Kalayna Price

I'm having one of those days where things just aren't clicking. I know what I should be doing, I even have plenty of ideas...I just can't concentrate. So, after hours of staring at the list of projects I wasn't doing, answering most of my emails, and haunting a couple of blogs, I decided to declare it a holiday. So today (whatever day it is) is now officially "I can't concentrate, here have an ostridge" day. Now everyone, lets go outside and play. (Or just sit there stupefied saying "what??" I think that's what this ostridge was doing.)

The new design is up and in record time considering I finished painting the 'focus' graphic Monday and worked my way up from scratch starting there. I'm hoping too many hours staring at code is the reason my screen looks blurry and not that my colors are glaring. While I'm thrilled to get this design up (I think I actually might not hate it tomorrow...wouldn't that be grand?) but I probably pushed all my time into it because I'm frustrated and avoiding another project...one I'm theoretically getting paid for. I cut the rant I just wrote because no one really needs to hear it. On the upside, I have a site redesign that I actually put effort and time into, so no longer is my site the cobbler's bare-foot child. (Hopefully...) So, what is everyone else up to? The romantic times convention is coming up fast. I know a couple of people going, and I really wish I could, but I doubt I'll go to any cons this year. Maybe next year. Those of you who have been to...

It has been a really long time since I did an art post, so I decided to write a 'tutorial' style post on the process I used in my latest watercolor painting, Petals. To the right is an image of the final product. Like all the images in this post, click on it to see a larger version. STEP ONE: SKIN Watercolor is a very unforgiving medium (it is translucent, so mistakes show through the paint) so the very first thing I did was very lightly sketch a rough outline of the girl on my piece of clayboard. I then very slowly started working on the skin. The color here is actually Cadmium Red, Cad Yellow, and Lemon yellow mixed together. On my pallet this creates a disturbingly red-orange color, and I remember, years ago, thinking I couldn't possibly have mixed it correctly when my watercolor teacher told me to use those colors. On top of white paper (or clayboard, as in this case) it does make a nice peachy skin tone. I actually know no other recipe for pale skin tone with water...

I find there are many different ways to spell the names of 'mythical' races/creatures. You have fae and fey, vampires and vampyres, griffin and gryphon, and fairy and faerie. (and others I'm probably forgetting.) What I want to know is if certain spellings annoy readers. Me personally, I hate the spelling vampyre. In fact, I once passed up reading a book someone said was great just because the author favored the word and I guess I was in the mood to be easily miffed. I have no preference on fae, fey, or faeries, but I know someone who says he can't help but thinking of Disney and Tink when he reads the name fairy and he can't take the story seriously. So what about everyone else: are certain spellings deal breakers? Do you think some spellings apply in certain situations and not during others? Opinions, anyone?

Well, after a couple weeks of looking at it, I've decided I hate this color selection and layout. How is it that I've designed dozens of websites I'm fairly proud off, but anything I do to my own always looks crappy. *sigh* The cobblers barefoot children and all that, I guess. Maybe I should sit down and interview myself the same way I do my clients.

A couple days ago, I was having a conversation with my brother who had just been invited to the second round of interviews for a job he really wants. He was trying to explain the uncontainable excitement and nervousness he felt--and the interview is still a month off. Ah, the waiting game; I know it well. So my advice, stay busy for a couple days, until the giddy brain -buzz wears off and then buckle in and settle down to wait. From experience I've found that the longer you wait, the easier it gets. That is, of course, until something changes and all of a sudden you are dropped right in the middle of that dizzying anxiousness again.

Well, the cars are all taking on a greenish complexion and the dogwoods smell like dead fish, so spring must have snuck up on me. This is the time of year I miss having a yard. Granted, every other time of the year when things like mowing and raking would need to be done, I'm quite happy that all I'm responsible for is a large balcony. But, spring makes me want to have my fingers in the dirt. Don't take that to mean I have a green thumb, because I don't, but the urge to *try to* grow stuff is there. I think I'm going to invest in some pots this year and try that container gardening thing. It would be nice to have access to fresh rosemary and other herbs again, but I don't know how well they will grow in pots on a balcony. Anyone have any tips? In other news, I highly recommend reading Kim Harrison's new book For a Few Demons More . I would tell you about it, but I'm afraid anything I said would be majorly spoilerish. Do you know how sometimes books in a ...

I apologize to anyone getting my rss feed. I'm probably driving bloglines and such nuts because I just realized that when I took the old gallery down, lots of my images went with it, and I had to revisit all those old posts and fix the links. Sorry!

Well, my name-site is up and accessible on the web, but it doesn't have any content yet. You might have noticed the new navigation bar under my header (it has some glitches still..I'm working on it.) Currently, if you click on any of those links, you will be taken to a blocked out page filled with fake Latin. Weird, huh? I hope to be launching the content soon, but I'm pretty excited to have the bones of the site up. In the past, I've always hand coded everything. I have a link in the middle of my desktop that says "super advanced HTML program"...it opens notepad, and up until the middle of February, that was it: the codes in my head, notepad, and google for scripts I couldn't just sit down and write. Now I'm learning Dreamweaver 8. It's a frustrating program...but it does speed some things up. To it's annoyance, I still hand code almost everything, but I like that it closes my tags for me and I get an instant picture of what I just changed. C...

Well, I did a little tweaking to the blog template, and I totally changed my color scheme. I'll be honest, I'm not completely convinced I like the new colors. There is reason to my madness...I work locally as a web-designer for a small company, but recently I've been thinking about going out on my own, breaking out of the local, and begin accepting online jobs. (It is an entirely internet kind of thing.) So, I'm pulling down my art-gallery site and using the space for the perspective business (KNsDesigns) It makes sense, the url already sounds like a design shop, and I have my name-site registered in the event that my book sells, so it's easy enough to move my gallery to the name-site (as all it does right now is point to this blog.) The problem comes into play when I consider that I wanted the name-site to lead to an author page (which, admittedly, I don't need right now) and color schemes for galleries and books tend to be totally different. (For instance, I w...

This week's library requests include: 2 books on forensic science, a book on criminal investigation, a book on autopsies, a psychology book on mannerisms and body language, and book about firearms. Really, I'm not crazy or planning on committing/solving a crime, but I am planning on writing about one. The book that is refusing to leave my peripheral (so I've been mentally plotting anytime my mind wanders) is very different from the books I've been writing. In everything I've written up until now, my point of view characters have had no reason to have intimate knowledge of guns or police procedure, so the bits and pieces I've gleaned from watching crime shows and reading mysteries has always been more than enough. But, this new character works closely with the police, so I'm thinking I should have at least a little knowledge that doesn't come from fiction. It does make me wonder what the lady putting my holds on the shelf will think of the selection thou...

Recently CNN put out an article about a 12 step program for email addicts. The first step, of course, is to admit you have a problem and email is controlling your life. Most of the subsequent steps are actually very practical advice like sorting email into categories and setting specific times to check the email. I found this article incredibly amusing, probably because around the end of last year I was definitely an addict. I have since come to terms with the fact that if a message were really important and needed my immediately attention, someone would call me. Thus I have mostly cut the cord between the inbox and me. Now I will admit, the first couple days after I send something new out I do hit the send/receive button a little more often, but who doesn't, right?

My dog has a curious habit If he sees me looking at him, he will wag just the tip of his tail, just once or twice. *thump.....thump* If I then talk to him, the whole tail wags. *thump, thump* If I stand and start walking over to him, the tail really gets going. *Thump, Thump, Thump* I reach out, *THUMP, THUMP, THUMP* my hand reaches his head, *THUMP.....* and the tail stops. Now, this happens on a regular basis, not just once in a while. So, is petting a let down? Or is it that the anticipation is exciting and once the petting starts he calms down to happily indulge in it? I'm not sure, but I know when I'm reading a book, it is the anticipation that really strings me along and adds tension. This works in lots of writing elements, whether it's action and danger, or relationships. Holding out really keeps the pages turning (and the readers tail thumping.) Once we reach that fight/love scene/ whatever has been building, that anticipation should be reaching the boiling point, b...

*Note, this turned out rather long* Yesterday, (in a very ranty blur) I briefly mentioned that I worked on a storyline for a game my brother is designing. I want to expand on that topic. Since early high school, my brother has wanted to be a game programmer, and since I've always written, I basically promised to write storylines for him eons ago. Well, now he is finishing his degree in programing, and he and three other engineers are designing a turn based RPG for their thesis (or something.) He told me about the project weeks ago and asked me to think up a story for it. We don't see each other that often these days, but we managed to steal a little bit of time to discuss things like battle mechanics and class types, (which can affect the story) but really that was all we had time to talk about. I tried to work out a story from scratch knowing only a little of the mechanics they would be using, but everywhere I turned I hit stumbling blocks. This isn't a big budgeted Final...

Insomnia, that is. If you've ever said "I'll sleep when I'm dead" or "I could get so much more done it I didn't have to sleep"...you're kidding yourself. Sure, it sounds great to have 22 hours in a day instead of 16 or so, but let me tell you, having 16 usable hours is much better than 22 hazy hours. What is this all about? I've had insomnia since just before Christmas. Over the past month or so, I've celebrated the handful of days were I've managed to get 4 to 6 hours of sleep. I really need 8 to function, and I'm partial to 9...but in the past weeks I've averaged 2 a night, and that has typically been interrupted. Laying in the dark, staring at the walls gets very old, very fast. Many times I get back up after a few hours of waiting on sleep, and I try to work or read, but just because I can't sleep doesn't mean I'm not tired--that deep ache behind the eyes tired. I feel like I'm walking dead in a thick haze ...

Happy accident is a phrase one of my art teachers in college used constantly. He was a rather unlikeable guy, and we mocked him for it, but now I use the phrase (idiom?) Isn't it awful how that happens--you hear something often enough, and it stops sounding strange or unusual. That's how slang catches on, but I digress. "Happy accident" is not something I say about art often, but a phrase I find myself applying to parts of my writing. I'm a planner, for the most part. I tried the 'pantzer' thing for years, but I never finished a novel until I began outlining. I may have very detailed plans for myself with complete summaries of scenes and bits of dialogue, but the bulk of any given outline tends to contain terribly vague sentences like "xxx will find the bad guy somehow and be injured in the subsequent fight." (Okay, usually I'm not that bad...) The very detailed parts of the outline are usually 'candy' scenes. The scenes that won...

Has anyone else ever noticed that research can be a very dangerous distraction? Case in point: yesterday I spent around four hours researching a subject that I used in two lines of dialogue and a couple hundred words of description. Was it good material? Yeah. But four hours? I don't know about that. If I would have left myself a note to come back to it, would it have effected to story in any major way? Nope. I was stuck and research presented itself as a procrastination tool I wouldn't feel guilty indulging. Does anyone else find themselves falling into that trap? Today's progress: HA!... 0 Yup, that's right. Zilch. At least yesterday when I didn't hit my goal I could blame it on research. Today was one of those days nothing clicked for me. Terrible day for it too because the web has been quiet. Practically no one blogged today, and only spam hit the email box. I spent large portions of today staring at the blinking cursor in my word document, then pulling up th...

Earlier today, Rachel Vincent posted an entry about the comment feature in word. The post generated a lot of talk among writers about how they mark up their work during first drafts, ranging from people who use comments, those who leave notes in bold/parentheses/carrots, and those who stop all together to go back and think about it. Really, it is fascinating to hear about how other people go through the process of getting stories on the page. Rachel is a comments writer, and I have to say, she makes a good argument for it. I'm a parentheses writer myself, simply because I get annoyed with the fact I have to use the mouse and a drop down menu to add a comment. As the conversation continued, it was mentioned that other people wished there was a comments hotkey as well. That got me thinking, and as I was sick of researching how cases make it to the supreme court, I looked into hotkeys for word and learned making a macro wasn't too hard. I posted the instructions in the comments ...

Probably anyone who has written a book will agree that you can't wait around for the muse to come. "Sit down and bleed" they tell us. "Those who are ready and working will find their muse." Honestly, I have found that to be true advice (if not particularly welcome.) No, my problem is not a missing muse. She goes on vacation often enough, I've learned to work without her. My problem is a distracted muse. She's always been this way, you would think I'd be used to it. How it happens: I'll be working on a project (or in need of working on a project) and all of a sudden something shiny catches her eye. Then, next thing I know, she's off chasing it into unknown and bizarre places. Maybe I should call her Alice. You would think my muse would be ready to get back to work. She had a vacation from CD the whole time I was editing and most of the holidays. Plus, I fed her very well recently. But, no. Remember that question I asked last week? The one abo...

My revised version of DH is wherever packages go between being dropped off at the post office and arriving at their destination, so to reward myself for finally finishing, I've been binge reading. According to Amazon, Blood Bound by Patricia Briggs is street-dated for January 30th, but BAM had it on the shelf today when I was there. I just finished it, and I have to say it was absolutely amazing. I think Ms Brigg's 'Mercy' (MC) books are now competing for one of the top spots as my favorite urban fantasy series. (Blood Bound is the second book, Moon Called being the first) If you read UF and haven't picked up these books yet, you have no idea what your missing. I closed the book feeling a mix of awe and depression because I don't think I will ever write a book at this level. I highly recommend this series. Hell to Pay by Simon R. Green is the seventh book in the Nightside novels. This series is full of macabre humor and layers of storytelling. I honestly ...