Cottontail

There were two constants in my young life: reading and writing.

I have no idea if I learned to read early or easily, but once I had, there was no stopping me. I have memories of winning an award in elementary school for reading the most books. My mother used to go the library and bring me a stack of books. I would polish them off in a week and she would go back for more.

Apparently somewhere along the line I taught myself to speed read. Always impatience to find out what happened at the end of the story, I tore through books at a speed that continued to impress teachers and friends. Once in second grade we were reading a story in class. It was about ballerina shoes and the class had to all read it silently to themselves. I read the story, and when I was done I looked around to see how everyone else was faring. My teacher came over and told me I needed to read the story. When I told her I had, she told me to read it again, because she had only just finished reading it herself, and so there was no way I had read it that fast.

My love of writing came in fourth grade.

The assignment for the class was an illustrated storybook about a cute, furry creature who has a problem, in the form of a bad guy, and then solves it. My protagonist (not that I knew that word back then) was dutiful Cottontail, a female rabbit who was out picking clover for dinner when she ran into the antagonist, a bear. There was an ensuing chase and refuge in an underground hidey place, far from home.

The next day Cottontail decided that if she was going to get home, she had to deal with the bear. A plan hatched, she let the bear chase her to the edge of a cliff, where she jumped out of the way of his charge and he fell off the cliff and into the lake below where he drowned. Unsure as I was at the age of six on the spelling of ‘drowned’, I went to my teacher, Mrs. Ligon to ask.

She read over my story and praised me for my creative ending, in not just having Cottontail and a bear randomly become friends as many of my classmates were doing with their stories. That little bit of praise stuck with me, and I have been writing ever since.

Frozen

So on Tuesday I walked into the back room of Fun N Games, now newly moved to University Mall, where we hold our weekly D&D session. Gloves immediately stood up, pointed at me, and said ‘You have to go see Frozen.’ Now if you know Gloves, you will know that this is very odd behavior for him, as he is the type of guy who is perfectly happy in his own opinions, but for the most part does not try to impart them on other people. Therefore, my husband and I knew that this sort of declaration warranted attention.

We proceeded to talk about how the commercials and advertising for the movie were horrible, or at least did not make me excited about going to see the movie, which is the point of advertising. At that moment of the conversation with Gloves, I knew two things: One: Frozen was based on ‘The Snow Queen’ fairy tale, and they had both an annoying snowman mascot AND another hoofed animal acting like a dog (A la Tangled) which is a pet peeve of mine, as I actually work with horses.

Then Blake brought up the fact that he had read a review that said the reviewer basically could not say anything about the movie, because it was all a spoiler. I thought about that for a moment. It’s a rather tall order. It also would explain why there was nothing other than joke scenes in the commercials, in addition to a line from the main!? character saying ‘That’s not a blizzard, that’s my sister’, which did not actually occur in the movie. Spoiler!?

After seeing the movie, I can understand why they decided that pretty much, the movie is a spoiler for the movie. I will now proceed to explain why I think the marketing was done the way it was, which is in fact spoiler. If you haven’t seen the movie, go patronize it with money. If you have, you have no worry of spoilers.

Reasons the commercials were horrible:

1) They did not want to show Anna in princess garb, that cut out a large portion of scenes at the beginning.
2) They wanted you to think Elsa was the villain and there are no real villainy scenes with Elsa, because she’s not a villain.
3) They couldn’t show the actual villain, because unlike most Disney movies, who the villain was is actually a surprise. And most of the rest of the time he’s on camera, he’s singing or with Anna in princess garb.

However, I was really happy with the way I feel they played with tropes in this movie. Elsa became a queen and then went rogue (not villain, but still rogue). The trope being Disney Queens are evil.

Also, I have a thing for fairy tail characters who know (to some extent) that they exist in a fairy tale world. (My top two favorite books ever are examples of this, ‘Howl’s Moving Castle’ by Diana Wynne Jones and The Fairy Godmother by Mercades Lackey) When they say ‘a supreme act of love’ and everyone goes right to ‘true love’s kiss’. (It’s a theme in ABC (owned by Disney)’s Once Upon A Time, which is also wonderful, go see it.)

Then there is Anna, who is an action girl, ready to go out there and deal with life on her terms, then becomes a damsel in distress. Sadface. They rush her back to the castle only to find out her ‘true love’ Hans is the villain at which point we assume she needs Khristoff to save her … only then she sacrifices herself for Elsa, which causes her to save herself! A wonderful break from normal fairy taleing, even if it makes Khristoff a rather handsome ancillary character.

So both girls had wonderful character development, the snowman ended up being rather perfect, and now the Internets have someone to pair Jack Frost with. Plus, the ice palace was rather spectacular.

NaNoWriMo 2013

http://nanowrimo.org/participants/pyropawz

So another successful NaNoWriMo. Much easier this year since my goal was not actually to complete NaNoWriMo, but to finish my entire novel, Shifting Winds, by the end of the year. I have my wordcount 50,921 from just this month. The novel right now clocks in at 116,414, though it’s still not finished. I am having some issues with the very ending section and how things come together, so working that out will be my December.

Thor: The Dark World

Last week when Thor: The Dark World came out, my husband and I took our date night out to see it. He, because it was a super hero movie, me because of Loki. Don’t judge me. The movie’s premise worked really good. There always needs to be some sort of explanation of why, when a world rending evil is lurking in a world where the Avengers exist, that the Avengers all (or part of at least) don’t just swoop in to save the day. This movie handled that by having the only proof of it happening unknown until things were really rocking, oh and having most of it take place in other worlds where mere humans can’t go.

Did I mention spoilers? I’m mentioning spoilers now. Open movie, cleaning up stuff from the last movie until new threat from unknown and ‘thought long gone’ source. Way to get Thor off his lazy, saving the nine worlds butt, and back to his ‘girlfriend. I guess the movie is technically named after him, so I accept that he must be part of the movie. But Loki! In Jail! With Books! >.> I am also super happy that they finally really showed what Frigg(a) could do.

Truthfully at the end of the movie I simply sat back and thought to myself ‘This movie gave me everything it was that I wanted, without even really knowing that I wanted it.’

Updating the site

So almost a year ago, I spent a large part of the beginning of my vacation in Williamsburg, working on creating a gallery page of old pictures I had of characters in php. It worked wonderfully, but apparently between working on it, and loading it up again a week later, the version of MySql changed and the page no longer worked. I had no idea why at the time. Now I have it up again, and so there are now links to them under The Gallery.

More gryffin progress

Dove into painting this bad boy. I fixed the top of the left wing from the previous picture. (See if you can find the error.) I finished painting the back end of the gryffin, which I was a little worried about, but it came out nice. Then I added the chestpiece and painted it a little. I need to finish that up, and prime the man who sits on the gryffin (Karl Franz turned into a high elf. 😀 ) and then it’ll be pretty much done.

Top of the Gryffin

Been a long while since I worked on this mini, mostly because I’ve been in Florida. I finished the detail on the bottom of the wings, but the pictures look pretty crappy. It’s hard to get a picture that shows off the detail without it being washed out.

But as for the top, the pictures at the beginning of today, and at the end of today.

High Elf Army

Last in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.

I like the high elves in Warhammer. They’re pretty and I like the minis, so I started painting some minis of them. Not for playing, but just for painting.

This guy took a long time to finish. There was a lot of detail. I’ve gotten a good number of compliments on him.

Just one guy in the little group of sword guys. He was the captain, so I finished him first. I am probably going to change the color of his jewel at some point, but I still like him.

I bought the dragon knight set cause they just looked so cool. It took *forever* to get these guys done. I only have the captain up here because I don’t have any good pictures of the rest of them yet.

Minis for others

Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.

My first paid commission. I painted this mini for the girlfriend of a player in the tower campaign. The pictures are pretty bad, but I don’t have the mini anymore to take better pictures.

This mini is super plain and is for one of my husband’s One Piece characters. The black pieces of Tam’s outfit actually turn a rainbow of colors based on which of his 9 personalities is active at the time. For as boring as it is, I really like it.

Near

Next in a series of posts to show off minis I have painted in the past two years.

Near was my main character for the Lich King and Cataclysm expansions in World of Warcraft. My husband was going to run an ‘evil’ campaign for which I bought this mini and planned out the character. he has since canceled that campaign since a lot of campaigns end up as ‘evil’ naturally. I still love this mini. I modeled on the horns, the bangs, and the tail.