S.L. Viehl's Blog, page 26

My Next Shop Stop

I think I've run out of ways to torment you all for April Fool's Day, so instead here's one of my favorite prank videos (narrated, background music):

American Beagle from Animal on Vimeo.

Coloring Book Bliss

When I reviewed the Barcelona Adult Coloring Book for Library Thing's Early Reviewers Program back in February I was at first skeptical about the reported calming, serene effects of this new trend. It didn't take more than five minutes to experience the meditative qualities firsthand, and so I became a coloring book convert. I don't know why it works, but everything they say about adult coloring books really happened to me as I worked on my pages.

My first experience was so positive that when Alexandru Ciobanu, the photographer and author of the book, offered me a paper review copy of another of his works, I said yes. I was curious if working from an actual book would make any difference, and I wanted to try some other types of markers and pencils to test how well they worked as coloring media.

Yoga and Meditation Coloring Book for Adults arrived a short time later. It's a slim, large book with fifty different illustrations to color, which range from large, easy-to-do mandalas to very intricate, highly-embellished body forms in mind-bending yoga positions. The illustrations definitely have an east Asian feel to them, but they also celebrate the female form without being crass or vulgar. I smiled when I saw some illustrations depicting a pregnant woman; that was a nice surprise.

Since there were no guide pages in this book to inform my color choices I drew on the cover art as inspiration. I liked the rainbow effect of the multi-colored body embellishments, and it freed me to do pretty much whatever I wanted. As with the Barcelona book I began by using watercolor pencils, which are the easiest for me to handle.

The only difference this time was that I used a bit less water on my brush while dampening the penciling, mainly to keep from saturating the page. I also placed a paper towel under the page to keep the watercolor from soaking through to the next page. I was surprised at how little bleed-through there was to the back side of the page when I was finished. The pages of the book are pretty lightweight, but they hold up well.

Here's how my first page came out:



For my second page I tried my artist-quality colored pencils. Because I can't use a lot of pressure due to the arthritis in my hands, I was expecting the same, poor results I had with the Barcelona book. I soon discovered that my penciling looked much brighter this time, which I have to attribute to the quality of the paper in the book.

Here's how that page came out:



I tested my fine-line Sharpie markers on the pages (and if you want to test any media in a coloring book, the best place is the title page or the back/end page), but they did bleed through quite a bit. As an alternative I bought some washable markers and erasable colored pencils, both made by Crayola, and used them to do two pages for a side-by-side comparison. The markers came out very vivid, and the tips allowed me to use both broad and fine strokes when I needed to. The colored pencils produced a lighter, more artsy result, but I liked the convenience of being able to erase any mistakes I made.

Here are those two pages:



I liked all the results this time around; I think the washable markers performed best, and with 50 colors more shades to choose from you can get a lot of shading and contrast. The watercolor penciling turned out almost as well, and gave me the opportunity to do a bit more in the way of shading and blending. The colored penciling might not have been as strong, but the paper used in the book seemed to help me get more color onto the page with them. Working from a book also didn't make a lot of difference, as this one is very flexible and lays pretty flat while you're using it.

With every page I worked on in the Yoga and Meditation coloring book I felt almost instantly calm, focused, and clear-headed. I can't explain that any more than I could with the Barcelona book. It was a very relaxing experience, and now that I have an entire book to work on I will be revisiting it every time I need to wind down and find some serenity. Since I'm a high-strung person whose thoughts are perpetually crowded, this is simply wonderful for me. I highly recommend Alexandru Ciobanu's Yoga and Meditation Coloring Book for Adults.

Font Me

Sorry I'm late posting today; my guy hurt his foot and naturally I'm the family nurse. While I'm off pampering my poor love and running him to the doctor, here's an online typography quiz you can take to find out which typeface best suits your personality.

My results:



Interesting. I would have picked something old-fashioned, like Courier New, so maybe it even fits. I just checked the blog template and I'm using Verdana for PBW's text, but I picked that because from my POV it was the easiest to read.

What typeface did you get? Let us know in comments.

(Online quiz link swiped from Gerard over at the Presurfer)

Sub Op

Spec Fic publisher Otter Libris has an open call for a circus-themed antho: "The Concept: Let’s go to the circus. Circuses are supposed to be places of joy and wonder, but they are also full of clowns and many people find clowns distinctly creepy. Circuses come into town and disappear after a brief stay, leaving behind nothing but a memory of the magic. They are homes for misfits, bearded ladies and contortionists who might be shunned in the outside world. What better environment than a circus for a story of magic and wonder that leaves you wondering if it ever happened. Give us your best wonderful, dark, or fantastic story about the circus.

What we don’t want to see: Gratuitous anything – violence, sex, profanity, doesn’t matter. If it is not integral to the story and it’s not advancing the plot or character development, we don’t want to see blood, gore, or sex just for shock value’s sake (this goes for language too). We are not opposed to violence, sex, or profanity – as long as it belongs in the story and it’s not just there to shock and titillate. Some things would be a very hard sell for us, like rape or torture of any sort, and torture of children or animals will get an immediate rejection. Think of how far we’re willing to go based on the well known movie rating system – if it would qualify for a PG, PG-13, or R rating, we’ll look at it. If it would be NC-17 or up, we’ll have to pass, thank you.

Word Count: We’re looking for stories that fall in the 3,000 to 10,000 word range. We will consider looking at stories outside this range, but they need to be just too good for us to pass up. You have a much better chance if you keep the word count within our range. Please query us before sending a story outside of the word count guidelines.

Reprints: We prefer unpublished, original fiction. You may query about reprints, but to be perfectly honest, unless 1) it’s an absolutely perfect fit for the book and so well-written that we can’t bear not to print it, or 2) you’re an author with a lot of name recognition and a significant publication history who can help drive book sales simply by being in the book, we’re not likely to accept it. Better to just send us something original.

Rights: We wish to purchase exclusive print, e-book, and audio rights for one year, and non-exclusive print, e-book, and audio rights for a period of five years after that, with the option to re-negotiate additional years of rights after that.

Payment: Onetime fee of $25 plus one contributor’s copy for the original terms of the contract. Payment is on publication.

Sending your submission: We will be accepting electronic submissions only. Make sure you put “Circus” in your email subject line. No simultaneous or multiple submissions please. Send your story as a .doc or .rtf file to submissions at otterlibris dot com. Please include your name and contact information in the document.

Submission Window: We will be open for submissions for the anthology beginning on March 1, 2016 and close to submissions on May 31, 2016. Any submissions received outside of this window will be deleted unread. We expect to respond to submissions throughout the window with a “no, thanks” or “we’d like to hold this for further consideration,” with final decisions going out approximately four to six weeks after the closing date."

Love Bill

I hope everyone who celebrates Easter had a nice holiday. Our dinner was a lovely success, and it was nice to have a big crowd around the table for a change. We're still trying to reinvent the holidays now that the kids are grown; I think just having a meal together with family and friends is a decent alternative.

I'm trying to be a bit more adventurous with my cooking, too. Last night I pulled out a big Chinese cookbook I bought from the last friends of the library sale, and skimmed through it to look for some new recipes. Near the back I found a Christmas card tucked in the pages:



Since the only person in my family with that name is not in love with me, I'm sure it's not mine. The card is in pristine condition, and probably a little older as it's made of nice, double-folded paper, not single-sheet card stock.



Bill was obviously a romantic. One of the reasons I love paper books is because they can serve as little time machines, and transport bits of ephemera like this from the past into your hands. Or you can tuck things inside them for your kids or future generations to find. I wonder if we'll ever find a way to do that with the electronic versions -- maybe someday we'll be able to add our own notes to e-books, and leave them for whoever inherits our e-readers or cloud accounts.

Have you found anything interesting lately in a used book? Let us know in comments.

Wishing You

Image credit: Subbotina

The Naturalist by Darrin Lunde

Like most American children of my generation I was taught in school to regard the Roosevelt name as mythic-heroic. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was largely regarded as the George Washington of my birth century, and his wife Eleanor a model of quiet, intelligent feminism minus the misandry that later tarnished the cause. Of Theodore Roosevelt I can recall only admiration for a man described as a fearless, rough-and-tumble outdoorsman made by an anarchist's bullet into the youngest President in history. "Teddy" Roosevelt advised speaking softly while carrying a big stick.

Darrin Lunde's portrait of Theodore Roosevelt in The Naturalist is that of the same man, but with very different insight into the making of America's first great naturalist President. For example, they never taught us that asthma crippled Theodore as a child. I found it rather heart-breaking that his father's desire for a strapping, healthy son drove Teddy to attempt to overcome his weakness by developing his physical condition. Nor had I any idea that our 26th President was from childhood an ardent bird lover, or a devoted, prolific writer who among other things published 45 books, mostly about animals. Almost everything I learned about Theodore Roosevelt in this book was news to me, which by itself makes it a must-read for anyone who wants to know the subject better.

The pickle for the modern reader is dealing with the dichotomy of Roosevelt's naturalist/conservationist views with his love of hunting, particularly big-game hunting. I think the author makes a great case for accepting that a statesman can want to protect nature at the same time he's heading out and killing animals -- often rare, borderline extinct animals at that -- every chance he has. This alternative portrait of Roosevelt is very detailed and unflinching, and although it's presented with obvious fondness for the subject it does inform, in some ways with brutal exactness.

The author provides a very readable narrative of Roosevelt's life as a naturalist, and offers a wealth of information about the many people who influenced his attitudes along the way. At times I felt as if I walked beside Roosevelt as he traveled the American West and the African plains, hunting and shooting (often badly.) I couldn't rejoice in the amount of animals Teddy killed -- almost 11,500 in Africa during one expedition -- and I kept wishing he'd taken cameras instead of guns with him. Yet while we may find his passion for naturalism via hunting reprehensible and offensive today, he was a product of his time. This founded the practices that built all those really cool animal exhibits you see in natural history museums all around the country; men like Roosevelt, who went out and shot the very first specimens.

Obviously if you're an animal lover this might be a difficult read; at times some of the more graphic descriptions made my own cast-iron stomach churn. Also, if you want to keep intact any unwavering hero-worship for Theodore Roosevelt, this is probably going to kick some holes in it, so you should pass. But if you want to get a better handle on the president who created five of our most important national parks, advanced our understanding of innumerable animal species, and used federal law to create and protect hundreds of wildlife habitats, this is definitely the book for you.

Undies

Here's an interesting (and for us ladies, painful) look at the history of women's underwear from the Victoria and Albert Museum (narrated, background music):

Underwear: From corsets to bullet-bras and back from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

Just Write

Today I'm off to write something new and post it online before midnight. Everyone inclined to do the same is invited to join me.

My link: More on Twenty-One (click on the title to go to the .pdf), with new material beginning on page 71.

For more details on Just Write Thursdays, click here to go to the original post.

Image credit: windujedi

Hodge Podge

While I was down for the count my review copy of Yoga and Meditation Adult Coloring Book by Alexandru Ciobanu arrived. Since I'm a bit frazzled trying to catch up and get ready for Easter no doubt it will come in handy. I'm also planning to use the pages I complete for another project, so stay tuned to see how I do.

I also joined BookBub, a free service for readers that e-mails me every day with an alert list of free or low-cost e-books being sold on Amazon. I was a bit skeptical at first, as I couldn't imagine getting free books every day, but they really do deliver at least one or two free titles in every e-mail. On the downside, most of the freebies are badly-written, or smut, or both. Mainly both. There's been only one history book in the bunch since I started the subscription. Still, I have snagged a couple of romances by authors who knew what they were doing -- Courtney Milan and Carrie Ann Ryan, to be exact -- so it wasn't a total waste of my time. I'll keep my account for a few more weeks to see what other pearls I can glean from the swine.

Finally, since Easter is Sunday I am going to move Just Write to tomorrow, so I don't leave poor Nex in the arms of that enormous squid thing for another week. But will Navara wake up long enough to keep her from being squid kibble? Stop by if you have a chance and find out.

Thanks also for your patience as I get back up to speed.