I'm a fantasy and young adult fiction writer. Here, you'll find book reviews, writing tips, personal opinions, and updates on my work. New posts every Friday.
Deep red Japanese maple leaves glowing in the evening sun. Japanese maple leaves turning fiery red and orange over our deck in the backyard. Witch hazel and maple leaves turning gold and red. A little blueish snail on some fallen leaves. Jasper and Lapis, two of our extremely mini serama chickens, havin’ a grand old time in the leaf litter. Bismuth, our other little serama lady. And last but not least, my little shoulder vulture, Peridot. She also likes the pretty Fall leaves and spends as much time as possible hopping around in them while muttering to herself. She pecked me in the eye about ten seconds after I took this picture, and she’s not sorry.
Sometimes you just have to go full morbid to cope with living through a worldwide natural disaster that just won’t end. Here’s my little friend, the Plague Chicken. She started out as a mostly normal sketch of one of my turken chicks, but rapidly turned into a disturbing monster. (More than the usual for those pocket velociraptors, anyway.)
She’s surrounded by herbs and flowers that were used during the black plague to ward off dangerous miasmas, and she’s absolutely done with everyone’s shit. Wear your masks, everyone!
A cross between a normal chicken and a plague doctor monster drawn in black ink. She’s surrounded by lavender, borage, poppies, roses, rosemary, and thyme.In case you were wondering how much I stretched reality, this is one of my bantam turkens. They’re quirky. (Pictured: a small dark chicken with no feathers on her face and neck, perched on a human hand. She kinda looks like a vulture, a quail, and a vintage flapper girl somehow made a baby.)
A wild rabbit has eaten some of my broccoli plants, which is very rude, but everything I’ve learned over the years tells me that rudeness is standard for rabbits. In spite of this setback, I’m still focusing a lot on the garden, and I’ve managed to keep up more exercise this week, which is probably helping with my overall mood. I’ve also started reading another Alma Katsu book, since I really enjoyed The Hunger. Besides, who doesn’t need a little additional horror in their life right now? The Deep seems pretty good so far.
Anyway, stay at home, take care of each other from a distance, and please enjoy these weird sketches.
This is the look I get from my bunny whenever I walk into the room after hearing a random crash. He definitely didn’t do anything.
Earthworm, moth, springtail, common garden snail, and woodlouse (isopod) sketches. These are all critters I’ve found around my yard over the past few months.
I’m not doing super awesome with this whole pandemic thing, honestly. I think we should cancel it.
I’m super scatterbrained and just keep forgetting what day it is and what I need to be working on, to the point that my blog post didn’t get written on Thursday or Friday, and then I kinda felt like it didn’t matter in comparison to everything else, but it does matter to me, so I’m writing it now.
I think I’m going to try to do a sketch a day for a while, because that was pretty fun in October, and it seems like a good way to get my mind off the wildly stressful stuff that’s going on right now. Today, I drew a Chinese mantis that I met quite a few years ago. She had wandered into my garden and was quite charming and friendly. This introduced species is very common in the US, and is even sold in garden stores for pest control.
My birthday is coming up at the end of the month, so that’s exciting. I’ll be thirty one! I suspect it’ll feel very much like being thirty.
I finally got a treadmill last week, and I’m actually surprised by how much I love it. I really like walking, and I already spend a truly excessive amount of time listening to audiobooks and watching youtube videos about weird stuff, so now those activities can be combined. This makes me feel much less useless and floppy.
I’ve been iron deficient for quite a while, and I found out that the supplementation I’ve been doing hasn’t actually been working all that well, so that’s fun. Having shitty blood really saps energy and focus, and the things required to make me absorb iron better are all also things that throw my potentially very painful stomach issues into overdrive. It’s a wee bit frustrating.
On the bright side, though, I did some vital houseplant maintenance and drew some tropical fish.
A moorish idol (top) and banggai cardinalfish (bottom) that I got to see at the Seattle aquarium recently, drawn in black pen and colored pencils. Sorry about the lighting on this pic. It’s always hard to find enough light to show the colors without washing out the black a bit.
One of my African violets was looking pretty sad, so I trimmed and repotted it.
I have no idea where I’m going with this one. I usually aim for detail and accuracy, but right now I’m really just playing with colors and shading. Maybe I should just mess around creatively more often. It’s pretty fun not to have any particular expectations going in. I’m not even sure if it’s finished yet.
A pen and ink drawing of a narcissus flowerThe same drawing, but filled in with colored pencils. Things got a little wild around the edges.
I had a mystery bird at my feeder, and it turned out to be a song sparrow. Identifying it online was a bit of a challenge, because the population of song sparrows up here tend to much darker than usual. They’re really striking little things.
I’m already waiting for spring, so my little sparrow got a pomegranate branch to sit on. We’ve had our snow now, and I’m ready for all the plants to wake up again.
A song sparrow sitting on a blooming pomegranate branch drawn in colored pencil
This winter in Seattle can’t seem to make up its mind. No snow quite yet, but plenty of drizzle. They’ve been predicting it for a few days, though, so maybe we’ll have gotten some noticeable flakes by the time this posts. That’d be fun.
With the colder weather rolling in, I’m super happy to have the third season of Anne with an E to watch, because it definitely picked up in the second season. Not that I didn’t like the first season, but I really love the diversity of characters they introduced as they went along. It feels like they’ve very much kept the spirit of the books and just broadened the scope of it.
And, in keeping with that spirit, here are some very romantical winter flowers that I discovered in the arboretum. Turns out they have a whole garden devoted to things that bloom in the colder months, and it is gorgeous. It smells amazing, too.
Daphne flowers. I thought they were a type of jasmine at first, because the scent was so sweet and strong, but they’re a whole different plant that I now really want for my own garden.
Daphne flowers
Hellebore
Pink camellias, I’m pretty sure
More pink camellias
Yellow witch hazel flowers. They smelled divine.
Yellow witch hazel with lots of frilly lichen
More yellow witch hazel and a path through the bushes
Orange witch hazel flowers
Some sort of interesting bulbous flower bud on bare branches. Possibly an edgeworthia, but I’m not sure.
A still pond full of algae and floating plants
A pair of mallard ducks in a different pond
Some new buds forming on a mossy branch in front of ferns
My office window looks right out on the tree that holds our bird feeder, so when I’m working I also get to watch the little house finches and juncos squabble and flit around. They’re all really cute, but these jays are probably my favorite birds that visit the yard. They’re all attitude and their little crests are just excellent. Plus, they sound like angry robots when they yell, which is very endearing.
A pen and ink drawing of a steller’s jay sitting on a thin pine branch
Jasmine Collins 