(no subject)

So I'm reading the reviews for A Good Offense (the sequel to The Best Defense) and I find this:

"...im not getting the whole purple haze thing, it flew right over my head."

For some reason that made me snicker.

Frankly, the reviews joisbishmyoga gets for these stories often make me depressed. Apparently people are reading and yet not reading these days. It's like they forget things that they read just a few sentences ago. Their comprehension seems spotty at best, and ask them to remember something from a previous chapter? Not going to happen apparently.

Now I know I have a somewhat odd and persistent memory but I can't believe that people can really forget something they read just a few minutes ago. My ability to remember stuff I read years ago (decades in some cases) can't be that bizarre, and remembering something from a month ago should be really simple and common, right?

(no subject)

My erratic drawing skills are out to get me.

I've been playing around with Word, figuring out how to print things in signatures ("book format") and to do that I needed something substantial, and because I don't want to waste paper, something that is finished and that I will actually read. So I grabbed an old Daria fanfic that I've read a few times and dumped it into Word. It was a good choice because it actually had a lot of endnotes, which I changed to footnotes. I might as well learn a few new things about Word (and this version of Word, which is newer than what I had been using on my old machine) while I'm at it, right?

What does this have to do with my drawing skills? Well my book is going to need a cover of course. I don't like any of the existing fanart for the story so I figured I'd just scribble something in PSP. I did start something with vectors and it was sort of cool but it was really taking too long so I saved it off to work on at some later date (a few years from now most likely) and grabbed the old tractor feed printer paper and a colored pencil.

And drew something I really like.

Dammit.

So I scanned a copy (red pencil scans pretty well in greyscale) and saved that off. Just in case I decide to rework it later like I do my usual stuff. Now I either ink the original sketch and do my usual color job or I try digitally painting the original sketch (paint, not color, as in no outlines) or both.

All of which is a lot more work than my original "toss of a sketch and use that for the cover" intent.

And, just to top things off, this is one of those black on black on black on black images. Daria's normally dark auburn hair was dyed "greenish black" with white streaks in the story, the wings and dress are black, with black feathers and beads and such. Please insert my normal "I hate working with shades of black" bitchfest here, thanks.