Snowstorm, stay inside and draw

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 20:31:53 GMT

Typhoon is very angry about the snow. She's not even an outdoor cat, and would be perfectly capable of finding a comfortable spot on the catio. But she's displeased and concerned with the conditions of this establishment. She'd like to lodge a complaint.

I'd say it was pretty, but it's all whited out now. Not a lot of contrast anymore. It's as pretty as the cover of The White Album.

(Which was just white, with "The Beatles" embossed on it, also in white.)

(There was a version that had the text in black, I guess? Or was that just the cassette/CD cover? I had the LP and it was white-on-white.)

Yesterday I did a marathon session of daily comic, wishing the whole time that I could have some high-quality alone time. Now I'm trying to have a marathon session of touching up the graphic novel, but my stamina for holding a stylus and tablet and staring at scribbles on a screen is much reduced.

At least the kitchen is cleaner than it used to be.

January is always a hard month. Ideally, I could go into semi-hibernation and not speak to anyone except for saying goodnight to my spouse and son every night, and come out in mid-February with a renewed sense of my place in this world.

But have you listened to the news lately?! That's not a world I have a sense of place in.

Not that it's THAT different from the previous iterations of the world. Humans were doing a lot of gawdawful things then too; we just had to dig a little harder to hear about it. Americans could still benefit from digging into the news, because while we have a full set of international news sources available to us, we still rarely look at it. I know a few American friends who read The Guardian. Somebody mentioned Al Jazeera a while ago; I haven't followed them in a couple of years, because you have to brace yourself for a high global death count (since they cover world conflicts that are harder to find in other English-language news outlets) and it's been a long time since I was able to do that.

Mostly I read French-language news now, which is not complete, but they cover the Middle East and Africa pretty well, and they're more likely to speak directly about the ugly bits of US and UK politics. Not always. You still have to click around different sources. But I can read in French. My vocabulary has improved in a direction I wouldn't have otherwise chosen: tuer, incendie, lacrymogène. To kill, fire, teargas.

I made a snow horse in the front lawn a couple of snowfalls ago, and I go out and patch it up when the temperatures allow for a little melting and the blocky, chunky snow becomes more malleable, but it's pretty thoroughly a wreck at this point. I was looking forward to an additional chance with this snow to build upon it, add a whole new layer and make it smooth and horse-shaped again, but it looks like it'll be just too cold for just too long.

In Alien Romance world, I'm working on a scene where the pub band is performing, and it has some continuity problems, so I'm trying to decide how much work I should put into changing the art entirely. There's this one guy in my comics critique group who is a bass player in a similar band in real life, and while he's always happy to identify and point out issues in my portrayal, it makes me want to put a little more effort in so he doesn't give me too long a list of corrections.

I had another friend who was a blues singer and she used to do the same thing for me, but she passed away last year. Every time I think about her, grief hits me all over again, and I think about her a lot.

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Progress on the book, before and after

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 18:03:46 GMT

Page 100, in which Maurice travels to Lyon.

Cleaning up the messy art today. There's no real stopping point; I can only tell myself that it matches the other art well enough and I should move on.

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gs_silva

Snowstorm, stay inside and draw

Progress on the book, before and after