The $15000+ Permaban

Our hopes and support are with Japan, of course.

Salon.com has a pretty good collection of ways to donate, and it’s a good idea to stick with reputable charities. Scams crop up after every disaster, and some of them, like United Way, just stick around forever. For some reason this is not common knowledge, but United Way has a pretty horrible history of corruption, greed and questionable competence. United Way just takes a percentage off the top before distributing funds to its member charities; they add exactly nothing but overhead (and occasional corruption) to the equation. Cut out the middleman.

Personally, I really love seeing the different grassroots funding drives. For example, Dreamwidth and LiveJournal have various fan-related Help Japan communities, where people are auctioning off their talents and services (the dreamwidth community is open until Sunday and Livejournal’s is open until the 26th), and YaoiCon has their own auction of goodies, open until the 20th as well.

My favorite, though, comes from SomethingAwful. Someone made an idiot of himself, and after he failed his chance to redeem himself, one of the Goons decided that he had to donate $10 to the Red Cross or be banned (temporarily) from the board as punishment. After a little discussion, another Goon pledged another $10 if the rulebreaker had to choose between matching the donation or being banned forever. Wonderfully horrible people that they are, the Goons dogpiled onto this idea, kicking off a massive fundraiser for Japan. The poor guy now has to match all of the donations or be banned forever. If he does match, he gets all the perks and upgrades the forums have to offer, and major kudos.

So far the Goons have raised over $15000.

I think he’s getting banned.

Elves, by Milli

Usually, when I commission an artist, I have at least a vague idea of what I’ll get back, some general sort of impression I’ve gleaned from a portfolio or a discussion. Once in a while I’m not so sure; I’m just impressed by… something. Sometimes it’s something about an artist’s expressiveness or flexibility that catches my eye, and I really have no idea what all those intangibles will do with my story. Waiting to see is very exciting, like being a little kid again and counting down to Christmas.

And then sometimes, after I’m done waiting, I get something back that’s so exactly right that I’m not sure anymore how I could have expected anything else.

That’s what it was like working with Milli of Lemon Kiss, on the last illustration in the Elves series.

She finished this on New Year’s Eve, about the same time that Andy finished his, and I’ve thought about it but don’t know what else to say. Isn’t it nice when things just… work?

Elves, by Andy the Octopus

It’s a little bit hard for me to share my rough drafts. I think that’s a byproduct of my creative process, such as it is; an audience makes it harder, the same way that dreams, so vivid and real when you first wake up, start to fade and slip away once you try to share them in the morning. If I keep them to myself, though, I can hold on for just a little bit longer; I can close my eyes and nudge the edges of my memory just a little bit further out, shuffling the words around and trying to piece them together in that not-quite-certain way until they feel “about right”. For any given story, I’m usually able to count the number of people who’ve seen previews on one hand, and one or two (if that many) get to see me working on it.

Finding artists is only a little bit easier. I have a little bit of a love-hate relationship with handing a story to an artist for illustration. On the one hand, I like to give them a lot of creative liberty, just for the chance to see my work through someone else’s eyes, but I can’t help sometimes but feel a little anxiety, wondering if it will come through just right.

I got very lucky with my friend Andrew Skelton (“Andy the Octopus“, as he’s dubbed himself). He’s been a good friend of mine for over a decade now, and I bounced quite a few drafts off of him, tuning as I went, so it was only natural that I offered him one version to illustrate.

He’s done a great job of setting the scene…

Café Verführen: Behind the Kitchen Doors

Café Verführen ran into a few lease problems over the past year (read: trouble getting an appropriate room, due to the shift in hotel), so instead of their usual careful pageantry, the staff scheduled a small panel on Sunday afternoon, a quick chance for them to let their guests take a little peek behind the scenes.

I find it a little bit hard to write about this, a little bit like I might have a hard time talking about Disney’s Backstage Magic tour, or maybe Dining with an Imagineer. On the one hand, as a stubbornly persistent return visitor, I take a certain thrill in knowing the little, less-than-obvious preparations that go into bringing the Café together. On the other, I wonder if a curious newcomer might return next year, knowing that it doesn’t all suddenly crystallize, and for that find it somehow a little less magical.

I did bring along a new friend I met this year, the very pretty Miss Molly mentioned at the page footers for a while now, and she was sufficiently impressed that she says she’d like to visit, if the “leasing issues” get sorted out in time for next year. I’ll send her an invitation to post her thoughts below. Beyond that, though, I’ve thought about it a bit, and just to avoid spoiling things, I think I’m going to avoid telling too much. Let’s just say that I’m still enchanted by what an amazing, beautiful little bit of fan-craft the Café is. Sometimes the most wonderful things are the most fragile, and if the Café comes to an end, I’ll understand…

… but I can’t say I wouldn’t be deeply saddened.

On a happier note, even if we couldn’t actually see the ongoing story play out, it does continue.

First and Last and Wordle

Lately I’ve been playing around with Wordle. It takes a piece of writing and pulls out the most common words in a piece of writing and applies some algorithmic magic to generate a word cloud, a bit like the tag cloud I keep at the bottom of this site.

It’s better-randomized, though, and more “cloud”-like. Sometimes its output takes a little finessing, but I’m a little bit fascinated with the way it seems to condense stories into important flashes of impression. Given First and Last and Always, for example, it almost seems to take a life of its own.