Liralen's Adventures Through Life

I now know the joy of Palomino Blackwings. Carl was cool enough to show them to me when I was there in Oakland, and they're utterly amazing pencils. Better yet is the pencil sharpener for them, which is in the foreground here. It's a lovely two-bladed deal, with the first blade made to sharpen the wood of the pencil. The second blade gives the point to the graphite. What's even better about it is that I can use it as a lead sharpener for my 2 mm leads in their lead holders! So Carl's kind of started me on a pencil binge since BigBadCon and I'm pretty happy with them. You can get them at pencils.com and jetpens.com . Today I've been using the pencils to diagram and plot out character motivations and the entire history of someone going undercover in the 90's Russian Mafiya. The whole spectrum of the organized crime over there is immense and fascinating and I can see why it might have scared people here. Combined with all the information from Codes of the

There was one small side trip we had to do on the way to Big Bad Con , although it was really way out of our way, because the convention was by the Oakland airport and Chez Panisse exists in Berkeley. I made the reservations for the café upstairs exactly one month before. They don't open up reservations until then, and last year we were unable to get reservations because we started too late. I made sure that this year. I also got an interesting surprise on the way there. If you want to just read about the con, click here.

I have made the Black Pearl and she is mine. There are these kits made by a company called Metal Works, and this little beauty started out as four sheets of laser-cut metal that I then punched out of the sheets, bent, and put together according to the directions. My near-sightedness made it so that I had to just take my glasses off and do it. I suspect I wouldn't have even tried it if I were still wearing contact lenses. There are times when it's good to know that I'm getting old. Today was a gorgeous Colorado fall day, the foliage all the colors of flame, and the wind stiff and solid enough to lean against. A raven glided (the way I knew it was a raven, as crows can't glide), stock still, above my head. It cocked one beady black eye at me, cawed at me, and then floated off backwards. I got another thousand words toward a short story, answered a query about usage of a photograph of one of my paintings on Flickr , and several hundred more words on the blog about

I had a very scattered day today. A great deal of the confusion stemmed from the fact that we have a dozen different projects and no idea which one we should tackle first. So, instead of working on anything in particular, we nailed down particulars for a few stories in order to be able to work on them tomorrow.

I plotted a book today. Strictly speaking, I mapped it out over the last week, and today went over it with DP, and today we have the whole outline for the third book in our series. Drawing the scene map had the advantage of me being able to add tags and things to each box whenever I felt like it. Each scene had the following: Characters A title Motivations What I wanted to get across in the scene And the movement of the character across the scene Today's List of Accomplishments: I made coffee cake I watched One Piece with Jet I helped Jet with homework Jet and I went to Noodles and I had the BBQ pork mac and cheese! I got my allergy shots I knitted on Cathie's sweater I finished the Home Tour Tickets Marian came by to give me all the committee's feedback and I incorporated it all. I sent the tickets to the printers after getting one last look at it from the committee. I wrote some of my blog entry about Oakland. I had burritos from flour tortillas I ha