I took 9-year-old Amy and her friend to the paint-your-own pottery place last week, and made this masterpiece. I borrowed the saying from an expensive mirror I saw at a store. (Does that count as plagiarism? I hope not.) I painted splotches of rainbow colors on the plate, covered them in a coat of blue, and then scratched the design in the wet blue paint. It looks like I should have added another layer of blue, but I'm not sure if the scratching technique would have worked through a dry layer of paint. I guess it looks cool enough as-is, though. And I do love that saying, and send thanks through the ether to whoever came up with it.
I've also started knitting my felted laptop sleeve. It took me two tries to get my practice swatches to felt (by washing the knitted wool in hot water.) My 6"x6" square
shrunk to 5"x5", which means I have to knit the sleeve that percentage bigger than the laptop and then hope for the best. Pictured are my
felted swatches, and the bottom of the laptop sleeve, with the front and back spread out a bit and the left and right edges starting to build. Other than that, I've been getting a lot of sleep. I've had a bad migraine this week, thanks to letting my rechargeable ONSTIM battery die as sort of an experiment. It proved to me that yes, my ONSTIM IS doing its job. My migraines have been less severe lately, even though they I still have them every day. Even though I only left the ONSTIM off for a few hours, it's taking me days to recover. I won't try that stupidity again. Thank you, Medtronic, for your wonderful device.
Work on Spinning Coins is slow (not enough brain cells to be creative lately), but I have started some preliminary research on the Reformation in France for a sequel. Oh, and I renamed a fairly major character in Book 1 with a name I found while doing the research for Book 2. It's going to be an adjustment for me, because I know and love him as Oscar, but Oscar is now Josse.
My biggest struggle at this point is over the use of profanity in Book 1. Polly, my atheist character, most certainly does use the occasional four-letter word. So far I've limited her to what you could hear on network TV. But there's situation in the story where even I, a staunch non-swearer, might be tempted to use a much stronger epithet. A "weaker" word doesn't get the emotion across in the same way. I don't want to alienate or offend any potential audience, though, and I've been assured that using this word would do just that. Comments on this issue are most welcome.
Your plate is quite pretty just as it is, and I like the saying, too. I think I've seen it on a Mary Engelbreit calendar or something.
ReplyDeleteLike I said before, you could use expletive-deletive symbols in the novel. You have to think of what a potential publisher would allow in a YA novel as well.