Queen’s Thief doodles!
Drew these quickly so they’re pretty sloppy and simple + super vague Byzantine-ish fashion. Just trying to sketch out the images I’d had in my mind of the characters.
I’m not quite through all of the books yet, so I’ll probably be coming up with more in the future! :)
(It’s a super excellent series, though. MORE PEOPLE OUGHT TO READ IT.)
Oh, these are lovely!
(via chachic)
YOU ARE BRILLIANT.
I have seen that cover so many times and been so, SO confused. But no more!
I mean, aesthetically speaking I still think it’s a pretty terrible cover, as are all of Lois McMaster Bujold’s. This is tragic, because the books deserve better, but I’m pretty sure Baen employs the same three artists for all covers because all of their books fit into the same slightly-odd version of SF covers.
Regardless, my life makes so much more sense now.
“It was akin to the feeling when one has just had a baby and goes out for the first time. One is weak and feels far too vulnerable, except in the tiny circle of the baby’s cradle, as if one had had a layer of skin peeled off. One is raw to touch. ‘Where someone lays a finger, it leaves a bruise.’”
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh,Against Wind and Tide: Letters & Journals, 1947-1986
My father has terminal brain cancer and at the moment this fact is manifesting in odd ways for me, a general tenderness of spirit. I’ve been describing it as a bruise. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just there on your arm or leg. Sometimes its origins are mysterious; sometimes you can trace them back to a knock against a desk or bed or chair. Usually you go through life without feeling it. But then someone touches it, or you bump against it accidentally and suddenly it’s throbbing again, and it hurts for some time after.
So it was odd to read this description tonight in Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s writing after her husband’s death. I’ll have to take her word for it on the baby part, but the rest of it is so exactly how I feel right now that it’s almost as if she’s whispering into my ear, or I’m whispering into hers.
Disorientation is constant. One is a wavering compass needle. True North has been taken away. Not only direction has gone, but the resistance that allowed one to move in space. It is as if one had been pushing against “something” and the “something” had been taken away; one is put off one’s balance.
One is so disoriented, one tries to make a map of grief. But one cannot make a map. Grief is not a place, as CS Lewis says, it is a process. I am just at the beginning. It is a journey—a long journey, unmarked and roadless—but other people’s signposts can help.
It’s one’s vision that flags, not one’s will power. As long as I can see something to do, to change, insert, or rewrite, then I’m opeful. (“This will change it, this will make the difference!”) But when I can’t see, and feel it is all so uniformly poor, then I am depressed.
And I went on thinking about it and realizzing that this is what life is, or should be: this spontaneous activity springin from the moment creatively. This is faith. This is the God in Homer (which one?), saying to Ulysses’ son when he hesitates…”Somewhat thou wilt look in thy own heart and somewhat the God will give thee what to say.”
It is the Quaker saying, “We must move as the way opens”—based on faith, on the premise that “the way” would open. This is Gideon at the walls of Jericho. And David with his stone…Then I end up, “But one must have passed through a great deal of discipline before one can reach this point”…Then comes the spontaneous action. But it comes out of that long background of experience, thought, feeling, work, reasoning, etc. This is the ground for one’s faith. This is the “trimming of the branches” which must precede any flowering of the tree (in St.-Ex’s image). Trimming the branches is an act of faith in the spring and the power of the sap of life.
I also realize again that my constructive or creative periods com ein waves and that there are definite troughs, depending on the energy spent, etc. I don’t think the work done in the trough, or against the tide, is any good—or you wear yourself out, like swimming against an undertow…I think the deep-well period needs some studying. It needs diversion and getting out—refreshment but not distraction, not dispersal of forces. There is no use freeing yourself from the pressure of deadlines and submitting yourself to the pressure of Christmas shopping or late nights.
This was an anonymous question I was asked; I’m repeating it in this format upon request, to make it rebloggable.
The ultimate goal in life seems to be to find a passion and to follow it. But how does one cope with a world that pretty much asks you to have your passion in business,…
1) I reject the idea that that’s THE ultimate goal in life. If it’s YOUR ultimate goal, that’s fine. But it doesn’t HAVE to be. You can have a different goal, or you can have several goals that you balance. (Not that that’s easy, either.) But there’s no REASON why finding/following a passion should be the ultimate goal, unless you want it to be. Personally, I think there are way more important things, like living a morally correct life and helping other people and being kind and considerate and polite.
YES. Look, following your creative dreams is great and all, but for instance, if you’re a Christian and you take your faith seriously, the ultimate goal in life is preparation for heaven, in whatever form your denomination looks at that. Or, as St. Theophan puts it very succinctly, doing what’s in front of you and being kind to those around you. So to say that THE ultimate goal is following YOUR passion seems more than a bit suspect. And…the original question also seems to assume that passion=creativity and that creativity and IT/business/engingeering are mutually exclusive. I’m a lit person, I’m a crafty person, I knit and sew and paint and all of that creative stuff. I understand fully the frustration of feeling like math and science are rewarded and the humanities patted on the head and told to go play in the corner…and I still call bs on that. If the sciences are to be great, it’s precisely because of the passion of people like several of my friends, who are no less creative than anyone else.
2) Honestly, I personally think this idea of an all-important personal passion often ends up being kind of selfish and immature. Now, sure, you could say that in an ideal world, everybody would be able to follow their dreams, but a) that is not the world we live in and b) there is literally no way that that would result in a functioning civilization. Given that, when anyone says “The only important thing is following my passion,” I can’t help but hear “I think I’m a superior person and worthy of getting to do whatever I want, and those inferior people can worry about mundane everyday responsibilities.” And on a more micro level, people who only care about following their dreams tend to be quite difficult to deal with for family or friends.
I have kind of mixed feelings about this point. On the one hand…yes, it makes a lot of sense. And yet, I’m also part of a generation that is currently very angry because we keep being told to give up on our dreams, grow up and get a job. And that’s not exactly what Felicity is saying, or at least it doesn’t seem to come out of the same motivation. But it’s close enough that I start to have a bit of an allergic reaction to just the phrasing, which I will freely admit is my problem more than anything else.
On the other hand, this goes back to my point above. There is a kind of selfishness, a self-absorbtion at any rate, which is problematic at the very least. Is the person who quietly works to make those around him or her happier and the world he or she can affect a better place any less heroic than the person who churns out great masterpieces and totally ignores family and friends?
3) Remind yourself ALL THE TIME that this job does not have to be what you do for the rest of your life. Especially if you’re young and don’t have dependents, it’s perfectly fine to try something for a year or two and then look for something else if you want to try a different field. (Try to stay for at least a year, though.) And it’s COMPLETELY, ENTIRELY FINE to work in a retail or service job to support yourself while looking for a job in your field.
This was especially tough for me when I was trying to find a job right out of college, because I did know what I wanted. I wanted to work in a library. That was what I had experience in, it was where all of my personal inclinations lay. And it took me over a year to get a job. I resisted for so long even LOOKING in anything but libraries because I was so afraid I was going to get trapped in a job I hated forever and ever and end up a sad bitter old maid who was only loved by her eleventyhundred cats. And then I learned to let go a little bit, to be open to other things and therefore let things HAPPEN. And almost immediately, I got two jobs in two different libraries and have been dealing with a surplus of possible jobs ever since. In short, YES.
Overall, I think this is a complicated subject. There’s a kind of selfishness that might be necessary to any big creative endeavor, especially the need to insist on time/space to do it. I can see that. At the same time, it’s always worth keeping the points Felicity’s making in mind as a counterbalance—is this really my ultimate goal? What is my ultimate goal & how do I achieve it? If it is my ultimate goal, how do I balance my life so that I’m not sucked into my own world 24/7, ignoring the needs of others and even of the other parts of my life. Because that’s one of the pieces of advice I’ve seen from almost every published author: LIVE. Go out and join a football team, a folk dance club, a knitting society, an underwater snorkeling group. Break your heart and use that too.
{EDIT} My point at the end here, which I think I didn’t make clear enough, is that if your focus is solely on your creative passion, however you describe that, to the exclusion of all else, then it’s your passion that will suffer.
Everything in language is a metaphor. We use metaphors to talk about metaphors. Chair is not chair. Chalk is not chalk. It’s already a metaphor.
(via miriamforster)
