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Michelle Bottorff
14 July 2009 @ 12:49 pm

Last night I spoke with a friend of mine about him acting as my musical mentor.  He seems very willing, but there may be scheduling issues.   We will see.

I brought four sample songs of mine along with me for him to listen to, and he says I write lovely melodies.  ::bounce::

Further discussion of my music had him affirming the following points.  A) I do harmony primarily by means of counter-melodies.  Um… I guess I know what I’m good at and I try to stick to that?  B) I appear to be addicted to writing in minor keys.

He claims that neither of those are necessarily a bad thing, and since he’s the expert, I guess I’ll trust him on that. :)

He also states that the counter-melody thingy gives everything I do a sort of folkish feel.  (Folkies are the only ones so melody obsessed that they think that an appropriate way to support a melody line is to write another different melody to go with it?)


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Michelle Bottorff
10 July 2009 @ 12:47 pm

I finished the script to Black Flag 3 last week.

Afterward I spent several days happily re-reading it and going, ‘look… squee! — dashing young pirate getting mugged by a bunch of fusty lawyers — dashing young pirate removing his shirt in court so he can present his muscles as evidence — dashing young pirate getting told he’s ‘too domestic’ while he is in the middle of shooting down armed invaders — bwahahahah!’ and then going back and reading the Black Flag 2 script so I could compare. The script for 2 is only half as long as the script for 3… “there must be something wrong with one or the other of them. Lets check…. aahhh, 2… now here is a man who knows how to get things done. Ooh, yeah! I love this story. Oh. Um…. Better check over 3 again. Yay, dashing young pirate telling off evil spy-chick, woot! But, still twice as long. Hmm… better go check 2 again…”

But now my brain seems to have decided that I should be working on Black Flag 4.

Unfortunately, I only have 2/3rds of the art for Black Flag 1 done. Scripting 2 makes some sort of sense, but scripting 3 was, without a doubt, jumping the gun a little — scripting 4 would just be ridiculous.  Obviously I need to hurry up and get some more spaceships built so I can get back to doing actual artwork, or I’m going to drive myself bonkers.  But it’s hard concentrating on spaceships, when the theater in my head is trying to play romantic scenes between a space-pirate genius inventor chick and the slave-owning ruler of an iron age nation who has been told since birth that he is a god.

The next Ice Wolf story has gotten a thousand words or so further along too. As usual, Bambi is about to get in a fight: If she doesn’t win, she’s in big trouble; she’s not at all sure that she can win, and…
…even if she actually does win, she’s still in big trouble. >:)

Meanwhile Serena has discovered that it is possible to for someone to sidetrack her empathic abilities by the completely innocent means of having a crush on her.  Whenever he’s with her any other emotions he might feel get drowned out by the “isn’t she wonderful… and she even said she’d go out with me, whee!” euphoria.  And if that wasn’t distracting enough, he’s also really cute, and almost as big as she is.  Too bad he’s the opposition.


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Michelle Bottorff

I just finished drawing page 100 of Scent of Spring. Go me!


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Michelle Bottorff
11 June 2009 @ 08:45 pm

Chapter 12 Completed!

Characters - 54 / 62 Characters - 87% Done
Construction - 27 / 41 Constructions - 66% Done
Art - 134 / 220 Pages - 61% Done

Production Total - 67% Done
Estimated Completion Date: September 2nd, 2010


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Michelle Bottorff
24 April 2009 @ 05:24 pm

I just finished putting together page 100 of Black Flag.

In the webcomic forum I inhabit, page 100 is usually considered a major milestone that you are supposed to brag about and collect congrats for, but A) I just posted about hitting halfway on the production meter and collected congrats for that, and B) I’m not posting these pages to the public, so I don’t have a webcomic that has reached page 100, I’ve merely created 100 pages of a webcomic. Its not quite the same thing, and bragging about it feels a bit like cheating, especially when it’s so soon after the last brag.

I feel like I’m managing to walk out of step with myself, somehow.


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Michelle Bottorff
09 April 2009 @ 10:10 am

My stats after doing the title page for chapter nine…

Characters - 53 / 62 Characters - 85% Done
Construction - 23 / 41 Constructions - 56% Done
Art - 84 / 220 Pages - 38% Done
Production Total - 50% Done

Estimated Completion Date: August 2nd, 2011

Yeeeehaaaaw!


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Michelle Bottorff
28 March 2009 @ 06:56 pm

I think I’ve managed to integrate wordpress posts and comments with my (in beta) webcomic site, without having to run the webcomic itself through wordpress.

It’s working on the version of the site on my home computer, anyway.

I maybe should have been working on Black Flag instead, so that I will eventually have something to POST to my webcomic site, but  I’m in the middle of building another set and wanted a break.


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Michelle Bottorff
13 March 2009 @ 08:33 am

I have completed Chapter Seven.

Characters - 52 / 62 Characters - 84% Done
Construction - 23 / 41 Constructions - 56% Done
Art - 73 / 217 Pages - 34% Done

Production Total - 46% Done
Estimated Completion Date: October 30th, 2011


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Michelle Bottorff
10 March 2009 @ 09:07 am

Having finally got the engineering section set built, I am now working on the end of Chapter 7 of Black Flag, and have just finished the page with my first kissing scene. :)

A tendency to rely too much on text is often cited as one of the most frequent beginner problems of writers-turned-comickers, so I always get a kick out of those pages with no words on them at all. (Besides, they are usually a faster to put together.) I have just completed two pages in a row with no dialog. Go me! Although, some of that is probably only due compensation for the previous page which is quite dialog heavy, because it contains a recently inserted mini-infodump. But I thought it was a rather well done mini-infodump? (My husband says “very well done, AND badly needed infodump” — but its his job to say that sort of thing.)

The one thing I can promise is that I remain true to form, and am far more likely to under-explain than over-explain.

In other news all three of my high-schoolers are home with the flu — my eldest girl apparently spend the whole day at school yesterday telling her friends that she was NOT SICK. Heh. By evening she had a worse fever than the two who had sensibly stayed home.


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Michelle Bottorff
20 February 2009 @ 09:50 pm

Lissa got her last dose of the chemo she’s been on most recently today. The standard procedure with this one is to keep boosting the dosage each time you administer it until nasty side-effects show up, and then you know how much the patient can take, and you only give them that much for the remaining treatments.

Her doctor reported that she is now his record setter. Her dosage was boosted every single time it was administered — he has never given any kid so much of this particular medication before.

He says its practically impossible that she won’t develop any of the usual side-effects this time… but then, he thought it was pretty impossible she wouldn’t develop them last time either, so he doesn’t know what to tell me to expect.

Either way they will not be giving it to her again, and in two and a half weeks she will be starting the maintenance phase of her treatment.

(She sure felt miserable after her treatment today. Even though she hasn’t had the *predicted* side-effects yet, the stuff always seems to make her very, very queasy.)


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Michelle Bottorff
09 February 2009 @ 01:51 pm

Lissa’s doctor is no longer pleased by her ability to tolerate chemo…

…he is *astonished*.

:)


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Michelle Bottorff
06 February 2009 @ 08:14 am

Today is the fifth anniversary of the first posting available on my blog/livejournal. (I wasn’t on either wordpress or livejournal at the time, those earliest entries were ported over from a different blogging program.)

The livejournal link is http://lavenderbard.livejournal.com/2004/02/06/

The wordpress link is http://www.lshelby.com/Blog/?p=323

So what was I talking about five years ago? Making art for my writing website, and the revisions for Cantata in Coral and Ivory. I mention Eyes of Infistar, which I had not yet started to write.

Both those books are now sitting at a publishing house waiting to be looked at.
That counts as progress, right?


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Michelle Bottorff
02 February 2009 @ 11:27 pm

I’m hoping that ‘pretty normal with these kids, especially in winter’ wasn’t supposed to be a code phrase meaning ‘it will happen about every other week’.

I’m also hoping the next time Lissa gets feverish, it happens during regular clinic hours.  The hem/onc people are used to this– they handle it quicker, and with less fuss and paperwork than down in the Emergency room.

 Lissa was impressed by the guy who drew her blood down there though.  She said he was so good at it, that she couldn’t feel him poke her arm.  (She wasn’t supposed to get poked in the arm at all, they were supposed to go through her port — but the first set of blood counts came back from the lab with a completely unbelievable result, and so they needed to do them over… and by that time, she was already getting her antibiotics through her port.  So…)


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Michelle Bottorff
21 January 2009 @ 09:24 pm

The home care nurse has taught me how to administer home infusions of antibiotics to Lissa through her access port.  Not only did I administer her medication, but I ‘de-accessed’ the port (removed the needle connecting the port, which is under the skin, with the infusion tubing.)  If she needs antibiotics again, I will still have to go into the hospital to have the port acessed, but I can give her any additional treatments myself.

Pretty cool.


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Michelle Bottorff
19 January 2009 @ 12:27 pm

…making an unscheduled visit to the hospital.

Lissa started coughing yesterday, and develloped a fever.  This morning it went up to 101, which is considered an emergency in Leukemia patients, and when I called her doctor I was told to bring her in immediately so she could be given antibiotics through her access port.

She will be recieving additional treatments tomorrow and the next day from a home health care nurse.

The hem/onc nurses told that this sort of thing was ‘pretty normal with these kids, especially in winter’.  It’s not considered particularly dangerous… as long as it is handled promtly.  Which it was.    :)


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Michelle Bottorff

… but not annoyed at me.  :)

I have  six children.  Five of them are readers.  All six watch movies.  Four of them like to listen to audiobooks at bedtime…  Since the post title mentions a librarian, you can probably guess where this is leading:  I am an enthusiastic patron of the public library system, and it’s a rare day that I don’t have twenty or more items checked out on my account.  

My house is not immaculate.  My children are noted for their intelligence and creativity, not their neatness and organization skills.  We frequently bring back items late, and every few months we lose one.  But amount this costs me in late fines and replacement fees is negligible compared to what it would cost to buy enough stuff to keep them all in reading/listening/watching material.  So I don’t really fret much when I get emails from the library saying I have overdue books, I just call their computer up, and hit the ‘renew all’ button, and then make a mental note to remind the kids to check their bedrooms and the area around the CD-player for library materials the next time we head off to the library.

But when four of the books I checked out to feed my own reading habit appear on the overdue list, and I cannot find them in my room, or on the shelf in the livingroom that is the designated drop point for library books, I start to wonder.  And when a month and a couple renewals later there are still several items missing, all of which had been checked out at roughly the same time, I start to think the problem isn’t us, for once.

So today when I went to the library with a couple of my kids, I stopped at the front desk, had them print out a list of the stuff still out on my card, and started circling the ones that I recognized as items that should have been brought back at least a month before, and made a request for a shelf-check.  Then with librarian-in-tow I headed out into the stacks.

“Well look at this!  This dvd…on the list.  It isn’t one of ours, it belongs to Beavercreek [one of the other branches in the county system].” “Oh, right, we had to request it.”  ”We’ll have to phone them up and ask them to do the check.  What about this one, Mary Poppins… is this a cd then?” “Um, yeah, it would be on cd.  I don’t like the kids to check out the other kinds.”  ”Well it isn’t here.”  ”Um, okay.  That was one of the ones I really wasn’t sure about.”  ”What’s next… the Scarlet Pimpernel?”  ”That’s general fiction.”  ”We’ll have to go back to the desk and look it up, this doesn’t say who it’s by.”  ”Oh, I know who it’s by.  Baroness Orczy.”  ”What’s the last name?”  ”Orczy?  Starts with an O.”  I led the way through the stacks to the right spot, and sure enough there were the two Scarlet Pimpernel books on our list.  ”Well, what do you know!” she exclaims, soundling slightly disgusted, and looks the next book on the list.  ”The Lieber Chronicles?”  ”In Science Fiction.”  ”Do you know who it’s by?”  ”Lieber.”  She starts checking the shelves and I spot a familiar looking book and pulling it off the shelf I hand it to her so she can check the barcode.  She frowns.  Once again the barcode matches.  ”Mother of Kings is by Anderson.” I tell her, leading the way to the start of the Science Fiction section.  Here I again locate the book before she does.  ”This one.”  ”That’s misshelved!”  ”Well, yeah, they had it under Kevin J. instead of of Poul.  Tsk!”

“I can’t believe this!” she mutters as we head back to the front desk.  ”When you brought them back did you put them in the slot?”  ”Sometimes I stack them on top of the desk, if someone is there, and they ask me to.”  ”How could they possibly have missed all these?  The scanner is right THERE!”  ”Well, yeah, but you only missed once, you know.  It was just a very big once.”  ”We’d better call Beavercreek and tell them to look for that dvd.”  While she is on the phone waiting for Beavercreek to check their shelves, my daughter Lissa wanders up with her selections, and I inform her that we have found a bunch of the things they said we hadn’t brought back, but not the Mary Poppins.  ”That must still be in one of you girls’ bedrooms.”  Lissa nods.  ”I remember, it’s a book on cd.”  The library looks up from her phone call.  ”It’s a BOOK on cd?”  ”Uh, yeah,” I answer.  ”I thought it was just a cd.  I didn’t know it was a book.”  ”Let me guess… we looked for it in the wrong place.”  ”Yes we did.”  She hands me her phone.  ”You hold this, I’m going to go check again.”  Off she goes.  Meanwhile the librarian at Beavercreek picks up the line and tells me they don’t have that dvd on their shelves.  I thank her and hang up, and a few minutes later my own librarian comes back. “You found it?”  ”Yes, and on a hunch I stopped by the dvd shelves…” she holds up the missing dvd, and says in outraged tones.  ”It says right on it that it belongs to Beavercreek!!”  

A double check of my account allowed me to spot yet another long overdue book, and so back we went to the stacks, and sure enough, that one was there too.  ”How long ago did you bring these back?” she asked as she removed late fees from my account.  ”It must have been over a month ago.”  ”Unbelievable.”  

Another librarian standing next to her at the desk smiled cheerfully and said, “You know what?  The next time someone comes in saying ‘I know I brought that back!’…

…we might just have to believe them.”

:)


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Michelle Bottorff
14 January 2009 @ 04:02 pm

I haven’t felt like posting much recently, because I’ve been feeling kind of down and everything has come out like whining, and I didn’t usually want it to come out like whining, so I wouldn’t post it.  ::rueful grin::

But now I have some good news, and something to natter happily about.

Firstly Boyd’s employer has gone back on their refusal to put anything in writing.  Or, in other words, they HAVE put it in writing that they are promising to make up the difference, if any, between typical paycheck previously and typical paycheck on the new system.  Hurrah!

(I could say something cynical about why the reversal, but it seems unworthy of me, so instead I’ll just be pleased and relieved.)

As for what to natter about, well, I’ve just RSVP’d for a housefilk, and I have started practicing some songs so that if I convince myself to perform, I will have something ready.  So far I’m working on four songs, two of mine and two covers.  Tom Digby’s “Two Hundred Million Million Miles”, and “The Paracite’s Anthem” by er… I forget.  (I’m bad at names and it’s somebody I don’t know — I just found the song in the Stave the Wails songbook and thought it was fun.)  And my own “More! (Tech Envy)” and the “Godzilla Polka”.  I picked these because well, I already have accompaniments for them that I can mostly play, so they seem a good starting point.  (And the last time I tried to play the Two Hundred Million Million Miles one in public I totally muffed it, so I sort of have something to prove to myself there.)  I’d like to add a few more things to the list.  If there is a song of mine any of you would like to hear again, be sure to mention it to me, so that I’ll know to add it to my practice sessions.

I’m concentrating hard on getting more mileage out of my Tina.  I’ve been playing it quite regularly these past two years… but doing duets with my daughter (on the violin) not doing song accompaniments.  My fingers are nicely in practice (more than my voice actually) and I figured it was high time I started working more on doing duets with myself.  :)


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Michelle Bottorff

I always have plans of what I want to do and goals I’m working towards, I don’t know why this time of year should be any different.

But a few of my plans involved the expectation of some major purchases happening this month.  I don’t think I can count on that anymore, in fact I should probably hold off even on the incidental purchases.  ::sigh::  Scent of Spring and Sails of Everwind are still on the docket, but I’m worried about what will happen with Black Flag without some hardware upgrades.  Ah well.  I already fell behind and caught back up once.  I can do it again.

I’m also a bit baffled as to my overall direction writing-wise.  The problem with working toward publication, is that so much is out of my control.  It gets rather frustrating to be feeling like you’re pouring effort into a production that is going nowhere and not being able to think of anything else you can do to get it moving.  I need to feel like I’m progressing, and just producing another book I’m proud of no longer gives me that emotional charge.  I’ve done that multiple times.  It doesn’t feel like forward motion anymore, it feels like treading water.  

Unfortunately everything I have thought of so far as an alternate goal to that elusive book contract and subsequent career involves spending a great deal of time doing things that aren’t writing.  Writing goals that, if pursued, will lead to you doing less writing just seem wrong somehow.  Arrrrg!  Maybe I should just concentrate on keeping Boyd supplied with reading material.  He’s read Eyes of Infistar about ten times already, he could really use a new book to start thumbing to death.


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Michelle Bottorff
02 January 2009 @ 11:38 am

Nothing in writing will be forthcoming.  Boyd’s employer thinks it’s ass is covered — the change was at the labor department’s insistance, and follows their guidelines.  

Ironicly, his best hope of demonstrating that he has, in fact, been screwed over, is probably to continue working for them long enough to collect a couple significantly reduced in size pay checks.


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Michelle Bottorff
01 January 2009 @ 10:18 am

Boyd got an email yesterday saying that now that he was a wage earner instead of salaried (due to new federal regulations imposed last year, that his company overlooked), his base pay would be 27% lower than what it had been previously. When he called they made noises on the order of ‘no, we aren’t REALLY going to cut your pay, the lower rate is just a placeholder while we get things sorted, and we’ll make up the difference in bonuses’.

Boyd’s response was: ‘Great, glad to hear it.  As soon as you get that to me in writing, I will go to work for you again.’  

Lissa’s been doing really well, though.  (Hopefully I haven’t screwed that up by letting her attend a New Year’s party last night.)


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