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I went over to R's last night to hang out -- we were supposed to watch Wheel, but he ended up getting delayed at Guitar Center (how this happens, I'm not sure; perhaps the guitars are hypnotic) and so missed most of it. Fortunately I had my keys, so I made myself at home. He eventually fell asleep, which was fine by me as it gave me a chance to work on the cover some more.

I'm...perplexed, I suppose, and a little disturbed that my laptop screen and my computer screen at work show such variations in colour on-the-screen; at work the original cover really shows the cream background, while on my laptop screen it just looks white. Tech-minded people, do you know why this is, if there's anything I can do to adjust it (obviously my contrast and brightness are all the way up), and if not, which one would be more accurate? The laptop's a Dell 1505, and the desktop is a Dell flat-screen, listed as a 1905FP in the display settings.

I did discover that Photoshop, in the "paragraph" tab, has a "do not hyphenate justified text" option. Learn something new every day!

On a final hilarious typesetting note: the title font is FFF Tusj, available for free, and when I was linking someone to it this morning I noticed the note from the author:

Handwritten version of Georgia.

The blurb and bio are both in Georgia. Which on the one hand is probably why I chose it, because subconsciously I knew it would tie into the other font aesthetically.

On the other hand, APPARENTLY I HAVE A "TYPE".

AHAHAHAHAHA. :D

Going to try and mess around with Dreamwidth some more this morning. Being able to friend LiveJournals on Dreamwidth will actually solve a couple of arcane "this shit only happens to me" problems I'm having.

Also, I am going to make a post soon about why you should not fear the fandom's disappearance from LJ. Because seriously, if you are afraid that people getting Dreamwidth accounts means that fandom is fracturing, you may not quite understand how this all is going to work.

Short version:

1. Dreamwidth has built-in crossposting to LiveJournal, so there's no reason you can't post to both places if you're on Dreamwidth, which means all your friends who went to Dreamwidth? 99% of them will stay on LJ too. LJ, like IJ, is useful as a mirror.

2. Dreamwidth allows you to friend LiveJournals, so you don't need two flists if you're on Dreamwidth OR to worry that people aren't reading your LJ entries if they're on Dreamwidth.

Seriously, guys, the gnashing of teeth is very distracting. And bad for your molars, too!

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BOSSBOSS BROUGHT ME SUSHI. He is the best Boss of all.

I'd told him about going to OySy before my Opera Outing last week and he decided to take some clients there for lunch today. He/they were so delighted by it that he ordered a plate of Philadelphia Maki for me and brought it back with him just in time for my lunch break. OM NOM SALMON CREAM CHEESE GREEN ONIONS RICE.

And now I am dead of sushi.

I also figured out why I appear to be having a nervous breakdown. I was thinking, well, I've felt this way before when I was putting up a show and there were elevenbeentillion details to attend to before opening night. But I have no opening night! So why am I...oh.

When faced with a lot of things to do, especially the completion of an artistic project, I automatically am trained to assume there's a short amount of time in which to do them. This is my mental Tech Week. So I am suddenly under the impression that everything I need to do -- dentist's appointment, Nameless copy, my Big Bang fic, a haircut, some clothing returns, fixing up the Dreamwidth account -- ALL HAVE TO BE DONE BY FRIDAY.

Obvs. this is not the case. But I can tell myself that until I look like a legitimate crazyperson and I will still be in the middle of a freakout, so I just need to make a list and go down the list. Tonight the list consists of finishing the Nameless cover tweaks and getting it off to press, and then prepping what I need to for the rest of, um, life.

So there's that. Also, I am going to Costco on Sunday! AND THIS TIME I will not get lost. Or if I do it will be in new and interesting ways!

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There is nothing about this webcomic strip that is not A+ awesome.

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I just got an email from Lulu.com: "Creating a Great Book Cover Has Never Been Easier!"

OKAY LULU I CAN TAKE THE HINT.

The cover was done (I chose the tan and olive but intensified the shading a bit; we'll see how that works) and the proof has been done for a few days, so I uploaded them and finalised the proof and had them ship me one and then went to the bathroom and threw up.

It's stupid really because it's just a self-published book, but I wrote it at a time when I was slowly going insane and I've worked hard on it. I sent it all over and rewrote it and gave it to friends to read and then rewrote it again and gave it to everyone to edit and rewrote it two more times and now the first copy is on its way. Eight days, ten at the outside, I'll have a thing I made in my hands. No mask I ever made took four and a half years to finish.

When I finished The Dead Isle it was a total shock, because I wrote the ending and then said to myself, "Okay, what scene do I write next?" and there were no more scenes to write. Apparently when I finish stuff I get musical, which I am not really at any other time, but I had to hear "We Have Fed Our Seas" because it was in my head for some reason. This time the finishing wasn't such a shock because it had been done for a long time, sort of -- the fabric was all there, anyway. So uploading it was this nerve-wracking "Oh god what did I forget" process, and hopefully I haven't forgotten anything. But I did have The Old Churchyard in my head, so I put that on, and that calmed me down a little.

Turns out I'm a high-strung artist after all. Who knew?

Anyway, have some poems for the evening.

The Old Church Yard
Trad. Appalachian

O come, come with me to the old church yard
We well know the path through the soft green sward
Friends slumber there we were wont to regard
We'll trace out their names in the old church yard

( Oh mourn not for them, their grief is o'er... )

***

We Have Fed Our Seas
by Rudyard Kipling, this arrangement by Peter Bellamy/David Jones

We have fed our seas for a thousand years
And it calls us still unfed
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead
We have strawed our best to the sea's unrest
To the shark and the sheering gull

And if blood be the price of admiralty
Lord God, we ha' paid in full

( There is never a tide that moves shoreward now... )