Greywaren Art

Winners of SHIVERs!

2009-08-12T19:15:00.000-07:00

Hi folks! I know this is incredibly late, and I apologize. But I did actually draw winners for signed SHIVERs, so here they are:

1 signed finished copy of SHIVER will go to Natalia.

1 signed finished copy of SHIVER will go to Alison.

And a signed audio book of SHIVER to Jo Castillo.

Yes, I know that's more than one, but I couldn't stop drawing names! :D Shoot me your addresses, guys.

OHMIGOSH

2009-08-05T15:27:00.001-07:00

I . . . um . . . it's hard to type. I wasn't going to post on this blog before I picked winners for the book. But I just got off the phone with my editor and it's really hard to type because my right hand won't stop shaking since I heard the news from my editor. But, um . . . SHIVER debuted at #9 at the NYT Bestseller List. Um.

Um.

I am having a very hard time thinking.

I took a picture of myself right after I hung up the phone with David at Scholastic (with my wonderful publicist friends at Scholastic screaming behind him). You can see just how coherent I look.

Um.

This is making my hand shake again.

My husband is taking me out for chimichangas. I think this will help.

Oh my gosh guys. Just thanks for putting me there. It'll be in the 16th's edition of the NYT. OH MAN.

Where Maggie Is Now

2009-08-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

Hi folks! I know it's been forever since I posted to this blog, but I figured that it was time to let you know what I've been doing. As you guys know, last year I sold my book, SHIVER (well, it was called STILL WOLF WATCHING back then) to Scholastic. I realized that I never came back and told you what happened.

Well, this week is the release week for SHIVER, so it seems like an appropriate time to tell you about my year. And this year . . . it's been insane.

This is what has happened.

I've been to New York City three times.

I've signed hundreds of advanced review copies of both SHIVER (August 1) and BALLAD (October 1).

I got a new sketchbook and have been filling it with sketches made in airports.

And in airplanes.

I've been to Chicago for the first time.

I've been interviewed for television, for podcasts, for blogs, for newspapers.

I've met hundreds of people who have already read my books.

I've signed hundreds of finished copies of SHIVER (and found out the interior ink is all in blue!)

My dogs and Moose have seen my author's copies arrive.

I have this week seen my book in stacks all over bookstores and folks have been sending me photographs of piles of SHIVERs in stores all over the country.

In my favorite indie, Fountain Bookstore:

In Barnes & Noble:

At Anderson's in Chicago:

And I've still been doing art, just in a slightly different way:

So that's me. I've been blown away by what's happened with this book -- a starred review in Publisher's Weekly, picked as Borders' August Original Voices pick, a Junior Library Guild Selection, and an inbox full of fanmail already.

I have been incredibly lucky to have some of you readers follow me over to my writing blog on Livejournal, but I should mention it is now also mirrored on Blogger.

And I'd like to give away a signed copy of SHIVER to one of my old Greywaren art readers, if you guys are still around -- so let me know in the comments if you want to be eligible for the giveaway!

I hope everyone's doing well and still creating art and still pushing towards their goals!

Happy New Year & Good-bye for Now (At Least on Blogger)

2008-12-30T06:07:00.000-08:00

I'm sure regular readers (or, lately, non-readers) of this blog will not be surprised when I say that I've decided that 2009 is the year that I'm saying farewell to Greywaren Art. I've not been good at updating, and I'd be lying if I didn't say that 98% of my time is dedicated to writing right now. I don't think it'll be that way in the future, but right now, that's where we're at.

So thank you all for being a wonderful, supportive bunch of readers and artists, and remember that I am still regularly blogging over at http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com.

Happy New Year!

(and one last butt-kicking: if you haven't made your 2009 goals yet, get out that Sharpie and make the list! NOW!)

Maggie-Art, the Santa edition

2008-12-15T09:53:00.000-08:00

Christmas, you're kind of breathing down my neck.

Seriously, did anyone else notice the overwhelming Santaness descending upon us? I blinked and suddenly it's 10 days away. All this hohohoness and 60 degree weather is making me itchy. Despite my not feeling very Christmasy, I seem to have gone all domestic and I've been making Christmas paraphernalia out of clay. I don't know why. My sister started me on it, and now I'm sort of stuck in a strange Maggie-world that is populated by clay, red paint, and revisions.

Due to my guiltless indulgence of my eccentric desire to buy books for everyone for Christmas (well, everyone I know, not everyone in the world. Let's not get carried away here), I'm practically done with my Christmas shopping. If YOU guys aren't, and want to pick up books, especially books by me, I'll be round:

Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, VA, Dec. 17th (this Wednesday), from 12:30-2:30. I love this bookstore. It looks just like a perfect little hole in the wall indie, cobblestone streets and everything. Those of you who have read LAMENT, this is the street where Dee's first kiss supposedly takes place.

College of William & Mary Bookstore, Williamsburg, VA, Dec 20th (this Saturday), from 10:00-1:00. Yes, again. They like me. And I like them. Because while there I get to play cool tunes with the organizer (also a Celtic music junkie) and they are two seconds away from the candy store from SHIVER, that has amazing candy apples.

I'm noticing, now, that my Santas that I made all look a little mournful. Like they're thinking: "Yes, I'm bringing gifts to children all over the world, brightening their day, and possibly their month or year, by so doing, but at the same time, I'm missing CSI to do it."

And my angel . . . well, she has no eyes yet, so I'll forgive her for a certain amount of disinterest in her expression.

But see, I am doing vaguely artistic things these days, still.

The Great Name Debacle

2008-12-07T11:35:00.000-08:00

The more observant of my readers on my Livejournal blog have noticed that the main character from SHIVER has changed names. This is sort of eerie, since I hadn't realized I'd babbled about them enough to realize the names weren't the same, but the fact is, it's true. Sam Roth (which is, for the record, the best name ever) the character from SHIVER who becomes a wolf for the winter, is now Lee Spence.

That sentence, my friends, is the result of 16 hours of baby name book searching, thousands of calories of cookie dough consumption, silent raging, not silent raging, denial, googling, and finally, acceptance.

Because this agony is something that other authors will probably have to go through and because it gives me an excuse to look at a photo of Lee Pace, I'm going to tell my sordid little naming story here.

So. This all started way back when my werewolf story was only a twinkle in my eye. I'd had the dream that sort of laid down the premise, but only two of the characters (neither of them main characters) came with names in the dream. (And one of the two names in the dream was "Robert de Niro" so I had to change it anyway). I can't start writing a novel until I have the Perfect Names for my main characters, so I was in the brainstorming phase. I wanted something sort of timeless, soft-sounding, and inherently sad and emotastic. Which brought me to Sam, partially because of the way that Meg Ryan said, "Oh, Sam," in Addicted to Love, after she's torn his heart into little tiny pieces and feels bad about it, but is stuck in the floor, so she can't do anything but watch from afar and say:

"Oh, Sam."

I just thought . . . whooo, shivers. I imagined the scene where Grace, the other main character, first sees him as a person after years of obsessing over him as a wolf. And when she asks his name, he says, "Sam." And I knew that was it.

Except it wasn't. Because there is this author y'all may have heard of, Stephenie Meyer, who apparently has also written about werewolves. Who knew?

That's sarcasm.

Anyway. So apparently, she also had a wolf character named Sam. Who knew?

That's not sarcasm.

I'd read TWILIGHT, but it's been a few years, so I'd completely forgotten that there was a werewolf named Sam in it. And my editors had too. And my crit partners. And basically all of the folks that had worked on the novel since last fall when I first began writing it. But not someone at the Scholastic sales meeting. And not, my editors reasoned (once they had this brought to their attention), the hoards of passionate TWILIGHT fans who had the demographics of every TWILIGHT character stenciled onto their arms with glittery pink ink. Sorry, sparkly. Sparkly pink ink. So at the very end of the editing process, after I'd lived with my characters as Sam and Grace my editors said that "Sam" had to go.

I sputtered and begged and pleaded and finally googled "sam werewolf," where I was greeted by one gagillion hits to Team Jacob and Sam Uley, The First Werewolf Named Sam. And I hung my sad head in defeat, because my editors were right, as they often are.

Which meant that my favorite bit of dialog in the entire novel had to completely change:

"Grace,” I said, very softly. “Say something.”
“Sam,” she said, and I crushed her to me.

This was when the silent raging began. Because I knew I had to do something, but I didn't want to. I still had a sequel to write, after all, and I was going to have to live with a not-Sam for another 95,000 words. It wasn't just SHIVER that was riding on this name change, it was the fate of the sequel, LINGER (probably LINGER), as well, and probably my entire sanity as well. My critique partner, Tessa Gratton, spent about 8 hours IMing me back and forth, sifting through hundreds of names, looking for the perfect replacement that would ellicit the same emotional response in me as "Sam."

The catalog copy deadline was, I should add, bearing down on us at this moment, giving us about two days to come up with a replacement. At that point, I think my mood was best classified as "angry/ morose drunk."

Examples of angry/morose drunk exchanges? This is sort of a montage of conversations that occured on Day Two of the Great Name Debacle.

DAVID (editor) to me and ABBY (other editor): How about Daniel? I've always been partial to Daniel.
ABBY to me and DAVID: Daniel is nice.
ME to TESSA: Daniel! Daniel!? Why do they keep saying Daniel to me in my hour of need? Have they not heard Elton John?
TESSA: There, there. How about Jonah? It sounds emotastic.
ME to my DAD: I need something other than Sam, even though Sam is the most perfect name invented.
DAD: Why, again? Because there's this other sampire in TWILIGHT?
ME: Werewolf.
DAD: But 'sampire' is funnier. How about Jack?
ME: Why was I ever born?

Eventually, I really buckled down, hit the stacks, and finally came back to the first name that had occured to me at the beginning of the Great Name Debacle: Lee. It was soft, reminded me of blue jeans, inherently emotastic, and moreover, was the name of the actor who I think of when I think of what Sam/ Lee looks like: Lee Pace. (cue audience reaction: awwww). So now I had Lee Roth. Like Kate Winslet's character at the end of Titanic, I was sad, but triumphant. I told my art critique partners about the name change.

One of them, my friend Nicole, said, "um, Maggie, have you, um, googled 'Lee Roth'?"

I did.

Those of you who were born slightly before me will probably already know what I found. Sigh. So, with a nod to irritating rockers who have ruined a generation of fictional "Roths", I changed his last name to Spence.

So there you have it. The story of how Sam Roth became Lee Spence and everyone lived happily ever after. And the other day, I actually said "Lee and Grace" all by myself, without accidentally saying "Sa-Lee" first. So maybe there is hope for me yet.

The Car Paid for by Wolves

2008-12-01T14:17:00.001-08:00

So . . . here it is. The car paid for by wolves, and the proof right there on its butt. I can hardly believe it. Isn't it gorgeousness? I have a name for it now too: Loki.

So. Guys, I have to admit -have I admitted this before?-- I'm so freakin' excited for SHIVER to come out next year. I mean, I was excited about LAMENT in a first book coming out this is all so brand new homicidal faeries wheee sort of way. But not the cold-shiver-down-my-spine I'm so excited for the world to read about my characters way I am with SHIVER. I mean, after six months of heavy line editing with my editors, I'm still in love with Lee (used to be Sam) and Grace's story. I'm starting the sequel (tentatively called LINGER) this week and I'm kinda psyched about that too.

I still remember the dream that sparked off the whole SHIVER affair. It was winter, and I still remember the girl's voice narrating: "I lay in the snow, a small spot of warm going cold, and there are wolves all around me. I don't know if they're licking or eating me."

And then, later, "I saw my wolf after that, always on the edge of the woods. It was like making eyes with him."

Do you guys remember? I'd never written a real love story before, I mean one where the love is the most important thing, and I posted a panicked post here: help -- I just started and my characters are already in love!

This is me, bouncing off the wall, by the way. Suddenly SHIVER seems awfully close to being real.

Five Things on a Friday, the Middle School & Satanist edition

2008-11-28T07:16:00.001-08:00

1. Hi to the Battlefield Middle School kids, if you're reading this. You all did a great job of looking like I was being interesting and laughing at the appropriate laughing parts. Also, to the kids who came up afterward to talk to me, thanks for being so awesome! Please be aware that I'm in love with your school library, however. It made me want to curl up in a fetal position and fondly remember my middle school days.

2. I found out this week that two thirds of the band Alkaline Trio are Satanists, which I found disturbing enough to look up what Satanism really entails. I discovered that it means you 1) party all the time, 2) don't count calories, and 3) go raaaaaaaah and smack people who get in your way. I'm paraphrasing, but those are the high points. I couldn't actually find out anything that had to do with Satan on the wikipedia page. In general, however, it's making me look at their song "Burn" in a whole new light.

3. I met my incredible agent, Laura Rennert, in person on Tuesday, and she was just like I'd imagined her. We talked for three hours over vaguely Italian food, and it went by in the blink of an eye. Of course, that might have been the 17 sugar packets I used in my tea talking. In general, though, I was left with that really satisfied feeling of having paired up with exactly the right agent. Plus, she gave me insanely good news which is, in the way of all my insanely good news, not allowed to be shared publicly yet. But let's just say it involved more staring at the wall and blinking rapidly in disbelief.

4. Today I'm cooking Thanksgiving dinner for my extended family and I'm drooling over the idea of turkeys deep sea diving in gravy. Of course, I'd be a lot more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed today if I hadn't been up until 2 reading one of my crit partner Tessa Gratton's WIP, which is amazing and fills me with vicarious glee.

5. It's Black Friday, so this is your one and only gentle reminder to buy fiction for your loved ones for Christmas and make the book biz happy in this Crappyconomy. You can buy LAMENT at Amazon or Indiebound or you can buy the Merry Sisters of Fate anthology in hardcover or softcover or you can buy someone else's stuff. Just buy a book. Save the world.

Maggie Does NYC, wrap up

2008-11-17T13:37:00.000-08:00

I'm back! I only got 500 e-mails while I was gone -- I'm working through 130 starred ones right now, so if you've e-mailed me and I haven't said anything yet, that's why.

NYC was . . . amazing. Where to even start? I think we'll go chonologically, because this might get long. As soon as you get bored or start to see flickering lights, feel free turn away from the computer and have a lie-down until things seem more normal.

So. Wednesday. Having deposited Things 1 & 2 at my mother-in-law's (oh thank you thank you mother-in-law), Ed and I fly from Buffalo to NYC, where we promptly flag down a cab and climb in with our two backpacks. (Note the animal cunning there, of only bringing two bags and thus avoiding playing elbow hockey at the baggage carousel).

Our cab driver has a very heavy accent and doesn't speak a ton of English, but he speaks enough to tell us "lots of pedestrians die here."

Welcome to New York City.

We get to our hotel without hitting any pedestrians, however, and once we get over the aforementioned shock of realizing that we were looking right down into the hole where the World Trade Center used to be, we hit the town. We have dinner with some friends who oh-thank-goodness not only know New York but want us to know New York and then catapult directly from the swank Soho House to Max Brenner's to meet editor Abby over chocolate.

Abby is cool, fun, and 8 feet taller than me. Actually, see that photo of me to the right, standing in front of Madame X? That's sort of the scale of me and Abby.

Then we hit the Strand Bookstore (18 miles of books!) and, coupled with the experience of meeting Abby and eating hot chocolate lava cakes just moments before, I feel rather faint and Victorian. Okay, not really. But I am compelled by some supernatural force to buy 10 YA and picture books. Abby wishes us good night and kindly does not mention that I smell like three hours of airport. We return to the hotel and I discover that LAMENT has just gotten a starred review in Booklist. Agent Laura also calls and delivers the final verdict on the auction for SHIVER's audio rights sales. And it pays for my Camaro.

There is, as Monty Python would say, much rejoicing.

Thursday. Having washed the airport off myself, we head out for pastry. Abby had mentioned Black Hound pastry shop to me, which was 100% natural and thus 100% guaranteed not to make me fall down and die due to preservatives, so we (meaning Lover and I) went in search of it. It was everything I'd imagined a pastry shop to be, and so I snorfled the entire counter. No, not really. We did buy four different things for breakfast though. I got a weird little strawberry thing which was somewhere between orgasmic and transcendent (you can see it in the bottom of the next photo of my Lover smiling a me over a giant cafe breakfast).

Having swallowed about 3,000 calories in two seconds, we decide to head to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art and avoid the rain. I've heard rumors that John Singer Sargent's Madame X is there and feel like the hour long cab drive through cab-infested waters is worth it. Now, I think I've mentioned before that if I wasn't married and John Singer Sargent wasn't dead, that we'd so be an item, such is my love for him. Well, not only do they have Madame X, they also have four or so other pieces and I am in heaven. See that dorky smile there? That is because I am in heaven, and in heaven, dorky smiles are okay.

So. Having conquered the Met Museum, we meet my friends for a comedy sketch-thingy they've gotten tickets for (Mike Birbiglia). It's in a small club and the people there all look very posh and New York and the guy is actually really funny. So it's all good (thanks, Donna & Mike!) Oh, and insert a lot of walking and shopping and general drinking of water and eating of croissants in there.

Which brings us to Friday. Friday is scary because I'm meeting editor Abby and editor David Levithan for lunch and then I am going back to Scholastic to meet lots of Scholastic-types. I'm not so afraid of Abby and David (though I am filled with fan-girl glee at getting to meet David in person), but I am afraid of vomiting pastries on other Scholastic folks who don't know me as well.*

*Please note I have never actually vomited on anyone or in fact ever vomited out of nervousness, but the possibility of it happening is terrifying enough to make it loom, a terrifying archetypal vomit predator, when these situations arise

Anyway, I have lunch with David and Abby (they've picked yet another restaurant without preservatives so once again I avoid falling down dead, which is another recurring fear) and we talk about Yugos and multiple points of view and advanced review copies and eat apple crostatas.*

*I do not entirely believe that's how you form the plural of "crostata."

Then we go back to Scholastic and I meet oodles of Scholastic types. I know they call a bunch of horses a herd and lots of crows a murder, but I'm not sure what they call a lot of Scholastic marketing/publicity/ foreign rights types all thrilled about my book except for surreal. They've all read SHIVER and they're all excited and that makes me excited and there's lots of jumping up and down and I may or may not have told the cover designer that I loved his cover so much that I was going to make out with him.

I think it went well.

We shop some more and eat more foods without preservatives and return back to the hotel room to discover that LAMENT has just gotten a starred review in KLIATT. At this point, I start blinking and smacking myself, trying to wake up. And apparently, I am awake, just living a very suddenly weird and amazing life involving stars and books and pastry.

This surreal life and the rain carries over into Saturday, which is all about spending way too much time in an airport and Sunday, which is all about driving the nine hours home from my mother-in-law's. And now I'm home and have about 65 starred e-mails to follow up on after a day's worth of chipping away at them.

I will leave you with a photograph of a sniffy commercial-filming girl whom I heckled and then photographed.

Halloween Giveaway and Contest!

2008-10-23T08:13:00.000-07:00

Okay. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, because it's creepy, packed with supernatural goodness, and involves staying up late. In honor of Halloween, we're having a Halloween short fiction contest over at the Merry Sisters of Fate. It's a great opportunity to stretch your fictional muscles, show off your literary prowess, and maybe snag the grand prize.

The prompt is simply "Halloween" (be creative, dammit), and we'd prefer the word limit to between 600-2000, and the deadline is midnight on October 31st. Link back to the entry in Merry Sisters of Fate and we Sisters will commiserate over a pot of bubbling brains and other Halloween goodies to decide which one pleases us most. There is only one prize, but oh, what a prize, m'dears:

- a copy of the upcoming An Infinite Thread, the first Merry Sisters of Fate anthology, which features the best of the Sisters so far as well as three anthology-exclusive short stories, all packed with the supernatural, blood, and angst, as the Sisters' stories tend to be.

- a signed copy of Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, and a CD with three of my songs that were inspired by Lament.

- a Merry Sisters of Fate t-shirt (or a homicidal faeries T, your pick).

Oh, I am dazzled by the beauty of our prize. You guys up for it? What's to lose?

Three Pieces of Art I Hope to See at the Met

2008-10-20T05:42:00.000-07:00

That's the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, by the way. I'm revoltingly excited to be going to New York City for the first time next month. It's really real! I've booked the flight and the hotel so it must be actually happening. Barring natural disasters like the sort that happened in that really bad Dennis Quaid movie.

I'm really excited to see what NYC looks like in real life, instead of through the filter of movies and books. Does everyone really wear really expensive clothing? Are there really a million-jillion people on every sidewalk? Is the Cash Cab really driving around waiting to pick up clueless contestants? And does the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man lie in wait beneath the city?

I get to meet my editors from Scholastic, find the biggest pastry shop I can, and of course, visit the Met. Already I've been on the website and I'm fantasizing about seeing these three pieces in particular.

1. "The Horse Fair" by Rosa Bonheur. Okay, this is a no-brainer, right? Maggie = horse artist. The Horse Fair = one of the more famous horse paintings alive. Er, in existence. I want to see it in person

2. "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher" by Vermeer. I have grown up seeing this image in all my art history books; the first time I saw it was a bad black and white image in an old art history book in grade school

3. "Breton Brother & Sister" by Bouguereau -- or anything by Bouguereau. I have a feeling that if I see this dude's stuff in person, I will fall passionately in love with him, as I am in love with John Singer Sargent already.

I also am looking forward to seeing the Early Gothic Hall, because I'm a sucker for medieval art and stained glass of all sorts. Okay, 'fess up -- what paintings are you guys dying to see in real life?

Art Paid for by Werewolves

2008-10-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

So, when I got my advance check for Lament, I bought a mattress, now known as the mattress paid for by faeries. When I got my advance check for Ballad, I paid the rent. It was hugely exciting. I made popcorn and we all watched as we signed the rent check.

Okay, not really.

Well, we did pay the rent. But not the popcorn bit. I'm not a big popcorn fan, actually.

So, here's how I'm rewarding myself now that I have my first check for Shiver. Art! As an artist, I've never been able to afford a big piece of art. I debated for a long time about whether to buy this gorgeous print of Oana Lauric's "Dal Duomo" or a blacked-out Stratocaster. I really wanted an electric guitar, but I also really wanted to buy a piece of art.

I'm not good with decisions, so I decided not to decide for a long time. Well, I mean, for a long time I didn't make a decision. Was that gramatically clear? Anyway, then the economy made up my mind for me. It's going to be a long, cold winter for small businesses, and when push comes to shove, the gallery I'm getting Oana's art from (Chasen Galleries) is going to appreciate my business more than Fender. So, sniff. My little black guitar will have to wait.

Now, admire. Isn't it pretty-pretty? Thanks to Oana for giving me permission to show it here. She does gorgeous work and it was hard to decide (again, not good with decision, much angst involved) which one to go with. Look at the website, you'll see what I mean.

Oh, and if any of y'all are wondering why Lament isn't in your local Border's or B/N, it's because they're both stocking it on the last Tuesday of the month because they both have it listed as a general October release. Thank you, box stores, for making my release parties horridly early! A pox on both of you. Oh wait, sales are already down. I take the pox back.

And those of you who have read Lament and want another faerie fix before Ballad, my short for Merry Sisters of Fate today takes place in the same world as Lament and Ballad but occurs between the two of them.

So do you guys think I made the right decision? Not about taking the pox back. About the art vs. guitar.

Tuesday Musings

2008-10-14T08:33:00.000-07:00

So, first of all, my interview with Cynthia Leitich Smith is up over at Cynsations. And I have to take a moment to fangirl squee because this is like coming full circle for me. I read Cynsations when I was doing my market research and to excitedly peruse the successful stories to publication, and now I'M on there. I was so thrilled when she blurbed LAMENT and then when she asked for an interivew, I just died. Yes, I have been undead for years.

In other news, I'm getting acquainted with my new editor at Flux, Brian Farrey. Andrew Karre handed over the reins of the imprint to him on October 1st, and Brian has inherited all his crazy stable of authors, myself included.

I've not actually met Brian in real life, or seen a photo, or spoken with him on the phone, which possibly explains why now, every time I get an e-mail from him, I associate him strongly with Brian the dog from Family Guy. I just see "Brian Farrey" and automatically, I hear Brian the dog voice over for the contents of the e-mail. And they . . . kinda talk the same way. Sorry, editor Brian. If it makes you feel any better, Brian on Family Guy is the brains of the operation.

This is how I picture my budding relationship with editor Brian. I'm of course Stewie in the picture at right (how could it be anything but that way? Evil genius in need of medication? Hellooooo . . . )

In other news, I'm so behind on following up on comments on the blog. Thanks everyone for commenting and I'm going to try to attack that with my slow dial up later today.

Whoopee!!

2008-10-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

Me, this morning (runs upstairs to jump on sleeping husband's chest): Wake up! I got a starred review in Publisher's Weekly!

Him (sleepily, with more enthusiasm than I would expect from someone who'd been sleeping two seconds before): That's great!

Me: (random squealing and racing around the bed)

Him: wait, what just happened again?

Starred review, baby! I love Mondays!

Okay, I don't really, but I love this Monday.

Three Tips on Finding Time

2008-10-12T18:07:00.000-07:00

"The Letter H" - ink on paper
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater
illustration for upcoming Merry Sisters of Fate anthology.

Today was scary for me. Every once and a while, I dye my hair a shade lighter. As I get older (approaching a crusty and crotchety 27), I have gone from summer-kissed light brunette to dark-haired, pale and undercooked.*

*I typed this "undercookied" at first, which is probably a Freudian slip as I just pulled some out of the oven but haven't eaten any yet

Anyway, today I dyed my hair. I got a new sort that said it only took ten minutes to work. So I put it down and came downstairs to catch up on some blog posts, and then realized that almost twenty minutes had gone by.

Whoops.

Cue Maggie galloping upstairs to hastily rinse it out. There was a patchy moment when my hair looked slightly skunklike, but I think it's become a nice light albeit-not-naturally-occuring-in-nature shade. Sort of blonde-brown-orange-red-green-something. Pleasant, though. Actually, now that I think about it, it's sort of cookie-dough colored.

So. Anyway. Three tips. I know I've done a ton of posts on time management, but most of them are extremely long and unwieldy. I got an email from Rose that made me think that maybe a three tips on snatching a few more minutes here and there might be useful. So here they are.

1. Like with like. Clump all your housekeeping chores with other housekeeping. Your town errands with other town errands. Your chihuahua wrangling with other chihuahua wrangling. It's easy to waste time doing errands and chores as you see them -- picking up one stray toy leads to folding laundry that's right next to the toy leads to loading the dishwasher leads to changing the sheets, etc.

Am I telling you to not do housework?

Yes.

Kidding.

No.

I'm telling you to think about making one or two days a week your housework days, and then just do mild tidying in between. If you've got to make a shopping trip, group it with other like chores. Cut out the back and forth as much as possible.

2. Make your to-do list shorter. Lots of people tell me they make to-do lists and then never get to the bottom of them. Well, #$%^, there's no satisfaction in that. Moreover, if you keep making a list that you'll never get to the end of, eventually the list will be meaningless. If it helps, make a list for the day, then another for the week, then the month, etc.. If you get done with your day's list, you can attack the week's list instead. But trust me, you'll be a lot more productive if you think you can actually cross everything off.

3. Turn off the internet. No, really, right now. I'm distracting you. Get to work.

Confessions of a Buffy Virgin

2008-10-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

So, as I mentioned earlier on my LJ, I was until last month a Buffy-virgin.

Buffy-virgin. noun. A person who has never seen an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, thus causing her to miss thousands of Buffy references throughout her entire life. The last straw will be when her editor who doesn't even own a TV makes a Buffy reference.

I broke down. I got the first season on Netflix and I have now lost my Buffy-cherry. And it's, um, sort of addictive. Like -- it's so campy, but I can't stop watching. Some of the episodes were so bad we were laughing for all the wrong reasons, but we just kept . . . watching.

I'm a little perturbed that the vampires have pretty faces and ugly faces (or in the case of Jessie, weird-ass faces and ugly faces). And the master sounds like he needs some Krispy Kremes. If I'd been several decades without Krispy Kreme donuts and sweet tea, I'd be calling for the blood of teenagers and clawing my way towards the surface as well.

So. Some thoughts from the resident virgin.

Buffy: what is up with this chick's wardrobe? One episode, I can see through her cleavage to her belly-button and the next one, she's dressed like a homeless person. Just as I'm wondering where her shopping cart is, she dresses up for a date and comes out looking like a she's a Hellmouth real estate agent.

Willow: First of all, it's kind of creepy how, in real life, Alyson Hannigan never ages. She looks exactly the same now as when she was a newly minted Buffy-character, leading me to believe that she's undead and that her casting in a show called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is meant to be ironic. She is the supposed-to-be-unpopular-and-geeky-yet-much-cuter-than-99%-of-living-girls character on the show, which is okay, because, this one time, at band camp . . .

Xander: Somebody needs to shoot this boy in the butt with a clue gun. He follows Buffy around Season One like a lost, sick puppy, clearly not seeing that the main character never hooks up with the comic relief. And after that episode in the hyena exhibit, he's dead to me. Do you hear that, Xander? You're dead to me for your laughable music-filled *sexybeast* attempts. Leave the *smolder*ing to Angel.

Giles: Oh, Giles. Thank you for having a British accent. It makes you sound so clevah and makes your obsession with demon-filled books and not with underage teenagers all believable. Does Giles ever go home? I think he lives in the library.

Angel: Angel's chief purpose on the show at this point seems to be to show up in dimly lit places so that he can be half-lit, all the better for him to *smolder*. Buffy goes to the club. Angel shows up. *smolders*. Buffy goes to an alley. Angel shows up. *smolders*. Buffy goes to her bedroom. Angel shows up. *smolderswithtongue* And yet, I put up with all this *smolder*ing because Angel is an angstpuppy and I love to feed and pet and cuddle angstpuppies.

So, verdict?

Yeah. I just got Season Two.

Three Tips on Thinking Like an Art Buyer

2008-10-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

So my tips for this week revolve around thinking like an art buyer to better market your work. I used to try to get into this mindset all the time when I was first starting out, but now I can really get into the art buying mindset because I'm about to be an art buyer. Yep, I'm making my first major art purchase, and I think it's going to be Oana Lauric -- I would dearly love a print of her Dal Duomo.

Anyway, the lovely and wonderful owner of Chasen Galleries (who represents me), Andrew Chasen (who brought me flowers at my book launch!!) let me into the gallery to look around after Lament's book launch party. It was like seeing it with brand new Maggie-goggles, because this time, I was looking as a buyer. It was great! Anyway, it taught me a lot . . . and made me wish I'd done it earlier.

So, here are three tips on how to think like an art buyer.

1) Visit a gallery and look around as if you had $1K in your pocket. Then $2K. Then $3K. What is going through your head when you look at the pieces? If you're like me, this is what:

That is friggin' gorgeous. Um, but can you imagine what my neighbors would say when they came over and saw it hanging over the couch?
Holy smokes that piece is gigantic. I'd have to build another bedroom for it.
Why am I paying $3K for something the size of my dog?
That much red would keep me up at night.
If I got that tall skinny one, I'd really need another tall skinny one to match.
I could look at that one all day long and all night long and all day long and all night and . . . that's the one.

2) Google thyself. Or rather, imagine what people would be googling if they were looking for your art. For me, my goal was to show up near the top of searches like "maggie stiefvater," "maggie steifvater" (always add the most common misspellings of your name into your website's keywords), "maggie horse portraits" (because sometimes people will meet me and not remember my last name), "jack russell terrier portraits," and "virginia colored pencil art." And make your google presence show your concentration. A year ago, the first page of my google results was art-related. I'm pretty sure now it's dominated by my writing. Make sure yours isn't dominated by some hijink you pulled off in college while wearing a chicken costume.

3) Surf your website like a buyer. Can you figure out where to get your art? How to pay? How much the pieces are? Or do you have to e-mail for every bit of information and arm-wrestle a confusing navigation menu to find out where you're from. Objectivity is a brilliant thing. Borrow or steal it when you can manage.

Launches and All That Rot

2008-10-03T11:01:00.000-07:00

Soooo I'm about to get ready to head down to my launch party in Richmond, VA at Creatures N' Crooks bookstore and I've been getting e-mails all day from folks who are planning on being there. And it just occurred to me what this means:

I have to be entertaining.

Fairly ominous. My husband says "you just talked to 400 kids in one day on Monday. How is it this is bothering you?" But this is different. I had a white board when I was talking to the kids. The ability to use those dry erase markers just makes everything better.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be posting about my Buffy-virgin experiences. And this afternoon, I'll just leave you with a linkie to my Friday fiction (which is oh so seasonal) over at Merry Sisters of Fate.

Here's to hoping I'm alive tomorrow.

Me in 3D

2008-09-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

Oh, and if you've ever wanted to see Maggie in living color, I've been captured in photograph and film at Poe Middle School, where I did book talks all day yesterday.

The Ultimate and Final LAMENT post

2008-09-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

So . . . here it is, I guess. The LAMENT post to end all LAMENT posts. It is the day before LAMENT's official release day and also a Tuesday, so today we get the last ever twisted Tuesday teaser (with the characters from the LAMENT scene cunningly disguised as animals to keep from being spoilery) and then . . . then the book is out!

It feels so weird, guys, to be here right now after a year of waiting. And after starting these teasers a few months ago . . . now I'm at the last one. Just whoa. WHOA.

So here's the week's festivities, for those who are interested.
Virtual Launch! Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the virtual book launch over at Enchanting Reviews, 9 pm EST. If you e-mail me before the virtual chat launch and tell me what song is mentioned on page 27 of LAMENT and then make an appearance at the chat, you'll be entered into a drawing to win cool swag like signed copies, homicidal faerie T's, and more.

Over at Merry Sisters of Fate today is Lamentiganza (I hope I'm spelling that right) all day today with the other sisters from the Merry Sisters of Fate writing fun posts about the top ten reasons why you should read LAMENT and other things .

I'm also guest-blogging a couple of places, and I think those will be up tomorrow. I'll be at Miladyinsanity, SeaHeidi, and David Bridger's blog. Oh, and there will be a (possibly embarrassing) podcast interview of me up at Les Bonnes Fee, where they've already reviewed LAMENT and said:

... Lament’s true strength lies in Stiefvater’s characterisations. Deirdre has a wonderfully authentic teen voice, Luke (the gallowglass) is tortured but not whiny, and James (the best friend would-be boyfriend) is wise-cracking and kind-hearted without being puppyish. Even Stiefvater’s supporting cast, a collection of fairies, family, and surprising new friends, are well-rounded. Moreover, she deftly side-steps the first-time author trap of painting the story black and white, with “villains” who are anything but flat, dry, and uninteresting.

Les Bonnes Fee already has an excerpt up as well as some mp3s of music I wrote to go with LAMENT.

And of course there's the physical book launch in Carytown, Richmond, VA on Friday. Woof. I think that's all. I'll be other places too, but I'll mention them as I remember them! Onto the teaser:

Three Tips on Kicking Artist's Block to the Curb

2008-09-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

Since I wrote about writer's block for one of my guest blog posts this week, I figured it would be appropriate to write about Artist's Block for my tips post. They're rather related -- sort of evil kissing cousins and it's easy to believe when you're in the grips of one or the other that you will never do anything creative ever again.

So what is artist's block? It's when you've got the time, the materials, and sometimes even the commissions lined up, but you just can't bring yourself to put pen to paper or brush to canvas or Sharpie to wall or glue to trash.

And here are three tips for shaking it.

1) Immerse yourself in someone else's art. There are some amazing websites out there for Safely Dead Artists. For instance, I was a huge Monet fangirl when I was a teenager. I had Monet posters all over my bedroom walls. Sadly, back then, they didn't have this amazing site. Definitely lots of fodder for thought there. If you can, get to a local museum. The idea is to remind yourself what you found exciting about art in the first place.

2) Give yourself permission to create something unuseful. I used to get artist's block a lot when I was creating art for a series or doing a lot of portrait commissions. Every piece of art I did had a distinct purpose and deadline, and I knew before I started that I not only couldn't mess it up, but also that I pretty much knew what it was going to turn into. Giving myself permission to do something entirely not useful in the general scheme of things (like "The Summer Girls" at right) always got my juices flowing again.

3. Switch media. When I get stumped with my colored pencils, I pull out my acrylics, and vice versa. They both offer such a different experience -- one offers total control and the other total freedom and messiness.

Joy in art, for me, is really connected to learning and changing as an artist. So when I'm stumped, it's almost always because I've let myself plateau and get stale.

And that's our three tips for this week! I've got to go Febreeze a dog. Anyone else have tips for shaking off Artist's Block?

Friday Five and New Scene for LAMENT

2008-09-26T15:17:00.000-07:00

1. First of all, since this is the last Friday before Lament's release date, my Friday fiction over at is a new, never before scene from LAMENT (it's not spoilery for those of you who haven't read it yet).

2. I talked at Robinson High School in Fairfax on Wednesday and Thursday and yoiks that place was huge. 4200 students under one roof. Jenniferohcious from LiveJournal caught me on film there wearing my Dr. Seuss Old Navy shirt and she also fed me lots of cookies. I don't know what I'm smiling at in her photos, but I look happy, or something.

3. Holy. Crap. People, this is my last weekend before Lament is out in bookstores. Did I say that already? Holy. Crap.

4. I converted Jeannine Garsee, author of Before, After, and Somebody Inbetween, who is a non-fantasy person, to the dark side. After reading Lament, she said,

"this is an awesome, contemporary-yet-otherworldly story with one KICKASS heroine who wishes to be anything but ordinary--and gets her wish in a complicated and very disturbing way. "

And was Karen Mahoney was "blown away" by Lament. I think in a good way, not in the way that characters were in that Jeff Bridges movie called Blown Away. The one where the IRA guy sings along to U2 songs while he builds bombs.

5. I watched Juno with Jenniferohicious these week, by the way, and I'm afraid people are right. I do kinda look like Ellen Page.

Twisted Teaser Tuesday

2008-09-23T18:39:00.001-07:00

A very hasty Tuesday Teaser today because I'm getting ready for my school talk at Robinson High School in northern VA tomorrow. If you're in the Fairfax area, there will be signed LAMENTs at Aladdin's Children Bookstore on N. Harrison Street.

Anyway, because there are um, only . . . two Tuesdays . . .wait . . . one Tuesday? until Lament comes out, this is the second to last teaser. As usual, the characters have been replaced with animals to keep them from being spoilery. See y'all on Friday when I get back!

Three Tips on Photoshop for Artists

2008-09-21T05:59:00.000-07:00

I know I swore I was going to be mirroring my writing blog over here from now on, but that didn't sit well with me -- because I want to talk about art and writing. So I figured out a compromise: during the week, I'll be mirroring my Livejournal blog's contents over here, but every Sunday, I'm going to do an installment in my new Three Tips series.

The Three Tips posts are going to be short (like me) but hopefully a little useful (like me). The sort of thing that can be read over a cup of yogurt or a bowl of dog food on Monday morning.

So this week is Three Tips on how Photoshop can help you as an artist. Now, the tips in this post can be used in other photo manipulation programs, as the functions I'm pointing out here are not advanced creatures.

Many of you probably already know these techniques, but they were invaluable for me as an artist starting out. We're going to use a photo of a pelican rummaging around in his feathers that I took at the zoo earlier this year.

1. Photoshop allows you to easy change your references into grayscale. For me, I simply go to Image>Mode>Grayscale at the top of the screen. Why do you want that puppy in grayscale? Because instantly you can see the true values of all the brilliant colors. As a newbie artist, I would've been tempted to make that brilliant blue background really light -- I would've mistaken intensity for value. But in actuality, that blue background is a very dark midtone. The grayscale makes that pop out at us.

2. Let's see your true colors, baby! Another problem I had as a novice artist was identifying the real colors of my reference. Color, like value, is relative -- our eyes can see the same color or value differently depending on what color or value it appears right next to. So while I could easily look at an isolated color and tell you exactly which colored pencil I need to pick it up, I have to train my eye to be able to see it when it's surrounded by other colors. Photoshop lets you isolate a color with the eyedropper tool. It's in the hovering toolbar (which I have cleverly and amazingly provided for you here at left). See the one I put in the red box? That's the eyedropper.

Selecting that option will transform your cursor into an amazing weapon of power that will tell you what the true color is of anything you click on. Ohhhh, the power!! So you can see how I took Mr. Pelican and clicked on the area that I've boxed in red, on the right. And you can see how it isolated that color for me there on the toolbar on the left. That's nice peach color. Mmm. I know exactly which pencil I would pick up for that. I've internalized the whole process now, but I taught myself with the eye dropper.

3. Our last tip is exaggeration. As an artist, one of the things we do is change the photo reference. We stylize it, make it more our own. Make it look better than real life. There are a lot of different tools in Photoshop that can help you mimic the effects you'd use, before you even try them on your finished piece. One of my favorites is adjusting the contrast. I do that with Image>Adjust>Brightness/Contrast. Another good one is Image>Adjust>Hue/Saturation. Play with the sliders to get different effects.

And that's our three tips on Photoshop. Over and out!

Sketchbook Giveaway Winner!

2008-09-19T18:11:00.000-07:00

I have a winner! I'm going to email them since their name isn't incredibly obvious from their subscription address -- and I don't want to put their email all over the internet.

But the first part of the email is sandimac

Congrats!

Edited to add: if this sucker isn't claimed by Monday morning, I do the drawing again! Please check your spam filters!

LAMENT Book Launch Parties

2008-09-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

it is now officially so close to my book launch that it's time to talk about the launches themselves.

That's right, plural. For the discerning future-fan (I coined that egotistical phrase all by myself), we offer two choices: the physical launch, for the Virginia-inclined, and the online launch, for the proximity-challenged.

Here are the details:

PHYSICAL LAUNCH PARTY

Where: Creatures N'Crooks Bookstore, Richmond, VA
When: Friday, October 3rd, 7:00 p.m.
Why You Should Venture into Supah-Cool Carytown for the event:
1) Me. I'll be there, dressed as . . . me.
2) I'll be signing books.
3) I'll be giving away fun prizes.
4) I'll be bringing my harp Rory and a fiddle, with a fiddler attached to it.
5) We will be three doors away from a French pastry shop.

VIRTUAL LAUNCH CHAT PARTY

Where: Enchanting Reviews Chat Room
When: Wednesday, October 1st, 8:00 p.m. EST
Why You Should Venture into Virtual World for the event:
1) Me. I'll be there using chat language.
2) If you come and chat and can tell me what song is mentioned on page 27 of Lament (you'll have to preorder a copy before the event), I'll enter you in a drawing for free prizes.
3) I will send out signed, personalized bookplates to all chat participants who want to affix them lovingly in the copies of their books.
4) I'll be talking about Lament, book biz, and writing! And other random things!

So, um, please come? I don't want to be all lonely or nuthin' . . . .

Tuesday Teaser

2008-09-16T19:00:00.000-07:00

All right. It's now getting dangerously close to when Lament is going to be appearing in stores -- three Tuesdays to go. As per usual, here's a teaser scene from the novel, with all spoileriness removed by virtue of the characters being disguised as animals.

Tomorrow I'm going to be posting details of my online and physical launch day events, sooo . . . stay tuned.

Sketchbook Giveaway Addendum for Bloglines subscribers

2008-09-16T17:11:00.000-07:00

A clever subscriber asked if being subscribed through bloglines counts. Ze answer is nein. That means no.

Well, I take that back. What it really means is that I can't see your email address to enter you in the drawing if you're subscribed through bloglines. I also can't see it if you're subscribed anonymously through feedblitz.

But far be it from me to let a technical difficulty show me who's boss. If you're subscribed but think I won't be able to find your name/ moniker/ email address to throw you in the hat, drop me an e-mail with the subject line "Sketchbook Giveaway" and I'll make sure you're entered.

If you're subscribed normally through Feedblitz, you're cool.

Onwards!

Sketchbook Giveaway Time!

2008-09-16T06:26:00.000-07:00

lrighty then. My most recent sketchbook (a nice fat one, 100 pages, for the record) is full and it's time for the giveaway as usual!

Here are some of the examples of sketches (including the A there on the left).

The rules are simple.

1) Subscribe to this blog to be entered in the drawing. If you're already subscribed, no worries, you're automatically entered.
2) Check back at 9 p.m. EST on Friday, September 19th, to see who has been chosen!

And . . . . go! Good luck!

The Reason for my Disappearance REVEALED

2008-09-15T05:48:00.000-07:00

So I know you guys think that I've abandoned you and this blog for Lament, but it would take more than that, my dear readers. I've had a good reason since back in May, I just couldn't announce it until now.

But it's official in Publisher's Weekly now, so here it is:

Abby Ranger and David Levithan at Scholastic prevailed in a multiple-round auction for world rights to Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver in a two-book deal with Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown. This YA novel describes the first love between a 16-year-old girl and a mysterious boy who spends his winters as a wolf and is fighting to stay human as the temperature drops. The 26-year-old Stiefvater has a YA novel, Lament, just out from Flux, with a sequel to follow. Shiver will be published in fall 2009.

This means that I've been working hard with both editor Andrew at Flux and Abby & David at Scholastic since then, and the amount of the deal means that I'm doing it full-time -- no art at all for income purposes. I'm still pinching myself on that front.

But that also means that this blog is going to have to change. I've given a lot of thought to this, and I think this is what I'm going to do, unless someone else has a better idea. Tomorrow, I'm going to officially announce the date of my sketchbook giveaway for blog subscribers and announce the end of this blog as a purely art blog.

From Wednesday on, this blog will mirror my blog on Livejournal, which is a mix of writing, life, and art. I understand if it loses me some subscribers but right now, that's what my life is. I'm planning on doing more close artistic studies later in the year, but for now, the emphasis is definitely on my writing.

So . . . um . . . yeah. That was longer than I planned for it to be!

Remembering

2008-09-11T10:20:00.000-07:00

It's 9/11, so I'm going to be doing radio-silence today aside from this post. Even though it's been 7 years, I can still remember the moment I heard about the plane hitting the Pentagon. Not the NYC ones. I must have heard about the NYC planes sometime when I was driving to my morning class, but I don't remember it.

I do remember hearing about the Pentagon plane, though. That was when I pulled into a gas station and found a pay phone. There was already a line of people waiting to use it, and when I got to my turn, I called my new boyfriend, who was a paramedic. I knew he'd be called to help at the Pentagon and who knew what else would happen there -- what if there was another plane? I'd just started dating him a month before but I was insanely in love and all I could think was that I'd just met him -- I wasn't ready to say goodbye yet.

Seven years later and he's still my husband. Seven years later and a lot of other people had to say goodbye that day.

Wednesday Whoops Teaser

2008-09-10T06:35:00.000-07:00

Grr. My computer is being ulcertastic this evening, so my Tuesday Teaser didn't get uploaded until today.

Anyway, as usual, here's is my twisted teaser for my upcoming novel Lament. It feels weird to say that I'll be posting a teaser every Tuesday until its release, since it's already shipping from Amazon, but the truth is that it doesn't hit major bookstores until Oct. 1st, four Tuesdays from now. So. Here's another teaser, relieved of spoilerness by the simple device of replacing the human characters with octopi.

More lovely reviews over the weekend, by the way, but I figure you're tired of them by now. We'll just go for the greatest hits:

"Lament was, to put it mildly, simply fabulous." - Julie Kagawa.
"Watch out Melissa Marr and Holly Black, there is a new faerie Queen in town!" - the Story Siren.
"ooooh, the smooching scenes. I cannot wait to read the sequel, Ballad." Robin Bridges

and of course
"Overall, this is a really fun book, genuinely hilarious and smart and sad. If nothing else, you've gotta love a book that begins, 'You'll be fine once you throw up,' and then uses the phrase 'puke arc'; in a way that is actually funny and not disgusting." - Skirmish of Wit

Moose, Revisited

2008-09-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

"Guess Who?" - 8 x 16" colored pencil on gessoboard.
Copyright 2007 Maggie Stiefvater.

As I haven't had a Moose-the-Cat piece available in a long time, I wanted to let you guys know that one of my old Moose pieces; the owner is selling it on eBay. It's one of criminally insane Moose hanging off the back of my computer desk while I worked.

If you're interested, it's here.

The Greatest Invention Ever

2008-09-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

So today was a monumental day in Maggiedom. I know what you're thinking. You're waiting for me to announce some book thingy (which is true, today is the day that Lament's Amazon pre-orders shipped, apparently) or some art thingy (sort of true, today I started on my first full sized piece in a long while). But the truth is far bigger.

Today was the first day of school.

This is the sound of me lifting off with little wingies of freedom and loads of time and three days a week of being able to not only work on writing and art, but also do things like load the dishwasher.

Amazing.

This morning, the kids were both more excited than me in a chocolate chip factory. I snapped this photo (they were saying "SCHOOL!" instead of "CHEESE!") and then aauaguhghghg

Ginger just farted.

I'm sorry, but it was bad. I may have to leave the room.

Cough. Anyway. They were both very excited, so we dropped them off and I went home, where I played my stereo really loudly and did more work than any woman should be able to get done in a 6 hour period.

Then Cop Husband and I picked them up and the teachers told us how good they were, except for when Victoria got into a fight with Will and screamed loudly enough that the entire school heard her. No kidding. I know the stories are true because the front receptionist said that an older child had actually run down the hall and out the front doors to escape the sound, and she'd had to chase him and bring him back in.

That's loud.

For some reasons, the teachers seemed very . . . not concerned by this. Does this happen often in preschool?

Preschool, for the record, is a great invention.

Teaser Tuesday and Sketchbook Update

2008-09-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Once again, 'tis Tuesday! First of all, I wanted to say that I am four pages away from finishing my latest sketchbook (which I will photograph later), which means I'll probably be holding the drawing for the sketchbook giveaway sometime next week. I'll also be posting about value sketches at the same time, because guess what it's full of? Fun times . . .

Anyway, Like all previous Tuesdays, I'm posting a non-spoilery scene from my upcoming novel LAMENT. Only FIVE more Tuesdays to go until its release date. And holy heck that's soon.

So why are the scenes not spoilery? Because the characters have been safely replaced with animals to protect their identities. This week, dinos, baby.

Are You Who Say You Are?

2008-08-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

"Cat with a Pearl Earring" 2.5 x 3.5" colored pencil on paper.
Copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.
Available on mugs/ bags/ stuff here.

Sunday is my blog-reading day. Well, it's really my lazy all-purpose doing things I don't have time to do the rest of the week day, but it's quicker to say "blog-reading day."

Anyway, the bigger my blogging circle gets, the more chances I seem to get to actually meet some of the folks whose blogs I read or who comment on my blogs. It's always a weird experience. Because sometimes, you meet someone whose online persona is just like them -- their speech patterns and their . . . I dunno, aura . . . are exactly like their real-life mannerisms.

But more often than not, there's a strange disconnect between someone's online persona and their real-life persona. And as a blogger, that's a bad thing. Because most of us are way better at speaking in real life than we are in writing. Sure, a lot of us can throw together a nicely patterned sentence or a formal paper, but we sure as bunny-fluff don't actually speak like that.

So the reason why this sucks for bloggers is because the success of your blog (and for artists who rely on blogs to drive purchases) relies on how well you can connect with your fellow man. The younger set doesn't have the same problems with this because they've grown up talking to people online. To them, there's no difference in how they speak and how they write (which of course has its own set of problems when they try to move into formal writing). A great example is this teen review of Lament. Tell me you don't know exactly how this girl would be in real life. I had the great fortune to meet her after she wrote that review and I have to tell you, what you see is what you get. And that's refreshing a world of insincerity and anonymity. People want to get a sense of who you are.

On the other hand, I get e-mails from older folks -- and by older I mean thirty -- and I get run-on paragraphs of stilted e-mailese. Often it comes across as curt or uneducated; it frustrates me when I meet them in person and realize that these are highly educated, well-spoken people whose communication skills fall apart when converted to the written word. In a word . . . ack. Communication disaster.

So here's the question for the week: are you who you say you are on your blog? Or are you buried beneath clunky prose and funkier punctuation? Here's an exercise: hold a conversation with someone. Anyone. Your husband. Your dog. Then run to the keyboard and write down exactly what you just said. With some polishing and slightly fewer swear words, that should be what your online persona sounds like too.

Hope everyone's having a great Labor Day . . . I expect I will have a blog post containing humorous antics and tales of disaster as I try to host my first ever multiple-family BBQ at my house tomorrow. I'm afraid, very afraid.

Reader E-mails and Teaserness

2008-08-26T14:45:00.000-07:00

Before I post the Tuesday Teaser, I wanted to get some blog business out of the way first.

First of all, I've been asked to do a post on value sketches, so that'll be coming sometime this week. Second of all, if you have other topics that you're interested in hearing me blog about (like the time last week I had to jump sock foot out one of my windows)(or art stuff, even!), feel free to email me to ask. Third of all, some blog readers have emailed me and I've tried to send emails back, only to see my responses successfully repelled by over-zealous spam filters. If you haven't heard from me, this is probably why! Try resending your email.

Okay. Now onto Teaser Tuesday.

Another Tuesday Teaser! As usual, I'm counting down the remaining Tuesday's to my debut novel's release (Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception) by posting a teaser scene from the novel here. With the characters disguised in other species to keep from being spoilery, of course.

So there are technically 6 more Tuesdays until the novel comes out but rumor has it that the book is going to be early, especially if you order directly from Flux here. That means that little baby Laments could show up in bookstores in . . . weeks. Sniff. I got my cover flats a few days ago. Sniff. My little novel is getting all grown up and moving out.

Anyway, here's the teaser. With insect goodness.

Twisted Teaser Tuesday

2008-08-19T11:29:00.000-07:00

Whoo. I can't believe there's only seven more Tuesdays left until LAMENT comes out. As per usual, I'm building almost unbearable tension for the novel's release by posting a teaser scene from LAMENT here on the blog each Tuesday. But of course, I don't want to be spoilery, so I've taken the liberty of disguising the characters in other forms. In this case, deep sea creatures, baby! I always wanted to draw a jellyfish!

And, whoa, the metaphor of the species in this one just kills me.

Baby Pics

2008-08-13T12:22:00.001-07:00

Because it's been too long since I posted doggie photos. If you are not into doggie photos . . . too bad. But look how big Ginger is getting! She's taller than Peanut!

Oh, and for the uninitiated, Ginger is a Banded Mountain Terrier and she's the Best Dog Ever. (No offense, Peanut, but you bark at your own farts. C'mon. What's with that?)

Twisted Teaser Tuesday: Lament

2008-08-12T12:42:00.000-07:00

Tuesday again! Do I need to explain what that means still? I guess I'd better. Here it is: my upcoming novel LAMENT: THE FAERIE QUEEN'S DECEPTION is coming out on Oct 1, which means there are eight more Tuesdays before it comes out. Every Tuesday, I post a scene from the novel, but with animals in the place of the characters to avoid being spoilery.

So here's this week's. Ducks standing in for the humans.

When the Lights Go Out, Are You Still an Artist?

2008-08-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

"er something" (top) and "Peanut" (bottom) by Victoria Stiefvater
Crayola Markers on some vaguely manilla colored support.

This picture that my 4 year old daughter did today sort of illustrates my current mood perfectly. I really wanted to start my newest novel, even though I've got other work to do yet on my novels under contract, so I got up at 5:30 this morning to get some time in. And now, ummmm hours later (don't make me do the math, but I've been awake awhile) that's sort of what my thought bubble looks like.

Anyway, vague sleepiness puts me in a thoughtful mood, and looking at some colored pencil art online made me even more thoughtful, and then looking at Victoria's drawings pushed me over the edge.

Which edge, you wisely ask? The rhetorical question edge. The one where I look at these drawings and at mine and at the colored pencil pieces online and I ask myself "when the lights go out, am I still an artist?"

Think about it. Do you remember when you were a kid and the power would go out and you'd be so bored that you'd eat your own brother just for the entertainment value? And your mother/ father/ creepy Aunt figure would give you a pack of paper, a couple crayons, and an oil lamp, and you'd go to town. Or at least, if you were me, you did. I was a tremendous doodler as a kid and even through college. I sort of got known for it in a bunch of my college classes, because my professors suspected that I wasn't paying attention (they were wrong) and that I had more interest in my art than in their subject matter (they were right).

I suspect that most of you, dear readers, were the same. We drew anything we wanted all the time, just to see what happened. And if the power went out -- well, nothing changed. We were still the same. Our mojo still flowed freely from pen to paper. But now, as an adult, can we say the same? Or are we married to that reference photo on the computer or our projector or our lightbox? How much of our style is straight-up realism and how much of it is actual self-expression?

So here's the really crucial question you need to ask yourself.

In the event of a zombie apocolypse where we lost all power, would you still be the artist you are with the lights on?

I didn't like the answer that I had for that question. I think the answer for most of us colored pencil artists is that we are not the same artists with the lights on as with the lights off. For starters, if zombies snacked on my brain, I'm not sure how that would affect my art anyway. (I guess it depends on which part of my brain). But for . . . um, finishers . . . I also didn't like that I had to truthfully answer that question "no." It's why I'm spending my artistic down-time throwing myself into my sketchbook, drawing from life, doodling, developing a style in a very organic, Maggie-centric rather than photo-centric way.

How about you guys? Would you be the same artist if the zombies cut your power lines? Does it bother you if the answer's no?

Twisted Teaser Tuesday: Lament

2008-08-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, once again it is that time of week. As the weeks countdown to LAMENT's release date (only nine more Tuesdays to go), I'm posting a teaser scene from the novel every Tuesday. But I wouldn't want to be spoilery, so every week, I have cunningly disguised the characters in each scene. This week, I decided to go with lizards. Well, an alligator, a lizard, and a green anole. Sounds a bit like the beginning of a joke, doesn' t it? An alligator, a lizard, and a green anole walk into a bar. The barkeeper says, "Why the long face?" And the alligator eats him.

Okay, so I'm no good at jokes. But here's the teaser. I guess one of the characters isn't disguised very well, but we'll survive.

Reader Questions about Writing, etc.

2008-07-30T11:36:00.000-07:00

"Sketches from the Birchmere"
Both of the sketches in this post are sketches from my sketch book (only 10 more pages to go before the giveaway!) and were done while I was sitting at a Joshua Radin concert last night.
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.

Okay, these questions, like the concert last night, turned out longer and less nicely formatted than I had expected, so I'm just going to post them here in their intensely long unabridged entirety and then tidy and fudge for my website's FAQ. These are questions from my e-mail, from this blog, and from my writing blog. Thank you everyone for asking questions!

Questions about Craft

For you which comes first when it comes to writing- the character or the story?
Story first, definitely, because I tend to come up with the ideas that sound like "what if . . . " I write about the process from beginning to end over at my short story group blog.

Do you have any rituals before and during writing that help you to stay in the zone?
For me, it’s music. If there’s not music playing – and music that I’ve handpicked for that particular work in progress -- for some reason I can’t focus, even if the room isn’t noisy. Somehow music acts like the glue that keeps all the pieces of Maggie (which would be a great name for a band) together.

During writing, I tend to reward myself for finishing a scene. You know, I get to go online and check my e-mails or jump up and make cookie dough or something before getting back down to work. I’m a very reward-based person.

When you write, are you more in the mindset of being the director watching the scene unfold, or the character experiencing it? (I guess this is a question about emotional distance.)
Oh, definitely director. While I empathize with my characters a good deal (I think you have to), I also need to do horrible and fun things to them, and to do that, a director hat is more useful. Plus, as a character, you might miss opportunities to bring in setting or play with overall tone for a scene. I also think about building my novels scene by scene, so director-ness is much more me. If you get too close to a character, i.e., in their body a la Patrick Swayze/ Whoopie Goldberg, I think writing becomes much more of an emotional roller coaster and I think contributes to the idea of writers drinking like fish and generally being unstable people great for parties and bad for marriage.

I'm an avid reader of your short stories and have always wondered how do you write such realistic male characters?
I’m a very tom-boyish girl, so I think all my characters tend towards middle-of-the-roadness. Did you notice that my boys are always a bit sensitive and my girls are always a bit rough and ready around the edges? I have a hard time with very girly-girls.

That said, I steal shamelessly from real people. I try to pay attention when people speak and imagine what it would look like written down. It’s a great exercise and it also teaches you a ton about whoever you’re talking to. Once they get over you frowning at them because you're wondering where you'd put the comma or em dash in the last thing they said to you.

Any tips on achieving a good balance between dialogue and description during a scene? I tend to err on having either "long talk furthering conflict" scenes, or "action/stuff getting done" scenes.
Back to director hat here. When I’m trying to pace a novel - because really what you’re talking about here is pacing, I think of my novel as a mix CD. You want song you burn to have the same atmosphere, but you need a nice mix of slow and fast. Slow scenes make fast scenes seem faster, and vice versa. So I try and build my scenes like that. Then within the scene, I’m always leery of action that can’t possibly end up with someone you love getting dead or maimed. You know, if it’s towards the front of the book and you know the main character lives on. Or if it’s secondary characters you don’t care about. Because then, no matter how hawt your sword swinging action is, it’s not really conflict. It’s something to be skipped over til you get to the next good bit. Same way with slow dialogue bits. I’ve got to care, and you’ve got to care too.

Rule of thumb for me? If I want to know what happens, I write it. If I need to know but don’t feel excited writing it, I put in a ***insert scene where Bob tells Marley about chains*** and come back to it. Nine times out of ten, I don’t end up needing that scene, and the book’s tighter for it.

In terms of background and world-building, when do you decide "enough is enough"?
I like to have the big parts of my world settled on before I ever put pencil to paper, but a lot of it evolves while I’m writing. Because my fantasies always take place in the real world, I don’t have as much to work out as a high fantasy writer. However, I do need some rules established for my magic or my supernatural crap which is going on. I don’t like to do a ton of pre-planning, because then I’ll feel obliged to do an infodump. I prefer to go into the novel with a pretty good skeleton of my world, flesh it out as I need it, and then in the first revision, go back and make sure it’s all straight forward and plays nicely with others.

I despise the info-dump and I also despise feeling like the author has put a lot of work into the world building. However you do it, it should appear effortless and in the background. The characters come first. World is a far far far second.

How do you balance family life with writing? Do you ever feel like you're so busy listening to the characters in your head that you aren't paying full attention to the people speaking with you in real life?
I will confess that if a really good argument is happening or a really charming moment, my mind will often slide over to Maggie-Author-Zone, where I steal the emotions and dialogue for later use in a scene. I was really bad about this as a teen, and I came off pretty detached, I think, because I was a watcher rather than a player. Now I only allow my characters and novels full rein of my head under controlled circumstances – brainstorming in the car by myself, for instance, or laying on the floor with the headphones on. Brainstorming is a crucial part of writing, so you can’t get rid of it. But you can definitely dictate when you do it.

As far as balancing family life with writing, I’ve always had a good husband who understands that writing is important to me. Even before it was my job, he knew that when I said “I’m going to write for a bit” that I wasn’t to be poked at. And we’re good at entertaining ourselves in the same room in parallel lives, so he’ll pop on a movie I would never watch on the sofa a few feet away from me, and I’ll pop on my headphones and start to type, and whenever we take a break from what we’re doing, we’ll chat or smooch or something disgustingly charming like that. I just sort of smushed it into life and it’s just like eating or washing the dishes or watching TV. I just make sure it has a beginning and an end time. I don’t dash over to the ‘puter to write every spare moment I get. I save them all up into a wad.

What's one thing you should abandon and one thing you should cultivate to become the best writer you can be?
I guess the one thing you should abandon is melodrama. When I look at my old stuff from ten years ago (yes, when I was 16. Shut up. I was not a melodramatic teen.) the really awful part was the melodrama. The ideas and plots were still kinda cool, but the way the action and relationships played out . . . people. I mean, characters. Get. Over. Yourselves.

And the one thing I would say you should cultivate is a good reading eye. We’re writers. You can study books on craft all you like, but the real thing that teaches us the most is reading a good book. The difference between a good reader and a good writer is that a good writer can look at a great book and figure out why it’s great . . . and apply it to their own stuff.

Questions about Business

Should I look for an editor or publisher or agent first?
Definitely an agent first. If you don’t get any personalized responses to your query letter from an agent, it’s a surefire sign you need to polish your query or your story a bit more. I suggest diving into www.agentquery.com first.

Is an agent a necessary thing to have? I'm assuming yes on this one seeing as how most major publishers won't look at your stuff unless you have one, but I just wanted to be sure.
Actually, I can’t in all good conscience say yes, although I love my agent and think she works like an absolute demon to further my careerm because I got my first book contract without an agent, with a mid-size publisher, Flux, who still accepts unagented submissions. Flux has a good reputation and gets good reviews and shelf-space in the major chains for their novels, but the danger with going with a mid-size publisher is that they won’t be able to get your books on the shelves of the major chains. So if you decide to submit your work to small publishers yourself, make sure you check out the local bookstores to find out if their current list is readily available.

Also, my agent negotiated my second contract with Flux (and my subsequent one which I can’t talk about yet) and I have to tell you, it was wonderful to sit back and let her do all the business work while I wrote. Plus she got me more money, a contract filled with bells and whistles that I could never have negotiated, and for the next book got me read practically instantly by major editors. I could never have gone full-time without her.

So can you get published without an agent? Yes. Can you get a contract with a major NYC publisher? Very likely not (most are closed to unagented submissions) Can you go full-time without one? I don’t think so.

When is a good time to start looking for one? Before editing? After editing?
Definitely after editing. Getting an agent is extremely competitive, only slightly less than getting published. You want to make sure your work is as good as you can get it, but don’t be surprised if they have even more editorial suggestions. And get used to the idea that your editor will have even more editorial suggestions after you’ve done all you can do on your own.

What's a good way to go about finding a good one?
I really like www.agentquery.com. It lets you find agents that represent your genre, take e-subs, and are members of AAR. Another good way to find them is in the acknowledgments of novels in your genre. Do your research on agents! Read their websites and make sure they’ve had sales in your area before you query them, not after. A bad agent is far worse than none at all.

Did you find your choices for, and, finally your remarkable agent after your publisher expressed an interest in work or before?
I got my agent after I had my contract for LAMENT (well after -- I didn't start looking for one until I was thinking about getting the sequel under contract), but there are plenty of folks who landed their agent without any publisher interest. There’s a great section on Fangs, Fur, and Fey where the members (including me) talk about how we got our agents and book deals. I'm sorry it's not an easy page to navigate, but if you look at all of the entries for the month of December, I think the posts begin on the 8th.

Is it harder to get an agent if there is no previously published work? I've never been good at writing short stories and getting them submitted into magazines or anything like that. My pieces of fiction have always been a lot longer.
I actually never managed to sell a short story until after I got my novel published. I had no credits at all when I got my first contract. A nice, professional looking blog (without no griping about rejections on it) will help you more than short story credits, as will a cheerful persona and a willingness to be edited. Sounds cliche to say your work will speak for itself . . . but it better.

The hardest thing for me was writing the damn synopsis. Don’t figure. I tried to keep it brief, but I wasn’t able to get any feeling in it. I’m still rewriting it. It seems too clinical. Common sense tells me if you can write an 80,000 word something, the synopsis should be easy. Your views, experience, greatly appreciated.
Agents will want synopses! Either a long (6 page-ish) or short (2 page-ish) I used to dread them. Okay, I still kinda do. But they don’t have to be horrible. What you have to keep in mind when you write them is that they aren’t chapter summaries. They’re merely an overview of the plot and character arcs, complete with ending, told in the same style as your novel.

So imagine that you’re standing in a grocery store line and someone asks you what the movie Pretty Woman was about. You’re like “Richard Gere falls in love with a prostitute.” They say, “sounds interesting, disease issues aside. Is it any good? Does it have a happy ending?” And you’re like, “Well, a rich business man hires Julia Roberts to be his live-in girlfriend/ sex toy for his business trip. He lets her whizz through the shopping district with his credit card and buy stuff to make her look like a lady – shades of Pygmalion – and all the while he’s falling for her and trying not to let anyone know that she’s a ho. In the end, the guy who plays the annoying guy from Friends finds out that she is, tries to come onto her, and Richard Gere beat the living ectoplasm out of him. He asks Julia if she’ll be his high paid mistress forever and she turns him down, now that she’s learned principle and Prada. Sad bit. Aww. Then he decides he wants her to be a real, live girlfriend instead, accosts her with opera, and they live happily ever after.”

You don’t talk about the best friend, the snarky sales people she meets, the concierge who helps her – you talk about the main plot and the points you need to show the arc of the characters changing. That’s it. And you tell it in the same voice as your novel. Either a two pager or a six pager, depending on if the agent wants a long or a short (I prefer the short).

Questions about Maggie, the future Queen of America

When I read author FAQ pages I like to see things like, what are your influences, what were your favorite books as a kid, what music do you listen to while or before writing (if any)...stuff like that.
Favorite music: Alternate rock (Breaking Benjamin, Muse, Ashes Divide, The Shins sort of stuff), Celtic (Lunasa, Solas, Silly Wizard, Bothy Band, etc), & soundtracks (The Village, Finding Neverland). But I’ll listen to anything. Some of my favorites don’t fit in those categories, like Blaqk Audio, Imogen Heap, and Palestrina. I burn mix CDs and buy music expressly for books that I’m working on – mood’s important!

Favorite books: definitely check out my recommended books on GoodReads (and feel free to friend me if my books look like they match your taste in books). I’m working on adding the ones I loved as a kid there but I’ve got most of my recent loves up.

Do you have a page on Facebook? Myspace?
Yep. Here's my Facebook. And my Myspace. And you can find out more about my tastes in movies/ music/ books on either. Feel free to friend me.

Would a statuette of a childhood era Maggie be a Hummel Figurine?
Yes, it would be. My maiden name was Hummel but I went with my married name of Stiefvater for my books because I thought it sounded friendlier and more approachable.

That's saracasm, in case you missed it.

Twister Teaser Tuesday (Whoops Wednesday)

2008-07-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

Because I got back so late from the Joshua Radin concert last night (Joshua, please, please, please, lose the hat), I didn't get a chance to upload my twisted teaser image for Lament to my blogs until today. Hence the whoops Wednesday. Anyway, so there are ten more Tuesdays until Lament's release date, and each Tuesday I'm posting an illustrated scene from the novel to build up audience anticipation to a friggin' fever pitch (:D) But since I don't want to be spoilery, of course, I have helpfully changed the scenes in some way from the original.

For this week's installment, the first action scene from the novel I have illustrated, I have drawn the first real faerie-human violent scene in the novel. But to protect the innocent and guilty, I have changed it to a little dog-on-cat violence instead. The best part about this one was that I sketched it while I was sitting at the concert and my sister was looking over my shoulder, snickering as she recognized the scene it was from.

Questions for Writers & Maggies

2008-07-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

I was just getting ready to answer a few questions someone sent me on writing and I figured I would answer them on my writing blog instead. Then THAT idea blossomed into doing a more extended FAQ that I could link to on my website and hopefully be a useful reference and keep me from typing the same answers all the time.

So I figured while I was at it, I would ask you guys if you had any questions I should add to the list, for writers in general or for Maggies in specific. Not that I am the end all be all on writing (far from it), but anything I can be useful on as an agented, published, full-time writer.

So . . . fire away.

Virtual Sketching and Butt Kicking

2008-07-26T06:27:00.000-07:00

"fruit thingies" - in my sketchbook (which is close to getting full -- remember I will hold a drawing of my blog subscribers to give it away once its full)
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.

First of all, I wanted to post my sketch for the July Virtual Sketching project. The reference photo -- fruity things of some variety (oranges? mangoes? alien seed pods?) -- really wasn't the sort of thing I'd normally tackle, but hey, it was entertaining and yellow-orange-thingies are always challenging for me because of the nature of yellows in colored pencils. The sketches are supposed to be posted any time today so you still have time!

Okay, and now onto the butt-kicking. I do these periodically for those who need/ slash want them. I was already brainstorming about doing one yesterday after two writers in two different online venues asked me how I got so much done, and then the always wonderful Jo Castillo left a comment on my last entry asking for a butt-kicking . . . so I knew it was a sign from the heavens.

So here it goes. You all know what I do -- I have two toddlers, three editors working with me on four novels, a part-time art career, musical instruments I practice, meals to cook (I'm allergic to preservatives so everything has to be from scratch), blogs to write, etc. etc. I think I have a full, life, but I don't feel like I have an impossible life. It's a happy life doing what I love.

And here are the secrets to my success in this month's butt-kicking. Remember, butt-kickings are like hydrogen pyroxide -- if it stings it means it's working.

1. Know What You Want
This is the biggest thing. I know exactly what I want. I knew I wanted to be a published novelist. I knew I wanted to make my living as a self-employed creative type. I knew I wanted to play the piano, etc. You can't make something happen unless you know what it is you want to happen.

2. When You Say You Want it You Better Mean It
The fact of the matter is that when most people tell me they want to be a published novelist or a career artist, they mean want with a small w. A small w want means that you aren't absolutely committed to hunting down that goal with an elephant gun. A small w want means that you can get discouraged. It means that you can be pulled from your motivation by the latest episode of America's Got Talent. No one can make you want something more. It's got to come from inside you.

3. When You Really Want Something, You'll Get It
This is not psycho babble. It's really true. If the goal is specific enough and you are committed enough to achieving it, you will get it. I used to qualify this by saying that physical constraints applied -- you know, if you were five foot tall, you couldn't end up playing professional basketball. But now, I don't think I believe that anymore. I've seen the stories about people taking on overwhelming odds and I now think that however crazy your goal is -- first five foot tall basketball pro, leader of the free world, bestselling author, etc - if you really want it, capital W Want, then you will make it happen.

4. Know the Difference Between Can't and Won't
This is one of the classics. People in my colored pencil workshops tell me all the time, "I can't draw anything better than a stick figure." But what they really mean is won't. Anyone can draw with perfect photorealism. But only some people really want to. Capital W Want that means they put in the hours to achieve it. The rest of the world won't draw anything better than a stick figure. I caught myself the other day telling my husband that I didn't have the patience to knit. That's a lie, did you notice? All it means is that I'm not willing to have the patience to knit. If I wanted to knit, I'd make it happen. Don't lie to yourself and say that you "can't" do something or that you don't have the skills necessary to make it happen. That's self-defeatism at its finest and most insidious.

5. You are Your Own Best Friend
We all have friends that motivate us, right? That get us back on track and pick us up when we're down? These best friends tell us that not getting into a particular juried show isn't crushing or that that deadline pressing down on you is doable. Well, guess what. You had better be your own best friend. Because you have to have a little internal voice motivating you all the time. Nobody will believe in your dreams as much as you and no one can be as hard on you to achieve them as you. Except maybe Jiminy Cricket.

6. Who Are You?
What do you tell people? What do you want to be able to tell people? "I'm an artist." "I'm a writer." "I'm a five foot tall basketball player." Now let's pretend that these people can drop into your life randomly seven different times over seven different days. What will they find you doing? Will they find you, the artist, creating art or developing marketing plans for it? The writer writing? The basketball player shooting hoops? Or will they find you procrastinating . . . watching TV, folding laundry that could wait until after your dreams get tended to, reading my blog, running unnecessary errands. The fact of the matter is that you need to make your dreams your identity. Long before I was a published author, I told people I was a writer and an artist, and if you dropped in at my house randomly at any given time, that's what you'd find me doing.

It's a question of wanting it, people. It's why I like writing for teens. Do you remember being a teen? When you had dreams so big they actually hurt to think you wouldn't get them? You need to sweep away the years of cynicism and putting your dreams aside and really harness that wanting again. In the end, watching So You Think You Can Dance won't change your life. But finishing that drawing, writing that paragraph, planting that garden -- whatever your dream is -- that will.

End butt kicking.

Virtual Sketching

2008-07-23T07:46:00.000-07:00

"Cassie" - quick sketch from life.
Copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.

I just followed a link on Stacy Rowan's blog to a blog I hadn't heard of before -- Virtual Sketch Date. Once a month, artists are invited to sketch a common reference for one week and then the finished pieces are linked to at the end of the week.

Sounds like fun, so I'll be doing it. If you want to try, here's the link. Thanks, Stacy, for pointing me in that direction!

Which reminds me, I have one last portrait that I'm supposed to be working on this week as well . . . time to break out the sweet tea.

Twisted Teaser Tuesday: Lament

2008-07-22T09:50:00.000-07:00

Time for another Twisted Teaser Tuesday! I have eleven more Tuesday's until Lament's release date, and so to celebrate and build up almost unbearable tension, I have decided to do a teaser scene from the novel on my blog each Tuesday. One would not want to be spoilery, of course, so the teasers will be slightly . . . altered from the original scene in order to preserve their secrecy. In this case, I've replaced the main characters in the scene with pelicans. And of course, in the real version, the characters do have hands.

You gotta have goals.

2008-07-21T12:47:00.000-07:00

"Memory" - 16 x 16" colored pencil on board.
Copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.
My panel for the Equine Mural Mosaic (which is fascinating -- check it out)

Regular readers will know that I am in love with goals. If goals were a vegetable, I would pick bushels of them, eat them until I was sick, and then freeze the rest so that I could have a continuous supply of goals through the cold months.

One thing I have learned about goals, however, is that, like vegetables, if you don’t use ‘em or freeze ‘em right away, they go bad. Some of them go bad in a spectacular fashion. Like if you vow to lose 20 pounds at the beginning of the year, forget about the goal, and then discover Haagen-Daas ice cream sometime in June . . . not only is that goal to lose weight gone bad, but it’s bad like stinking in the bottom of your crisper drawer bad. With rotten goal juice eeking around it.

And other goals go bad in a sort of failure to stay relevant way. Like if you suddenly crave sweet potatoes and buy a ton of them. If you don’t cook all of them, you’ll have those few lonely ones left over. They’ll never go bad in a fantastically awful way, but you’ll end up throwing them away after eight months because you just don’t want them anymore. So goals should be checked often and the ones that are really timely ought to be attacked immediately.

So enough with the metaphor. I wanted to write a post today about New Year’s Resolutions. Stop staring at the screen like that, it’s rude. I know it’s nearly the end of July (yes, it’s nearly the end. The 21st. Can you believe it?) but they’re still a good topic. Because halfway through the year(ish) is a great time to pull out your Resolutions and see which of them are done, which of them are so irrelevant you’ll never truthfully attempt them, and which of them are oozing stink-juice in your veggie drawer.

Here’s the sordid truth about New Year’s Resolutions: very rare is the resolution which actually stays good for a year. Twelve months is a long time. Priorities change, economies shift, careers jiggle, exercise goes better than planned, things get born under your porch with six limbs and eyes that glow red faintly in the darkness. It just makes good sense to reevaluate your goals partway through the year to make sure they’re still functioning the way they’re supposed to.

Here are my New Year’s Resolutions I made at the beginning of the year. Let me show y’all how I’m changing them to make them fit my changing priorities (without welching on any of them).

1. make x amount of money with my art
2. make x amount of money with my novels
3. make x amount of that with prints.
4. Contract for sequel to Lament.
5. Memorize 2 O’Carolan pieces for the harp
6. Visit NYC
7. Inspire someone to be an artist
8. Comfortably run a mile
9. Record a lament for Lament.
10. Get an agent
11. Contract for one other book.

I've managed to accomplish #1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, and 11. Instead of just crossing them off the list, I’m revising them.

NEW 1. Establish a solid financial plan for the next two years. (See how this is related to my first three goals I accomplished?
NEW 4. Begin writing Re: Myself, my next work in progress. (See how this one flows naturally from finishing Ballad and handing it in to my editor? The idea isn’t to keep myself constantly busy for the sake of being busy – but rather to keep myself motivated and on track for my career and personal life.)
NEW 7. Talk to one hundred teen writers about the business of writing. I’m about a third of the way there already. (similar purpose, just different career)
NEW 10. Keep my novel website updated regularly.
New 11. Double my number of subscribers to my writing blog (m-stiefvater.livejournal.com) and my short story blog (www.merryfates.com) (see how both of these are about furthering my writing career, just like the original goals)

Now for the ones I haven't done yet. Two stay as they are: I'm still going to NYC and I'm still going to record the lament -- I've written it, I just need to make it into the studio.

But two need to be changed.

I didn’t do #5. I’ll confess, I let these two musical pieces sort of go stale next to my potatoes. I had thought I’d be playing my harp more, but really I’ve been working with my acoustic guitar more as the harp needs new strings. So I’m changing #5 to something that will actually have meaning on the list: Buy an electric guitar for my birthday in November and start to learn some fun tricks on it.

And I worked diligently on #8, running a mile, until it got hot – really hot – and then I decided that I really needed something that I could do indoors. I’ve been dying to get killer abs, so I switched this to sit-ups instead. (and whoo do I see a difference . . . you could throw bricks at me now and my abs would repel them). Anyway, so my new number 8 is to do sit ups three times a week for the rest of the year. Still fitness related. But totally air conditioned. Go on, call me a wuss . . .

So how about you guys? Have you revamped your goals yet? Do you need to?

Teaser Tuesday

2008-07-15T12:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, by my reckoning, I have twelve more Tuesdays until LAMENT's release date. I wracked my brains to think of ways to talk more about it in the upcoming weeks (okay, not really. Really I just drank some sweet tea and listened to some City Sleeps and decided I like to draw bears doing funny things), and I decided that what I want to do is feature a teaser from LAMENT every Tuesday from now until its release.

But one would not want to be spoilery. So these teasers will be . . . slightly obscure. So for today's teaser, I'm featuring an important scene from LAMENT, but to keep from being spoilery, the characters have been replaced with Bears.

No, there are no bears in LAMENT.

Well, there are now, I guess.

Dispatches from my Belly Button

2008-07-14T20:20:00.000-07:00

My belly button hates me.

Yesterday, I innocently took my kids to the beach. Not even a real beach. Colonial Beach, which is like, not even a real beach. It's is 90% pebbles the shape of the hole on the bottom of your foot they made and 10% sand. Anyway, Thing 2, my son, dumped some sand over me. Which was lovely, but aside from a braful/headful of pre-glass, I was still pretty okay fine.

Until (bah bah bah -- that's supposed to be scary music cue) today when I realized my belly button felt . . . nope, that's it. I could feel my belly button. That's not normal. So I checked it out, because belly buttons are fun. They go on forever, and they can hide stuff in them. Like in this case. There were two grains of sand stuck in there. So I took them out. I thought that would be the end of this sordid tale.

But no, my belly button hates me.

So now I'm sitting here typing with a bright red belly button which Dr. Dad informs me is infected. In 24 hours. People. Seriously. Who gets an infected belly button from two grains of sand?

My love slave called me this evening from the Cop-Phone in his car.

LOVE SLAVE: Calling to find out how you are, with your infected belly button and all. See if you're pulling through.
ME: It's all red. I can see something down there. I think it's calling my name.
LOVE SLAVE: It would be a shame to lose you to something like an infectious belly button.
ME: That's great. I'll try and hang on.

So I'm trying to hang on, despite the fact that my belly button hates me. To think I took care of it all these years and didn't even stick anything in there to see how deep it went . . . it's betrayed my trust. Deeply.

The Girl Who Couldn't Grow Up

2008-07-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

"Will in Sepia" - 8 x 10" sketch on Artist-x board.
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.

This week, I was talking creative writing to a few dozen teens at a creative writing camp, and one of them said something that I'd always deeply suspected but never heard vocalized quite so clearly. The teen came up to me afterwards and thanked me profusely for coming and talking, and then she said that she'd always been afraid of growing up, but now she was fine . . . because she saw now she didn't have to.

Basically it was a nice version of my husband telling me that I'm juvenile. I've frequently wondered if my complete Peter Pan complex is going to result in my children being completely dysfunctional. After all, I eat cookie dough, listen to my music loud, and do cartwheels for the heck of it. Will this cause

a) brilliant children
b) children who move out as soon as possible in search of a mother-figure
c) thousands of dollars in therapy for my offspring

At least I'm not wearing a face mask and riding around in a wheel chair like Michael Jackson. There are indeed worse role models than myself.

Oh, oh, oh. I should squeal. Have I told you guys about this yet? The advanced reviews of LAMENT have started coming in, and now we have three official blurbs for the book cover and my website. All pretty staggering stuff when you consider that these are people that don't have to say nice things about me! And they still did! Whooooo! Here they are:

"Chock-full of the fierce and the fey, Maggie Stiefvater's Lament is musical, magical, and practically radiating romance. A blood-fresh reinvention of old traditions, perfect for engaging sharp minds and poetic hearts." - Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of Tantalize and writer of the hugely successful Cynsations young adult fiction blog.

"With her lyrical writing, Maggie Stiefvater reimagines myth and legend to bring the world of Faerie to our own." - Richelle Mead, bestselling author of Vampire Academy and Frostbite.

"Teens will love this thrilling modern twist on fairy folk-lore. The characters are real and compelling folks you wish you could meet." - Tiffany Trent, author of the Hallowmere series.

October 1st, the release date, seems so soon. I think I'm getting an ulcer . . .

Really Whale Down Those Colors

2008-06-30T20:15:00.000-07:00

Whew. I'm back from my two-day colored pencil workshop at the Apple Tree in Springfield. It went really well. Much caffeine was had by all. As it's the last workshop I'm teaching for awhile, I thought I'd reveal a few of the secrets of the world here on the blog. Well, secrets of my workshops, anyway.

Here they are -- do with them what you will.

We spend half the workshops getting over the fear of failing. The path to success is littered with bodies. For every successful colored pencil piece I turn out now, there are at least twenty quite hideous colored pencil things (not even fit to be called 'pieces') laying moldering in some garbage pile somewhere
We do three versions of each piece. A two minute value sketch (like the black and white sketch of the books), a 10-15 minute color sketch (like the color version of the books) and a final piece that takes 2-4 hours (like the portrait of Moose at the top)
All the time that you spend staring at your art, trying to decide what to do next or what color to pick up -- that's time you could be using to slap some color down. All those "ums" "ahs" and "ers" really add up. That's what preliminary sketches are for.
I have discovered that if I were made into a doll with a pull string on the back, I would say the following phrases: "push those dark values." "Whale down those colors." "Super sharp point on that pencil, ladies." "Do I need to come over there and heckle you?" and "Pick out some wild colors!"

ARC Giveaway!!!

2008-06-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, folks. I have ARCs of LAMENT to give away. Well, almost. They're winging their way through the postal system to me and will be here within days (I had to give away my last one to high schoolers -- you can see in the photo that the loss was painful to me). Two of these beauties are going to blog readers and I have used my animal cunning to devise a way to distribute them. As you all know, every week, there are three pieces of short fiction by me and my two critique partners up at Merry Sister of Fate.

If you'd like to be in the running for an ARC of LAMENT, here's the deal. You have to read all of June's fiction up at Merry Sisters of Fate (stop whining, it's only nine stories under 1200 words each) and then leave a comment here or at Merry Sisters. Tell me which story you like the best and why so I know that you read it (and if you just pick one randomly and comment, I will so hex you). And then I will use a random number generator to pick two of the commentors to have brand new baby read-it-before-you-can-buy-it-Laments.

And in case you're wondering what this LAMENT thing is about, here's a blurb: Dee Monaghan is a painfully shy but gifted musician. She's about to find out she's a Cloverhand -- someone who can see faeries. When a mysterious boy enters her ordinary suburban life, seemingly out of nowhere, Dee finds herself infatuated. Sucks that he's a faerie assassin, and she's his next mark.

Basically, Dee's life is a lot like a lot of real-life teens' experiences -- except hers has homicidal faeries, make-out sessions with a hot soulless guy, and more four-leaf clovers than a box of Lucky Charms. It's good times. You know you want it.

ETA: I'm doing the drawing on Friday, June 27th!

Saturday Snippet

2008-06-21T03:34:00.000-07:00

I don't normally post my writing on this blog, but I figured I'd post my weekly short story from my group writing blog at Merry Sisters of Fate to let you guys know what I'm doing with a lot of my time these days. If you like what you read here (and there -- every Friday is the day for my new fiction to be up), I'm going to be having one advanced review copy of Lament to give away to a blog reader probably next week. Stay tuned.

And the good news for my art is that I'm just finishing up the first draft of Ballad and I'll be free to twiddle with my pencils a bit. In fact, I'll have to, as I'm doing a piece for this giant Equine Mural Mosaic and it's due to be done on the 25th.

Now onto the fiction! _______________________________________________

"Death's Diner"

At the diner, Death ordered a chocolate milkshake, so I knew someone was going to die.

“What can I get you to eat, honey?” The waitress smiled at him, all dimples upon dimples upon dimples.

Death dramatically flung the single-side menu down. “I don’t care. The tuna. Is the tuna good today? No onions. Does it come with onions?”

“Strawberry milkshake for me,” I said sweetly, because it was pink. After the waitress had gone, I turned to Death. “You’re so unattractive when you pout.” I pushed a pink nailed finger into his bottom lip and wiggled it. “Fish lips. It’s what you get when you pout.”

Death glowered around at the other people in the diner. His words were slurred because my finger was still pushing on his lip. “Why do they have to come here to die? This was my place. They’re ruining my happy memories.”

I removed my finger and smiled at him. Death was so sentimental. “So, who is it?”

The waitress pushed our milkshakes in front of us. Death seized his and circled it with the cage of his arms. “I just want to drink my milkshake. If I think about it, I won’t enjoy it at all. And God knows I deserve a few small pleasures, right?”

“I should’ve been Death,” I observed. I stirred my pink shake. It was the exact same color as my lipstick. And that made me very happy. “It wouldn’t put me off my feed a bit.”

“Well, Love is cruel.” Death glowered past me at a young couple in one of the booths. They were laughing and feeding each other french fries. The boy leaned across the table to playfully blow the girl’s bangs up. Death mashed his straw into his milkshake a few times and looked away.

“Oh. So they’re the lucky ones? Boy or the girl?”

“Please be quiet. You’re giving me an ulcer.”

I leaned over and sang in his ear, “Which one iiiiis it?”

He growled at me. “Unfortunately, not you.”

I smiled at him. Death was so melodramatic.

“What is that?” he demanded. He was looking at his plate, which had just arrived.

I took it. “Pickle.”

“Remove it from my sight before I’m ill.”

I ate it and leaned against him. “Delicious.”

He clung to his stool to keep from falling off. “You disgust me. This diner disgusts me. Why did I get a milkshake? Why are they getting up? They’re not supposed to get up yet.”

But the boy and girl were getting up, tossing their napkins down and taking each others’ hands. And they were looking at us.

“He’s supposed to choke,” Death told me. “On a hot dog. Where’s his hot dog? Why didn’t he finish his hot dog?”

The couple walked straight to us, and the girl rested her hand on Death’s arm. “I just wanted to tell you that you two are such a cute couple. So cute the way you are together.”

Death stared at her.

“Thanks,” I told them. “Have a nice day. And loads of babies.”

Death watched them push out of the diner, leaving the uneaten hot dog on the table. The hot dog was pink, too, which also pleased me. It sort of rounded the day out.

“You’re welcome,” I said.

“Love is insidious,” Death told me. He pushed away his chocolate shake. “Let me have some of your milkshake.”

Death is predictable.

___________
Author's Note: I love diners. Mmmm milkshakes and tuna fish sandwiches . . . this is heaven.
*photo courtesy MBK (Marjie)

Rocking from the Depths of My Studio

2008-06-17T17:15:00.000-07:00

I threw out the coconut shells today. It was deeply traumatic. I had to convince myself that I really didn't need flower pots made of coconut shells, bras made of coconut shells, or candle holders shaped like coconut shells.

They just looked so useful.

So, onto my current obsession. I have decided that what I really want for my birthday in November is an electric guitar (and for Christmas I want a tortilla press, but that's off topic). Now, stick with me as I do the reasoning. The instrument I loved to play most of all was the bagpipes. And what are bagpipes?

loud
obnoxious
quite horrible if played badly
rockin' if played right
totally and completely in your face
able to be heard the next state over

I would still be happily playing the bagpipes if my teeth hadn't gotten bashed in by a woman driving on a suspended license (for DUI several times over)(with her kids in the car)(grrrr). No teeth, no bagpipe-playing. It's a long and boring explanation.

Anyway, I play the harp, but the harp is just . . . not me. It's pretty and soft and fits into every occasion. Does this sound like me to you?

I didn't think so either. I also play the piano and some acoustic guitar, but they are likewise Not Maggie-Like.

So let's make a list of the attributes of the electric guitar.

loud
obnoxious
quite horrible if played badly
rockin' if played right
totally and completely in your face
able to be heard the next state over

I think I'm onto something here.

I want a black one. A shiny black one with a white stripe (does this not sound like a girl picking out a car?). And I will Rock on it. And the neighbors will wish that they'd told their dogs to stop barking overnight. I've already begun to page slowly and meaningfully through Fender's website. And plan long trips to our local guitar shop, where I will annoy the guys who work there by refusing to make a decision until November.

I think I'll name my guitar Angel, short for Dark Angel of Doom Coming Down with Massive Decibels Upon Neighbors Who Should've Put Their Dogs in Overnight.

By the way, you might've noticed that my sketches from my list of topics have not materialized yet. I've discovered that my interest in sketching objects is . . . um, well I don't have any. I'd rather be sketching people. And it's tough to do that when you're currently holing yourself up in your studio working on a novel deadline than looms in two weeks.

So goal one: finish novel.

Goal two: find people.

I haven't been out of my studio in a long time. Is the earth still populated by homo sapiens?

Coconut Bra, Anyone?

2008-06-15T18:48:00.000-07:00

"the bookstore" - in sketchbook.
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.

Last night, my family trekked over to my house and my dad made his chicken curry for us. (He makes awesome curry. On a relative curry scale, where 1 equals smells like dirty foot and tastes like it too and 10 equals dreams of the Taj Mahal, it's at least a 9).

Anyway, it involves coconut, and in honor of my preservative intolerance/ allergy/ deathmatch, he got a real coconut instead of a bag of shredded stuff. Then he gestured in the general direction of a screwdriver and a hammer and told me to split it and scrape out the insides.

*insert much banging and swearing here*

Anyway, I managed to bend the coconut to my will and whatdya know, fresh coconut is way better.

Today, all of the curry supplies have been cleared away, but the coconut shells remain on the counter. I know I should just chuck them in the trash, but they look so . . . useful. I mean, it's not like I'm about to construct a coconut bra or anything, but they just sem like they should be saved for . . . okay, I got nothin'. Hats? Knee guards? Wheel chocks?

Maybe I should just throw them out. But if Monty Python could use them, why can't I?

On a different note, I recently finished an ARC (advanced review copy) of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. The Amazon blurb:

Katniss is a 16-year-old girl living with her mother and younger sister in the poorest district of Panem, the remains of what used be the United States. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games." The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed. When Kat's sister is chosen by lottery, Kat steps up to go in her place.

Maggie's verison:
"The Most Dangerous Game" meets Survivor. I loved it: deft characterization wrapped tightly around this absolutely lean, brutal plot that grabbed me and hung on. This was one that I started reading in the morning and snarled at all comers until I had finished it in the evening. HIGHLY RECOMMEND. It was one of those that as an author I sighed and said, "I want to do that!"

New York, New York!

2008-06-13T05:20:00.000-07:00

I am fantasizing about going to NYC. I don't know why. Well, I sort have wanted to go for a long time. On my list of New Year's Resolutions taped up by my desk, it says in large sharpie marker letters: 6. VISIT NYC.

I'm determined to get there this year. In my head, I have a list of places I want to visit there which sounds a lot like the lyrics to the song "A Partridge in a Pear Tree."

Sing it with me:
Five Pastry Places
Four Candy Shops
Three Indie Bookstores
Two Art Museums
One Delmonico!

It seems strange to me now that three out of five are food related. But out here in the sticks we have a lot of chains and not a lot of pretty ones at that, so the idea of running fingers over glass cases full of pastries (while angry New Yorkers yell at me for leaving finger prints) and eating a Delmonico steak from the real Delmonio's (medium rare, please, I like my steaks to bear a strong resemblance to the animal it came from but not blink at me) . . . mmmm. It just seems like this must be what NYC is for, right?

Anyway, I will get there this year. Somehow. Now you're probably wondering what the weird illustrations are in this post. The first one is an illustration of the fairy tale Donkeyskin that I did for our weekly fairy tale run-down over at the Merry Sisters of Fate, my group writing blog (my Friday piece of short fiction is up today too).

And the treehouse was one of three treehouse pieces I did for Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. What's cool about them is that these drawings appear in all their brochures and in their ad in Southern Living - get this -- on a huge billboard. How cool is that? Yes, I know I'm showing my total newbieness (I made up that word just now -- it's fun to say -- try it) by squealing over this, but the truth is, as a portrait artist, I didn't normally do work for hire. So this is all magical to me.

But not as magical as a pastry would be right now.

I Are a Real Author

2008-06-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

Ooooooooooh. I have my first real interview up, at Authors on the Verge. In it, I talk about Lament, which comes out in October, and Ballad, which comes out next year.

And plus . . . it means I'm real! Really real!

Almost Back . . .

2008-06-10T13:58:00.000-07:00

I swear I'm not really gone. I just returned from a weekend that involved

a) beer
b) puke
c) being virtually passed out on a hotel bed.

Unfortunately, it was not me doing the drinking, nor me doing the puking (well that's probably a good thing) and me being virtually passed out on a hotel bed was a result of other people doing the first two.

All I can say is, I can't wait until my children are old enough to understand that vomit belongs in an appropriate receptacle. (and no, they weren't the ones drinking the beer, either). Anyway.

Anyway, for the rest of this month, I'm going to be doing a sketching scavenger hunt of the sort Jo Castillo talks about on her blog. Basically I have a list of words and I'm going to try to sketch one of them every day that I blog for the rest of the month. I didn't like WetCanvas's list, so I used a random word generator (yes, these things really exist . . . I'm not sure why).

For those who want to play along, here's my list of 15 words for June.

1. Landscape
2. Leaf
3. Swimming
4. Token
5. Criss cross
6. Emblem
7. Typesetting
8. Noisy
9. Fresh
10. Innocent
11. Fancy
12. Numerous
13. Flying
14. Triumph
15. Music

Aren't they inspiring? Or something?

May Artist Wrap-Up, May Artist: Nicole Caulfield

2008-06-01T18:22:00.000-07:00

Grrrr. I think the universe was intrinsically against me finishing up my May Artist series, because my internet was knocked down by thunderstorms every evening that I was home, making it totally impossible to blog this week. So I'm going to take the hint and finish up with the last artist I had earmarked before my internet went wonky: Nicole Caulfield.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize her name, because she's one of my close artist chums -- we e-mail daily. But even though we're friends, that's not why she's on the blog today. She's on the blog today because I admire her work hugely and have for a long time.

Like me, she's a colored pencil artist that works on board -- she's the artist who introduced me to pastelbord -- and she's been a huge influence on my work.

Now, without further ado, the reasons I like her work:

Absolutely jaw dropping texture. Look at the folds in the cloth, the crinkles in the paper. More than just photorealism, I believe in the weight of the fabric and the snap of the paper.
Coherent palette and style. I know instinctively when I look at one of these pieces that they are a Nicole Caulfield: everything screams Nicole from the color choices, the subject matter, the cropping, and the grain of the pencil -- everything is very uniquely Nicole.
Those long weird crops. Oooh, I love them. Let me count the ways. Composition get more difficult the further away you move from a traditional rectangle format, but Nicole deftly leads the viewer's eye through the piece through careful angles and color choices.
Deliberate. Nicole's pieces have a sort of studied intelligence to them, and I have a feeling that's because she composes and takes all of her own reference photos herself. I've seen the process she goes through . . . every item in a shot has a reason to be there.
Sense of light. Nicole has a great grip on dark values, so she gets a great effect of light. Again, just . . . thoughtful.

Nicole is definitely the colored pencil artist I look up to the most and I think she sets a pretty fearsome standard.

I hope all of you guys liked the May Artist project - I have a new project for June that I'll post about tomorrow.

Farewell to an Era

2008-05-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

I know I've been terrible on keeping to my own schedule these past two or so weeks, but I'm in the process of doing a Major Life Shift of the sort that you don't really ever see coming and as such, it sneaks up and bites you on the back of the calf with pointy, stalactite-shaped teeth before you even notice it came in the doggy door with your cat.

I should hurry to say that this isn't an Unpleasant Major Life Shift (UMLS -- I mean, it even sounds bad as an acronym, doesn't it? Like the noise you'd make after licking an ice cream cone and finding out it was seafood flavored). Quite the opposite. Probably the exact opposite, actually, although PMLS sounds a lot like an unpleasant time of month and doesn't fit with the spirit of the thing at all. And I will give you the full details on it later. I just can't yet.

The upshot is this, though. I'm going full-time with my writing for the foreseeable future. I'm going to keep sketching and drawing for my own enjoyment, and to keep learning, and I'll still be offering workshops and doing works for the gallery that represents me in Richmond. I'm actually looking forward to the experimenting.

And I'll be keeping up this blog regularly, still posting several times a week -- probably with sketches most of the time, with only the occasional full colored pencil piece. And there will probably be a lot of silly anecdotal posts of the sort I used to do almost every post.

But that's not the real purpose of this post. This is: I was going to close my commission books for the foreseeable future, but I've decided I'm going to take on just two more and then, unless an act of Congress intervenes, I am not taking on any new portrait commissions for the next two years.

So if you've been dying for a Maggie Stiefvater portrait . . . this is your last chance for the next two years. My e-mail for commissions is here and I'm taking only the first two I get (held with a deposit). And then the books close for two years.

(all images this post copyright Maggie Stiefvater)

Last week for the May Artist Project

2008-05-26T19:20:00.000-07:00

Happy Memorial Day everyone! I hope you all got to eat small animals barbecued on a grill like I did and have a good time with your family or at least people who like to eat the same barbecued animals as you.

I'm not done with my May Artist project but I am taking the extended weekend off (as you may have noticed!). I'll have two final artists this week and a wrap-up post for everybody I missed in the last post who also did a May artist study.

G'night and see ya tomorrow!

May Artist Project -- Group Hug!

2008-05-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

I'm revoltingly pleased that some of my blog readers joined in on the May Artist project. Artists I would've never even thought of looking at!

Here are the links to the bloggers who highlighted artists on their blogs. I wish I could show all of the artists here as well, but I'm sticking to the Safely Dead (and Beyond Copyright) artists here.

Gillian McMurray did a post on Franz Marc (his foxes are there at the left -- aren't they just the coolest ever?) I'd seen a sleeping dog piece of his before, but never these foxes.

Meg Lyman did a post on the hilarious and talented Will Bullas -- definitely worth going over and taking a look.

Sheona Hamilton-Grant did a post on Rien Poortvliet, the illustrator of one of my absolute favorite books as a kid -- the Gnomes book (which is sadly now out of print and I'm going to have to scramble to find a copy because I must have it for my two ankle-biters when they get a little older).

Jo Castillo did a wonderful post on a Dangerously Alive artist (as Tania dubbed those who are not Safely Dead), Tom Christopher, who works from life. He has a particularly gorgeous piece on her blog called "Winter Light" that I loved.

Thanks everyone who played along and everyone who's commented on the May Artist Project so far. I've a got a few more artists left to go for May and then I'm doing a fun sketch project for June that Jo's turned me onto (thanks, Jo!)

May Artist #6: Wendy Sutherland

2008-05-19T18:15:00.000-07:00

Okay, y'all who have not yet participated in the May Artist Project with me, I'll give you two more days and make it Wednesday that I feature the artists who blogged with me.

Here's the challenge: find an artist (either Safely Dead or a Dangerously Alive one that you've gotten permission to show their works on your blog) who you greatly admire. Study their body of work and jot down why it is that you admire their work and what you'd like to apply to your own.

Sound easy?

That's because it is, especially if you're only doing it once instead of three times a week on dial-up (sorry, did that sound bitter?)

It's a great way to learn and a great way to introduce your readers to new artists.

Okay. That said, today's artist for me is a Dangerously Alive artist, Wendy Sutherland, who kindly gave me permission to show her work on this blog.

Wendy has a huge collection of works on her site, and they're all very unified in style, which is something to strive for in itself, but for me, the pieces of hers that make me want to be her are her tree pieces.

You guys may be scratching your head by now because Wendy's stuff is not my usual fare on this blog, but I love them. And here's why:

Spare compositions. Nothing fancy. Horizontal lines, a few values, maybe a hint of color, and the interest of crossing branches to hold our interest.
Evocative. Instant mood, baby! Still, cold -- I can feel the bite of the highlands where Wendy lives. This is because of the spare compositions and the stark, unadorned lines of the trees.
Simplified/ Stylized. They are undeniable trees, but they're missing the fussy twiddly bits of real nature. These are Art Trees and they can't be bothered with things like branches that don't suit the composition shape, leaves, or even twiglings that get in the way of the piece.
Abstract and realistic at once. These would work even if they weren't trees. The shapes alone are appealing, and then we see that they're trees. I read once that even the most effective of realistic compositions can be reduced to a pleasing value pattern at its most basic level . . . I think this very much is true here.

Thanks again, Wendy, for letting me display your art here. And the rest of you, get busy. I want to see a lot of links to artists studied in the comments this time! You have two days! That's forever!

Monday Morning Cup of Tea

2008-05-19T06:26:00.000-07:00

I think I'm going to start having a regular Monday post full of the random things I can't put anywhere else. Never fear, I'm also having the May Artist feature today, but it'll be posted this evening.

So.

Fun things for this week.

1) Most importantly, my dad, Keith Hummel, M.D., got nominated to run for Congress in the 1st Congressional District here in Virginia. That is . . . amazing. I spent all day on Saturday talking to delegates (people as hyper as me! Likey!) and meeting people who will be helping Dad campaign. I don't normally wax political on this blog, but I really feel strongly about my dad's positions -- especially his really down to earth solution for healthcare reform (as a practicing E.R. doctor, he knows the system, and as someone who did medical billing and insurance for two years, I unfortunately do too). Also, he's very much a Normal Guy just running for office because he feels like we need to change the way things are before Our Economy and Country in General get Flushed Down the Toilet (technical term).

That guy on the left, by the way, with the charming mug that looks a lot like mine . . . that's him. Dr. Dad.

2) I am still making art! Promise! At right is a piece that I'm hoping to put the absolute final touches on this week and send off to the client.

Life is going to be pretty crazy for me in the next few months because I'm ramping up to write full time and also I'll be helping my dad out a lot with campaign stuff (if you're in Virginia and you're interested in having him speak at an event, come talk to me, baby!), but I'm going to try and reshape this blog to still be artsy and useful and entertaining. I'm guessing that more book and writing and reading stuff will make its way over here.

I'm still getting used to the idea of being able to write full-time. Definitely dream come true for me.

Brave new world, anyone?

3) There was a three. I swear there was. But I feeling like it's time for cookie dough and sweet tea to start the day. I hope all of you that are following the May Artist project are doing a May Artist for your blogs today and linking here so I can do a round-up!

May Artist #5: Elizabeth Nourse

2008-05-16T17:18:00.000-07:00

I am completely squirming today with exciting stuff that I can't talk about (yet) but I have to type about to torment you guys. I really wanted to use it and my runny nose as an excuse to get out of doing this blog post tonight so I could hurry up and watch Chocolat to reward myself for being good . . . but I felt the siren song of discipline singing to me.

So here I am, and I'm glad I did, because I found a really interesting (Safely Dead) artist to highlight this time.

Between this artist and Mary Cassatt, you guys are going to think I've gone all soft and that I'll stop calling my children things like "Ankle biters," but never fear, it's not really the sentimental subject matter that drew me to Elizabeth Nourse's work.

Without further ado, here is what drew me to her art and what I would like to steal for my very own:

I'm pretty sure it has a lot to do with my recent sketching kick, but I've become a real sucker for realistic gesture and pose in my art. And Nourse's work, like Cassatt's, is full of very real and very candidly observed people.
Lovely use of values. You guys are probably beginning to see that I tend to like works that are mostly dark punctuated by light, rather than the other way around. Nourse has plenty of dark gloomy works to make me content, but regardless of the predominant value, she uses the value on the opposite end of the scale to point to her focal point.
Multiple subjects. Busy, busy, busy. I love works that have multiple subjects and pull it off well. Check out the first painting in the post. Absolutely crawling with children and yet not busy at all. Why? School marm there is the clear focal point and the children, while adorable (and probably smelly) are merely there to play supporting roles.
Color. As teens would say, OMG. I love those purples and burgundys offset by light violets and whites. It gives the paintings a certain . . . gravitas.

Makes me glad I'm bringing my sketchbook with me tomorrow.

Links for this artist:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Americans in Paris
Valparaisio Poetry Review
Revolt in the Desert
The Ohio Channel
Biography of Elizabeth Nourse

More Words from Maggie

2008-05-16T05:36:00.000-07:00

Those of you who are interested in my fiction (which has very exciting things happening to it this week that I can maybe announce in awhile) can check out the group fiction blog that I've started with two of my critique partners, Tessa Gratton & Brenna Yovanoff. Each of us is doing a piece of weekly short fiction and in between we have sandwiched discussions of authors, myth, and sometimes the two combined (is Stephen King an elf?)

Fridays are my day to post my fiction and today was my first posted story (although there are other fun content posts already).

Anyway, I'd be very happy to see you over there at Merry Sisters of Fate and have you sound off on what you think!

May Artist Challenge

2008-05-14T20:21:00.000-07:00

No May Artist from me today (although I do have another Not Safely Dead artist to study on Friday). Today I wanted to challenge you guys to do what I'm doing -- not three artists a week for a month, but something a bit more manageable.

Here's the challenge:

Find one artist you admire. Safely Dead is easiest, but Not Safely Dead is fine as long as you secure permission from them to feature their work on your blog.
Identify their strengths and the tricks and techniques you'd like to use in your painting
Blog about it on Monday, May 19th
Comment on this blog post with a link to your post.

I'll do a wrap up post with all the links and hopefully we'll get quite a few so we can learn a ton on Monday.

I hope to see you guys in the comments!

May Artist #4: Doug Dawson

2008-05-12T18:26:00.000-07:00

This week's first artist is unusual because he is not Safely Dead, unlike every other artist that I've highlighted on this blog to this point.* He's quite alive and I was very happy when he gave me permission to display some of his art for this post.

*If you are a Not Safely Dead artist, please don't send me e-mails asking me to look at your work and/ or feature it on my blog. Believe me, you aren't the only one, and believe me too, I'm picky. I won't like it, even if you're good. That's just the way it is.**

**If you are a Safely Dead artist, you may contact me -- only via e-mail -- about your art. Just because e-mails from Undead artists intrigue me.

Anyway, that aside, the artist is Doug Dawson, an American pastel artist whose work I greatly admire. He's represented by Ventana Fine Art, where you can see more of his work.

I am, in a lot of ways, a lot pickier about my Still Alive artists than my Safely Dead ones. I mean, for starters, Still Alive artists are under copyright. I have to go to the trouble of getting permission to display their art and letting at least one other living person know that I seriously admire them, which is bad for my tough-girl image. I definitely need to see some definite quality with a capital KW to make that worth my while. Also, Still Alive artists had all those Safely Dead artists to learn from. They ought to be at least as good, if not better, right?

But Doug Dawson is good enough to make me smile and nod and say "bring on the art." So here it is. He offers numerous workshops which I would gladly give at least one of my wisdom teeth to take. None of them are close to me, however, so I'm forced to do this sort of remote talent-stealing thing I do.

So, without further ado. Things I like about Doug Dawson's work and would like to steal for my very own:

Amazing sense of light. I can't remember which was the first image of I saw of Doug's -- it was either "The Church on Alameda" (the first one featured here) or "Doing the Town" (the third one down), but with both of them I just sort of gently picked my jaw from where it had fallen to the floor and thought "I want to do car lights like him."
Atmosphere. After I'd gotten over throwing a fit over why my light couldn't look as beautiful as Doug's, I started lusting after his ability to create a mood. Tell me those paintings don't powerfully evoke evening or early night.
Detail. Just enough to draw our attention to the focal point, but no more. These are suggestions of shapes. The memory of places. The invocation of a place. Okay, maybe the last one was too corny. But you get the idea. This is stuff more real than photo-realism.
Subtlety. Boy, I say that a lot in these May artist posts, don't I? I think it's because it's one of my weak points. I do know that I desperately admire it in Doug's work. Understated colors, limited palette, no crazy showmanship, just silent blowing-you-away with his invisible technique.

Looking at Doug's work now, I think part of what makes his light so convincing is a) no white and b) no black. Sure, he has small details that are either in some of his pieces, but the sky is not nearly as dark as you'd think it would be nor is the light as white as you'd expect.

Instead, we get darkness suggested with cool blues and purples and a hazing out of details, like at twilight, when it sucks to drive because you can't really make out the road signs.

And we get light implied by warm colors waving wildly from the other side of the color wheel. "Hi, I'm yellow-orange! I'm a complementary of blue-purple! Aren't I warm and light and bright?"

When I see Doug's pieces, it makes me want to break out my color wheel and try a limited palette piece with one splash of color from a complementary. Remind me in June when I'm done with all the artists that I wanted to do that. In between him and Mary Cassatt, I'm feeling like pastel artists are taking over my brain.

Thanks to Doug for giving me permission for this post and I hope you guys are enjoying this series as much as I am enjoying researching it. It's making me feel a lot better about being away from my art supplies finishing my novel for my editor.

Workshop News

2008-05-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

Oh! Almost forgot. Those of you who are considering taking a workshop with me, I'm doing another one at the Apple Tree in Springfield in June and the Colored Pencil Society of America's D.C. Chapter did a really nice write-up on my previous ones in their newsletter. (they said I had a lot of energy . . . would you have guessed that?)

Anyway, they also mentioned it on their new blog, so if you're a CP artist in the Virginia/ Maryland/ D.C. area, I recommend that you check out their blog and let them know they've got readers.

Happy Mother's Day

2008-05-11T19:40:00.000-07:00

In honor of Mother's Day, I think I need to give a shout out to my mom for not giving me away to perfect strangers during the course of potty-training me. See, I'm now in that delightful stage with my daughter.

It's a very strange sort of thing, the first flush of potty-training. At home, she's started using the toilet herself. I'll hear a little thunk as her door comes open and next thing I know the toilet is flushing and Victoria is standing before me in her birthday suit saying, "Mama, I'm done!"

I'm not sure why she has to take all her clothing off to use the toilet.

And when we're out running errands, we have to try out every store's bathroom. To see if the whole potty process still works, I guess. Can I describe the fun of taking two toddlers into a public restroom fitted with those auto-flushers? You know, the ones that have the suction power of 100 vaccuums and sound like a greyhound bus pulling away from a station. Picture the scene: Victoria sitting on the toilet, clutching onto the edges and shouting, "Mama I did it! I did it!" while Will, a year younger, clings to the wall opposite crying lest he be sucked down the drain. Meanwhile, I'm shouting, "Will, I've never seen a child ever get successfully flushed down the toilet! Be quiet! Victoria! Just put your clothing back on!"

People look at us funny when we leave.

And of course, the best thing is that public restrooms make Victoria really talkative. So in we stroll into a restaurant bathroom. A pretty swank bathroom, as all things go. We wait our turn until one of the stalls is free and here is Victoria, kicking her legs and sitting on the toilet.

VICTORIA: Mama, this is a nice bathroom!
ME: Yep.
VICTORIA: Look at the floor!
ME: Yep.
VICTORIA: Wow. Can we live here?

The other occupants of the bathroom looked at me really pityingly after that little trip. "There goes that woman whose house must be so bad that her daughter wants to move into the Smokey Bones bathroom."

So, Mom, here's to you. For not giving me away while I was in the first flush of potty training (pun oh so intended). And for otherwise putting up with me. Because I know I was a terrible child . . . I know this 'cause I've never grown out of it.

*grins wickedly*

Ew

2008-05-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

I am just posting to say that there is no sound in the world more disgusting than a terrier eating a banana.

Just saying.

Ew.

May Artist #3

2008-05-08T16:54:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay, guys! I was at the Woodbridge High School today, having a Q & A with the creative writing students there (hi guys if you're reading! you were great!)

Anyway, today's May Artist is Hubert von Herkomer, a German-born artist who spent most of his career in the late nineteenth century (that's the 1800s for y'all who need number things) painting illustrations and portraits in Britain.

There is a quite a bit of Herkomer imagery available online, but a lot of it requires licensing which Maggies are too lazy to apply for, so I'll direct you to more images at the Natio nal Portrait Gallery. And of course, as always, check out the linkage at the very bottom of the post for places to find more info - like bio, where his works currently hang, and where to find prints, etc.

Okay. Onto the fun stuff. I found Hubert von Herkomer on the Museum of Fine of Art Boston's gigantic website. I forgot what I did to find him -- probably I typed in "someone to possibly come close to being worthy of the love I bear in my heart for John Singer Sargent."

Anyway. I love this dude. Not in a "sweep me off my feet and let's have arty pigmented babies" way but in a subtle, "I know how to use dark values and am a Master of Understatement and Gesture" sort of way. I can live with that. I wish I could find more of his work available online, but so far I've just not found anything to rival the John Singer Sargent gallery for any other artist.

Anyway, what do you guys think of his work? Here's what I find interesting and appealing about it:

First and foremost, check out his lighting. Regular readers will know how I harp in almost-constant monotone about values and lighting. "Strong light from one side or the other make for the best portrait." That's what Maggies always say. I know, because I am one. Okay. With that in mind, take another look at his lighting. Yeah. He's got that understated, non-directional light thing (no strong shadows) going on and he pulls it off. Yes, I know you guys can show me a bunch of French guys who technically pulled it off in some distant century, but I've not liked any of them. More on why I like Herkomer's lighting below.
Because he uses value patterns in an interesting and thoughtful way, even without strong lighting. See the white dresses everywhere? And the pale faces and dark backgrounds? The shapes are interesting without needing strong shadows.
And check out his autumnal/ evening palette, perfectly in accordance with his nondirectional light. Lovely, warm, quiet, subtle. Like evening just after the sun has gone behind the trees.
Finally, I love his faces. This is where I especially recommend you check out the National Portrait Gallery's link -- he invests every face with such character, without having them busting out in a smile. I feel like I've actually run into these people, and they've given me a wry smile because my skirt's too short, and I now know something about them.

Von Herkomer is another artist that I'm wishing I had time to put into a full length monthly study of him, because I'd like to copy one of his works and steal some of his magic for myself.

Links:
Hubert von Herkomer - Wikipedia
Hubert von Herkomer - Art Renewal Center
Lady Lever Art Gallery
National Portrait Gallery
Artcyclopedia

Postponement!

2008-05-07T20:25:00.000-07:00

Artist #3 is going to be posted tomorrow night -- I've got a school visit tomorrow at Woodbridge High School and I have to be up at ohhhh dark thirty. Time got away from me and I'm still scrambling to make sure I actually know where my car keys are for the morning trip (this from the girl that flushed her husband's contact lens case down the toilet two days ago)(don't ask)(yes it was an accident!)

Anyway, I will be profiling another artist tomorrow - I've got him picked out already -- but if I do it tonight, I'll explode.

So sit tight.

May Artist #2: Louis Comfort Tiffany

2008-05-05T19:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, maybe I'm being self-indulgent here by choosing Louis Comfort Tiffany as my second artist to study, because I've known I've loved him for a long time. I can't help it. He was an amazingly versatile artist that, aside from some quite hideous lamps, had an incredible grasp on palette, form, and style. I definitely have stuff I can learn from him.

I had always drooled unabashedly over his stained glass pieces, but I didn't know about his regular paintings until I bought the book Louis Comfort Tiffany by Jacob Baal-Teshuva, which is full of gorgeous photos of both his stained glass windows and his paintings (and also his hideous lamps, but we'll pass over that lightly).

So what is it that draws me to Tiffany's work? Well, man -- first of all, I really encourage everyone to follow the links at the bottom of the post to find out more about his life, because it's really fascinating stuff, and also to see more of his art, because it's impossible to represent it well in just a few pieces here.

Tiffany's work is diverse enough that I could really do two posts: one for his paintings and for his windows, but I'm going to only talk about his stained glass for now.

Why I Like The Works from Tiffany Studios:

Clever use of limited palette. One of the things that I find appealing about these windows is that he used an amazing amount of neutral tones and colored grays/ lavenders/ browns so that the color he did use popped out -- or to create a contemplative mood when the "color" of emphasis was pure white.
Use of strong, simple compositional design rather than color to create interest.
Powerful overall shapes. Stained glass tends towards a certain 2D-ness -- sort of like the layers of 2D cutouts that make scenery on a stage -- and I get the feeling when looking at a Tiffany window that he is embracing that effect and using it to lead me to a very definite focal point.
Strong structural elements. By necessity, he has the edges of the windows giving him strong verticals and horizons, but does that faze Louis? Not hardly. He rocks those strong geometrical shapes with diagonals that constantly guide our eyes where they need to go.
Recession. I'm not talking about what our economy's doing. I'm talking about how Tiffany pushes those dramatic elements of the composition back by placing bold, intricate shapes in the foreground.
Application of color. I love that no color in a Tiffany window is single color. Every petal of every iris is three different shades of purple; every brown is streaked with a green in the same value. Strong, simple compositions marked by insanely detailed glasswork and complex, beautiful colors. Lovely.
Idealism. These aren't real places. Well, actually they are. Oyster Bay is, for instance (the top right image). I saw a photograph someone had taken of Oyster Bay from the same angle. Can I tell you it did not look like that window? Tiffany's windows drip with a sort of understated idealism only made tolerable by his beautifully muted palettes.

Links:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artcyclopedia Images
Ye Olde Wikipedia
And of course the Tiffany book I mentioned above is really the best I've found for luscious images.

We Interrupt this Programming for a Random Novel Announcement

2008-05-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

Notice the phrasing there. Not for a Novel Random Announcement, but rather a Random Novel Announcement.

For those of you just signing on, I'm a novelist in my spare time (hahhaha -- see, I knew I couldn't get that out with a straight face), and it's been a pretty exciting time for in my infant novel's life. Today for the first time ever, I got to hold an advanced review copy of Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception -- that's an uncorrected proof that goes out to reviewers. This one, for the record, is not really for me. It's for the kids at a high school in northern Virginia, who will be subjected to my presence later this week.

As you can see from the photo, I'm glad to be holding my book and seeing that it's real. Now just to wait until October for it to hit bookstore shelves, right?

And wait, it gets better. I'm now officially a multiply published author. Because the deal for Ballad: The Gathering of Faerie is real too. PM reported the deal:

April 28, 2008
Young Adult Maggie Stiefvater's BALLAD, the sequel to Lament, in which a gifted teen at a music boarding school draws the attention of a dark faerie muse who strikes a Faustian bargain with her victims, and, when Halloween descends, he must choose between his long time friend/crush and the dark faerie herself, to Andrew Karre at Flux, by Laura Rennert at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (World).

I am being intolerable around the house, as you can imagine. My husband is getting ready to ship me off to a foreign country until I can be reasonable. Not likely to happen soon, I guarantee.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

May Artist #1: Mary Cassatt

2008-05-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

I'd initially resolved to only study artists that I wasn't already familiar with for my May Artist Project, but I've never formally studied Mary Cassatt since I've started doing art seriously.

I remember, though (warning! childhood reminiscing alert!), that when I was growing up, my mom had a big book of Mary Cassatt's works. One of those huge, glossy affairs with tons of color images. Anyway, I remember sitting on the couch and just reading it again and again (yes, I was a small, strange child). My absolute favorite was Little Girl in a Straw Hat and I used to just stare at that page. I don't know why. Probably a deficiency in some vitamin.

Anyway, I decided today that I wanted to see if Mary Cassatt still held the same fascination for me nowadays and . . . she does. So here she is, and I'm determined to find out why.

Okay. So first, I had to get over just going ooooh I likey when I was looking at the images and find out why I liked them. You know, like a grown up. So, here's why I think I like her work:

Colored whites and light colors. Look at how interesting she makes her light colors. For that matter, look at how much of her work is a light color.
Wonderful gestural line. These are real people doing real things. Look at how floppy and jointless her kids are, like real kids, and yet have perfect anatomy. I can almost pinch the baby fat and smell the old diapers.
Faces. She has great expression in all of her portraits' faces, and yet the eyes are very understated. A lot of them don't even have catchlights. I'm thinking, after looking at them, that the reason she can pull this off is because so much of the personality is expressed in the body language.
Colors. I'm a sucker for limited palette and although I don't think I could ever use her springy pastel palette, I like how few colors she uses for each piece.
Multiple subjects. She handles multiple subjects effortlessly. Look at that one of the mum and the sister kissing the baby. Three subjects -- not competing for attention a bit. Perfect balance.
Composition/ cropping. She has great diagonals. Look at how in so many of her pieces she has diagonal lines drawing your eye through the piece.

Seeing her work makes me want to get out my pencils and do a piece with just 10 pencils. It also makes me want to sketch my kids from life some more. Something with a lot of white . . . I might do a quick study tomorrow to see if I can incorporate that personality in gesture rather than in face.

Here are links for those interested in further study: here, here, and here.

The May Artist Project

2008-05-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, folks. I know I've been absent for the past few days, but I have been sketching, just not posting them. Life has been very interesting on the writing front (nothing I can share yet) and I've been busy in the evenings. But now it is May and as I said before, I have a cool goal for May. I want to do a quick study of 3 different artists a week, both alive and dead, who I find fascinating for some reason. I've gotten some great suggestions and please don't feel offended if I don't use your suggestion! There are a lot of artists and not that many weeks in May.

So this is how it's going to work. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll be doing a veritable link and image fest of an artists' work, starting tomorrow. Anybody who wants to join in, e-mail or comment and I'll do a round up of the bloggers doing it every week.

So see you tomorrow!

Fresh as Curdled Milk

2008-04-28T08:58:00.000-07:00

"Victoria eating eggs" - sketch from life
I seem to be sketching a lot of people eating and watching TV, because they hold nice and still then!

I wanted to start out by putting a correction to my art materials post -- I was having a brain fart when I typed and as Nancy pointed out, Colorfix and Pastelbord are both made my Art Spectrum, not Ampersand. My brain was definitely on auto-pilot -- thanks, Nancy, for pointing that out! The links to the products in that post still work though.

Now onto my intensely fascinating personal life. I'm having another one of those smell weeks (and no, again, I am not pregnant). The worst odiferous experience I had this week was while I was showering. I have to admit it was the last place I expected to be assaulted by a foul smell. Normally the shower is that magical place where you go in smelling like solvents and whirl out smelling like a girl. Not so this time. I went in smelling like solvents and came out smelling like . . .well, you'll see.

It was all going well until I pulled out my body wash. My husband, who is a much more talented and willing shopper than I, had bought a new variety of body wash for me (it said "beauty body wash" on the packaging, which seemed to me ridiculous and a waste of a perfectly good adjective. I mean, body wash ain't gonna make me any more beautiful and anyway, it's not like there is "beauty body wash" and "non-beauty body wash." It would be like saying "body wash for humans." Some things are assumed, right?).

Anyway, I squeezed some out onto my palm and noticed first that it had the consistency of old toothpaste. So convincing was the old-toothpaste appearance that I felt obliged to smell the body wash before allowing it access to my skin. If I had to describe its odor in just two words, I think I'd go for "expired yogurt."

Expired yogurt is cheaper. Next shower, I'm stealing my husband's body wash.

2008-04-26T19:13:00.000-07:00

"the boys watching 'cops' "
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater
quickie 10 minute sketch

This sketch thing is turning out pretty fun, actually, though people are starting to give me suspicious looks when I pull out my sketch book similar to the wary ones they get when I take out my camera.

More tomorrow and a longer post having to do with more smells.

Is anyone else doing this sketch thing with me through the end of the month or am I by my lonesome?

My e-mail

2008-04-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

Forgot to add: blog readers can always contact me here.

I've now made it through all the spam filters of my accounts, but of course, it deletes them after 30 days. I shudder to think of what's been lost.

I need cookie dough.

E-mail kerfuffle

2008-04-26T03:42:00.000-07:00

I do have sketches to post but right now I've just found out that g-mail has been faithfully delivering 75% of e-mails from my blog readers and publishing industry folks . . . to the spam folder.

I am, to use a technical term, wigging out. (see me wigging out at left? Wigging out.)

So if you've sent me an e-mail in the past month and I haven't replied and look like an absolute heel . . . resend it if I haven't replied to you by 8 a.m. this morning.

People Unawares

2008-04-23T18:19:00.001-07:00

Today I took my grandmother to an eye appointment, so I took my sketchbook along so that I could get my people sketches in today. There were only three people in the waiting room, so I ran out of people to sketch much faster than I ran out of time.

They don't call it a "waiting room" for nothing.

I'm not a patient person.

Anyway, I will have something indubitably more intelligent to say tomorrow, but for today . . . that's it. My brain is fried from waiting.

In Which Maggie Goes Wild

2008-04-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

"dude sketching"
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater
in ye olde sketchbook.

Or at least feral. I was going to do two more series weeks as usual for the remainder of April but I decided to go wild. See, in between a wild deadline for BALLAD (did I mention that I was given 90 days to write a novel by my relentlessly cheerful editor) and other fun stuff that I cannot yet mention, I have not been doing many pieces of art that I can show on the blog.

That, my friends, must change. Even if I can't do large pieces, I still want to be stretching my artistic brain. So I am going hog wild for the next two weeks, and hog wilder for the next month. Through the rest of April I am going to be seriously attacking my figure drawing skills. It's something that's not at all natural to me, and it's something I very much want to be good at. I mean, you guys are my species after all. I should be able to draw you. So my goal is to post at least one quick figure sketch every day on this blog. Whether or not I'll have something intelligent to say . . . well.

And for May, I've decided I'm going to study three artists every week. Unlike my usual fare, which is safely dead and gone, these will be any artists that I find absolutely inspiring (feel free to post any suggestions in the comments)(if you nominate yourself I will virtually claw your eyes). In each post, I'll try and do a mini analysis of what draws me to their work, what I'd like to take away from their technique, and what I learned in general from them. I'm hoping to come out of May with a complete draft of a novel and a recharged artistic battery.

Sound good? Can I hear a booyeah? Who wants to do it with me?

Maggie on Art Materials, Part III

2008-04-20T19:52:00.000-07:00

"Thursday" - set of sketches in my sketchbook.
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.

Remember, the sketchbook will be given away to a random blog subscriber when it's full, so sign up for the blog even if you don't read it through your e-mail if you want to have a chance to win it! (I'm about half-way through the current sketchbook at the moment)

Sorry about the delay! My brother whisked my computer away to HighSpeedInternetLand to get updates downloaded and so I was without computer access. However, it did give me a nice long day to get other things done, especially since Sunday is my lazy day. After drinking four glasses of sweet tea, I decided it was time I try a fun looking project that my friend Vivien Blackburn mentioned to me. It's a comic strip of your day done in twelve panels, done from memory rather than observation. Hers is rather prettier than mine but it was a lot of fun regardless. The hardest part was trying to figure out how to illustrate novel-writing! All the exciting stuff having to do with writing a novel goes on in my head . . . to the uninitiated, I'm just staring blankly at a computer screen.

Anyway, Vivien has captions for hers but I think I'll let you puzzle out what mine is without. I'd love to see any of my blog readers tackle this -- if you do, be sure to let Vivien know on her blog.

Okay, onto the questions from the last posts. There are just a few -- let me know if I missed you.

1. About solvents. Have you tried "eco-house extra mild citrus thinner #115?" It is as you described the British solvent that you order. This is made in Canada, and I think I got my last batch from Dick Blick. Smells nice. For even lower toxicity you can't beat Gamblin's Gamsol. It just doesn't smell quite as nice.:-)

I've had this mentioned to me quite a few times but I've never gotten around to ordering it. I think I've now been officially pushed over the edge, however (my husband would argue that happened a long time ago), and I'm going to give it a try.

2. Hi Maggie, which retailer do you trust to place your overseas order with?

I don't really have too much call to order overseas except to order Zest-It, as mentioned in the solvents post, and the few times that I ordered from Canadian super-art-store, Curry's, which went off without a hitch. Other than that, I haven't had much experience with it . . . I think if I were choosing an overseas retailer, I'd be tempted to google their name to find out if there is anyone talking smack about them online (that's slang, did you catch it? I'm so hip) and then I would decide between the final two by determining which company's sales representatives had the most charming foreign accent.

3. I have a question related to the pastelbord (although I suppose this could apply to any support) and solvents: Do you find that the application of solvent limits the number of layers that you can apply?

I actually find the opposite to be true. If I'm really between a wall and a hard place (which, um, really are the same things, did you notice?) layerwise, I'll usually add some solvent, because it'll let me get another layer down on top. Now -- layers on top of solvent do behave completely differently than layers pre-solvent, so that's something to experiment with. I don't think I'd go around adding solvent to a portrait commission before I had tried it on something that I wasn't afraid to make Excrutiatingly Ugly.

4. have you ever tried working on metal? as a metalsmith i haven't tried it yet, but it is all the rage right now. the metal has to be sandblasted so the pencil can grip, but its quite a neat effect. i think its rachelle thiewes that has done it best, especially in her sculpture pieces.

Metal is something I hadn't thought of -- I can only imagine that layers must be a thing of the past working on a surface like that, because there's nothing to absorb the layers. I tried googling her but didn't find anything immediately accessible.

5. I like Colourfix alot and was just wondering how you choose a background/support color to use. Sometimes I use a color that is in the subject alot (like cream or tan for a drawing of a yellow lab ) and sometimes I use a complementary color for the punchy contrast. Is there any color you prefer/would order a bunch of?

I always use the dark colors of Colorfix, because I prefer working on darker supports (my work tends to be mostly dark with elements of light, because I am Wednesday Addams). I also prefer the warm colors -- the brown and the red in particular -- because my work tends to be warmer. I would just keep in mind when I was ordering that colored supports are supposed to save you work. If you're doing a dark piece, you want a dark surface. If you're doing a warm piece, pick a warm color, etc. If you're doing a cool piece on red, you'll kill yourself trying to beat back that red. Colored papers should be a time-saver, not an ulcer-causer.

Okay! I'm hitting the sack. Let me know if I missed you and if there's anything you'd like to see me tackle as a series post for next week. Otherwise, I'll be announcing my next one Monday night.

Maggie on Art Materials, Part II

2008-04-18T05:02:00.000-07:00

Today a brief post to talk about other fancy-schmancy stuff I’ve tried in the course of my pencils. Last post I mumbled somewhat coherently about the Bristol Smooth paper I often use.

I love trying new supports and so here are the ones I’ve tried, from most successful to least.

Top of the list has to be drafting film. I use Dura-Lar Matte, which is a non-yellowing acetate alternative (if we’re being official). Make sure you get the matte, otherwise your pencils won’t stick. Anyway, film is this lovely strange surface that is very smooth and buttery. I only ever managed to get two layers (on each side) and never had much luck with solvent on it. Because it’s so terrible to blend but amazing for fine detail, I had a great time using this for the 8 gagillion ACEOs I did last year (ACEO = Art Cards, Editions & Originals – 2.5 x 3.5" of art).

It is, as its name suggests, transparent, so it's easy to get fun and fascinating effects by experimenting with which colors you make dominant (on the front side) and which you make more subtle (on the back side). I still recommend that newbies to film start very small on this support and give it a few pieces to get the hang of it. It is absolutely nothing like working on paper, and if you treat it like paper, it will treat you like crap. The pieces around this paragraph are all 2.5 x 3.5" pieces I did on drafting film. See the crazy detail? It’s because the film loves detail like I love sweet tea.

Okay, next up. Artagain black paper. This is a nice, smooth paper that lets you play with working on dark paper without having the crazy toothiness of Colorfix paper (mentioned in the first post in the series). Drawbacks to working on black paper include ugly green colors when you try and use yellow without putting white under it first and not being able to erase without creating a mess uglier than a Ford Festiva. Here’s an example of an old piece I did on Artagain.

Next is another white paper. Arches HP Watercolor paper. It’s got a lot more texture than Bristol Smooth, but it still takes colored pencil without making it look like chicken wire. There are other good watercolor papers out there for colored pencils but when you’re trying them, I’d recommend looking for “HP” by the name (versus “CP”). The HP stands for “Hunky Prince” and who doesn’t need one of those?

No, seriously, it stands for “hot-pressed,” which results in a smoother paper than cold-pressing. Here’s an example of an old piece I did on Arches HP. Notice how much of the toothiness you can see through it – it’s almost grainy looking.

Finally, some weird supports I tried but wasn’t thrilled with: wood, canvas, Clayboard, and Mi-Teintes paper. Wood was interesting but didn’t layer well, canvas was really bumpy (even smooth portrait canvas - the image on left is on canvas) and didn’t layer well, clayboard was slick and didn’t blend properly, and Mi-Teintes paper . . . . well, I was fine with Mi-Teintes once I decided it was manufactured by the devil to torture colored pencil souls still on earth. Every time I try it, I have to fight endlessly against the chicken-wire pattern on the rough side or the ugly, tactless smooth side. You might have luck with these supports, but I just didn’t like working on them, even if the eventual results were passable as something like art.

And one last footnote to this . . . I was sent samples of a new board, r-tistx boards, to try out, and I finally got around to trying the week before last. It had a sort of colorfix type sandpaper surface on a white archival backing board and the color went down okay (though not as nice as pastelbord from the get-go) but things went weird when I layered. Once I got a some pigment down, the next layer started sort of swirling up from the surface and making a dusty mess on everything. So I decided to tamp it down with some solvent. Well, that worked much better . . . um, until I started back with my pencil and it ripped right through the sanded surface and straight down to the slick board.

Hm. Might be just that board. I’m going to try one of the other sample boards sent before I write it off as too fragile, but I have to say that after two hours of work on a piece, I was pretty p’oed. Plus, it would’ve been done already if it had been on pastelbord. So, grrr. But again, it usually takes me a few tries on a new support to get the hang of it, so jury's out.

Questions/ comments? Question's and anything I've forgotten will be tackled tomorrow.

Maggie on Art Materials, Part I

2008-04-15T18:17:00.002-07:00

I was going to confess that this post was supposed to happen yesterday, but I got caught up in that lovely event known as Tax Day. No, I didn't intend to wait until the last moment . . . em, but I did. Why? Because I love that warm toasty feeling that comes from staying up until midnight doing your taxes (thanks, Dad, for helping me).

Anyway, after an eventful barf-filled and tax-punctuated extended weekend, here I am. And this is the first art materials post, as I promised. I think I'll break it down this way: what I use in my daily work in the first post, other materials that I use more rarely or have used in the second post, and suppliers and random bits that I'm sure that I'll figure out when I get there in the third post.

Now y'all know that I'm a colored pencil artist by profession, so while I do use acrylics and pastels, these posts are largely going to be directed towards colored pencil artists or those who want to dabble in them. Feel free to pitch in the comments with questions or suggestions.

So first. Pencils, baby! I started out >gasp< with Crayolas -- the sort that you use as a school kid. I struggled with them for a long time and the truth of the matter is that you'll drive yourself crazy trying to layer them and your pieces won't last very long -- the reds and pinks in my old pieces have faded with age, like Joan Rivers. So I always recommend that beginners invest in artist-quality pencils from the get-go. If you can't afford a whole set, you can buy just the colors you need open-stock (one at a time). I use the same 26 colors over and over again for the most part, but I had to have all of the colors available before I found out which were my palette.

There are several different sorts of colored pencils out there. I use Prismacolors and I love them. They are softer and more buttery than the other two brands I've tried, Derwents and Polychromos, and I like their color range. You might like a firmer pencil -- if so, try those other brands or the Prismacolors Verithins.

Lightfastness, or how permanent a pigment is, is always an issue with colored pencils. Ratings are available for all of Prismas' colors and they also have a "lightfast" set of colors that are supposed to be far above their others for permanence. In practice, however, I've found that my regular pencil pieces sealed with varnish and taken to numerous outdoor shows show absolutely no fading after a year. Use your discretion and always warn your clients to take good care of their finished art pieces -- colored pencil pieces (like any other medium) are like vampires and don't like direct sunlight.

My absolute favorite support for colored pencils is Ampersand Pastelbord, a sanded support on an archival board. The surface is very rough and grabby and until I got used to it, I hated it. But once you get the hang of it, it really makes the pigments glow and you can get lovely, almost oil-paint effects on it.

A similar sanded surface that I like quite a bit is Ampersand's Colorfix paper. It comes in a lot of different colors and is also available in primer form. That means you can buy a little jug of Colorfix goodness and paint it onto any piece of paper or board and voila! Instant sanded surface.

For beginners, I always recommend they start on a smooth, white paper. In some ways, it's easier -- you can get fine detail without sweating, you don't have to wonder what color the pencil will turn out to be when you put it down, and the layering is predictable. But it's slower and more demanding of proper technique -- which is why I want beginners to use it. Even if sanded supports are more forgiving and let you be sloppy, you should know how to do it right, because it'll still stand you in good stead if you get into a problematic corner (artistically. If you run out of gas, I don't think having good colored pencil technique will help you). Anyway, there are many many many papers that fit the bill out there, but for a cheap, acid-free, smooth paper, I like Bristol Smooth.

Final piece of the equation for me is solvents. I use solvents to melt my layers of colored pencil together. Especially on the sanded surfaces, solvents, for me, are a must. But solvents as a general are a smelly and noxious bunch, tending to give Future Queens of America such as myself headaches and encourage cancerous growths without proper ventilation. So I use Zest-It, a British product that unfortunately has to be shipped overseas -- it's non-toxic and smells like oranges. The shipping is indeed awful but the price of the solvent isn't, so I recommend that you buy a bunch at once to save on shipping -- maybe encourage a group of students to buy several containers all at once. It does go a long way, for what it's worth!

I apply my solvents with a brush and I learned the hard way that using a decent brush makes a huge difference. It's the difference between a work of art and a puddle of solvent (which might get you into some high-end galleries but won't thrill your portrait client). I use high-quality (though not super high-quality) synthetic flat brushes and I make sure to rinse them out between each use, especially when I've been doing large areas of dark color.

You'll also need a sketchbook (I like a small one with wire binding), a sharpener (I use a cheap Exact-o model), and a pencil case (I have two of these, organized inside by hue, and I love them).
Okay. That's enough for now. Question and comment away and I'll see y'all tomorrow.

Next Week's Series &

2008-04-11T15:09:00.000-07:00

"Sleeping" 4 x 6" colored pencil on paper
Copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.
Being auctioned to benefit local greyhounds.

All right, I'm out of here for the weekend and won't be back until Monday but I wanted to give y'all a head's up on next week's series, which is on Art Materials. If you have any questions, pop 'em in the comments.

See ya!

Reader Questions

2008-04-09T18:08:00.006-07:00

"Sawyer in the Sandbox" - 16 x 20" colored pencil on pastelbord (I don't think I showed you guys the finish on this one yet, did I?)
Copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater.
E-mail me about commissioning a portrait.

Bet y'all thought I would never get around to them.

If you don't see your question here, it's only because I somehow overlooked it -- stick it in the comments again if I did!

First things first: all those who were making tittering "preggers" noises on the last post, no, I am not pregnant. No, there's no chance. Yes, my house really does smell funky. Now, ahem, settle down.

The questions are in no particular order -- just the order I grabbed them out of the comments and e-mails.

Are you planning on teaching a workshop in the Northeast?
Depends where in the Northeast you mean. Nicole Caulfield and I have been playing with the idea of doing a joint colored pencil workshop somewhere in the Boston/ New Hampshirish area one of these days. If you're interested, please e-mail me and let me know -- and tell me where you'd be coming from -- so I can get an idea of interest level. My workshops are usually two-day affairs where we throw off self-doubt and really focus on fearless color and learning to work efficiently. And heckling. There's a lot of heckling in general.

That painting-a-day movement has fascinated me since I first heard of it. I can see how it would be a huge benefit and learning experience. Did you have trouble completing bigger projects, though? If you only have an hour to paint at night, you aren't left with much time to work on your 4x5' masterpiece or commission...

For me, I needed an hour to do a painting a day. Any less than an hour and usually I was making dog poo. Because I do this full-time, I usually had between 3-6 hours a day to work, depending on other commitments, and half of that time I'd spent marketing. So I would usually spend an hour doing my painting a day and the rest of the time work on something bigger.

If I had only an hour in the evening, I'd be tempted to do a painting-every-other-day and work every other day on a large piece. I think it's important to build up your body of work for galleries and exhibitions, and if you're doing small daily paintings, that just won't happen.

How do you balance learning & self-teaching experiments with paid work?

Heh. Well, this blog helps a lot, because it keeps me on track with my self-teaching experiments. But my balancing act works mostly because I take Sundays off from making money. It doesn't have to be Sunday -- it just needs to be a day that you can clear the books. On Sunday, no matter how urgent my projects, I set them aside. I forget about them entirely. And then I let myself do art experiments, write fun novels that aren't under contract, play piano and work on writing some tunes, get some leisurely reading done -- something I could never do without angst during the week. And on Monday I'll be raring to go again.

One question about working on board. I'm doing my first colored pencil on board and also some watercolors on board. My goal is to get away from having to frame with glass. How do you protect your cp pieces when they are finished? Is it as simple as spraying with fixative or is more protection needed?

I spray mine with a final fixative. I like Prismacolor's glossy, but I also have used Grumbacher and Krylon without any undue pain and suffering on my part. And they seem to be quite durable -- in any case my toddlers have rubbed their hands on them without any ill effects.

Do you ever have to turn down commissions because your backlog is too long? If so, what's your max #? Do you prioritize by how much money you're getting, or how long someone's been in the queue, or how much you like the commission?

I haven't yet turned one down, but I do warn clients of my backlog before I take them on. I prioritize by how long someone's been in the queue (seems like the only fair way to do it) but I do work on two pieces at a time. I can rotate them by day, then, to keep from getting stale or rushing a piece. I think the longest waiting time I ever had was six months -- but I work fast. If I was an oil painter, I might have to rethink my strategy.

Are there any of your older posts that cover your working technique from start to finish? I've never worked with colored pencils but after having seen what you do with them I'd like to give them a try.

and a related question which this sort of answers: I was wondering if you would share some of the colors and methods you use to do the White fur on cats and other animals?? I had problems with that.. they looked fine in the hard copy.. but as soon as they were scanned (even a drum scan) the colors just melted away and could not be seen.. I searched through the things you have written to see if you had expounded on this subject :D but didn't find anything.

I have a few posts that show my technique, but it's much easier to describe in person! Here are a few posts from the past:

Checking out the Competition: Colored Pencil Work in Progress
Nature Lover: Colored Pencil Work in Progress
Secret Admirer: Colored Pencil Work in Progress
Dusk: Acrylic Work in Progress
The Streetlight: Acrylic Work in Progress

I also have a bunch on WetCanvas with more text to them. Here are all the threads I've ever started on WC for the insanely curious (some are quite painful to read now), and here are a few works-in-progress.
Royal, Gypsy Stallion
Leopard
Gawain, Lipizzaner

A question, do people treat you different because you don't have a art degree? Gallerys etc?

Actually, my gallery just asked for a one-page bio of sorts for people who asked for more info about me, and then judged based upon my work itself. Super high-end NY galleries probably care more about your background, because at that point they're justifying your price -- but I would think exhibitions and awards would still count for more than any degree. For the gallery that represents me, which is probably the nicest in Richmond, the buyers are judging based upon what your art looks like -- and so are the owners.

You mentioned getting other artists to look at your work and getting constructive feedback. How does one do that outside of workshops and classes?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a tiny online support group of my peers that I bounce pieces off -- but we all met on WetCanvas. I highly recommend it as a place to get constructive feedback.

After reading some of your other posts on time management I decided to write down daily goals like you suggested, but how do you keep yourself motivated to keep those up? After awhile I got lazy and said "oh, I don't need to write them down I have a mental list!" And now I don't get anything done. Is it just something to keep forcing upon yourself until it becomes a habit?

It is definitely all about making habits. We actually get into the habit of being lazy and not pushing ourselves. Once you get a definite schedule/ plan/ productive habit in place, it becomes second nature. I'll still get bogged down if I get sick and have to get back into the groove again, but for me, the most important thing is just to keep my eyes on my goals.

Do you know yet when Lament (my faerie novel) is being released?

Yep! October 1st, 2008. It's up for pre-order here (and also on the side-bar) and I'd be very happy if you ordered it and either read it yourself (it's for 12-adults -- upper end teens and adults will probably be the happiest with it) or gave it to your child or your librarian!

How do you correct for distortion in photo references?

Unfortunately, this is a practice/ familiarity with subject thing. With equine art, my specialty, distortion happens all the time, because horses are so big. We get the giant-nose syndrome. Or, tiny body syndrome. I've learned to correct by taking my own photos -- standing well back and zooming in to prevent distortion -- and then when I do a portrait of a horse from someone else's photo, I make sure that the body is proportionate. I recommend sketching a lot from life or at least studying proportions in real life with a critical eye so that you can spot how a photograph alters things.

And someone asked if my writing took away from my drawing energy, or vice versa. I don't remember who asked and I couldn't find it again in the comments, but it was such an intelligent question that I remembered it!

The answer is yes. I can only work on one really brain-intensive project on a given day, so I tend to have writing days and drawing days. After I finished STILL WOLF WATCHING, I couldn't draw or write for days afterwards -- I was just empty. It's worth noting that I do think that your creative pot is only so full, so use it wisely.

I hope I answered everybody's questions. I have this nagging feeling that I've forgotten one in an e-mail somewhere. . .

April Odors bring May Flowers

2008-04-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

I thought I would be very excited about the approach of warm weather. It's been a long winter and writers tend to be of the sedentary type, so cold weather seeps into our bones and makes us not-happy-campers. So I really did think that once the temperature made it up over 50 every day, I'd be looking like this:

But in reality, I've been looking more like this:

Because along with warm weather has come a strange battle with odors. My house, which normally has the terminally pleasant scent of cookies just baked, about to be baked, or in the process of baking, has now become a Bastion of Odor. I spend all day hunting down one only to realize that it was masking another.

Did you know, for instance, that the second broccoli gets cold it starts smelling like old fish? It's a process I expected to take days. Or at least hours. But no. In between cooking it for the kids at lunch time and clearing their plates away, I had managed to perfume the entire room with the smell of rotting piscatorial badness.

Or juice. My kids like apple juice. Give it two seconds in a sippy cup and suddenly it smells like an orchard barfed on my carpet. And we drink this stuff?

Even popcorn grosses me out now. I made the kids some as a snack this afternoon and then realized that the entire kitchen smelled like a fast food joint had burnt down. With a whale inside it. And some hair.

My husband broke out the air fresheners. Those clever ones that got better scores on the SATs than me -- the ones that puff out alternating scents every so often so that you don't get immune to them. Yeah. I'll tell you the two scents it alternates between: moldering hay and over-ripe fruit.

This is the real reason God invented seasonal allergies. So that my nose would be stuffed up and I'd be immune to smell until late summer.

Maggie on Online Art Education, Part III

2008-04-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

Both tiger and clouds are quick pieces demo'ed in the workshop this weekend -- just two of the references students worked on.

I'm back from my workshop! Stuffing information into willing victims was fun and rewarding as usual, but the best part of it was staying with my friend Marian, who took me riding on her fantastic stallion. I used to ride like a fiend but I haven't had the opportunity in years. It was great to be back on a horse again and he had a gorgeous canter. I don't have enough adjectives to describe him -- or Marian for that matter. Marian, if you're reading this, I had a great time as always!

As promised, I'm going to post the last bit of my online education series tonight and then on Wednesday I'm going to do reader questions -- I specifically didn't plan a series topic for this week so that I wouldn't get distracted. So anything you want to ask, throw it in the comments, because that's all I'm doing this week. Well, anything but the color of my underwear or what my first name was before I changed it to Maggie in my teens. Those are top secret and must remain thus to preserve the integrity of future Trivial Pursuit editions where surely I will be a hot topic.

Long time readers might notice, by the way, that I've cut down the posting on my blog from daily to three times a week. This is part of my rabid attempt to stuff more things into my life and unfortunately is here to stay for the foreseeable future. I've just found out that I have a 90 day deadline to write the sequel to Lament so I'm going to need my evenings for that. Who needs a social life anyway? Moi?

Okay. To finish up the online education series, I wanted to say that no matter what sites you used to get your education (there are some excellent recommendations in the comments to the last education post), the functions they fulfill are the same. What you're looking for in your self-directed study is:

TECHNIQUE
These are sites that are specific to your chosen medium. For me, it's colored pencil, so the WetCanvas colored pencil forum was a great start for me. I also recommend Nicole Caulfield's blog, as she's always experimenting with new techniques, and Ann Kullberg's site. If your medium is a more common one like acrylic or oil, you'll have a huge pool to choose from -- lots of artists practicing the medium means lots of artists sharing their techniques. If you're working in something a bit more rare -- I read about this guy who made sculptures out of cow poo -- you're going to have to look harder for technique and probably have to supplement with real-world workshops.

THEORY
Learning to color-by-number isn't enough -- you need to learn to interpret and shape your pieces. To do that, you need theory. That's what function sites like James Gurney's blog fills for me. He makes color theory fascinating through plenty of visual examples. Theory can be complicated, snooze-worthy, and overwhelming -- so find a site that speaks your language. For weird bits of theory, I often have to dig deep, like when I was having my great Dynamic Symmetry hunt of 2007 for my Maxfield Parrish project.

INSPIRATION
This is why I do my artist-of-the-month studies when I can. It's always inspiring to take apart a great artist's work and see why it ticks. For me, looking at the work of John Singer Sargent, Waterhouse, Maxfield Parrish, and other greats always makes me want to pull out my pencils. Find who does it for you and bookmark the pages.

MOTIVATION
This isn't the same as inspiration! Inspiration is that passionate rush to the canvas. Motivation is what gets you there when the passion's not around. For me, being part of a forum really helped push me, and then having a blog also motivated me to have something to post. Then when I found the daily painting movement, I really got motivated. I wanted to be able to say I'd done more than 300 drawings and paintings in a year. Find someone or something to keep you accountable and stick to it.

FEEDBACK
You can't work in a vacuum, or else you run the risk of practicing the same mistakes again and again. This is what I think I miss the most about not getting a college art degree -- the idea of someone telling me "lengthen that bit" "intensify that color there" "crop the edge." We all want an Obi Wan to tell us what we're doing wrong, but working out of our home, you're not likely to find a light-saber wielding mentor. I'm part of a small online peer group of artists who chatter about art daily, and they've been invaluable -- I highly recommend finding other artists online at the same level as you and become critique partners. It helps with accountability and also gives you that objective feedback that you can't do for yourself.

And now bring on the questions!

Ack!

2008-04-04T18:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, guys - I know I was supposed to wrap up my series on Art Education online today, but I just got too busy getting ready for my workshop at the Apple Tree this weekend (another one in June if you're interested in some colored pencil kicking of buttocks) and I'm not going to have time to write anything coherent. I'm afraid I'll have to post it on Monday when I get back.

Until then, au revoir!

Getting an Art Education Online, Part II

2008-04-03T17:04:00.000-07:00

You may be wondering why there is an alien baby in today's post. Well . . . I wanted to show you what I looked like before I started my online art education. This alien baby is actually a drawing I did of my daughter back when she was about six months old. And I thought it was good.

Ugh. Anyway, do the math. This drawing is a little over three years old. How far I've come!

As if you need any more encouragement about online education, right? I've decided this is such an important topic to me that I'm going to do an additional post about it tomorrow and hopefully attack the questions as well.

Today I want to post on the online resources I've made use of in the past three years. There are hundreds more that I'm sure I've not encountered yet, and I encourage you to post the ones that were actually useful to you in the comments. Not the ones you ought to post. Not the ones you thought about reading. The ones you did. The ones that really made an influence.

Now, as a bunch of the commenters noted in the last post, art education in any form is what you make of it. Essentially, all artists are self-taught -- it's just whether or not you have a professor to guide you. Online, you have to be your own professor, your own study-guide. You also have only you to be accountable for, which can be a problem. No deadlines mean lackluster study habits. So it shouldn't be a surprise that the first and absolutely best resource on my list is an artists' forum. Surround yourself with people who know what you're working on, because then you'll have an excuse to get your work done and to strive harder.

Without further ado, my top five resources:

WetCanvas: http://www.wetcanvas.com/
Hands down, this is the best resource in my arsenal. There are other artists forums out there -- ScribbleTalk, ArtPapa, etc. and I'm certain they're also useful -- but WetCanvas just happened to be the first one I ran across and the one that became my home. Why was it useful? First of all, there were a ton of struggling beginners just like me, posting their works in progress for all to critique. Even if I couldn't work up the nerve to post my works for critique, I learned shovel-loads from observing how other people laid down color and attacked their artistic problems. Plus, as mentioned above, suddenly I had accountability. If I posted a work in progress, I felt motivated to finish it and post the next step. I'm Piper1 on WC and you can see just how far my work's come since I began posting on the colored pencil forum. It's a huge site -- plan on taking a while to get familiar with how it works.

Making a Mark: http://makingamark.blogspot.com/
The blog of art maven Katherine Tyrrell is a veritable haven for beginning and advanced artists alike. She covers a huge range of art subjects and writes about them sensitively and intelligently. I would say I'm biased because I'm also a close friend of hers, but we met on WC and became friends precisely because we approach art-making in the same way. There's always more to be learned.

Gurney Journey: http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/
This is the blog of James Gurney, the artist who created Dinotopia. Don't let that throw you. His blog is a wonderful resource for color theory and art techniques -- my mind boggles at how much time each of his intensely useful blog posts must take to write. I highly recommend it for intermediate and advanced artists -- beginning artists might find it a bit overwhelming.

John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery: http://jssgallery.org/
Ironically, the painter who had the most significant influence on my work is dead as a doornail. John Singer Sargent's work still hits me everytime I look at it, and I spent literally hours going through this site. I don't think everyone has to idolize JSS, however, I do think having an artist mentor, alive or dead, is useful.

Endless Summer Art Fair: http://summerartfair.blogspot.com/
This is one of clever Casey Klahn's blogs -- this one is full of tips on setting up art booths and generally not making an idiot of yourself when you're displaying your art in public. A must for working artists.

More tomorrow . . .

Duck & Cover

2008-04-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, I lied. No duck. But there is a cover -- the cover of my novel, Lament: The Faerie Queen's Deception, done by Julia Jeffrey. What do y'all think?

(and of course I don't need to mention that you can pre-order it by clicking on the side-bar of the blog, thus making me very happy).

Non-Stick Kitchen

2008-04-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

I just left a strangled scream on my husband's voicemail. Entirely unintentional.

See, it was a pleasant spring day. All was right in the Stiefvater household. I was calling my husband at work to let him know that the kids were talking about missing him. It went to his voice mail, which was fine, it just meant he was busy. And then, just as the pleasant voice told me to leave a message after the tone, I saw my two year old son taking a five gallon bucket of used vegetable oil off the table. Before my mouth could even form a slow motion "Nooooooo" appropriate to horror movies, he had dropped it.

The ensuing oil slick made oil-tanker spills look small scale. As the wave of oil came towards me, I left a strangled scream on my husband's voicemail and threw the phone from myself.

As environmentalists know, cleaning up an oil slick is hard work. It takes time and effort and a lot of Dawn cleaning products. I didn't have any puffins covered in oil or anything, but I did have two small dogs that I should've been paying closer attention to.

WILL: Peanut and Ginger love it!
ME: Love what?
WILL: Peanut and Ginger love it!

I turned to see Peanut and Ginger licking up the oil slick. I yelled at them and got an old towel to work on the floor. I returned and found Ginger barfing on the carpet.

WILL: Ginger made another mess.
ME: (unrepeatable)

I realized at this point that you can get much better effect with swear words if you combine them. Compound swear-words are much more evocative. I also realized at this point that non-stick spray is made of canola oil. And that a kitchen floor is flat, like a cookie sheet. And guess what . . . nothing was sticking.

So here I am, sliding across the floor with two rolls of paper towels stuffed under my arm, watching dogs barf out of the corner of my eye, and listening to Will use an entire box of wet wipes to clean the oil off his legs.

And all the while I'm thinking -- there are some parents who cry on their kids' first day of school. Those parents need medication!

Or maybe just some more canola oil.

My Parallel Life

2008-04-02T06:15:00.004-07:00

When I'm not creating art, you all know that I'm busy in my parallel life of writing novels. I've been asked to guest blog during "The Three Days of Fey" over on Livejournal. I talk there about my writing process and the faeries in Lament. I don't blab much about the writing and publishing process on this blog, but if you're interested in that half of my life, check out my post at the Three Days of Fey. (and if you actually do want to hear nitty-gritties about novel publishing, you can comment here too).

Getting an Art Education Online, Part I

2008-03-31T19:27:00.000-07:00

"Genesis" - work in progress
colored pencil on rtist-x board
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater

I thought that I'd take this week to talk about how I've gotten my education as an artist. I know there are many wonderful art schools and programs out there that have produced many wonderful artists . . . but I'm not one of them. If I wanted to get an art degree now, I'd never have the time with two small ankle-biters on the loose (and two dogs, too). And back when I could get a traditional art degree, I couldn't.

Imagine the scene: bright-eyed Maggie, a stellar but bored history major approaching the art department with her portfolio.

ME: Lookie. Drawings. Do you think your class . . . and I . . . we could . . . you know, get together sometime?
HEAD OF DEPT: (looking at portfolio)
ME: I'm hoping that long pause means awe of some variety.
HEAD OF DEPT: (looking at porfolio)
ME: Okay, now it's just rude.
HEAD OF DEPT: Right. These suck. Go study dead people some more.

Okay, so they didn't say "suck." They said "not sophisticated enough," which means suck. Anyway, the long and short of it was that I wasn't going to be taking art classes any time soon. So I put my art away, short of my in-class doodles, until after college. When I decided to pick it up again after I graduated, I knew it was going to be all up to me.

So tonight I want to talk about what sort of mind-set you need to have when you tackle self-teaching yourself art. And of course, as usual, this isn't the only way, it's just the way I did it (which is of course the right way, duh). On Thursday I'll be talking about resources and non-traditional learning methods that helped me.

Things You Need in Your Brain Matter to Teach Yourself Art

1. Self Confidence. No, you don't have to style yourself "Future Queen of America" (what kind of loon would do that anyway?) or strut around with a really high opinion of yourself or think that you know all the answers. In fact, two of those will hurt your chances and one of them will tick me off. But you do have to believe that you can teach yourself to be a better artist. You do have to believe that you have that better artist somewhere inside you, and that if you just rummage around long enough, you'll pull her (him) out of your innards.

2. Curiosity. If the way other artists work and compose and shape their art doesn't interest you, you might be looking at the wrong hobby or profession. A well-developed sense of curiosity about new techniques will always serve you well. Without it . . . yeah, you're one of those kids in sleeping in the back of the classroom.

3. Insanely Keen Powers of Observation. You're teaching yourself, so there's no wise Obi Wan figure here. A lot of times there will be a brilliant concept in front of you for the taking -- but no one's going to explain it to you. If you see a painting that you love, don't just love it. Deconstruct it and steal its soul. It's what I would do.

4. Constructively Critical Eye. This goes along with #!. You need to be able to look at your work with a helpfully critical eye. This takes a nice dose of #1 and #3. There's a big difference between knowing your work can be better and thinking that you suck.

unconstructive criticism: Wow. These paintings look like chimps on amphetamines painted them with q-tips dipped in curdled yogurt.
constructive criticism: Wow. These paintings look like chimps on amphetamines painted them with q-tips dipped in curdled yogurt, because I need to work on how I apply my pigment. But $%^&, look at those colors! I rock (for a chimp on amphetamines).

5. Willingness to Listen. There are a lot of blogging artists with very big brains and also a lot of generous artists who talk a lot in person. Recommendation? Don't tune them out and begin fantasizing about next time you can catch Family Guy on TV. Ask questions. Listen. Put it into practice. And then show the artist, if you can, how you've put their advice into practice -- because then they'll give you more. I can't tell you how many people told me that they gave me advice because they saw me putting other artists' advice to good use. I'm starting to get cynical myself -- a lot of people who ask for my advice do nothing with it, and it makes me feel like I'm wasting my time giving it. But when I see someone who is using other advice wisely? I feel like they're a good investment.

6. Motivation. You gotta want it, grasshopper. You have to want it enough to ride out everyone who tells you your portfolio isn't sophisticated enough, your drawings not precise enough, your colors not saturated enough, your subjects not salable enough -- because there will always be more negative around you than positive. So you have to be your biggest cheerleader.

So questions and comments in the comments as usual! For those who have gotten a non-traditional education or want one!

Reader Questions, Deferred, and Next Week's Series

2008-03-30T17:50:00.000-07:00

Short post! I've decided to make the reader questions a bi-weekly thing (is that when you do it every other week? Or twice a week? I mean the first one). Every other Friday -- it'll make it easier for me to collect them all and answer them at once.

And I wanted to introduce next week's topic: getting an art education online. Any questions, put 'em in the comments as usual -- I will get to them!

Maggie on Time Management, Part II

2008-03-27T17:46:00.000-07:00

all artwork in this post are 1 minute sketches from life at a Lunasa concert
copyright 2008 Maggie Stiefvater
(please note all sketches posted in this blog are from my current sketchbook, which like the last one will be given away to a random blog subscriber when it's full -- so if you read regularly, make sure you subscribe so I know!)

As promised, today is the follow up post on time-management -- what I do to keep myself on track in the midst of a crazy world.

In the last post, I pointed out the top reasons that kept me from working: excuses, funky priorities, aimlessness and self-doubt. Those are the top reasons. Here are some others that might sound familiar to you: lack of energy, distraction, procrastination, and misdirected energy (fake usefulness).

And here's what I do to counter-act them. Maggie, Future Queen of America, tells all.

1. Excuses

This is a bad one for me, because I can think of so many: toddlers not taking as many naps, new puppy needing lots of walks and making lots of epic puddles, too many commitments, not enough hours in the day, need to cook dinner, need to clean the house, need to finish reading that novel that is burning at me to read it . . .

And I have to confess that for me, the biggest defense against excuses is my husband. He knows what I can do and he can see write through my excuses. He has a very low BS titer. Everyone has someone like this -- it could be a sister, a friend, a husband, another of your personalities -- someone who knows just how much you can do and will hold you to it.

If you don't, use me. I know what you're capable of. Shove those excuses under the rug. They're not doing either of us any good. This is about good habits, too -- the more you stop leaning on your excuses, the weaker they'll get, until finally you can blow them down like a straw house.

2. Funky Priorities

Funky priorities, as you remember, is when you think that there are things more important than your art, your writing, your music -- whatever it is that your dream is. For me, there are only a very few things that I consider more important that what my dream is, but I know that just because this is a concept that comes easy to me, it's not necessarily one that comes easily to others, especially if you've been raised to have an eye constantly on the reliable and the tried-and-true.

I do, however, have funky priorities when it comes to choosing between my various interests -- music, writing, and art, and I think the method I use for straightening out my priorities applies across the board. I ask myself constantly

do I need to be doing this? (watching a TV show, signing up for a new artists' community online, etc)
will it matter in the long run? (fretting about not making it to a show opening, knowing who the front-runner is in American Idol)
does it make me feel good to get this done?
does this touch upon more than one of the goals that I've set for myself?

And I know this last one is silly, but as a writer, you have to indulge me -- it really does work for me.

If I were a character in a book or movie, would I be sympathetic for the character that I am? Would I think that I was doing all I could to accomplish my goals?

3. Aimlessness

This is one that used to torment me a lot. I would clear my schedule, allot time for work, sit down at the desk, and sort of . . . fritter around. It wasn't that I didn't have things to do -- I had lots to do. Too much. Way too much to accomplish in one day. Way too much to accomplish in one week. Give me a month, maybe. It just piled around me like . . . like . . . stuff that piles around you (my powers of metaphor momentarily failed me).

So I started setting goals. I got myself a notebook and started putting down my daily, weekly, and monthly goals. I got out of the habit of the notebook once the year was done, but I still have a stack of index cards and a calendar on my desk now. The calendar has long range goals and deadlines and the index cards have the week's goals on them, one day to each card. I also have my 2008 Goals/ New Years' Resolutions taped up next to my desk (Out of 11, I've already crossed out 2 and I'm this close to the next two - I can taste it).

Tada! My aimlessness was gone. I could get right to work. But it's not something I ever grow out of. If I try to go a week without my daily goals . . . nothing gets done. Work crawls to a halt. I don't think I'll ever be able to manage without them written down.

4. Self-Doubt

Yes, I still get it. Yes, I still foolishly think I can get around it by getting praise from outside parties. No, it never works.

Self-doubt is sort of like a cramp when you're running. It makes it hard to run at first, then intensely painful (and still hard), and finally impossible. You want to stop. You have to stop. You just can't keep going -- but you do. Well, most people don't. Most people stop and say, "$%^&! Blinkin' cramp! #$%^!" But those people who push through the cramp -- it goes away and you can keep going, good as new.

Well, I assume so. When running, I've always stopped for the cramps. But I don't stop for the self-doubt. Even when I think a piece is complete crappola, I push through it. Because I know the next one won't be, even if the current piece is a write-off. And I'll never get to the next piece if I stop then.

6. Lack of Energy

Sleep isn't something I like to compromise on, though I hear through the grapevine that most Americans do. I become a raving banshee hair-pulling lunatic without at least seven hours of sleep, so I try to get as much as I can. I also try and work with my circadian rhythm as much as I can. Meaning? I'm a morning person. The days I got to bed early and manage to get up early before the kids, I can get a lot more work done, because I feel good. Hard to remember that when I want to stay up and watch a movie.

Also, I watch what I eat. I'm of the opinion that Americans are guilty of eating a lot of junk, and it makes us uncomfortable, sleepy, and depressed. I'm allergic to preservatives of all sort, and it's an allergy that got worse as I got older. The early symptoms of my sensitivity? Depression, tiredness, headache. (then all sorts of fun gross painful ones later, but that's for another time, my pets). I don't think that I'm the only one that doesn't react well to preservatives, I just think I take it to a slightly higher level than most people. On my preservative-free diet, I have lots of energy and I stay fit.

Also, some of this is habit. People used to sitting stay sitting. People used to moving stay moving. I suppose if I stopped moving and being energetic, I might stop moving and being energetic altogether. I'm not really prepared to find out. So I keep on motoring.

7. Distraction

Oh, I'm bad about this. There are lots of things to distract me. The neighbors' dogs barking. The birds on the feeder. My cat feeding on birds from the feeder. Children hooting in their rooms during "nap" time. Husband watching interesting television. The thoughts rambling around in my head.

For me, headphones are the answer. I pick a CD suitable to what I'm doing -- nice uptempo stuff when I'm on a deadline -- warn my husband that I'm going to another planet, and put on the headphones. I must have music to stay focused. Otherwise, I can guarantee you my brain will be off holidaying while I'm trying to work.

8. Procrastination

*coughreadingblogscough* I'm a good one for procrastinating. I always waited until the last moment to do my papers in college too. The way I kicked this one (though it still plagues me) is fooling myself. I set false deadlines, well before the real deadline, and make myself work to that deadline instead of the proper one.

Example? My deadline for getting Ballad written isn't until the very end of the year. Plenty of time to write it. I can play around, right? Wrong. I'm giving myself a fake deadline of Halloween. If I have it done by then, I can play afterwards.

9. Misdirected Energy

This goes back to priorities, but unlike the more general priorities, misdirected energy is more insidious. See, with this one, I'm talking about things that seem useful for your work, but aren't really. For instance, investing a lot of time in an exhibition that won't really pay off. Or spending a few hours creating a pretty profile page on an artists' forum. Or going to art group meetings that aren't productive.

These are really hard to identify, because they feel like they must be useful. But time's at a premium, and the truth of the matter is you have to be like an emergency room doctor. Triage, it's called. It's looking at a room full of sick people and deciding who's most likely to kick the bucket and who's just there for the lollipops and Snoopy band-aids.

So look at your waiting room of tasks carefully. Who's really going to bleed to death first? And who can be shunted to the end of the line or off the line entirely?

10. There has got to be a number 10 to this list. This is going to drive me crazy. I'm going to make one up. Um.

Man, I couldn't think of one. I really am creatively stifled tonight, aren't I?

Okay -- you guys know the routine -- questions in the comments section and I'll answer them tomorrow. Also, any solutions that you've come up with, share!