Doctor Who Fan Art

I drew River Song last night and worked Gallifreyan symbols into the curls of her fabulous hair.  It's not my best portrait, but not my worst, and I'm kinda out of practice.  I'm thinking of touching it up on the computer because I need practice using my wacom plug in tablet and my computer drawing software.  If it turns out, I'll post it :)

The 100 Day 500 Word Count Challenge

I've started a summer challenge for myself in order not only to encourage the practice of creative writing, but also with the goal of having a completed book by the time I start my final semester at UNC.  Counting from the 15th of this month, if I write at least 500 words a day, I'll end up with a 50,000 word novel by the time I go back to school.  I thought about doing 1,000 words for 50 days instead, so that I'd have more time to edit and revise, but... baby steps.  Anyway, here is the first sentence of my work in progress:

The sun rose on the city of Spierglass, and spilled down from the Sky God’s temple at the top of the mount, down to the courts of the palaces and then further, across the inns and markets and slums of the lower city, where stone gave way and the courtyards were made of beaten dirt. 

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts

Two stands of ornamental grass

Dried and rattling

Thin, hollow, like tiny bird bones,

Sit at the north- and southwest corners

Gray decaying lavender, like a beached whale,

Quietly dies in the southwest corner

Its once blue-green leaves balding

To show the gnarled, leafless interior

Opposite sits an octopus rosemary,

Splayed and raunchy, the evergreen fronds,

The old growth, ready to spiral out green tissue

As soon as the shearer’s back is turned

Purple-blue blossoms browning,

Seeds dropping rosemary’s babies

Spider-made sails once stretched between the branches

Now even rags and tatters gone

Quince buds untwist into leaves and flowers

Variegated pink and white

Tapered, aristocratic thorns stand sentry

But snap at barest pressure

 

Christmas-day planted garlic

Reaches with narrow green fingers

Through near frozen soil

In that sunny spot beneath the bird feeder

In the center, beside the tiny three by three

Textured cement paver courtyard

The branches of the weeping willow

Make shepherd crooks for the birds to loiter

Mint, damned mint

Crowds along the west border

Through the grasses, under the quince

And tickles the corpse of lavender

I will have mint until the day I die

And when I’m buried, I will have

“She should have put down a root barrier”

Engraved on my headstone

One Million Bones

 

This is happening, November 12, UNCC campus. 

Check out the Facebook page

 

Exercise from Magical Words Blog

Ok, so I've decided this is never actually going to get done, so I'm posting it now as an unfinished...thing.  Enjoy.

Magical Words is an excellent writing blog which I skim fairly often.  This post showed up a couple days ago (probably more by the time you read this***) and I thought it was an interesting idea.  I have started the fall semester and this week has been a bit busy, so doing the exercise could also be a good way for me to remember to write instead of just freaking out about school.  Prompts are also a good thing for me.  For some reason I tend to be much more creative when I have a jumping off point rather than starting from scratch (a trait that has served me well in academics, but something that I find worrisome when thinking about the future).

Here's the basic idea from Magical Words' Catie Murphy: 

Here’s the rule: first, before you go any further in reading this entry, right-click on “leave a comment/# of comments” and open it in a new tab or window. This is really important for this exercise. The entire point here is that you should absolutely *not* read what other people have written until you’ve done yours. Please, please follow this rule.

I am going to present you with an extremely generic story point. I want you to rewrite the material I have provided the way *you* would tell it, and then keep going for a little while. Five or ten minutes, a couple hundred words, something like that. No more; this isn’t a long writing assignment.
Post your retelling of the story. Then, and only then, may you read what other people have written. Again, I ask you to please, please follow these rules, because doing otherwise will defeat the point.
Here’s your story:

Robin ran up the stairs in the tower to the locked door. A wooden bird was beside it. Robin’s heart pounded, chest tight with needing air. Robin poured water on the bird’s head and it sang, making the door open. On the door’s other side was a beautiful princess.

I won't be commenting on the actual post on Magical Words, because to the best of my memory I don't have a WordPress account and I don't want to mess with registering (you can't post a comment unless you have).  But, here is my version of the exercise:
     

               The tower was swaying with the weight of so many birds.  Robin would never have guessed that creatures as small as her animal namesake could shake a structure made of stone, but it wasn't their mere physical burden that disturbed the balance of each stone on stone beneath; it was that the enclosed air in the narrow neck of the tower had begun to slosh with their chaotic, ever-present movement, like water in a tidal pool.  Arms upraised in instinctual terror of losing her eyesight, Robin leaned against the wall and began crawling up the stairs, resting on the balls of her feet and bracing her shins on the step above.  cracks and fissures in the walls joined the intentional gashing slits of archery windows to stab the dusty, seething air with blades of light.  Twice before she reached the cracked wooden door at the top of the stairs Robin was dashed by a maddened bird, and each time she nearly fell, each collision left her with fresh blood - on her scalp, in her hair, across her cheek.  Finally reaching the door was as unexpected as a No Trespassing sign in a dream where running is eternal and the monsters behind are only ever just out of sight.
                 A nook in the wall beside the door was just above Robin's head.  Slowly, pressing her hands against the door without minding the splinters that caught and dragged and came away in her skin, Robin unfolded.  The nook was shaped like a fancy window, with a horizontal bottom that Robin could see now was actually some kind of well with water rippling strangely, and sides that were vertical for about a foot and then tapered sharply to a point six inches above that.  At the point where the taper began, there was a shelf, and on that shelf sat a wooden bird.  It was so plain it might just have been a lump of wood, but Robin knew better. 
                 The sudden, hot prickle swept across Robin's upper back, and she twitched spasmodically.
                 Water trickled in the fountain, but was voiceless in the vortex of swishing wings.  Or maybe the two sounds were so similar that they just bled into each other.  The thought of touching that dark, swirling mass made Robin's stomach clench, and she couldn't say why.  When she finally dipped her fingers in, breathing so fast and so shallow her vision was beginning to spot, the water was sickeningly warm - why had she thought it would be cold?  She dribbled the clinging droplets over the wooden bird's back and head.
                    It wasn't that the bird moved, or even became more lifelike, but suddenly new shadows appeared, outlining curves and depressions in the wood that described the essence of life; maybe it was just that it was more like the way a tree is alive, instead of the way birds and other animals live.  The maelstrom behind her cut off jaggedly.  Robin, desperate not to turn around and look, sent every muscle rigid.
                    And then the wooden bird sang.

***See follow-up post here - have I really messed around with this for two whole weeks??  I need to get going so I can go read the other entries.