Cartoonist, Artist, Geek, Evil Crafter, Girl Scout Troop Leader and Writer. Also, a zombie. I haven't slept in I don't know how long.

Episode 23 – When Princess Grows Up…

People always say that Princess is just like me, only shorter. That is not true at all. For starters, Princess wears a lot of pink. Pink shirts, pink pants, pink socks, etc. And she wears dresses. Lots and lots of frilly dresses. And she loves the jewelry and the bling and all the glitter she can get her hands on. There’s a reason why we call this girly-girl Princess.

Me, I don’t do the pink thing. I look good in black. And brown. And I’m killer in red. As for the type of clothes I wear, I’m a basic t-shirt and jeans kinda gal. Dresses? Don’t own any. Well, okay, I have one or two, but they only get pulled out once every couple of years when someone gets married or dies, and those dresses are definitely not PINK. I don’t like pink and I look horrible in it. In fact, I think I’m allergic to the color. Seriously.

Anyway, I wanted to apologize for being a bit late with this week’s ep. My husband, St. Michael the Magnificent, spent all last week re-painting the downstairs and that completely disrupted my work schedule. But those rooms need painting, badly. We’ve been in the same place for the last 14 years, and things were starting to look shabby. Since I knew it would be another 14 years before we would re-paint, I made sure to pick out a color I would be happy with. I spent hours comparing paint chips, studying them in my foyer and kitchen until I finally found just the right shade. It’s a very pale sort of shell pink. Wait, no. I did not say pink. It’s really almost a warm white. You can’t tell it’s pink at all. Unless you look at the trim color which is mint green, and then you know it’s pink…

Well crud.

Christmas Recipe – Mom’s Russian Tea Mix

I’m having a crap-tastic day so far. Stayed up waaaaay to late to finish a story that didn’t quite work like it should have. Then I tried to sleep late this morning only to have my oldest invade the bed, demanding I get her going for church. I am not religious. The closest I come is Zen Buddhism, which I practiced regularly for three years. But there’s no longer a zendo in my area, so I feel no need to get out of bed to prep my daughter for church while her Catholic father snoozes away. That doesn’t stop her from trying to get me to do it however.

Anyway, after everyone who was going to church headed out the door, I went to make myself some coffee, only to drop the coffee pot and watch it shatter into a million-billion little pieces. So no coffee this morning. To salvage the day from this tragedy, I have turned to one of my other favorite drinks, and to make it a good, positive thing, I am sharing that drink with you. Here it is, Mom’s Russian Tea:

19oz container of Tang or orange drink mix

19oz container of lemonade mix

1 cup ice tea mix, unsweetened (with or without lemon, up to you)

1 tbsp cinnamon

1tbsp ground cloves

Put all the ingredients together in a Tupperware container and make sure the lid is sealed VERY tight. Then start shaking it to mix everything up. If the lid isn’t tight, you will have a drink mix disaster of epic proportions. Once you have everything good and mixed up, put 3-4 teaspoons of the mix into 1 cup of hot water and enjoy. Trust me, this will taste like Christmas.

Deep Fried – A Holiday Self-Portrait

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Yep, this is me. All frazzled and fried, just in time for the holidays.  And from what I hear, I ain’t the only one feeling like this.

It’s December 5th, and I have managed to buy a grand total of one, yes one, Christmas present.  That’s it!  Even though I put a little reminder in my calendar to start shopping waaaay back in October.  See, that’s how organized I am!

So the plan now is to drug— er, occupy the Pixie with some TV and then spend the morning knocking out a few blog posts.  After that, I’ll hit the online shops and do the Santa Mommy thing.  The Cynical Woman cartoon gets the rest of the day.  Tomorrow and Sunday are dedicated to my erotica podcast — I’ve got a story to finish for next month, plus recording to do for the next week’s episode.  Oh, and I did I mention I’ve invited the Princess’ little playmates over for an evening of pizza and mini-chick flicks?

No wonder I look like this!

Deep Fried – A Holiday Self-Portrait

CWtoon_xmas_portrait02

Yep, this is me. All frazzled and fried, just in time for the holidays.  And from what I hear, I ain’t the only one feeling like this.

It’s December 5th, and I have managed to buy a grand total of one, yes one, Christmas present.  That’s it!  Even though I put a little reminder in my calendar to start shopping waaaay back in October.  See, that’s how organized I am!

So the plan now is to drug— er, occupy the Pixie with some TV and then spend the morning knocking out a few blog posts.  After that, I’ll hit the online shops and do the Santa Mommy thing.  The Cynical Woman cartoon gets the rest of the day.  Tomorrow and Sunday are dedicated to my erotica podcast — I’ve got a story to finish for next month, plus recording to do for the next week’s episode.  Oh, and I did I mention I’ve invited the Princess’ little playmates over for an evening of pizza and mini-chick flicks?

No wonder I look like this!

Test Post

Nothing major.  Blogjet is giving me fits, so I’m trying to see if I can make it behave and post like a good boy.

Redecorating = Love and a New Toilet

The Feng Shui in our home is off.  Or maybe it’s the Wang Chung.  I dunno, I always get those two confused.  Anyway, everything is all higgledy-piggledy in la casa de Madden to the point that I don’t know what goes where or what happens in each room.  And why is that, you may ask?  Because…

We are redecorating.  Nothing major, just a fresh coat of paint on the downstairs walls.  And new paint on all the trim.  And the doors.  And then Michael’s tearing up the floor in the foyer and the downstairs bath so he can put in new tile.  And then maybe when all that’s done, he’ll finally put the toilet back in downstairs.  You know, the one he took out two years ago?  Right after our darling pixie Sam was born?

Yeah, that one.  So it’s not a BIG job because we’re not replacing furniture, but maybe it’s a big job because Michael’s doing all this painting and ripping up the floors and tiling and re-toileting stuff.  Oh, what am **I** doing?  The most important job of all – keeping the kids out of his hair.  And out of the fresh paint.

I love my husband, and he loves me.  And I will be so grateful when we get that downstairs toilet re-installed that I think I will take that man to bed…

And let him sleep for a week.  ‘Cause he’s gonna need it.

Episode 22 – Yoga!

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Allow me to introduce my good friend Patricia (also known as ‘Other Patty’)!  She puts up with an awful lot from me.  Of course, so do Mary and Patty…

The four of us form a gang we call “The Screeching Harpies.”  Remember, this is a posse, NOT a mommy’s group.  Yeah, we get the kids together to play, but our real purpose for meeting up is to plan the next Apocalypse.  So if you see a gang of forty-somethings (we’re not quite that old but we’re getting there), sitting in your local sushi restaurant, cackling evilly as they devour platter after platter of sushi, you know who you’re dealing with.

This week’s strip got done a little quicker than last week’s, thanks to the fact that I now know what to expect from Manga Studio Debut 4.  Since I bitched so much about the program last week, let me say something nice this week.  The program’s got some new nifty features, especially in the drawing tools.  The pen tool can now adjust its line width according to how close you’re zoomed into the picture (that’s a big help, believe me!), and I can save customized settings for the tools I use most often, which also helps a lot.  The pencil tool stinks – it draws a line so faint I can’t see it on screen – but that’s okay because I can set up a customized marker tool instead for roughing out the artwork.  And the text tool and word balloons are pretty nifty, so long as I save **every couple of seconds**.  Otherwise, working with text will crash the program so bad I have to restart my computer to get it to work again.

But that’s about it!  Over all, we’re doing good this week.  Now go practice some yoga.  Seriously. 

Episode 21 – With Friends Like These…

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…who needs enemas? But seriously, this one is for Sam and Terri Pray of Under The Moon press.  They were recently screwed out of buying a house because the local community voted to ‘not harbor producers of gay porn.’  Under The Moon produced one anthology of gay erotic romance, which automatically brands them as undesirable elements according to this particular pristine community, but hey, the hetero erotic romances were apparently okay.  It was just that one book of gay smut…

Anyway, this is the first cartoon produced with the brand spanking new Manga Studio Debut 4.0!  I was so excited when I got the notice earlier this week that the upgraded software was out, I went right ahead and bought it.  I couldn’t wait to try it out.  Among the new features listed on Smith-Micro’s website were an improved text tool and WORD BALLOONS!  That’s right kiddies, for just $20 I could upgrade to a product that was going to solve the biggest problem I’d been having with producing the cartoons – getting the words onto the panels.

Except that it wasn’t exactly that easy.

First off, I bought the download version (with a back-up disk on its way to me).  When I installed and started up the program, it asked me to install the materials for MS Debut 4.  Materials are those nifty gray scale images that I use for backgrounds and fills.  I knew I had the materials – I’d seen them when I checked out the program folder after installation.  Problem was, I couldn’t figure out exactly which folder to point the materials installer to.  I tried the folder marked ‘Materials’ but that didn’t work because that would be too easy, apparently.  After an hour of trying to figure out how to get the materials and tones installed, I finally sent an e-mail to tech support.  To their credit, tech support answered within a couple of hours.  In the meantime, I searched around the Smith-Micro websites (there are two of them, and it took me a while to figure out which one had a FAQ on it for technical questions) and the Manga Studio website to get some answers.  What I discovered is that the good folks at Smith-Micro wrote up perfectly nice installation instructions… if you were installing from a disk.  But they left out a few details if you were installing from a downloaded version of the program.

Once I finally heard back from tech support, I was able to get the materials installed and I went straight to work.  The pen tool has some nifty new updates that make it ever better for inking cartoons, which is a huge plus.  However, the text tool crashed the program repeatedly, which led to yet another e-mail to tech support who replied that they couldn’t replicate my problem so obviously the fault was with my computer and not their program and I would have to un-install and re-install the program to fix things.  Joy.  That only took another hour or two of work time to accomplish.  And even after that, the text tool still kept crashing the program unless I saved after every use of said tool.  It’s annoying, and it bugs me because if I add more than two text objects to a page, that program is gonna go down like Moses in the fifth, and the only way to get it to come back up and cooperate is to shut down and restart the computer.

However, I can get the text tool to work, and once I figured out where Manga Studio kept the word balloons hidden (the user’s manual says they’re in the materials window – they’re not!!  They’re in the Beginner’s Assistant window), I was able to add my dialogue to my cartoon and finally output the finished work.

So this week’s image was all done in Manga Studio Debut 4, which is really how I prefer to do it, and it was done in the space of a single day (would have happened even quicker if not for technical difficulties…).  Drawing by hand is fine, but I really do prefer doing the whole thing digitally, and in just the one program.  The quality of the inking, the ease of adding tones, the supposed ease of adding text… If it weren’t for the fact that the text tool is buggy as hell and the fact that the user’s manual is unfortunately obscure on certain important aspects of the program (like installation and where to find those bloody word balloons!), I’d give Manga Studio Debut 4 a perfect 10.  As it is, the best I can rate them is a 6.5.  The program has great potential, but it’s also got some serious flaws.  Let’s hope Smith-Micro figures this out and does something to address the problem.

You Know…

You know that only a child could get away with running around the house wearing nothing but a cape, a mask and a pair of mismatched high heels, shouting “I’m Batman!”

When my youngest daughter does it, it’s so dang cute.  But if I did that, I’d be locked away for good.  Why do kids always get to have all the fun?