Card Commissions

Hey all,

I am opening up commissions! *confetti*

So far, I'm doing greeting cards. The cost varies from $5-$10 depending on the artwork and whether the inside of the card and the envelope are decorated. I'm working on setting up a PayPal and a webpage for commissions, so I'll post more when I have more details!

Some examples:



Superhero themed get well card featuring the recipient and family



Anniversary card featuring recipient



Birthday card for a librarian



Birthday card for an old movie enthusiast

Also! I started using my tablet again, so if I get good enough at that hopefully I can open up digital commissions. Yay!!

Thanks, lovelies! See you soon!

Renting Love

I was listening to the musical Rent today, and I started thinking about a lyric from "I'll Cover You":

I think they meant it
When they said you can't buy love,
But I know you can rent it,
A new lease, you are my love...

At least, that's what I think it said. And for some reason it struck me as really profound, because I think Jonathan Larson (the writer) got it right. Because you can't just buy love and have it forever. I know Larson probably meant you "can't buy love" in a monetary sense, which is also true, but it works on another level too, because you can't do one nice thing for someone and expect them to give you love forever. That's not how it works. A relationship, especially a romantic one, is like a contract where both (or however many there are) parties set down terms, and as long as they stick to those terms both benefit.

It's like--Well, when a person rents a house, there's an agreement, right? The tenant can't damage the house or, often, have loud parties, and sometimes the landlord is responsible for keeping up the yard or the fence or whatever. If either party violates the agreement, either they renegotiate or the tenant has to leave. If the tenant can't pay the rent, or damages the house or causes too much trouble, they can't live in the house any more. (Considering the plot of Rent, that part of the analogy is a bit ironic, but go with me here.)

Isn't that like a relationship? In your typical romantic relationship, two people* start out by discussing what they want to be to each other, and how they can be that. Then they try to fulfill the terms of what they've (hopefully) talked about, and as long as they can meet each others' wants and needs, the relationship will continue. But if one person violates the terms--for example, cheats on their partner--either the terms have to be renegotiated, or the relationship will end.

It's not a perfect analogy, considering that there can be an imbalance of power between landlord and tenant--I know landlords can evict tenants without a real reason, or on short notice, especially if the tenant is too impoverished to fight back. But some relationships are like that too. Sometimes one person will start violating the terms of the contract, and will lie about it or just manipulate their partner into accepting their behavior. I think there's an unspoken rule in any relationship that you don't hurt the other person, emotionally or physically**. And if that rule gets broken without serious, genuine reparations, or it gets broken more than once, well...that relationship just shouldn't continue.

Just thought I'd share that with you guys. I might expand on it later. Thanks for reading.



*Or more, but in most cases two, I think.

**Unless you're in a safe environment with a safeword. Or you're boxing partners, I guess, but that probably wouldn't be romantic. (Hm, I bet there's a story in there...)

Poem

When I was a child, my father
(a child of the fifties, of
TV serials and canned dinners, a child of
a mother with no maternal instincts,
who nevertheless did pretty well),

told me of the nuclear bomb drills
how he and his classmates crouched
under useless desks
and were told, "This will protect you!"
though they never believed it
but thought
(knew)
that death would fall from the sky

I will tell my children, someday,
of how I,
(a child of the twenty-tens, a digital native
news blaring in bright colors from every screen)

how I and my classmates
crouched under desks in the
lockdown drills
preparing for armed intruders
for AK-47s and bullet-marked walls
how we were taught to huddle
in corners, to stay away from windows,
to be
silent
and pray the gunman would pass by

(of the day a medical center
eight miles from my college campus was
massacred,
how we were warned to stay inside
and heard helicopters through the dormitory walls)

I wonder if my children
will have drills
warning of enemies in their schools
(their home)
or if someday the constant fear
the pictures of bomb-blasts and kids with body armor
and pockmarked walls
the so-called shelter of flimsy desks
will abate.

Somehow
I doubt it will. 

I'm impressed by how many pageviews this blog gets, considering that I've barely updated in the last couple months. Thanks for sticking with me, guys. I'm not going to promise to update again soon, because we all know it would probably be a lie, but I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm alive and well and I do want to pick up blogging again soon. I've just been a bit lethargic lately.

It's weird coming home after you've been in college for a while. I'm only an hour away, so I can come home whenever I want to, and I went last Thursday for an event and then went back to college on Sunday and came home again today. One of the first things I realized when I got here on Thursday was that my parents had stopped buying the foods only I ever ate. I hadn't realized I was the only one eating bread and peanut butter and milk. It was very odd and now I need to find new things to snack on.

Holy cow, I just realized it's two days past this blog's third anniversary. Wow! *throws confetti*

Happy Thanksgiving!

Why You Should Read Coffee Cake (and Beignets)

Folks, let me tell you about one of my favorite books, Coffee Cake. It's written by the fabulous Michaela Grey and it's pretty damn great.

Coffee Cake is a nifty little romance that started out as a Supernatural fan fiction featuring Sam and Gabriel. Even as a fanfic, it was really, really good. I never got to read it on AO3, but I did read the sequel there before it got taken down for publication.

I'm just going to put the back cover description here:

"Bran Kendrick never expected to fall in love. He’s asexual, after all. What chance does he have of finding someone who’ll see past that? So when Malachi Warren catches his eye, Bran tells himself his crush will pass. Malachi disagrees. He has been attracted to Bran for some time, something he is delighted to find Bran reciprocating. They begin to date and feel their way through an intimate relationship that meets both their needs.

Suddenly Bran finds himself juggling a new boyfriend, a demanding job, and a college degree he’s not sure he wants, but he couldn’t be happier―until a series of seemingly random accidents befall Malachi. When they escalate, Bran realizes someone is trying to take away the best thing that ever happened to him, and he must scramble to keep Malachi safe while they search for the would-be killer."

I think my favorite thing about this book would be the characters. Bran is longsuffering, warm, sweet, and very real. I've started to identify with him more since I began college, actually. And Malachi is wonderful. He's a prankster with some serious self-esteem issues and I love him so damn much.

Coffee Cake does have some flaws. At times it verges on melodramatic, especially in a few particular scenes with Malachi. Personally, I feel that Bran and Malachi fall for each other unrealistically quickly, but I do tend to favor drawn-out romances myself, so there's that. (Besides, it's not like I have enough experience to know what qualifies as realistic.)

Even though Bran is asexual, there are some intense--and very well-written--sex scenes. They're easy to skip if you're not into that, but if you are, well, have fun.

To be honest, though, I actually like the sequel to Coffee Cake better than Coffee Cake itself. It switches to Malachi's point of view and chronicles Bran and Malachi dealing with the events of Coffee Cake and moving to a new location, which offers some interesting narrative opportunities. It deals well with subjects such as trauma, grief and recovery, and it introduces a couple of new characters whom I absolutely adore. Maybe it was because I read Beignets first (there was a time when Beignets was available on AO3 while Coffee Cake was about to be published, which happened to be when I found the author), but the conflict felt more real to me. So if Coffee Cake doesn't quite hit the spot for you, you should definitely still read Beignets, because it's awesome.

I don't really have a particular reason for doing this review, except that I happened to be thinking about it right now. Coffee Cake and Beignets are published by Dreamspinner Press in ebook and print format. I think you can get them on Amazon too.

See you soon.

Sometimes it's the little things that make you feel good. For instance, the beautiful lady behind the register where I just got dinner who kept calling me "sweetheart" and gave me extra fries when the latch on my sustainable box turned out to be broken, and the lovely woman at the salad bar who remembered me from this afternoon and asked if I'd found the token for the sustainable box exchange thing (I did; it was in my bag. Typical me.). I feel very loved. :)