), so it is actually a Thing and not just an Excuse to Justify My Unconscionable Laziness (my conscience likes capitalizing things, did you notice?). In fact, I suspect that the You Cannot Draw Because You Must Feel Guilty About Thesis* miasma that has been keeping my sketchbook stalled at the two-thirds point for a while is also why I feel like I can’t get at my characters or their stories, either.

ANYWAY! I pass this on because maybe it will encourage someone else.

*You thought that was going to read “Work on Thesis,” didn’t you. Truth be known I have time and to spare to WORK on the thesis, but there is never enough time in the day for all the fretting.

I am settling into the semester, hammering out a few pages of thesis here and there. Also I’ve started my piano lessons and TURNS OUT playing the piano requires lower-back strength in order to support sitting with decent posture during practices. So I’ve also started exercising, which I undoubtedly should have been doing anyway. “I want to feel good” was always such a vague reason that it couldn’t motivate me, whereas “I want to play the piano without pain” is sufficiently precise to, hopefully, keep me on track.

Other than that, you know, the usual semester stuff. I’ve been brooding on a few blog-related things in my spare time, which may or may not result in posts at some point. We’ll see?

For now–Linus, clothing design, and crazy Coptic monks lie below the cut!

I knew there was another story after the end of the Linus novel, but I saw it as a short story, loosely connected to the events of the novel, and more to satisfy my curiosity about what Linus does than anything else. At the same time, the conclusion of the novel didn’t please me–it ended at the right spot, dramatically, but it left so much unresolved. Which is when it dawned on me that the loosely-connected short story might actually be a full-length sequel addressing some of the unresolved issues in the first novel.

Which is exciting!

So, you know, me and Linus dancing. It seemed appropriate.

Well, I mean, except where it’s not, because Linus is still a wreck and I am simply trusting the process to fix him.

You know, as I contemplate (I can’t help doing so) the possibility that I am going to be able to really get back into blogging and writing and art in a few months, I start to wonder what I’m going to do with some of the stuff I’ve already written. And… I really want to share it! Like Linus, I really want to share his story. I’m still not sure what the right path is to do that, but I’m determined to find it and take it.

The portraits aren’t what I’d like them to be, but the ink doodles aren’t nearly as funny without them, so. Portraits are something I want to work on along with the fifty bajillion other things I need to level up in, artwise (this is both exciting and frustrating, because I am pretty sure I CAN level up, but not… you guessed it, until I graduate).

The thing he keeps doing with his hands is probably because they are still kind of weird and weak after his injuries at the end of the first novel. Which, yes, may make playing the piano a lot an interesting challenge.

Once upon a time I drew this suit on a few characters, and I still like it so I drew it again.

Okay, this. This requires some explanation. See, in junior year I did my big Historical Research Methods project on the Desert Fathers, a bunch of Egyptian monks (called “abbas”) living out in the desert enclaves of Scetis and Nitria in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, or thereabouts. My primary text was the Apophthegmata Patrum, the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers,” a collection of stories and sayings by/about these monks. I won’t go into my project (the title was “Infractions in the Apophthegmata: Methods of Discipline, Attitudes to Sin, and the ‘Holy Lie’” for the curious), because the real story here is that the Desert Fathers were crazy awesome dudes. Abba Anthony, whom I drew here, went around fighting demons and living to 105 and generally being a crazy holy man.

The thing is, my love for the Desert Fathers clearly transcends the bounds of scholarship. Periodically, I contemplate the idea of putting together a book of retellings of some of my favorite Apophthegmata, in a form for children. I think they would make the kind of book I would have LOVED as a kid, although I’m not sure who would actually buy something like this for their offspring. In the course of daydreaming thus, I’ve doodled my favorite abbas a few times.

Abba Arsenius was a very important man in The World, and when he renounced all that he became very partial to silence and solitude. He comes across somewhat grumpy in several stories.

Abba Moses is possibly the craziest of the Desert Fathers, although that is a hard call to make. He used to be a criminal, but he repented of his wickedness and became a holy man instead. He goes around giving people a hard time about being judgmental, and generally being amazing.

Abba John the Short is probably my very favorite, because he features in the story I like best, that of the Forgetful Old Man. Abba John is sometimes disruptive and troublesome but, like most of the Desert Fathers, also very generous.

Abba Mark is one of the youngest abbas, and I drew him with a pig because one of my Historical Research Methods prof’s favorite sayings is about how Abba Mark was so obedient to his elder that he agreed that a pig was a little buffalo. I think you may have had to be there, or else be my professor.

But wiki thoughts raise for me the question of publicity, which ties to larger questions. Most of my info is for stories that are either unwritten, partially-written, or written but unreleased into the wild (and mostly no longer in fit shape for release, ahem). That, to me, is a major complicating factor. Would putting so much story info together in a public wiki diminish reader interest in the stories themselves? I have this same concern about my blog archives, actually, which is what makes it an urgent question at all. Periodically I feel the urge to purge, because the weight of all that info I blithely revealed in image descriptions troubles me. Partly because maybe I’ve given too much away, maybe no one is interested in the stories now (although then again, my experience has been that people are not very careful readers of my posts and tend not to remember all the plot stuff I blathered two years ago). Partly also I feel trapped by a lot of stuff I’ve committed to “in public” that has turned out not to work.

Or is this another iteration of my continual desire to wipe out my Internet traces in the unrealistic hope of somehow “starting fresh” and THIS time I’ll know what I’m doing and do it right? This is all too likely. I’ve left a trail of deleted blogs and emptied archives in my wake over the years, and I am an ace at editing my past without any clear sense of what good the exercise actually does.

I don’t know.

Maybe I need to get some (non-Marigold Woman*) stories into shape and get them out into the wild (a whole ‘nother can of worms) before I’m ready to answer this question.

I’d appreciate your thoughts, readers and fellow writers and general peoples. In fact, that’s precisely why I’m sharing these worries, because I don’t know which end is up and I’d appreciate other perspectives.

* Meaning that the Marigold Woman is less of an issue because I feel no need to give any information about that, even though maybe I should. But it started as a prose experiment to which plot was secondary, and I like keeping it on that footing even if it has grown a plot by accident.

O pulchrae! O pulchri!

O honey-Latin dulcet ones, Vergil tilts his head to one side, marveling at the Greek. In the wings his Italian acolyte waits impatient, to tour the dead the dead the dead.

No need, Alighieri, the dead the dead the dead whisper hiss susurrate their peculiar preoccupation with my failures continually. Take a tour of my skull, sir. I think there are popes here.

Mother Mary cradles her son, and what good is a thing done decently and in good order? Yet the bread is the same, the wine is the same, the air and fire reach down on lightning fingers though no one knows for sure what path they take. That flash frightens the dead the dead the dead for five seconds of perfect sky. Their bones rattle and fade.

Who can discern this?

The footfalls of the elephants, that sound, disrupts the silence. Their hides are painted with bees. They fill the lawn with the smell of their dusty backs, they knock over the gnome and dance solemnly amongst the tall grass. Everyone watches from the safety of the long portico. Where are the prophet and the Marigold Woman? Does anyone know? I’m sorry, sir, they’re still out. Would you care to leave a message? Yes, I would. Withoureyesturnedinward howcanweseeGod? At the tone, sir.

This is the last dance, but the dead the dead the dead are intent on spoiling it. Their hissing disturbs the elephants. If someone–someone who is now sitting in the window-seat wrapped in a blanket–could walk onto the lawn and call halt, perhaps the elephants would discharge their duties and return to Carthage for the last time. But the window-seat and Carthage are both a million miles away, out with the stars but unable to sing with them, wheeling interminable cycles in the cold and the silence. Earth looks very small from here.

The elephants try to keep dancing, the bees on their sides wrinkle and ripple, the dead keep hissing, no one quite knows what to do.

Soon, someone must arrive. Perhaps it will be Mother Mary with a crowd of saints and abbas, and we will dance with them instead of the elephants. Until then, is there nothing to be done?

God only knows, sir.

So. Yes. That is the state of me, largely. Don’t expect much brilliance or discussion-provoking posts for… another eighteen weeks.

I do, however, have art queued up for the next eighteen weeks! Including some silly cat drawings I did as a reward for finishing the request event.

The inevitable Theo!Cat, who has the most unrealistic colors and pattern in the world but by now it’s a matter of this being the pattern he has whenever I turn him into an animal, nature or no nature. I did try to tabby it up a little. Ish.

Saul!Cat’s appearance is also pretty well established (as a British Shorthair mix, appropriately enough), because cat symbolism goes especially well with Saul (ironic, since he hates cats!). I tried a more classic tabby pattern on him, because I’ve been studying tabby patterns lately. They are fascinatin’.

What kind of cat is a Ritchie!Cat? I always have this problem with Ritchie and animal symbolism–he just doesn’t lend himself to it–but when Wiki told me that the Savannah Cat was the tallest domestic cat breed on record, that was not a hard choice. He, too, has semi-unrealistic coloration. I started with the intention of leucism but couldn’t resist adding spots, which spoils the effect (actual leucistic servals–savannah cats being part serval–don’t appear to have spots). So he’s just vaguely pale.

Does this… does this really require explanation? Oriental Shorthairs have weird faces and bat ears. The connection was fairly obvious. I had a hard time giving Cass!Cat suitably weird white-blue eyes, though, because a lot of my crucial markers are dying (resupplying my markers is on my long, long list of post-graduation goals, though it’s also dependent on acquiring the money).

EVEN THOUGH Simon does not have a smushed face, a Simon!Cat is very clearly a Persian to my mind. I may be doing Persians a disservice here; I’ve never actually met one and don’t know much about their temperaments. They just look Simon-y.

Linus is almost as hard to get a bead on, animal-wise, as Ritch. I settled for a probably-part-Oriental mix. The spots are because I felt like adding spots, and if I drew Linus!Cat again (not likely, he’s just not a cat person) I would probably omit them. I think.

Gosh, spots sure are fun.

And finally, of course, my own cats.

I’ve decided to compile all the request drawings in one big fat post, in case you don’t want to go through expanding the comments on the initial entry.

In a couple of days I may post the silly cat drawings I did for myself as a reward for finishing.

(WARNING: 33 images below the cut)