Life in a Northern Town

This is the personal blog of Alaskan writer/artist Layla Lawlor. A list of my published works to date is under the cut. No need to ask before friending me. I don't necessarily friend back on request, but I rarely post locked content. You're welcome to introduce yourself if you like.

( Short stories )

( Graphic novels )

All entries to this blog are mirrored at both laylalawlor on Livejournal.com and layla on Dreamwidth.org.

When I was a kid, we used to joke that we wished the groundhog would see his shadow, so we'd ONLY get six more weeks of winter ...

Apparently, thanks to a bill that Palin signed into law shortly before leaving office, Groundhog's Day in Alaska is now Marmot Day. Insert your own joke here.

I mucked out the chickens' litter on Monday, and this morning, peeking at me from the clean sawdust, was a little brown egg -- the first egg of 2010. Still unfrozen and everything! The new chicken setup, with its floor heating, is so much better for getting usable eggs during the winter. Last winter, I probably had to discard about 2/3 of the eggs in February and March because they froze and cracked open before I could gather them. This year, the ambient temperature in the chickenhouse may not be above freezing most of the time, but the floor is warm. During their brief laying spell last December, I only had to discard one egg due to temperature-related breakage.

First egg of 2010!

I should make a mini omelet. And, hard as it is to believe when it's -25 and there's snow everywhere, it's time to start thinking about gardening. I would really like to have an actual garden this summer, in containers if nothing else. And I need somewhere to put my big strawberry.

Um, hi. *waves* Freebird is coming along; I've finished a ton of minor edits and 30 new strips for the book (20 strips plus a 10-page backup story), which means I'm actually pretty close to done with the new material! I'd like to do another backup story, but I haven't figured out *what*, exactly -- the one that I just finished deals with Matt's backstory, so I kinda want to feature another character, but I'm not exactly sure who. I'm thinking either a young Karen, or a young Richard with his first wife, Sheila. (The idea of just stopping here is also awfully tempting, but I really like the idea of having little glimpses of several characters at the end -- a bunch of the little character moments that I never got to work into the main body of the comic for various reasons.)

There is one scene that I really *REALLY* need to rewrite (I've already rewritten/relettered the damn thing at least three times, so I'm not eager to jump into it), which will probably entail adding a page or two of new material. And then all that's left (well, the only major things that are left, anyhow) are the cover and the other backup story, if I decide to do it. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I don't think it's a train ...

I promised a long time ago to post snippets of Freebird as I worked on it, and well ... obviously, I guess, I haven't. How about one of the new strips?

( Richard and Rainbow, being snarky, as usual - plus random commentary )

Ugggggh ... now that classes have started again, I'm trying to reset my schedule from mostly-nocturnal to at least somewhat diurnal. It's not getting off to a fantastic start; I went to bed at 1, popped awake at 5:30 a.m. and now here I am, zombie-shambling around campus. braaaaaaaaaaains...

( Just nattering about school )

My creative goals for 2010:

* Finish new Freebird strips and get book to publisher.

* Write 1000 words of fiction per day (or, 1 finished comics page = 2000 words of fiction; I realized last year that I have to have some sort of conversion like this, or I never do any comics pages AT ALL; one comics page is WAY more effort than writing 1000 words). If I keep this up, I'll end the year with some sort of compromise between 365,000 words of fiction (3 novels!) and ~180 comics pages (1 graphic novel!). Of course, the problem is that I seem to wander between projects and never finish any of them. We shall see.

* Continue writing specifically targeted short stories and attempting to sell them.

* Make (at least) 1 sale to an SFWA qualifying market. Or at least TRY, by submitting to these markets every chance I get.

* Finish the rough draft of 1 novel. (I'd like to end the year with a novel sitting, completed, on my desktop.)

* Revise "Sea Change", my NaNo novel from 2007.

* Work more on Sun-Cutter. Amass backlog of pages and begin updating by end of year.

* Revise the damn sci-fi-Western novella and write the sequel which seems to have mysteriously wandered into my brain. *shakes brain to see if story drops out*

* Get HM book into some semblance of order; decide whether to do POD or press run; make actual progress towards making it happen.

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope the new year is good for you.

Time for my annual year-end creative roundup post. First, let me check my progress against last year's goals! Then, I'll be back in a new post with this year's goals.

I started last year flying high, and then got knocked down, first by work -- I wasn't planning on having to go back to work full-time, let alone full-time plus freelance out the wazoo -- and then I went back to UAF full-time to finish my degree, at which point my creative output basically plummeted to zero. Still, I'm not too unhappy with what I actually managed to accomplish.

( Checking last year's goals against my actual progress )

I'm actually feeling pretty good about the past year. Here's my short list of what I did in 2009:

- Recorded daily writing totals (I actually started this in mid-2008, but this is the first year I've done it from the beginning of the year and been conscientious about it).
- Wrote ~117,000 words of original fiction; finished several short stories; worked on two novels.
- Finished several Kismet short comics.
- Started Sun-Cutter; then had to put it on hiatus.
- Quit work; went back to school.
- Sold three short stories - Hetsie's Wonders and two stories which will appear in very small-circulation anthologies coming out next year. I'm not precisely taking the world by storm, but I'm pretty damn psyched about this.
- Made solid progress towards publishing the print edition of Freebird.

Back shortly with my 2010 goals!

But I've added some more tools to my repertoire (router and belt sander). And I have a direction, at least, for my final sculpture project (which is due Wednesday *cries*).

I may not be enjoying this sculpture class all that much in some ways -- it's still not really my kind of art -- but I think I've gained more useful skills than in a dozen regular classes.

I passed my library skills exam last week (which means one less class I have to take). One more week of classes to go, and then finals. *breathes*

So, one of the reasons I'm feeling massively accomplished this week is that I finally got my welding project done for the sculpture class.

( Pictures of a very big strawberry under the cut )

The last couple of weeks have been hella busy, but I'm feeling so accomplished right now! All my exams are out of the way until finals, and I think I did really well on them; I finished my big welding project in Sculpture; I turned in all of the paperwork and completed most of the school-related errands that I've been putting off, including declaring a minor, changing my school ID to my married name, registering for spring classes, and getting all the info for testing out of the mandatory Library Skills class, even if I haven't taken the actual test yet; did an updated unofficial degree audit and got good news (more on that in the next paragraph); and I just finished a paper that I've been stressing about, which means no more work due until right before Thanksgiving. YAY.

I was bouncing all over the place when I found out that I'm closer to my degree than I thought. Unless I'm overlooking something, I actually only need two classes in the spring, and they're classes I wanted to take anyway! I think ... cross my fingers ... I might get my easy semester and graduate this spring.

I'm looking forward to this weekend to relax, do a little housecleaning and writing, and not have to go anywhere for a couple of days.

Picked up next semester's course schedule today, and have spent the entire evening poring over it and happily fantasizing about next semester. I made half-hearted attempts to work on my homework in the Native studies class and also to study for the two(!!) art history exams I have next week, but ... lack of functional brain is a problem. So I'm back to looking at the schedule.

The big question, I guess, is whether I want to take classes that I'm not really interested in, just to finish up the degree in the spring, or give myself an extra semester or two, and take the courses that really excite me. Right now I'm leaning towards the latter option, because there really is no big rush for me in finishing the degree. And it would be nice to have a couple of part-time semesters during which I can work on the novel(s) and Kismet, instead of another full-time semester with no time to do any creative stuff outside class. (Though I just realized the zooarchaeology class that looks really awesome next fall doesn't qualify towards my degree. Bugger.)

Tentatively I'm looking at 8 credits in the spring and maybe 6-9 next fall. At this point I pretty much just need upper division humanities/social science credits, so I can cherry-pick the things I most want to study ... and throw in other stuff to fill out my schedule.

One such hole in the schedule is on Tuesday and Thursday mornings next semester. Orion and I share a car, and the first class he's teaching is at 9:45, while my first class doesn't start 'til 11:30. So I'm poking at various one-credit phys-ed courses to fill the gap during which I'd just be hanging out on campus anyway. It's currently a toss-up between yoga or beginning rock climbing. I really want the rock-climbing course because not only have I always wanted to learn (I was climbing-wall certified in college, but I wasn't very good at it), but I also think it would be awesome research for stories yet unwritten. (Writing. It's a disease.) The problem is that I'd only have 15 minutes to make it all the way across campus -- sweaty and tired -- to my next class. Whereas yoga would be a nice relaxing way to wake up and then I'd have half an hour before my next class. Decisions.