Shopportunities

In case you are afraid of using PayPal, don't have a mailbox, and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Cross My Words and Hope to (Verb) zine is now available at several stores for your shopping convenience.

Issues in Oakland has an amazing array of magazines, including my zine!

Dog Eared Books in San Francisco has a tiny zine section, so mine should be relatively easy to find. They also have a large selection of new and used books.

More locations are coming soon, but if you're reading this you should probably just click below to buy a copy, so some strangers can purchase them from the store.

Oh, and I don't have any totally subjective reviews yet, but here's what some of the contributors are saying:

"I got the zine in the mail the other day, and I just wanted to say I think it's fantastic. It looks really well made (the binding is great). And of course the content is excellent as is the concept." - Keith Ecker

"How does it work? I didn't read the instructions yet." - Rachel Weiner

"The Zine is amazing!" - Jacqueline Suskin

"The brilliance of this zine is that it forces the owner’s hand from passive to active involvement. You can’t read the stories as they’re intended until you solve the crossword and fill in the blanks. And once that’s done, you can re-blank the blanks and get a friend to fill them in without context, perhaps while riding in the back of a car. This zine is an instant toolkit to becoming both an artist and a friend, two of the highest forms of collaboration ever conceived." - Channing Kennedy

Get a copy and let me know what you think!

Thanks!

Cross My Words and Hope to ____ (verb).

The Cross My Words and Hope to _____ (verb) Activity Zine is available now! Only $5+s/h. Here's how it works:

(Click to enlarge/read/understand.)

So for only $5, you get three short stories, six poems, five comic strips, one enormous crossword puzzle, and a lot of mad libs and colorable drawings.

The stories, poems, comics, and illustrations are all amazing. Contributors include
Keith Ecker
Channing Kennedy
Jessica James Lansdon
Gregg Lewis
Lauralee Sparling
Jacqueline Suskin
Allen Talbert
Rachel Weiner
and me!

Click below to order your copy! Heck, you probably need to order lots of copies for all of your word-game-loving friends!

Or, if you see me in person sometimes, just give me $5 and I will give you a zine in exchange. But be sure to let me know you want one so I will have it ready!

Animating

Things are happening!

Zine things:
My crossword zine is coming together. I have to think up like 10 more clues (which means I already thought up about 300), make someone solve the puzzle for proofreading purposes, work on some layouts, make copies, and it will be done! I even wrote my letter from the editor part today. Maybe I will finish it by the weekend IF the contributors will all send me their bios.

Movie things:
Robin is working on my movie! We met up last weekend and she showed us what she'd done so far, and it was great! She did stuff!

I am also doing stuff! I went to the park and took photos of the town. Here's what it looks like sort of:


Realistic, huh? I made Jessica come with me to protect me from being run over by joggers and cyclists and baseball players while I crouched on the ground in the middle of a dirt patch. She did a good job. I did not get run over by anything.

I am also working on animating the audience for the vaudeville show that happens within the movie. Here is a preview of what a few of them look like:

The audience was drawn by HARVEY JAMES™ who is super cool and good at drawing! He's also taking commissions right now starting at just $6, which is really cheap! Go here! Give him some money! It will be well-spent, I assure you.

Animating the audience, however, is up to me. We tried filming them puppet-style, by attaching strings to paper cutouts, but the lighting was terrible and the cutouts wouldn't stay right-side-round, so it was a total mess. In fact, it's still a total mess in one of my drawers, where all of the cutouts are knotted up in a big pile. So I decided to try doing the animation digitally, which I'm kind of excited about, because I've never done such a thing, but also kind of nervous that it will be really tedious and hard. However, I am up for that kind of challenge. At least it's not confusing, tedious, and hard.

And then in a week or so you (if you somehow managed not to be a contributor) can give ME money when you purchase my zine! And in another 5 years (completely random estimate) you can give me money again when you purchase tickets to see my movie at a movie theater! Hooray!

I am actually not a great singer, despite the implications of this post.

We finally hired someone to work on editing my movie! Channing just did not have time to work on it, as I may have mentioned in every post for the past year. I had been suggesting hiring someone for a few months, but he kept promising that he would just buckle down and work on it. Clearly it wasn't happening. So now our friend Robin Griswold, who is a recent film school graduate, is tackling the project. I hope she doesn't go insane from listening to me singing too much. Not that you will, when you eventually watch the movie, because I obviously have a lovely singing voice. But editing is terrible and annoying, no matter how classically trained and perfect the voices on the soundtrack are. It is this attitude, combined with my inability to teach myself complicated greenscreen compositing, that has prevented me from editing the movie myself.

In the meantime, I am working on a crossword/story/coloring/mad lib zine. I've received quite a few lovely submissions from various writers and drawers. Now I'm working on formatting everything and adding more illustrations. I might also try to think of a title that's more concise than crossword/story/coloring/mad lib zine. Thinking of titles is always difficult for me.

I'm also doing boring projects around the house, like sewing bags to contain my hand-washable laundry and our stash of plastic shopping bags. Once the shopping bags are corralled, we can fit a mini-compost bin under the sink so we can actually compost a bit more regularly.

I also finally got a zipper foot for my sewing machine, so I'm going to be attempting to make some dresses soon! Hooray for things that don't have buttons or drawstrings!

Oh man, this movie.

Channing took a day off of work last week to edit the movie because he thought never working on it was having a negative impact on our relationship. Which is true, because I would get mad whenever he wanted to do anything besides edit my movie, which I realize is unreasonable. So I was just really trying not to nag him (not totally successfully) but I was getting really pissed about it. I'm naggy by nature, and keeping that bottled up is a challenge, but I don't want to be a terrible girlfriend, you know? Anyhow, there's still a lot to do but I feel that I am temporarily appeased because some progress was made. I will probably be mad again as soon as I see the next sentence about any movie that is complete.



We will probably have to reshoot this part, which is unfortunate because lollipops are disgusting. Zoom in and you will see why.

De-uglification?

I'm sure some people will think that I'm making this more ugly, but I like it a lot more now.

Here is my old and improved jean jacket:




Now I will not feel like such a dummy when I wear this with jeans. I haven't decided if I should add more stuff to it or not. I'm going to wear it for a while and see how I feel about it.

I'm also working on a new zine. It involves a crossword and a bunch of stories. Right now I'm waiting patiently as my collaborators work on their story-parts, which should be finished pretty soon.

I haven't done any new projects in a while because I'm depressed that my movie's editor is too busy to edit my movie. I'm now officially trying to work on smaller projects to get my mind off of it.

New Website

I had my sweet boyfriend make a portfolio website for me a few years ago. Unfortunately I think we (he) ended up updating it like once since then. Since there's not much hope of ever keeping it updated regularly if I can't do it myself, which I currently can't, I'm going to abandon the old site pretty soon. I'm moving things over to a tumblr blog. It sort of seemed like a terrible idea until I realized I could organize everything with keywords and tags! So you can just click on Look, Read, Watch, Wear, or Buy from my page to go to everything from that category. And, after Channing helping me for only a few brief (okay, sort of long) hours, I was able to get everything working pretty much exactly as I wanted! We even finally figured out how to add paypal buttons, so you can buy zines and bags directly from me and I don't have to worry about etsy listings expiring or other annoying etsy things. I'm also uploading my videos to Vimeo so that I can have higher-quality versions online all in the same place instead of having them spread over two youtube channels. They'll still be on youtube, too, but now it's easier to access all of my videos from one page, and the earlier videos will be higher-quality than was once available on youtube. I'm really excited to be starting over, since I've been pretty unhappy that the official online representation of my work was mostly a representation of my work from three years ago. I'm planning to continue using this blog to talk about things I'm working on, keeping the portfolio and works-in-progress slightly separated. So thanks Channing, for helping me realize my dreams.