Kat Zantow's Blog, page 8

Update that maybe should have been posted yesterday

I am back from my long absence of a week. Excuses to commence below other points of interest:

Due to travel-time interference, the Tiger Print drawing will take place at the end of the day on the 5th of November. So remember to enter! If you  have not entered, there's still time to win a snarling wall-asset. Who wouldn't want a perma-snarl to wake up to?In a stunning turn of events, I won 3rd place in the Fantasy Book Review/Swift Publishing Short Story Contest. Woot! The story was 'To Ashes," and though this blurb describes it as classic fantasy/sci fi, it's probably closer to paranormal. Today begins NaNoWrimo. I am joining this initiative, sorta. Mainly I'm going to write a collective 50,000 words, to finish a novella and a half. Why piggyback NaNoWrimo? You barely have to work to write - you just surf the cosmic energies and words pour onto the page. Like this blogpost. It was empty a moment ago. Where did those words come from? 
Last week.

Dear internet. Do please forgive me. It was an absence, but I had my reasons to totally fail at updating for a week. I went on a vacation with my parents, down Virginia, and through North and South Carolina. Through a confluence of events, we ended camping in a haunted, abandoned house which for some reason had no wifi.

No wifi? Aww man.

Stay tuned for an adventure tale of travel to be posted this Thursday!

Tiger drawing Saturday Evening!

White Tiger Art + Shadowing Giveaway

White Tiger Print Giveaway & Shadowing eBook

You can win this fine piece of art by Kat (White tiger; pencil touched up with Photoshop; 8.5"x11") to put on your wall! And an ebook which would be hard to put on your wall, but knock yourself out if you want to try. Art by yours truly.Why? Because, dear blog readers, you're awesome. And I'm awesome. And tigers are also awesome. Who wouldn't want to wake up in the morning and look at that snarling face? (Pro tip: it's a great picture for new guests to come across unexpectedly. They make the best faces.)

Only one of you will be a winner (but this does not make the rest of you losers).The drawing will take place Nov 1st, to determine who acquires the snarling patron saint of white tigers and a free copy of Shadowing.

HOW TO ENTERfollow my blog (with google friend connect on the sidebar) and post a comment belowfollow @Kat_Zantow on twitter and tweet about/retweet this giveaway announcement. post about this giveaway on your own blog (link me to your post in comments below). "Like" me on Facebook and post on my wall. You can enter through multiple methods. This puts your name in the fishbowl multiple times (max 4).
Disclaimer: Entries are limited to US residents because I do not have a billion dollars for postage. Winner is required to provide valid mailing address upon email request, or else I can't really send the art print, now can I? 

Tea & Simplicity

If I did a 180, I could see this picture on the wall as I type.
Advice of the day: calm down. Make a pot of tea and relax.

There's too much of this rushing around. Though you may not feel it, there is a mental tax from multitasking. Focus on the present for once. Close the twelve hundred tabs you have crowding your browser. Close your eyes and sip a cup of tea. Maybe mint. But not if you hate mint. Try something herbal, light on the caffeine.

Imagine a plan to throw a tea party with crazy hats and cucumber sandwiches. Explain to a few confused guests that it isn't a political rally. Scratch the whole idea. Who wants to plan things when you're drinking tea? It's a drink of relaxation - unless it tastes of bitter almonds.

Fluffy Dresses vs. Moth Wings

Last time I walked around Barnes and Noble, the cover of every YA chic book had a character in a full ball gown. In many of the getups I saw, it would be awfully hard to break into a jog, let alone a sprint. I prefer my protagonists to take the novel sensibly attired in something that allows mobility. Then they can face the conflicts of the novel at a sprint, or at least a jog. And they can sneak. Every try to move stealthily in a full ball gown? They rustle. A lot. 
Of course, back in the day, I was guilty of drawing all sorts of equally useful fashion designs. These, and especially the central figure, introduce a whole new set of pitfalls in high fashion.
Clearly, I should have my own fashion line.Forget ballgowns - if people like me ruled the fashion world, everyone and their dog would go around wearing things as useful as an enormous pair of Luna Moth wings. But! If giant moth wings became the fashion standard, it would have several obvious benefits to the economy:

Doorways would need to be widened for everyday convenience. This would reemploy carpenters and construction workers everywhere and solve the housing crisis. Just think of the industry! Statistics suggest that 99% of houses have doors.We would have more manufacturing and tech jobs to allow a fully electrical wardrobe. This would be necessary to give the wearer full control of flapping and potential gliding. A powered wardrobe would necessitate more efficient portable power. This would lead to more efficient solar panels, with perks like ultraconvenient cell phone chargers in your shirt. What could be better?
This is not much better either.
At least she can move her legs.Better, dare I say, may be something lighter, perhaps with your legs free. I distrust any book with really bulky dresses on the cover. It says to me that the character will be able to leisurely glide through all the problems of the novel. And that's not what I want in a story. You have to find the right outfit for the pace. Whatever she wears on the cover, I picture as she jumps over every obstacle, through every hoop. (Can she even fit through a hoop in those dresses?)


Rule of Hoops: If wearing a hoopskirt doesn't hamper your protagonist, you may need to pick up the pace of the narrative. 

Thrones are lame.

Moonblind Monday: well, sort of.
Oh man, it's Monday already? Lame. I spent all of last week adjusting to a new part-time job that somehow managed to give me a full-time percentage of souldeath and distraction from everything useful, like creating art. But on the plus side, I've been cleaning up my art desk, laughing at old artwork, and trying to clear some space so I'll have room to smack some art into those canvasses. 
So I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss my upcoming art plans for Moonblind. The plan is thus: pictures that are awesome. 
This is not moonblind art.
This is a REALLY OLD PICTURE.What is necessary for awesome pictures is avoiding boring things. Like thrones. They are inherently flat and lend themselves to crowded and flat compositions. Fortunately, the Moonblind characters are the people doing the grunt work. They are not caught in boring compositions; they are full of action and excitement. 
As you can see in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, Royalty are pretty boring people. They spend all day sitting on thrones, which probably hurts their backs and sitting-pads, and leaves them in dull, static compositions. And as long as they're stuck sitting on a throne, they worry constantly about symmetry, looking impressive, lighting, and whether or not tigers will get hungry before feeding time. It is a dull, hard life, keeping up appearances. 
Also super old. Apparently her throne
is part octopus. Again, not quite Moonblind.Lessons learned from old art: 
-Royalty is pretty boring. I'm sticking to action-oriented protagonists.
-Sitting is also boring.
- Bright colors are cheery no matter how many skulls you sneak in.
- Thrones are boring to draw.
- Depth is in a static, needlessly detailed picture.
- I wish I had a tiger foot-stool. I guess Comma will do for now.

The Slow Death of the Desk Drawer

Weekly Wordcount: Negligable. Done a little editing. 26,000 total.
This Week's Reads: Beloved. In progress: Embassytown, Assassins
To read: Villains by Necessity (It just arrived, and it is in super nice condition. I am excited.)

Desk Drawer ProjectsOnce upon a time, two summers ago, I wrote a novel for a school thing. This was an inherently bad idea, because I set upon the project from the lens of wondering what the school like to see - not what would I like to write. 
This story was not a fun romp. It was a turgid, pretentious piece of work, an uneasy mix of college lore, depression, and the ways in which people are pathetic. All is tainted with modernism. The biggest influences were Death of a Salesman, Long Day's Journey into Night, and the memory of a hurricane that left my house powerless for a week.
I have long wondered what to do with the thing. It sits there, in that metaphorical desk drawer (it's on my computer, in a folder somewhere). I take it out once in a while and see if enough time has passed, and has revealed to me how to fix the story. Every six months or so I think I am ready to renew the project, to finalize it once and for all, and turn it into an ebook. But I can't, because it doesn't quite work. 
Why not?

It lacks tension, stakes. The characters are bitchy. And what is the conflict? The characters are their own worst enemies. Who cares about hurricanes and fires? There is no connection between internal and external conflicts. Everyone fights themselves and mopes about the state of things around them. 
It's a day, a tense day. It might help the thing to deal with the consequences. My current pet theory is to interlace another day, or series of days, three weeks in the future.

And then everything is reveled to be zombies. Zombies are the cure for modernism. 

Banned Books: A Study in Shame on my old school district

Last month the Albemarle County school district, which sits all around Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, made international news for banning a book. What could have been a bit of local headshaking (though I missed any local coverage) was picked up in news articles from DC to LA to the UK. Everyone was bewildered and offended on behalf of the beloved series.

What salacious novel did they strike down?

Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yes. Sherlock Holmes.


This lurid tale of murder, mystery, and machinations is no longer suitable for 6th graders.

Why was it banned? It presents Mormons in a negative light, and provides an incomplete view of their religion. I wonder if school districts could ban all books that present topics with a negative bias. I wonder what would be left to read.

Disclaimer that I found in the comments of the UK article: poster claims the tale of the book's banning has been blown slightly out of proportion, as it was not banned exactly, just stricken from the reading list due to an offended/concerned parent. Students can still find this book, as well as other Holmes tales in the library. So there's some hope for the avid reader.

The Vanished Villains by Necessity

So once upon a time, I scheduled this blog to be posted, and blogspot said nope. Or maybe lulz, you think I'm in your timezone?


Wednesday-Wednesday Weekly Wordcount: 5,500 added to Gloaming, of 26,000 total.
This Week's Reads: Marathon Man, some Embassytown.
Happy Banned Book week! I have an embarrassing banned book story that I'll tell you Friday. But today I'm going to cry about a book that was not banned. 
But it is gone. 
And its untimely absence leaves me sobbing into my pillow on dark lonely nights. 
I wish I had gotten a copy of Villains by Necessity by Eve Forward, when I had the chance.

Out of print on Amazon, vanished from my library, new copies running at over a hundred bucks a pop--it's out of reach. And it isn't on Kindle or Nook, which is pretty criminal if you ask me.

Back in middle school, this was my favorite book ever. It was new, it was different, it was a revelation that not all sf&f was confined to the transposed plots of The Black Cauldron and Lord of the Rings remixed a little and thrown on the page. It was a revelation that there could be fantasy outside of the hundred farmboys prophesied to save the world, the weak females, and the sickeningly lawful knights.

No, this was a tale of the villains, and they were much more fun. It combined humor and darkness. It quite possibly began my obsession with assassin-characters. It subverted cliches, without giving way to the chasm of postmodernism. It was filled with action and adventure. It did not regurgitate the narrow range of morals and divine right of kings everything else pushed.

It was, along with Vlad Taltos, the strongest influence on Shadowing .

It was the best book.

Of all time.


...or at least that's how I remember it, and that's how it'll stay in my mind, because it is quite firmly out of print. And it doesn't seem any amount of clicking Amazon's "I'd like to read this book on Kindle" has changed that.

Moonblind Monday and Fever Dreams!

As I get deeper into Moonblind book 2 (sequel to Shadowing), I am doing an art push. Expect dragons, Knights, Overlords, and almost demotivational style character sketches.

Art of the week: What is a Moon Dragon?

I would have posted this at some reasonable hour, but have a terrible cold with fever and chills, and I may or may not have woken up just before two o clock today from a vivid dream.

The dream was of a team-style version of The Hunger Games. I think it was freelancing army types with guns that were trying to kill us for the audience's entertainment. Rather than strangers, we were a close-knit team of seven kids that had been raised up in a cultish and hard-labor situation. I'm not sure if the games were going to change and go all Hunger on us to determine a winner. Probably would.

Comma was there, but she was a cute little robot-cat full of little robotic beads like huge nanoparticles. The sponsors briefly drained out her robot beads and left her as a 2d puppet until I complained enough that they refilled her back fully functioning. She continued to be ornery, but I dragged her along so she would not get blown up. Oh dreams. Always crazy.

...And without further tangent: Moonblind Art of the week!

Possible Omnibus Cover!Get excited for next Moonblind Monday!

Art Update

Fig 1. Look to Moonblind Mondays for moar
dragons! Probably with more body mass.You have have noticed some changes to the blog. Slick new..teal? Turquoise? Blue? (With three faces, two sheep, one dragon/squid - find them all!) Because clearly I need to clash with all the artwork I'm going to be posting. And I am going to be posting artwork. I'm officially making a commitment to...a thing a week. Moonblind Mondays for fantasy art!

Yep. Fall remodeling. As much as I loved staring at that cup-o-joe, it was a stock picture, and really, we can't have that. Dormant-artist-Kat has awoken from a long sleep, and she won't stand for any generic background. I finished two art commissions this week. Now I can fill my car with gas over nine times times! And more importantly, I am back to the hopeless addiction of creating art.

Back to the blog, and the background. I knew I needed a new one. I lazily thought "hey, I'll stick a boring gray rock up! I have one I photographed from the Henchman cover."

! Little did I know that blogspot only took 300k files. And that an 1800x1600 file saved to be 300k is impressively blocky. But this was all learned quickly enough. Thus I turned to tiling as my sole hope of regaining detail.

! Little did I know that I would lose about six hours staring at it, putting puzzle pieces together (amid flashbacks to tessellations in seventh grade geometry), slowly making the tile bigger and bigger, then drawing creepy faces out of the shapes (all in the name of of apophenia!)

By monday I'll have some Moonblind art.

Fig 1. This is my favorite bookmark that I made in the bad old days of my artistic strivings. And yet, like most people who read books, I end up using random scraps of paper instead. A metro card. A movie stub. A tag for some piece of clothing marked down to $9.

I was considering making some artistic new bookmarks. But then, for the moment I've only got an ebook. Does you ever use real paper bookmarks?