M.J. Scott's Blog, page 24

Geeking out about fan art

One of my fave things to do on Pinterest is browse the geek section and look at all the cool fan art that people make about the things that they love. So much creative talent and since starting to draw and paint myself, I appreciate it even more. Artists are awesome.

Some are awesome and funny:

Via fashionablygeek. Artist Karen Hallion.

Some are awesome and cute:

via Icanhazcheezburger. Artist Mike Joos.

And some are awesome and glorious: (I think these were official commissions for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary sold as separate pictures so not sure if that’s fan art but it’s still for fans and it’s still glorious.)

via  RiverSongisthequeen.  Artist Alice X Zhang.

I love that people love a story or character so much that they want to make art about it. I know some authors have an issue with fanfic but I don’t unless the fanfic author tried to make money from my world. And I don’t think any author would be upset with someone loving their characters enough to want to draw or paint or embroider etc them. I’ve been playing with doing a wee bit of fanart when I’m in the mood. I posted Baymax a while ago. And here’s another one I did (yes, Marvel fangirl here).

Good practice for sloshing the watercolours around in a different way. Who else is a fanart fan? Any fave artists?

 

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State of the Mel #3

Every so often I do one of these posts, mostly for new followers at various places to catch folks up on who I am, what I do and an update for everyone on what I’m working on. So …

Who am I?

I’m Melanie Scott (most commonly answering to Mel). I write books. Specifically I write fantasy (dark and urban) as M.J. Scott and contemporary romance as Melanie Scott.

Selfies are good. Have a selfie.

M.J writes dark fantasy (the Half-Light City series which is now finished and The Four Arts series which begins with THE SHATTERED COURT in April) published by Roc and urban fantasy (The Wild Side series) published by moi.

Melanie writes the New York Saints series. Book 1 in that series THE DEVIL IN DENIM came out in August 2014. Publisher’s Weekly picked it as one of their Top 10 Fall 2014 romances, so that was pretty cool. Book 2 ANGEL IN ARMANI came out December 2014. Book 3, LAWLESS IN LEATHER comes out in May. Read more/pre-order etc here.

My agent is Miriam Kriss at the Irene Goodman Literary Agency. She’s the gal to speak to if you have queries about rights to any of my stuff.

More specifically I’m of the female persuasion, I have a day job that I don’t tend to talk about much online and I have so far survived all the deadly critters that my home country of Australia likes to strew in the path of its citizens. I live in Melbourne where there are few deadly critters and a lot of very changeable weather. So I am forced to whine about the weather. It’s a Melbournian pastime. I drink Coke Zero. Coffee makes me sick (sadface). I like geeky things, movies, tv, ballet, knitting, food, photography, watercolours, baking, project life, naps, travel and books. I also have my girly moments (nails/make up/perfume/sparkly things/bags/shoes). I like to talk about all these things on my blog.

I am an experienced cat butler. My two current feline employers are the Torti (a relatively sane for a calico/tortoiseshell girl who like rattly mice and glaring out windows at birds and other cats who have the temerity to wander into her line of vision) and the Fuzzy Girl (a slightly less sane, built like Garfield, tad un-coordinated, very chatty fluffy grey and white girl). The previous employers (if you go delving into the archives) were the Orange Cat (a very sweet but neurotic red burmese boy) and the Grey Cat (possibly the most sane of my cats, a fluffy smoke tabby moggy girl). I hang out with friends of the writer and non writer variety and I am slightly prone to klutziness (maybe that’s why the Fuzzy Girl appealed to me). I am not kidding, I broke my ankle getting up from my couch. My teeny tiny garden is often neglected even though I like growing things.  I am team Iron Man, team Buffy, team Thor, team Ollicity, team Baymax, team genre, team animation, team happy endings are the best, team chocolate (preferably dark), team margarita, team ginger beer, team science, team musical, team music in general, team my heart belongs to Number 10, team reading is sexy, team thinking, team virgo, team colour and pictures make me happy, team movement is good even when you don’t want to, team glow, team don’t be a douche and team life is better with folks who make you laugh.

More about the books, please?

The Half-Light City series is an alt-world dark fantasy quadrology. It has fae and vampires and werewolves and magic and follows a bunch of characters through a particularly troublesome time in the Half-Light City which houses many races and many problems. All four books SHADOW KIN, BLOOD KIN, IRON KIN and FIRE KIN are available at all the usual places.

The Four Arts series is also an alt-world dark fantasy series. It has witches and demons and religious differences and a heroine trying not to get her life ruined by all of the above. It begins with THE SHATTERED COURT in April.

The Wild Side series is an urban fantasy trilogy which follows the adventures of Ashley Keenan who is trying very hard to be a normal boring human accountant but all the pesky werewolves and vampires in her world make that difficult. The first two books THE WOLF WITHIN and THE DARK SIDE are available at all good ebook retailers. Likewise, THE DAY YOU WENT AWAY is a free short story prequel that you can find at all the usual ebook sellers plus on Wattpad.  I am hoping to write BRING ON THE NIGHT this year in between my contracted books.

The New York Saints series is a contemporary romance series about three guys who buy the New York Saints (the worst team in MLB) and the women who complicate the process. As mentioned above, the first two books THE DEVIL IN DENIM and ANGEL IN ARMANI are out, the third, LAWLESS IN LEATHER, comes out in May and I’m currently writing book four PLAYING HARD (and then will be writing book five PLAYING FAST). The Devil in Denim is also available in audiobook at Audible for US folks and Angel in Armani will follow shortly. The first three books will also be coming out in Germany but I don’t have dates for those yet.

What are you working on?

Last two year’s writing schedule was  a bit nutty. Which meant, naturally, that life decided to sideswipe me with other stuff.  Including a four month or so bout of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo which was very unpleasant. But I caught up eventually and continue to WRITE ALL THE THINGS and DO ALL THE OTHER STUFF I LIKE.

I’m currently writing PLAYING HARD. Everything else under consideration currently falls under the heading of sekrit squirrel business which can’t be discussed publicly. But I still haven’t received either my clone army or my allocation of minions yet so projects to be completed as time allows. If you want to be updated about things as they happen, sign up for my newsletters. M.J here and Melanie here.

Tell me more…

Places I hang out include here on the blog (but hey, you knew that already). I love me some twitter and @melscott will find me there. I tend to be most active on twitter but you know, internet procrastination for the win, so I hang out elsewhere.

M.J’s facebook page is www.facebook.com/AuthorMJScott and Melanie’s is www.facebook.com/WriterMelanieScott. If you’re into Google+ I’m here. I get my fix of pretty things, recipes, geekiness and ideas for stuff on Pinterest where I’m mel_writes. If you want to keep up with the blog you can subscribe in a blog reader with the RSS feed via the button on the top of the page (or directly in Bloglovin if you’re a Bloglovin user using the button in the sidebar).

I like to take pictures, so if you like looking at pictures, my Instagram handle is also melwrites. I also post various pics on FB and twitter. I take most of my pictures with an iPhone 6 (previously a 5) and also break out my Canon DSLR. I would like a micro 4/3 camera at some point but that is filed under the category of gadget lust that must wait for funds for now.

And that about wraps it up for me. Until next time…if you have any questions, find me at one of the places above or drop me an email via either of my websites.

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Sunday snippets

Well, we are, amazingly, three months out from The Shattered Court which is the first book in my new fantasy series and three months and one week out from Lawless in Leather, so I thought I’d share a snippet from one or the other each Sunday until then. So here’s the first one.

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Getting photos out of the camera – playing with Project Life

When you take lots of photos eventually you decide you want some of them in non digital form…and looking for ways to do this led to my discovery of Project Life.

Basically Project Life produces kits of cards in a bazillion different designs (and there are other companies who do the same) that you can slot into divided photo album pages along with your pictures to add colour, thoughts and just a bit of pretty. Playing with colour is one of my catnip things, so I was intrigued as soon as I first read about Project life back in late 2012. I’ve made photobooks of trips and things before (or back in the day had photo albums) but I always felt they were a bit boring to look at and never had a good way of telling some of the story of what was happening. As a kid my nana always used to bring out the family photos going a fair way back and she knew the stories of all the people. I know my uncle has some of the information now and she did write on some of the photos but some of that family history was lost when she died.

Which makes you wonder just how much of our own histories will be gone if we all just leave photos on our computers and don’t look at them and tell the stories about them. So I bought a kit at the start of 2013 and an album and started off doing 2013 and then life got busy and I let things slide. But over my christmas break I decided I’d finish doing my 2013 album and I sat down and picked a bunch of photos out of my 2013 shots and sent them off to be printed and when they arrived back, I sat down for about six hours and made an album.

This is one of the pages from when my mum and dad and I did a behind the scenes experience at Melbourne Zoo and fed the tiger

Since I bought my first kit the whole Project Life thing has taken off in a big way (seriously, if you google or go on pinterest there are a squillion blogs and posts about project life and memory keeping). Some people do it the paper way that I did this album but you can also do it digitally in programs like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements with cards and other things that people design (including digital versions of the actual Project Life brand products) and then print out (or get printed) and put into albums or get made into photobooks. Late last year Project Life came out with an iPhone/iPad app that you can also use. So after I finished my 2013 album, I decided to use the app to do my 2014 album which I then got printed into a photo book. The app is awesome because you can make a page almost as soon as you take the pictures and then save it to various online services or your camera roll to sync with your computer later.

This year, because I still have physical products, I think the plan is to use a combination of all three. I’ve always wanted to know more about using Photoshop Elements for design type things (and photo processing) so this will help with that. I’m also going to try and do more journalling about things as I go along. Because I did 2013/2015 after the event the notes about the pictures are shorter than I might like. I think it’s important to keep a record of my own story as well as the ones I make up in my head. And I think it’s interesting to take time to reflect a bit on what’s happening during the year. That’s one of the reasons I’m trying to blog more this year. I miss getting my thoughts down and then being able to go back and see what I was thinking about things.

People do Project Life in a variety of ways, some people do two pages a week etc but that’s too much for me to fit in with everything else I do, so in my 2013 & 2014 albums I did a mix of pages about particular things like the tigers or trips or even my watercolours and more general monthly “this is what happened this month” type pages. Some months take 1 or 2 pages and some take eight. And that’s fine with me because it’s about what actually happened and what I want to talk about and how much time I have to play with the pretty at any given moment. So I’ll probably take the same approach this year. Mix up big things and little things and my paintings and whatever else happens or takes my fancy. Because that’s what life is about. Here’s a page I made in the app for this year. I’ve been trying to take a picture of the sky every day in January just because, so I thought I’d put the favorites in the album. This is the first of those pages.

I’m thinking about maybe scanning in some of my old photos that are in albums (or transferring them to project life style albums and trying to get some of those memories down too as a long term project. What about you? Do you journal or take pics? Make albums? Do more traditional scrapbooking type things?

If you want to see more of my photos, I tend to pop a lot of them on Instagram so you can follow me there. They also get put on my facebook pages (links on my websites).

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Fave things: 5 great lip products

I’m going to throw in the odd post about Stuff I like TM and because I was looking at the makeup purse in my handbag and trying to determine if I could cull anything, I thought I’d start with some of my fave lip products. Now I am a bit of a makeup girl. I don’t wear it all the time and I am definitely perfectly happy leaving the house with a naked (apart from sunscreen of course) face when I can’t be bothered. But I’ve always liked playing with makeup. It’s a fascination that probably dates back to me starting ballet at age approximately five. I like that I can change my look or change my mood with makeup. And I find watching makeup tutorials on YouTube weirdly relaxing. But that’s a topic for another time.

I’ve also always had fairly dry lips, so even on no makeup days, I’m wearing some sort of lip balm. And because I don’t like to get up early and spend forever doing my makeup, I tend toward a simple eye/brighter lip look most of the time. So fave lip products (er, not counting actual lipsticks because that would then make sticking to five too hard).

From the top going clockwise:

Nuxe Reve de Miel lip balm. This is my night time lip balm, especially in winter when my lips tend to turn into the Sahara desert. Only need a teeny bit and it stays on. I think Priceline has Nuxe but couldn’t see this particular product on their site. Nuxe pops up in chemists a lot. But Adore (where I’ve linked is speedy service and give you samples and Tim Tams in your order. Just sayin’.) Runner up in this category is Trilogy Everything Balm.

Goto Skincare Lips! This is my day lip balm these days. I have several scattered in various handbags in the attempt to not be far from one. Nice and nourishing, no nasties, smells good and is an Aussie brand started by Zoe Foster-Blake who is hilarious, writes books and is a makeup/skincare guru.

Then lip colours. Now, I do love a lipstick but these days am more likely to reach for a lip crayon. They tend to be a bit more moisturising (as a generalisation) and somehow easier.

From bottom right to left:

L’Oreal Glam Shine Balmy Gloss in I’m-not-sure-the-name-wore-off but I think it’s Mad for Pomegranate (a nice deep buildable berry pink) (the other non-department store brand I really like is Bourjois. Revlon also do one that many people love but my lips do not. And Covergirl’s are nice too and less glossy than these.)

Clinique Chubby Stick in Mega Melon. The chubby sticks were the first lip crayon type products I tried and they are still my all time faves though sadly not the cheapest here in Oz. Mega Melon is my nudeish but a bit more colour shade. They are really nice on the lips and have both sheerer and more intense versions. I have *cough* a few of these.

Nars Satin Lip Pencil in Yu. These are a more recent acquisition and very nice though more ex-y. Slightly more traditional lipstick texture with a more intense colour. This one is a gorgeous bright pink. They also do a matte version which has some great reds if you’re a red gal. They even stay mostly red on me (my lip chemistry is weird, many reds go pink on me).

So there you go, some fave lip product frivolity for when you’re in the mood. And one day, I’ll do the lipstick version. Anyone got a fave to recommend?

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Australia Day

It’s Australia Day today which means most people in Australia have a day off and are probably enjoying some food and the odd drink or two with friends. For me it’s a writing day as usual but I wanted to stop and say yay for Australia. It’s a pretty good place to live. Sure, it has some issues and needs to do better at stuff and it would be nice if it was just a leetle closer to other countries so it didn’t take eleventy billion years to fly anywhere and it would be even better if geographical restrictions on books and tv and movies would just die already but it’s doing okay. So Happy Australia Day fellow Aussies and for everyone else, well, you should come visit! Seriously, the place isn’t brimming with poisonous wildlife and we don’t have bears or tornadoes or polar vortexes. And we do have some pretty cute wildlife life our happy quokka friend below!

And no one will make eat Vegemite if you don’t want to. Though you should, it’s tasty

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Rediscovering an old favourite movie

Somewhere in one of my notebooks is a list of movies I used to own on VHS (old school) that I want to replace on DVD or digital. I have no idea where that notebook is sadly. But I was browsing through iTunes one night during my Christmas break and up popped Still Crazy.

 

Now I have a couple of story kinks when it comes to movies and one of them is a love of “finding your path/reaching a goal (or going splat in the attempt)” movies (books too but that’s a story for another day). This is the reason for my love of sports movies, my love of dance movies, my love of a lot of band type movies. The quest is a story that I just like. And Still Crazy is definitely a quest movie. It came out in 1998 a year after The Full Monty which gave the British ordinary guy quest comedy a bit of a boost worldwide. I probably stumbled across in Blockbuster (really old school) and picked it up because one of the stars is BIlly Connolly and Billy Connolly is one of my comedy gods. It’s basically the story of the former members of a getting towards pretty successful late 70’s era rock band which imploded due to the death of one of the members and the drug issues of another and what happens when they decide twenty odd years later to give it another go. It’s got a great cast, including Bill Nighy doing a pre-Love Actually turn as an ageing rockstar (I’ve often wondered if this was Richard Curtis’ inspiration to cast him in Love Actually), Stephen Rae and JImmy Rae. It’s both laugh out loud funny and a bit heartstring tugging and has a bit of a mystery thread in it as well. Plus the couple of Strange Fruit (the band’s) songs we get to hear are pretty good. Well worth a watch if you like British comedy, music and quests. Now if only I could find the list of the other movies I need!

Anyone got an older movie they love to recommend?

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The Soup

I am a soup fan but I usually reserve soup for winter. But Melbourne has turned on some oddly cool summer weather in amongst the hot spells, so soup is doable. Plus it’s generally pretty healthy and makes good freezable leftovers for day job lunches and quick dinners.

Just before Christmas I was listening to Leigh Sales and Annabelle Crabb’s Chat10Looks3 podcast (which I hope comes back this year) and Annabelle mentioned a soup that is so good her family simply calls it The Soup. Namely Bill Granger’s Spicy Vegetable and Lentil Soup. I am a fan of vegetable soup and middle eastern type spices, so I was sold but didn’t think I’d get a chance to make it until winter. Until Melbourne co-operated with a cold snap and I produced this.

And I can report it’s damned tasty. Now, I didn’t have a veggie bin full of winter vegetables, so I made it with just half a small butternut pumpkin, 1 largish sweet potato, 2 carrots (my tip is to cut up the carrots quite small as they don’t roast as fast as the other veggies also I just sprayed all the veggies with olive oil spray before tossing the spices through rather than using so much oil) and 500g of tomatoes and kept the lentils and stock and spices the same. If you’re vegetarian, just use veggie stock instead of chicken. That combination of veggies fills up my largeish LeCreuset casserole when it’s made and gives me six-seven serves (the full recipe would be more than that, I think. Or else more like a stew). It’s warm and spicy (not hot unless you want to whack in more chili, I put in 1/4-1/2 tsp of chilli flakes and that just gives a hint of heat) and filling and requires just one pot if you have a big enough oven-stovetop casserole just all round thumbs up. I don’t bother with the fresh coriander unless I happen to have some but the greek yoghurt and sumac are recommended. I’ve already made two batches and if the weather keeps being odd, I’m sure I’ll be making more (and if summer heats up, this will bolt back into the meal rotation as soon as things cool down again).

Got a recent recipe discovery to share?

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New look blog

Been doing a spot of freshening up on the blog. A change is a good as a holiday and all that. I wanted a lighter theme as I’m starting to use more and more photos in my blogs and I think they work better with white. No changes to the websites but given this blog straddles both and I natter on about all sorts of things besides writing, it can be its own thing.

Hope you like it!

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Monday tunes

Monday requires a fun song. This one is on high rotation on my iTunes since it came out. I am a big T Swift fan. She writes some great lyrics and damned catchy melodies. Plus she’s kicking butt, so go girl!

This isn’t the official video of this song but is too adorable to miss.

 

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