Hayden Thorne

Inktea Goodness!

My graphic novel cup run­neth over! I squee to king­dom come! (click on the images for a bet­ter view)

Today my swag came all the way from Bris­bane — a print copy of the first chap­ter of Refrac­tion, a comic put together by Ink­tea. Lovely art done by Alex, who, if you’ve been fol­low­ing my blog for a while now, did the illus­tra­tion for The Glass Minstrel’s cover, which is one rea­son why I’m just dying for Sep­tem­ber to roll around. I want my author’s copies in my smarmy lit­tle paws. *pantpantdrool*

I’m so impressed with not only the qual­ity and quick­ness of her work, but also how pro­fes­sional she is even though we’ve been friends since ye olde fan­dom days. No favoritism, no noth­ing. :) And here I am, totally fan­girling her like a deprived puppy.

There’s also a note with a sketch tossed in. And, yes, I agree whole­heart­edly with Alex’s lit­tle side note: more men need to wear fancy cra­vats! Period cos­tume is too swoony for words. Cum­ber­some, maybe, but Regency and Vic­to­rian men’s cos­tumes make me go *rawr* shame­lessly. Hey — bishounen in fancy dress? I’m so there. Why do you think I love writ­ing his­tor­i­cal fic­tion with gay teens? I sure as heck don’t do it for the his­tory lesson.

Kid­ding. Okay, maybe some.

Last but not least, a promo card for Refrac­tion. You can check out Alex’s gallery at her Deviant Art page. Yes, yes, yes, I’ve pimped out her gallery before, and I’ll do it again. And again. And again. :D

As I’m also plan­ning to write another his­tor­i­cal — the Beat­le­ma­nia plot­bunny — I’m curi­ous to see how the cover design would be. Well, that is, if I sell the story to Cheyenne. Note to Alex: The print qual­ity of the book is excel­lent! And for the bind­ing? I think it’s cool. If any­thing, it reminds me so much of those under­ground ‘zines that indie book­stores up and down Berke­ley carry. Or maybe used to carry. :) And I can’t wait to snag a print copy of upcom­ing installments.

BTW, for all of you — Refrac­tion is also an online comic, which you can read here. Devour, enjoy, and support!

Go Away, July

The mind-boggling suck­age lev­els of July con­tin­ued to spi­ral today, but at least Teh Drama was lim­ited to work. I won’t go into par­tic­u­lars only because there are, lit­er­ally, too many things that went wrong, and I really don’t want to dwell on them. I guess the good news is that all the crap stuff involved designs and really dumb promises made to cus­tomers regard­ing rush jobs and sports jer­sey shadow boxes. I mean, WTF?

Oh, and another good thing is that I’m now off for a week! I ain’t com­ing in on Thurs­day, which means more time to kick back and read as well as write! :D For the win, man, for the win!

When I got home, I found my copy of Tina Ander­son and Amelie Belcher’s Loud Snow wait­ing for me, and it looks like Ander­son also included a free copy of another GloBl graphic novel with it (Diplo­matic Immu­nity by Ander­son and Car­o­line Monaco). I’m stoked! I haven’t bought a graphic novel in a long, long time, and I’m con­stantly dis­ap­pointed in my search for GloBl titles. Then again, maybe I haven’t cast my net out far enough, but as I’ve been so busy with my own writ­ing lately, I just haven’t really explored options out there.

Any­way, I can’t wait to dive into this trea­sure. I’m still wait­ing for Anderson’s Games With Me to come out in print. So far it’s only avail­able in e-book for­mat, which I’m not too thrilled with because I don’t have a e-reader. :S I cer­tainly hope to take care of that defi­ciency some­day, but for the time being, I con­tinue to pine after that one book. Sigh.

If you’re curi­ous about Loud Snow, you can read up more on the book here. Yaoi 911 also posted their own detailed review here.

And, yes, it’s always a good thing to sup­port indie artists. :)

And Yet More Progress

So…two pieces of good news: the stom­ach cramps are gone, finally, and so are all resid­ual ten­der­ness in my gut. Good rid­dance, I say. This week­end was hell and a half for me, but I’m still tak­ing it easy this week, diet-wise. Soup and yogurt con­tinue to be my two top sta­ples, and every­thing else is pretty lim­ited in terms of serv­ing size. I also restocked on pro­bi­otics since we were low. Last week, I cut down on my usual dosage because we were low, and I didn’t plan on buy­ing a new bot­tle till today (Mon­days are my usual gro­cery days). Maybe that con­tributed to my stom­ach dis­tress, I don’t know. But at least I’m back to my old dosage. So, yay for good health. :D

Sec­ond piece of good news: I man­aged to get 2,600+ words writ­ten today, and with this week being kind of a hol­i­day for me (I’m tak­ing Thurs­day off), I’m get­ting all ambi­tious and am aim­ing for 10,000 words by the end of the week. It looks like a doable goal, judg­ing from today’s writ­ing frenzy. Hope­fully noth­ing dis­tracts me between now and the end of the week enough to derail my momen­tum and inspi­ra­tion. After two hor­ri­ble months of stag­na­tion, I want to plow right through the first draft till it’s done and ready for the next sev­eral revi­sion stages.

Inspi­ra­tion time! :D

Cour­tesy All WOW videos

This is where I lose all sense of dig­nity and deco­rum and go, “Eeeeeeeeee! Board­ing school love!” BTW, if you’re not famil­iar with Another Coun­try, here’s the Wikipedia page on it. It also goes with­out say­ing how much I just adoooooooore Rupert Everett’s “mes­mer­ized lover” gaze. Sorry. Can’t help the heavy, des­per­ate fan­girl sigh­ing from this cor­ner. I’ll get over it, I promise. Check back with me tomor­row. Sigh…

Getting There…

I def­i­nitely feel much, much bet­ter com­pared to the past cou­ple of days, but I’m still not out of the woods yet. There’s still a bit of sore­ness in my mid­sec­tion, and ear­lier today, I had another wave of stab­bing pain in my upper abs, but it only lasted for a few sec­onds at most, which is a good sign. Plus there’s a big­ger dif­fer­ence in terms of com­fort when I took both Zan­tac and Motrin. Yes­ter­day, at the height of my cramp attacks, those two pills cut down on the pain but not enough. I still felt the sore­ness and a more muted kind of pain.

Now to have myself today’s yogurt. ^^;;;

We went to my mother-in-law’s birth­day party, which took place at her favorite Chi­nese buf­fet in Anti­och. I really enjoyed see­ing every­one again, though I really couldn’t enjoy the food as much. I ended up sneak­ing in a few shrimp (not sure how they were cooked) with steamed rice, but for the most part, I stuck to soup the whole time. And it worked. The chicken broth helped soothe my stom­ach a bit.

But since I’m still not quite there yet, I’ve got chicken soup on my gro­cery list. Tomor­row I’ll be stock­ing up on the stuff till I’m good and ready for more solid food again. I still have no idea what might’ve caused my stom­ach cramps, but for now, I’m just tak­ing it easy with the food and sup­ple­ments just in case.

Like Death Warmed Over

Thurs­day morn­ing, I woke up with stom­ach cramps. Noth­ing seri­ous — but uncom­fort­able enough. But the feel­ing went away before the morn­ing was over.

When I woke up Fri­day morn­ing, though, the cramps were way more severe, and this time around, they were on all day. I took some pain meds, which allowed me to focus enough on my writ­ing and other things that needed to get done.

I thought at first that some­thing in some of my sup­ple­ments caused the con­di­tion. Then I won­dered if some­thing I ate did it, which didn’t make much sense because Andy and I ate the same stuff on Wednes­day, and he’s fine.

The pain woke me up sev­eral times through the night, so this morn­ing, Andy took me to John Muir in Con­cord, and we went through urgent care. The doc­tor assigned to me said that she saw noth­ing wrong and that it could be caused by a num­ber of fac­tors — whacked out hor­mones (I’m 41) that nor­mally affect the lower abs and send pain shoot­ing up to my upper abs (I’ve expe­ri­enced this peri­od­i­cally through­out my ordeal, but it also hap­pens vice versa); some­thing I ate caused a minor case of gas­troen­teri­tis (but with­out the vom­it­ing and diar­rhea). Since I also came down with a slight fever last night, it could be a bac­te­r­ial (viral?) infection.

Any­way, I’m now armed with Zan­tac, Motrin, and a few days’ sup­plies of yogurt as per doctor’s orders. Sigh.

It’s been very dif­fi­cult to move, the pain that radi­ates out from the affected areas is intense, and with the pills I’m now tak­ing, everything’s been reduced to just sore­ness and a lot of stiff­ness. I haven’t had any real meal since I woke up this morn­ing, and I went to bed imme­di­ately after I got home and slept through the entire afternoon.

Tomorrow’s Andy’s mom’s birth­day, and there’s sup­posed to be this huge fam­ily reunion thing. I don’t know how I’ll sur­vive it.