I think I can start swearing on Echinacea now. I was rather severely ill last week, and this week I’ve had a cough that I could NOT seem to shake. Unfortunately, no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find a pure echinacea tea which I’ve always used in the past to fight respiratory and sinus infections (I have both!) and throat-related problems. Most of what I was finding was blended with at least twenty or thirty other ingredients, just about killing its potency.

Well, hurray for Russian pharmacies. I can’t read the writing, but I sure can read the pictures, and I found me some Echinacea! I’ve had one cup and already the congestion is loosening in my lungs and head, and I can breathe better. I’ll probably end up also doing a steam therapy later; it’s where you pour steaming water into a bowl, place a towel over your head, and breathe it in. If you add some dried leaves or an essential oil (in this case, echinacea), then you can get the benefits of whatever you infused in your lungs as well. Drinking it really only does half the job. You sorta gotta breathe it as well. IMHO, echinacea especially works best that way.

Now only to find some goldenseal as well.

I swear … echinacea is possibly the best thing for a respiratory cold I’ve ever used, and that includes meds. It’s one disgusting-tasting cup of liquid relief. Tastes like unwashed flower roots.

Actual letter to nieces and nephew, lol. I’m looking forward to their responses:

—–

Hello Claire! Hello Amelie! Hello Sawyer!

This is your Auntie Becca writing from New York. We got TWELVE INCHES of snow today! I wish I’d had my camera while I was walking through it. It looked like the whole world was drowned in powdered sugar.

How are you doing today? Mimi told me you got snow, too! Did you make snowmen? Did you eat any of the snow? Don’t eat the yellow snow! Only eat the white snow!

So what is a day like for Auntie Becca? I get up early in the morning (before the sun is up!), throw on my work clothes and then my cold-winter clothes on top (Gloves, scarf, hat, jacket, and boots) and head to work. Every day, I take the subway. It’s a big train that runs underground. It costs $2.25 to take one way. Can mommy show you how much that is?

When I get into Manhattan (that’s the fancy name for New York City), I am surrounded by tall, tall buildings, a hundred times taller than any tree. Do you know another name for a tall, tall building? A skyscraper! Because they scrape the sky, of course. :)

I work at a publishing company. Do you know what a publishing company does? We make books! We pay writers to write and artists to draw. Then we print their books and sell them to stores where people like you can buy them. Mimi told me you have a few Fancy Nancy books! That’s one of the books we sell! (And there’s a few more for all of you in the mail).

We also publish adult books (those are books for big people like mommy and daddy). We publish books about cooking (Mommy has a lot of those!), visiting different countries, art, and all sorts of things! Everything! If you can think of it, we probably publish it.

Every night, after work, I take the subway back home (what is a subway again?). It takes me an hour to get from work to home. While I’m on the subway, I like to write. It’s not very fun just sitting for an hour (can you sit still for an hour with nothing to do?), though sometimes I like to watch the people. There are LOTS of interesting people in New York! I bet when you play dress-up with mommy’s clothes, you don’t look much different!

Except in winter. Most everybody wears black. I don’t know why.

When I get home, I make dinner (or heat up leftovers), and then I sit at my desk, and I write.

And write.

And write.

And write.

And when I’m done, I take a shower, curl up beneath my bedcovers, and go to sleep.

And then the next day, I repeat!

Though of course, on the weekends, I do other things, but I’ll save that for another email!

What’s your day usually like?

Love and hugs and snuggles,
Auntie Becca

—–

Of course, *I* like the little kid books. :D

Apparently HC liked me so much, that even though my contract comes to an end on Friday, they’ve already asked me back, starting Monday, under another manager.

The irony? I’m replacing the girl who’s replacing me.

Looking forward to meeting my new boss. :) I’ll be working in Adult sales this time around (please, oh please, don’t make me stare at Sarah Palin’s sales figures all day). I’ll miss all the children’s books, but I’ve stockpiled enough Fancy Nancy’s in my cubby to keep me content until I start jonesin’ for more. ;)

Fancy Nancy makes the world go round.

What my daily four to five hours of writing is like:

Write on subway for hour while traveling to work. Write for hour during lunch break. Write for hour on subway ride back home … if I can find a spot to sit. Evening trains are considerably more full than my morning train. Get home. Fuel up. And erase the entire last three hours of writing. Rewrite what was a couple hundred to a few thousand words to a third of its previous existence.

I think I spend more time writing things I eventually erase than I do writing what I end up keeping. It’s a lot like drawing a comic page, though: even an initial rough penciled page usually involves pages worth of drawings and sketches and thumbnails just laying it out. My writing process seems to work the same way: scribble furiously in the margins for hours in order to get that half to full hour’s worth of credible content.

My temp position at HC is up at the end of the month, so I’m taking a week and a half off to work on “Jane’s S.O.S” and “Jeannie Carnini”. As much as I enjoy this job, I’m happy to be getting the break to work more solidly on my personal projects again. It’s only been a month, and I’m experiencing the pangs of loss from not being able to work on my comics full-time. Snatches here and there aren’t enough. I think temp work agrees with me!

Last week, I was terribly sick, and I’m only just now starting to recover. Congestion, throat, and lung issues, and feeling like a leech was stuck to the back of my spinal cord, draining every ounce of mental energy from my brain. Spent my few semi-lucid hours watching Harry Potter and Indiana Jones. The latest Harry Potter, “The Half Blood Prince”, was so beautifully directed and composed I ended up watching it twice. Without a question, the best Harry Potter movie so far. It even beat out “Prisoner of Azkaban” which was my previous favorite, and that, honestly, was the only movie I liked better than the book. Though I can’t say that movie six was better than book six. The book “The Half Blood Prince” was so exponentially better than any other that it couldn’t even compare.

The music in “The Half Blood Prince”, however, was what made it truly stand out for me. The composer, Nicholas Hooper, moved away from some of the tired tropes of the earlier movies, and composed scores that managed to capture the essence of the previous Harry Potter music themes, yet played with an originality, diversity, and finesse that every musical scene sparkled with emotion and depth. I ended up downloading the soundtrack, and the entire movie unfolds through the score alone. I’m reminded of “Peter & the Wolf” in that every character has a unique sound or instrument perfectly suited to their temperament and theme. And while the score is generally very simple, it’s rarely repetitive and musically directed with the kind of emotional skill you find in modern music, not classical. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a classical soundtrack, and having once wanted to be a composer myself (Didn’t realize I was an avid music student all through middle and high school, did you? Why do you think I got such a late start with my art?) it’s refreshing to hear emotive, compelling music that isn’t over-composed or cliche.

Anybody who’s a fan of a broad range of music that explores the depth of human emotion and thematic mood really should check this composer out. Very few are so skilled in their craft.

On that note, back to work for me. It’s only ten, so I still got a few hours of writing time left. Less deleting, more saving. :)

I’m happy I feel a little more adjusted to my HC job today. I don’t feel as exhausted as I did every evening last week. I even managed to work on some writing during lunch and on the subway today. We’ll see how I manage tonight.

But at least the immediate desire to curl up and go to bed as soon as I got home wasn’t there today, and I feel neither exhausted nor hyper alert like I normally do as the evening wears.

I have, quite possibly, the most amazing friends in the world. Here is proof a la what awaited me on my doorstep when I arrived home after a long day at work. I hope I didn’t damage it stumbling over it, lol! It’s wide format, like my old scanner!:

All it said on the box was “Rivkah” and my address. Apparently my boyfriend knows, because the anonymous friend had to ask for my address, but he’s not about to tell me! And I won’t push!

Whoever you are, thank you! This is a true blessing, and I’m guessing you’ve seen all my poorly-shot photos of art in the last few months and got fed up without any real scans, lol. I promise to fill mucho, muchos art on it and to make an endless stream of beautiful books. :) You’ve made my year.

Now I REALLY can’t wait to get paid on Thursday. Then I can pay for my letterpress class and really get crankin’! I don’t think I’ll have much to draw in the next few weeks because of work, but it should be enough to leave me a month or two padding until I decide to take on the next job (ah! The beauty of temp!).

Now, back to work! And eating!

This is so f’ing FRUSTRATING. Every time I start to get into a project–REALLY get into it–money problems rear their ugly head and I have to, AGAIN, put a halt on my work to raise enough for rent.

I really like my new job, and it pays really well, but …

Three years of this. When am I finally going to be able to get back to and finish my comics? So many projects flooding my drawers but put to the side for love of having a roof over my head and food on the table.

But I’ll keep going. Through the cloudy water. Down that muddy lane. One slow molasses step at a time.

*sigh*

I get home every night now and fall straight asleep. I’m so exhausted I can do nothing more than read. But looking on the bright side of things, at least I’m making money now, especially in a business I love, and that means I can take the letterpress class I want and save up to print my books the way I want instead of caving and selling to a publisher because desperately need the money. I’m not taking the same route anymore that I took with Tokyopop. I don’t want to publish my illustrated work through publishers anymore if I can help. I enjoy being my own publisher, and I’m going to take what I learned and put it to use. Finally.

It just takes time. And patience. So much agonizing patience.

And a whole heck lotta love.

—-

I think half the exhaustion is that commute. With walking plus train, it’s three hours of traveling each day. Ouch!

This is an afterward Ray Bradbury wrote in the 1979 edition of “Fahrenheit 451″ about censorship. All bold are my own stresses, but this is it from the back of his book (and my favorite novel, you should read it if you haven’t yet, because otherwise you’re missing one of the most valuable pieces of fiction ever written) verbatim:

——

“About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader.

In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”

The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.”

Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant, and Bierce, into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito–out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch–gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer–lost!

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like–in the finale–Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention–shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?

How did I react to all of the above?

By “firing” the whole lot.

By sending rejection slips to each and every one.

By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Fire-Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.

“Shut the door, they’re coming through the window, shut the window, they’re coming through the door,” are the words to an old song. They fit my life0style with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the damns and hells back in place.

A final test for old Job II here: I sent a play, Leviathan 99, off to a university theater a month ago. My play is based on the “Moby Dick” mythology, dedicated to Melville, and concerns a rocket crew and a blind space captain who venture forth to encounter a Great white Comet and destroy the destroyer. My drama premieres as an opera in Paris this autumn. But, for now, the university wrote back that they hardly dared do my play–it had no women in it! and the ERA ladies on campus would descend with ballbats if the drama department even tried!

Grinding my bicuspids into powder, I suggested that would mean, from now on, no more productions of Boys in the Band (no women), or The Women (no men). Or, counting heads, male and female, a good lot of Shakespeare that would never be seen again, especially if you count lines and find that all the good stuff went to the males!

I wrote back maybe they should do my play one week, and The Women the next. They probably thought I was joking, and I’m not sure that I wasn’t.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-hear or water-conservationist, pro-computertologist or New-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run, and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” so it shapes “Zoot,” may the belt unravel and the pants fall.

For, let’s face it, digression is the soul of wit. Take philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet’s father’s ghost and what stays is dry bones. Laurence Sterne said it once: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine, the life, the soul of reading! Take them out and one cold eternal winter would reign in every page. Restore them to the writer–he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids all-hail, brings in variety and forbids the appetite to fail.

In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-deflations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make a fist, my lungs to shout or whisper with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book

All you umpires, back to the bleachers. Referees, hit the showers. It’s my game. I pitch, I hit, I catch. I run the bases. At sunset I’ve won or lost. At sunrise, I’m out again, giving it the old try.

And no one can help me. Not even you.

——

Oh Lordy, I’m tired. My new job at Harper Collins is going splendidly (how about reading children’s and YA books and playing in Powerpoint and Photoshop all day? And making spreadsheets of sales figures for HC and the companies it distributes. Ehem.), but I do tend to forget how much energy it takes maintaining a 9-5 job. Plus, It’s an hour commute there and a little over an hour back.

However, I am managing to juggle it, at least. I may be tired now, but I actually left at 5 am and 6 am my first two days so I could work on “Jeannie Carmini” before work and worked on it again during my hour lunch. I find it impossible to do creative work afterwards because I go home and crash, but I’m tossing around the idea of taking up an offer to work in the same building as the Deep 6 studios. It’s on my way home from work, it should be only $150 a month, and I find it a heck of a lot easier to work when I’m tired when I’m out, than to get home tired and hear my comfy bed and laptop calling me.

So “Jeannie Carnini” is going slowly now, but at least it’s still going, and steadily. I think because I enjoy my job, I’m not watching the clock and therefore have the joy still left in my heart throughout the day.

And seriously? I LOVE MY JOB. This is just a three-week temp job, but if they don’t ask me back right away or hire me full time, I plan on going to Human Resources and asking if they have any positions available. I get to look at book sales figures all day (I know. Only *I* would find that amazing), the pay is AMAZING (considering the most I’ve ever been paid for a 9-5 job was $10/hr because Austinites are CHEAP), and IT’S IN PUBLISHING. If I were offered any other 9-5 type job in New York … this would be the place I’d first pick.

And of course, once I get my second paycheck, I’m immediately singing up for a letterpress class at The Center For Book Arts.

It’s almost $600 for the class, but … letterpress is a beautiful art form. I don’t know why more printers don’t switch to gravure plates (printing plates that have raised text/illustrations so they leave an impression on the paper), considering they’re so much cheaper to make now, and WAY easier. A little UV light and BOOM! Photopolymer plate! Which taken care of properly will last indefinitely.

Offset printing, however, uses lithographic plates, which uses a thin layer of oil to create the image, so that’s why they don’t leave indents in the paper, and I hate it. I also want to mix my own inks instead of being limited to stupid CMYK halftones for color reproductions. Mixing a color directly makes it vibrant and ALIVE. And “Jeannie Carmini” is going to be either two or three color anyway (I’m thinking brown, yellow, red/pink), so it’s not like there will be any screening involved.

I also want a foot-operated platen press. ;_; OMG. IT’S LOVE. I’ve been drawing designs throughout the day of how to make my own from more readily accessible materials.

But I digress. I like my job. And I’m actually feeling good about the book I’m working on. Life is good.

On another note, I was looking at my click-throughs, and found the response at bottom of this post entertaining to read: http://comicsworthreading.com/2010/01/12/lea-franco-makes-comic-about-slur/

I’m not a particularly PC person. I use words like “retarded” and “gay” and “queer”, but I’ve always used them in more of a … playful way? They’re words that have come to have colorful meanings with subtle differences dependent  upon inflection and situation. I mean, I’m queer. But I also use “queer” to mean “odd in a fun, quizzical” way. I say “retarded” to mean someone who is ignorant. And I use “gay” to mean “retardedly stupid”. Dan Savage of Savage Love (it’s a cynical, brilliantly funny sex advice column for the uninitiated, btw) had a whole rant about this word, and it’s a common thread throughout his podcasts of people who call him up offended that he’d “dare” use them and that somehow he’s single-handedly bringing down the whole of American Society by using them.

I’ve never used any of these words as a slur because well … I don’t use slurs because they’re disrespectful and ignorant. But I still use them with their alternate meanings. I’m not trying to insult anybody or show my superiority. Like I’d never call someone a “nigger” (I refuse to use an asterick for that word, btw, because it has too much power as it is, and being afraid to say something in demonstration is the same as showing highschoolers how to put on condoms by having a banana but no condom), and there’s no other double, subtle meaning to it, so there’s no reason for me to ever use it (except in rhetorical demonstration, of course).

Some words are purely racist/sexist/etc slurs. But some words have subtle double meanings, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to use that alternate meaning. It doesn’t make me ignorant. If anything, it makes me MORE literate because I understand the humor of the double meaning and know how to use it in ways that fit the context. It’s like dancing on a pile of knives: it can be safe and fun and exhilarating as long as you step the right way.

I also know people who use FAR worse words in funny, humorous ways that make even me cringe. But I let them have their way because oh my gosh, I’m smart enough to realize their intent is not of malice or ignorance, but of making a new word out of something old. It’s the intent and not the words themselves that hold power. Just watch one of Sarah Palin’s many speeches someday if you don’t believe me. They have some of the most foul-intent hate-speech of any politician I’ve ever heard. But she never says it directly. She never uses the WORDS. But her intent behind simple language that typically relay more gentle meanings, make her one of the most horrific people I know. Of course, that’s why she scares me. Because some people hear only the words, see them as sunshine and roses, and then don’t wonder later why they’re up on The Daily Show as Hatechild of the Week.

But that’s just my two-cents.

(edit) I should probably also mention that my mother’s step-sister has Down’s Syndrome and my mom makes “retarded” jokes ALL. THE. TIME.  Matt thinks people who have mentally handicapped kids or relatives get a pass for getting offended about the use of this particular word, but then why does my mom do it? She loves her sister. I’ve never heard her say anything with insulting or cruel intent about her. Perhaps, then, she just has a sense of humor? Because my mom is one of the nicest, most considerate people I know.

MK Reed just recommended that I look into The Center for Book Arts if I want to take bookmaking classes. They have a letterpress course I want to take, and of course, all those binding classes!

I know all the academic functions of printing and binding, but being able to put it into actual practice and gain hands-on experience … fantastic!