Today is my anniversary. Another year spent married to this guy. This is Jo. Jo rocks. We’ve been together for just over ten years now, married for seven of them. I love him more today than I did a decade ago and if I were to imagine my life without him it would be a dismal thing indeed.

He’s got his game face on in this picture — we were in the lab and he was pouring things into test tubes for me to photograph. He’s cool like that.

*Insert some sort of clever segue here between anniversaries and music*

Today I’ve got a guest blog over at Beth Cato’s blog. It’s all about music and stories. Check it out Once you’ve read my blog post poke around Beth’s site a bit more. I’m the third guest blogger she’s had there recently talking about music. Also, she’s just kinda awesome.

*Insert one more clever segue*

I’m working on a collaborative project with Jennythe_reader. We hooked up via 2xCreative (which I’ve mentioned before here). We’re actually doing a couple projects together. For the first, I sent her a poem I’d written and she is writing it out all pretty-like and then embellishing the paper. I don’t think my description does it justice, but you can hear her talk about it a little bit here. Anyway, I kind of wanted to do something more. Partly because my time investment was pretty small this month (I already had the poem written and only had to send it to her) and also partly because I wanted to do something different. Whenever I work on a collaborative project I provide words in some form or another. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but Jenny, well, Jenny is a fabric artist. It just so happens that I paint fabric. How could we not do something that combined those talents?

I dug out my fabric painting stuff from where it was tucked into a corner of the basement and painted three pieces. I will be popping these into the mail to Jenny this week and I’ll keep you updated about what she creates with them. I can’t wait to see!

In other, writing-related news, though I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I am doing the November Poem-a-Day challenge. My theme is going to be ‘Classic Horror’ with a focus (I hope) on ghosts.

I’ve also begun transcribing and revising Shadows. Right now I’m only working on the revision part (the first couple chapters were already transcribed), and I’m 4,785 words in. I’d love to use a word count meter of some sort here, but that’s tricky when you don’t know how many words you’re going to end up with LOL I think my last estimate was about 70k but at this point, it’s all a big question mark.

Finally, did I mention that it’s my anniversary? Happy Halloween everyone and Jo, I love you.

October is freaky busy around here. There’s birthdays, anniversaries, family visits, Thanksgiving… it’s busy.

So of course I decided to sign up for the October 2xcreative project

Basically if you sign up you’re randomly paired with someone else who has signed up and you work on a creative undertaking together, then you share your results with the community.

There haven’t been a whole lot of sign-ups over there lately and I think it’s a great community so I’d like that to change. If you have a little bit of spare time this month why not pop over and sign up. You might just enjoy yourself, and besides, I need a partner and right now I’m the only person signed up

Clicky here to go to the sign-up post

A couple years ago Kyle Cassidy paired people up on his blog to work together on something creative. After everyone was partnered up Kyle said ‘Now go and make beautiful things!’. Being the brat that I am, I immediately knew I wanted to do a project titled ‘Something Beautiful’. Luckily for me my partner, Sarah, is also a bit of a brat -and- is into photography.

Things clicked into place for us well at the beginning, but then life stepped in and what was meant to be a 30 day project actually took us more like two years. However, it’s my pleasure to announce that Something Beautiful is finished and ready for release. Whoot!

What is Something Beautiful? I’m so glad you asked

Sarah sent me a bunch of portraits and I used them to inspire micro-fiction stories. She added my words to her portraits, using the image as a canvas for the words (clever, eh? That was her idea, not mine). We ran into some technical problems though, which meant that only a few of the images have the stories on them — most have them ‘on the side’ (like gravy. Gravy makes good things better, right?). The point is, you get her portraiture photography which is meant to show the beauty in people regardless of size or shape, combined with my, rather dark, micro-fiction. Yay!

Sarah and I agreed that we didn’t want to make any money off this project, but wanted to use it to help others. That means all proceeds from book sales will be donated to the National Eating Disorder Information Centre (http://www.nedic.ca) which works to educate people about eating disorders, body-issues and self-esteem. Helping people see the beauty in themselves and those around them.

You can pick up a copy of Something Beautiful below:

Something Beautiful in downloadable .pdf – $3.50
Something Beautiful in paperback – $14.99

But wait! There’s more!

Sarah and I have discounted the books, 10% off the base cost which means right now you can pick them up for $3.14 and $13.49. What’s more, if you use the coupon code JULYBOOKS11 you should get another 20% off, up to $25. There are savings all around, with all the profits going to a good cause.

Lastly, I would like to thank Kyle for starting the ball rolling on this probject. I never would have met Sarah if it hadn’t been for his blog, and certainly never would have created this book. It was an adventure and I learned a lot over the course of this project’s completion.

Kyle also started the 2xCreative community on Livejournal which is dedicated to collaborative projects. It’s been pretty quiet over there for the last little while, but I’ve participated in a couple pairings there in the past and really enjoyed them. Perhaps, now that Something Beautiful has been released out into the wild, it’s time for me to drop by and stir things up a bit. I hope to see you there.

Productive again? Yay!

My focus, which has been sadly lacking since November appears to be making short appearances these days. It’s nothing fantastic and I’ve not suddenly turned into a writing machine, but I’ve been more productive than in ages.

One thing that has helped is the pseudo-secret project I’m working on these days. I’ll share more details soon…ish, but I still need to pin down a couple details first. I’m excited about it though. I’ll likely spill the beans about it on my newsletter first, but information on the blog will follow soon after.

I’m also working on two collaborative projects. Kyle Cassidy ( LJ ~ Twitter ~ Website ) recently set up a project where he paired random strangers up to work on something, anything, together. Long story short, I am working in two collaborations as a direct result. Each is hugely different from the other and I’m really enjoying them both. I feel like they are really pushing me out of the rut I’d been in and sort of forcing productivity. This is a good thing because if I do it long enough it will become a habit again LOL

Now, so long as the baseball game we’re supposed to go to tonight doesn’t get rained out, I’ll be golden. Please don’t rain. Danica has been looking forward to this all week and passed up a chance to go to a movie and a slumber party for this game. Please don’t rain…