A troublesome customer (how it should have gone).

    I glanced up at the clock on the monitor. It was fifteen minutes into my break, and I still had filing to do behind the register before I could take off. My replacement had arrived on time, but the constant stream of customers had kept me pinned behind the desk. Now the line had dwindled to three people, two of them apparently a couple. I finished helping the customer in front of me, then turned to the other cashier.
    "My break started 15 minutes ago, so I'm going to take off now. Do you think you can handle this on your own?" She smiled and nodded at me. "Awesome. Where was that binder? I have a donation sticker."
    "Wait a minute," Interjected the next customer in line, an elderly woman standing with her husband, two slim volumes balanced upon her palms. "I have to wait now because she wants to take a break?" She turned to her husband, the look on her face self-righteous affront.
    "I'm sorry, but I've been here a long time..." I began.
    "She's been here a long time! As if I haven't!"  The customer in front of her seemed to be nearly finished with her business, but I called for backup anyway.
    "Look, I've called backup. Someone else should be here shortly. But I really can't help you, I need to go. And I think you need to calm down and be a little more considerate of others." I took down the donation binder that my coworker had indicated, and began recording the sale.
    "I'm the customer!" She was close to yelling now, and I was having difficulty maintaining a smile-- I'm sure it looked strained.
    "Yes? And?"
    "Your customer service is awful! I can't believe you treat people this way!" She turned back to her husband, who had taken to throwing sarcastic jibes at me between her outbursts. "Can you believe this? She must really not like this job!"
    The implied threat is what did it for me. I returned the binder to the shelf, and approached the register. My coworker was trying to mollify the irrate woman, telling her that I had called for backup.
    "Well, she didn't tell me that!" Was the customer's huffed response.
    "I see that I've been wrong," I said calmly. "I didn't realize how much more important your schedule was than mine. It's true that I'm rather behind on taking my medication, but since your time is so valuable I can put that off a little longer. Surely nothing bad will happen."
    "Well, finally!" The customer trounced over to the counter, angrily dumping her books in front of the scanner. I keyed my employee code into the register, then leaned across the counter to for her purchase. As soon as she was in range, I twitched the specialized muscle in the corner of my eye, causing the vessel there to burst.
    Jets of blood shot from my eyes, hitting the customer squarely in the face. She began screaming and stumbling backwards, flailing into other customers, who were backing away themselves. With a quick thumb's-up to my grinning coworker, I clutched my hands to my still-bleeding eyes and staggered out from behind the register. Headed up the escalator and towards the breakroom, I made sure to mutter "Oh gods, oh gods..." whenever a customer approached, for effect.
    Only three people stopped me to request directions, making it the most effective aversionary tactic I have yet devised.

Employment

So I have a job again. A seasonal position as a bookseller for Borders, which is obviously not ideal, but certainly better than nothing. After Office Depot, I had forsworn ever working retail again... though tough times obviously call for doing things you'd rather not. 
But at least it's a book store, and so far everyone I've met there has been really nice (and in some cases, quite pleasingly zany :) ). Being out of Reston and dealing in products rather than services, I think this is going to end up being 50x less stressful than OD was, as well. Despite this being the holiday season. Let's hope time proves me right.
The other advantage of this job is that it dovetails really nicely with my biannual graphic design contract, which happens every early spring and late summer. If they like me well enough at Borders, perhaps I can keep swinging back and forth between the two jobs (working summer and holiday seasonal) until something more permanent comes along. Sure, Borders only pays about 1/3 of what ASET does... but it's more than 0, and admittedly the majority of my entertainment spending goes towards books anyhow. Getting a consistent 33% off of those purchases will be amazing.

In the meantime, I keep drawing and writing. Submitting to magazines and contests. Further successes will, of course, be reported here. :)

Happy Hallowe'en, GUD-monster style!

"Be careful your clockwork doesn't run down." monster:  You're the robot from Darby Larson's Electroencephalography in Issue 1. You were built by Dean's family to help around the house, but it seems you don't take orders too well. You do take other things, though. Like hearts. What GUD Monster are you?  Find out at GUD Magazine!

I have spent the past week working on the illustrations for this quiz.  I ended up pouring in more time than I had intended, but the cause (promoting GUD Magazine) is good, and I really enjoyed doing it!  Sometimes, it's incredibly nice having inspiration placed in front of you. :)
I encourage you to take the quiz. It's quick, amusing, and links you to both my art, and some excellent writing.  The monsters are also quite strange and creepy (not your usual Hallowe'en fare, these!)

There are also ten different possible outcomes, so you might want to take it more than once. ;)

Where the writing goes.

For anyone who has been following my blog for a long, long time, there might be some recollection of my having once posted snippets of short fiction on here as well.  I stopped doing that a while ago, frightened by the prospect of having my work stolen (something that is easier to do, and more difficult to prove with words than it is with imargery).  But I have no ceased writing!  Since finishing my six thesis books, I have continued to write short ficiton for myself.
Emboldened by my recent visibility on GUD Magazine's blog, I am beginning to submit some of them to contests and literary magazines. 

First up is Nanoism's December five-part twitter serial contest.  I'm posting about it here for three reasons!
a.) So that you know about this magazine, because it's awesome and because there is a chance I might be in it! 
b.) Because, as an incentive, they allow you to submit two different stories if you mention the contest! 
And
c.) This is a nifty contest, and a really cool little magazine, and you should submit!  Yes you!  Whoever you are, send them something and make it good!  They make it very simple to do so.
The deadline is October 31st, and winners will be published in December.

Second, I am also submitting to Fantasy Magazine's Halloween flash fiction contest.  Flash fiction is good for me.  It forces me to be succint, to have an entire story arc in mind when I begin, and to actually finish the thing.  1,000 words is also a pretty good goal for a single day of writing. 
This contest is particularly good because the premise requires that a graphic be paired with the story, as the inspiration, and I can make my own.  Thus, it gives me a possible venue for showing my art as well: two-for-one!
The deadline is October 16th, so get to work!

Blogging!

So I just wrote a guest post for GUD Magazine's blog!  It's on the topic of banned books, and is a belated post in recognition of the ALA's 'Banned books week' several weeks ago.  Check it out!
And while you're there, be sure to take a look around the site.  GUD's an excellent literary magazine, and the freebies there alone are enough to be worth your while.  Plus, they've recently gotten a whole slew of honorable mentions from 'The Year's best horror'.  I have three of their issues, and I've been enormously impressed by everything I've seen an read of them.  They have some great editors, and a lot of diversity in what they publish.  Definitely worth keeping an eye on. 

My brain is getting in the way of thinking.

I have difficulty working with music or sound around me.  Or rather, I have difficulty conceptualizing... once a sketch is down and I'm onto the grunt work of rendering, I can listen to anything.  This is something I am just realizing.

Despite five years of art college, it took until now for me to recognize this pattern in myself.  I honestly thought that the reason I tended to do most of my work in silence was because I was too lazy to turn on music, or an audio book until I was several hours deep into a project.  I also though that the reason that I didn't like spending time in the noisy Print studio at school was because I am antisocial. 

It took until I was living with Evan full-time, working in the same studio space as him for the problem to truly surface.  He loves music, and works best with his MP3 collection, a podcast, or an internet radio station playing in the background.  He does a lot of insanely tedious work for a graphic design firm, so he seriously needs it.

I know why this is, too.  I have Asperger's Syndrome (as I've probably mentioned before) and tend to automatically visualize everything.  If there is a music track playing, my mind is working to visually map that song, with colour, imagery, and geometric shapes.  If someone's speaking, my mind is creating a tableau based on whatever they're talking about, overlaid with a running transcript written in a pleasing serif font.  This ties in with the synesthesia so common in us Aspies, apparrently.  Also, sometimes I just hallucinate stuff, for no other good reason!  My brain does not like to think that I am lonely.

The net effect of this sort of all of this?  I become almost blind when there's too much sound going on around me.  I'm seeing what I'm hearing, and I'm finding it almost impossible to focus on whatever is in front of me.  So even if I'm doing fine, inking and listening to music, someone talking to me over that can make my entire workspace go invisible. 
I love working in coffee shops, because they remove me from the constant temptation of internet time-wastage, while also getting me out of the house.  This is where I write best.  Unless it is too loud there. This is highly frustrating.

The best solution I can think of is to find myself a quiet, private place to get started on my work in.  Where that is, I have no clue, as I live in a townhouse with no backyard to speak of.  Anyone else out there with similar issues, and perhaps suggestions?

SOZD*!

Today is 'Support Our 'Zines Day'!  Something I was informed of upon waking this morning, by an incredibly exuberant Eimhin.  He, not the procrastinator that I am, has already posted a wonderful and comprehensive list of 'zines-of-amazingness on his own blog, which I recommend that you peruse.  But there really is no possible way to over emphasize the importance of literary magazines, both in purveying excellent literature (and visual art, comics, and poetry...) and in promoting artists, burgeoning and established alike.  So take a spin about these bizarre and marvelous publications, and if you can afford it, show them some love.

GUD Magazine
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet
Crossed Genres
McSweeney's 
Weird Tales
Leading Edge
Brain Harvest
Electric Velocipede
Sybil's Garage
Tin House
Flash Fiction Online
The Cafe Irreal
Fantasy Magazine
Strange Horizons
ClarkesWorld
Shimmer
Steampunk Magazine

If there are any others I have missed, or simply have not heard of, please tell me about them in the comments!  There are few things as satisfying as discovering a good new source of fiction.

I listen to not nearly so many Podcasts as Evan, but I am a generally huge fan of the readings over at Telltale Weekly.  Alex Wilson's voice and inflection are perfect for these readings, and his content selection is excellent.  It was through Telltale that I first found out about Kelly Link, actually (you must listen to 'The Girl Detective' as read on the site) which has, of course, led to all sorts of  fascinating developments in my life.

*SOZD still sounds to me like a state of drunkenness.
Somewhere between dameschwipschen and completely toasted.  Probably not the ideal state for reading, but to each one's own.  Go for it.

Random pet peeve

This may strike you as strange, but one of my biggest language-related pet peeves is the misuse of the word 'cannibalism'.

Cannibalism is the devouring of the flesh of one creature by another member of its same species.

Anthropophagy is the devouring of human flesh, by any creature. 

So a chicken that eats another chicken is a cannibal; but a chicken that eats a human is anthropophagus.

There, important English-language lesson of the day.  Use this knowledge well.

All that talk of not having any art done...

...and I forgot that I hadn't posted this sketch here.  Done in my Canson sketchbook, one fine afternoon whilst sitting about at the Hardbean Cafe downtown. 

A larger version, as always, can be seen on my DeviantArt page.

Graphite.  5 1/2" x 8"

On the misappropriation of 'masculine' and 'feminine'.

Still struggling with my artwork and creative motivation.  In the meantime, I've decided to write about something that has bothered me since I was just a wee childling.  That is...gender, and how it's characterised!

As a child, I was what is commonly referred to as a "tomboy".  I liked dinosaurs and dragons, hiking and getting muddy, running about and playing outside.  I hated dresses, and as of 3rd grade began refusing to wear them entirely.  I would not wear pink, make-up and purses held no fascination for me. 
For a long time, people thought this meant that I did not want to be a girl.  Hell, even I was convinced of that for a while.  But what has come more and more apparent to me over time is that being a girl is never what bothered me.  It was (and is) the false set of roles and restrictions that are handed to every child upon determination of their biological sex at birth.  Restrictions that are, inarguably, a lot more restrictive to the development of individuality in girls than they are to boys.