Mirriam Neal's Blog, page 17

//Beautiful People: Valentine’s Edition 1.

ARADHEL SMITH AND VADIK CHAUSSER How did they first meet? They first met when Aradhel and her accipiter, Brynhedda, seek him out hoping to gain passage on his ship. What were their first impressions of each other? Aradhel said something not at all diplomatic, Chausser tossed his drink in her face on principle, Brynhedda tackled […]

//beautiful people, or, help me out here

I’m very behind on the Beautiful People meme, and the as the last set of questions was centered around Valentine’s Day, the questions are two people instead of one. I have several (okay. More than several) couples, and making decisions is hard, so I put forth to you good readers to help me choose. Some […]

//a reply

I opened my inbox and saw your email sitting there. I’ll be honest and say the sight of your name makes me need to take a deep breath and brace myself, but I opened it. You’d read my blog post. You knew ‘Her’ was you. And again, you said you were sorry. I’m not willing […]

//the art of confident friendships

I’ve been trying to write this post for over a week, but every time I open it up, dormant emotions kick up and I opt out, writing something a little less painful, something that doesn’t hit me quite so hard. Friendship is a tricky, frequently painful subject to personally discuss. I can talk about friendly […]

//colossians 3:16 + a late sketch winner

Colossians 3:16 opens with, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom.’ As a kid, I thought this verse was referring to verse memorization (duh) but reading it this time around, the word ‘dwell’ struck me and the first thought I had was, dead things don’t dwell. To ‘dwell’ assumes life. […]

//february sketch dump

It’s been a busy month – I finished editing Paper Crowns and now the publishers are working on formatting the interior. On top of that, I’ve been pushing myself artistically, taking myself back to basics and experimenting with styles. I’ve been stuck on two separate art commissions for ages now and I realized it was […]

///principled fiction, that difficult creature

“Have you written a blog post on how your Christian principles affect your writing?” Well, I hadn’t, but now I have. It’s a broad subject I want to condense a bit, so I’m going to use bullet points to touch on the most important aspects. First of all, I firmly believe in not shoving the […]

//mascara application

I’ve never liked asking for things. It makes me uncomfortable. Even as a child, I can remember really wanting something, but then placing more practical concerns in front of it – it’s money mom and dad don’t need to spend, I don’t actually NEED it, I can try to make it myself. I was doing […]

//the discipline of dreaming

A few days ago, a friend asked me what I thought about Icarus – the full story, not just the half that gets toted around as a warning not to fly too high. Everyone knows that half – Icarus flew too high, and the wax holding his fragile wings together melted. He plunged into the […]

//identification, please

a sketch of Jenny F.‘s character, Golden Lion Boy (that’s not really his name) There’s a common type of character I like to refer to as the Shell, and the Shell is all too common. It doesn’t matter what genre the book is or who the target audience is, at least fifty percent of the […]