A Day in the Life of Procrastination

What was I supposed to be doing today?

Writing. I have a manuscript due to my critique group in a week, and it's not anywhere close to being finished.

What did I actually do today?

Two very important things, neither of which was writing...

1. Took the Squashes back to the shelter. They're having surgery tomorrow, and then they'll be available for adoption. It's always kind of sad to leave my foster kittens at the shelter, but they're usually adopted within a couple days. And if I don't clear out space at home, I can't help the next litter!
   
   Here are their graduation photos (taken by Lori). Aren't they adorable?
   
   

   

   Sugar Pie

   
   

   

   Spaghetti

   
   

   

   Delicata

   
   

   

   Butternut

   
   

   

   Acorn

   
   
   
2. Set up a "free books" page on my website for other authors to share.
   
   Anything I can do to get my books in the hands of readers is a good thing. If people like the first book, they'll probably enjoy the whole series.
   
   https://tmbaumgartner.com/free-books/

Random Programming Project

I used to write software for a living, and every once in a while I pick a fun project and mess around with it a bit. My current project is a program that will create a digital fore-edge image.

What's a fore-edge?

It's the surface of a book opposite the spine, where the red arrow is pointing.

What's a digital fore-edge?

Okay, so there are a couple ways to put a picture on the fore-edge. The most common way is to literally hold the pages closed and paint it. That gives you the best results, but it's expensive and only some printers offer it.

The other way is to print a slice of the image at the very edge of the page when you're printing the text of the book. When all the slices are put together, you have something like the original image.

For example, if I wanted to put this b&w dragon on my fore-edge (green background added for clarity):

First, I would slice the picture up sort of like this:

Then I would put one slice at the margin of each page of the book and when the book is held closed (or maybe with the pages slightly flexed), you would see the dragon.

That sounds easy

I mean, yeah, it's not that hard in concept. But the way they print books adds a few complications. Basically, they start with a larger page, print the words, and then chop off the edges.

Except...

There's a margin of error when cutting off the edges. So I need to account for that.

Anyhow, it's not really all that complicated. I'm using Python and I was able to quickly create a program that adds an image to a page on a pdf, so I know it can be done. (Then I changed a bunch of stuff in my program and broke it completely. This is how we code.)

How do you test it?

Yeah. This is one of the drawbacks. I won't know for sure if my program works until I load the paperback and buy a copy. (I'll probably use Barnes & Noble, because they allow authors to load a book and not make it public.)

If it works, great! If it doesn't... this could get expensive to debug.

Anyhow. This is what I do for fun.

Belated Holidailies

Hey, did you know that December started yesterday? It wasn't until KarenD left a comment on an old blog entry that I remembered it's time for Holidailies, the blog every day challenge for December (plus January 1st, if you're following the rules).

So, a quick introduction: Hi, I'm Theresa! I raise kittens and write books. I also dabble in other crafts that I am pretty terrible at, which makes them fun. I live in California with a dog and two feral cats.

I can't actually remember how many kittens I've raised this year, but I haven't had less than two litters at a time for the last four months, so it's a lot. (It's been a bad kitten season.) I currently have nine kittens in the house, though these five are leaving tomorrow to go find their forever homes.

(The Squashes: l-r Butternut, Sugar Pie, Spaghetti, Delicata, Acorn)

That leaves me with four tuxedo kittens who have a tentative surgery appointment in seventeen days, so I will be stuffing them with food at every opportunity to maximize their chances of being big enough by then.

My publishing schedule has been a little bare this year, with just one omnibus (Penelope Standing Unleashed) and one new book (Theoretical Magic). But I'll have a couple of books out in the first quarter of next year, so it will even out.

One of the reasons I only had one new book out this year is that I narrated an audiobook (Shift Happens — that's the Audible link since that's what most people use, but it's also available from Kobo and Spotify and maybe even your library), which was a monumental undertaking. Now that it's done, I'm really happy with it and I learned a ton, both about narrating and writing. But it took me a lot more time and effort than I had planned.

Anyhow, hello, and welcome back! I can't wait to see what everyone else is blogging about this year!

When Kittens Go Bad

With ten bottle babies in the house currently, pretty much every time I turn around it's time to feed a kitten. But it does mean that I have an abundance of kitten photos at the moment.

This kitten is actually adorable and sweet. I still think this image is funny.

Is it spooky? Meh.

As Long as it Works

I may have achieved either peak redneck or peak MacGyver over here. Or possibly I am just a cautionary tale about idiots owning a home.

Anyhow, I had my kitchen faucet replaced a few years ago. I was going to do it myself, but then I couldn't get the valves to turn off under the sink and my plumbing rule is that if the water to the house has to be shut off, I'm paying someone else to do it.

The problem is, the faucet I used to replace the previous one (which was literally crumbling to pieces, was a cheap piece of crap. After a couple years, the handle got loose. Then it started falling off, which is a pain because I had to slot it back on the stem while the water was running.

View of the underside of the handle

But I lived with it like that until I realized I couldn't leave it like that when my petsitter came by. That was when I looked more closely and realized I could shove an allen wrench through the hole in the handle and tighten the screw that holds it on the stem. Problem solved.

... for about six months. Then it got loose again. I ignored it for a few months, then tightened it again. And so on. But lately the time between tightening and falling off has been decreasing to days, so I looked more closely — the metal ring that fits on the stem is broken. So every time I tighten it, it just opens a bit more.

View inside from the bottom

Ideally, I would replace the faucet, but I'm between plumbers at the moment and I don't feel like dealing with it. This is my solution. How often do I need to use my socket wrench anyhow?

New handle created by parts from my socket wrench set

It works great.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 9

Once again, I'm realizing that I was influenced by Lisa Frank during my formative years, so asking me to produce "spooky" is like asking a neon dolphin to solve a Rubik's cube. I mean, it could happen, but it would probably be by accident.

Today I tried to draw a pumpkin. A four-year-old can draw a pumpkin, but I required an artistic filter to fix what I'd done. Then I tried to make it fun. Is it spooky? Not so much. But I kind of like it.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 8

Today I was just playing around in GIMP. This wasn't what I intended to make, but I like it better than what I had planned.

Is it spooky? Well... I think I would call it more "atmospheric". Click on it to make it bigger — that improves it.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 7

I decided to go back into DazStudio today and try to get the dForce stuff to work. The idea is that you have clothing with certain values set such that it hangs naturally on the 3D model when you tell it to run the simulation.

Since non-hooker clothing is rare in Daz, I was excited to see a nice shirt. It's a little hard to see here, but it's what's known as a "batwing shirt".

The problem is, when I put it on the 3D model it looks like a puffy jacket before I run the simulation, and when I run the simulation, it goes completely off the rails. This is where it was going when I finally killed it off today. The tornado of gold polygons heading off to the upper right corner is the shirt.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. Oh well.

Anyhow, while I was in Daz Studio, I messed around with some options and made a green person. I should have worked on the lighting a bit, but I'd already wasted a bunch of time on that shirt simulation, so... Yeah.

Is it spooky? No, not unless you are frightened by my complete lack of perfectionism. Maybe I'll re-render it someday with lighting that doesn't wash out all the features. But dang, those trousers look great!

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 6

Looking through some old photos for Halloween inspiration, I found one I'd taken last year of my dog next to a stack of pumpkins. They're at a bad angle, but I grabbed them anyhow, added some sparkles and some swirls, and there you go.

Is it spooky? No. I think it gives more of a cozy vibe, but I'm okay with that.

It's good to have a reason to practice, but I think we've confirmed I'm really not into the horror/spooky vibe.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 5

For today's terrifying image, I wanted to once again to attempt blood drops from text, this time using this tutorial. After much screwing around trying to create a new dynamic brush option, I mostly figured things out, though I couldn't find a good font within GIMP.

(Do I understand how fonts are made available on my laptop? Absolutely not. It's one of the few reasons I haven't booted Adobe InDesign to the curb yet — I know I can use any font available there for commercial use and it has a bazillion fonts. Just not $23/month's worth.)

Anyhow, the "Run away!" was fine and all, but as an image, it was kind of boring. And then I thought: Kittens make everything better! I find this hilarious.

I could have blended the kitten image better, but that would have involved getting out the tablet and I was too lazy. The whole thing is still funny anyhow.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 4

Be proud of me — I dropped by the shelter to pick up food for my (eight) foster kittens and did not pick up any new kittens, despite the foster coordinator sending out two emails today. Turns out this was a good thing because one of the litters later turned out to have ringworm and while I'm not against taking care of ringworm kittens, it's not a good surprise.

For today's image, I was playing around with gradients. Again, is it spooky? Hm. I think this may be the closest I've come to a Halloween theme. So I'm going to say: YES!

(Purchased image: DepositPhotos 376866310)

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 3

 Today I did sort of the same thing I've been doing for the past two days, but this time I followed the directions... Well, not entirely. But I got within the 50th percentile, which for me is amazing.

Is it spooky? Not really. But it's black and white — does that count?

I've also started doing an alphabet in smoke, but it's not done yet, so I threw this together instead. Enjoy day 3 of Horrordailies!

(Original image is from DepositPhotos 10846953.)

In other news, I have five blobs sharing my office and they are pretty cute.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 2

 It's day two of Horrordailies. This one is better than yesterday's, but that's not saying much...

Anyhow, this uses an image I purchased from DepositPhotos (376866310). The background was created using Hurl noise with added sparkle.

I think this smoke fade technique works better with a close-up of a head, but I'm trying to use images that I already own.

Random semi-spooky "art" - day 1

Okay, so October is Horrordailies time. But I'm not really into horror. Or spooky things in general. Or even pumpkin spice.

But I'm willing to use this as an excuse to play around with photomanipulations because I got some new digital pens that imitate smoke and I'm still working out the best ways to use them. So why not?

This image is objectively terrible, but I like the vibe. So there. Day one is done. It can only get better.

Silhouette

My local library has a makerspace on the first floor with a bunch of hobby stuff including a 3D printer, laser cutter, and sewing machines. It's all free and very cool and I've been meaning to check it out for the last ten years, but going there on my own without a specific goal in mind felt too intimidating. Also, most of the advertising seems geared at teens and groups of teens are super intimidating. So I haven't gone. Until now.

Silhouette Cameo

A week ago Tuesday, Facebook accidentally showed me a post I wanted to see: the makerspace was offering a free four-session class on the Silhouette Cameo machine and they still had five spaces available. Did I know what a Silhouette Cameo did? Absolutely not. (I googled — it's similar to a Cricut, which I've also never used, but at least I kinda know what it does.) This was my excuse to get a toe in the door, so I signed up. But first I checked and it said the class was for both teens and adults.

Class was supposed to be T, Th at 4pm for two weeks. Half an hour after I signed up, I got an email that due to scheduling conflicts and low enrollment, they were changing it to four weeks of Thursdays. It was a little weird that they changed the schedule an hour after posting on Facebook and the day of the first class, but whatever.

Week One: Vinyl sticker

I showed up, signed in, and was directed through a busy area to a room in the back. I took this picture seven minutes before class was supposed to start. I was the only person in the room.

This was the point when I started to wonder how low the "low enrollment" really was, but I took comfort in the fact that there were three computers set up, so it wouldn't just be me.

The next people through the door were a woman with her two kids — one child was probably less than a year, and the other little girl was... eight, maybe? She could have been a tiny ten-year-old. (I don't know. I'm terrible at guessing ages of kids.) Anyhow, I wondered how much the mom would be able to concentrate while riding herd on two (admittedly really well behaved) kids. Meanwhile, she looked at me and said, "Oh, is this class for adults, too?"

The third person never showed.

So it was me and the eight-year-old. She had the advantage of the confidence of a kid who knows what she wants to do, whereas I knew how to use a mouse and how to press the shift key to get capital letters. We were actually pretty evenly matched.

The instructor, who introduced herself as "Pam" to me and "Miss Pam" to the little girl, had prepared the class for teens and adults, but she's a school teacher and she had no trouble adjusting. She had a makerspace aide work with the girl and went through the software with me and it all worked out far better than I'd expected.

I made this vinyl sticker for my phone case:

I called week one a success and went home to prepare for week two.

Week Two: Cards Psych!

The Cameo can cut card stock, so you can make really intricate birthday cards, and the schedule said we'd be making cards during week two. This time, I had something in mind and I was all prepared when I went to the library, except...

The makerspace was closed for scheduled maintenance.

In retrospect, this shouldn't have surprised me because I had evidence that scheduling was not their strong point. Still, it would have been nice to know class was cancelled before I walked half a mile in 90-degree heat.

Oh well. Next week...

Baking-Adjacent

It's April, and kitten season has begun. What does that mean for me?

It means I haven't had an uninterrupted night's sleep in almost three weeks, the kitten cam has 15 new subscribers (because who doesn't want to watch kittens, right?), and I'm actively believing that brown stain on my pant leg is kitten food. (No, you don't want to think about the alternatives. And it's entirely possible it is kitten food — weaning is a messy business.)

Big Chungus and Elmer are delightful, by which I mean they've each been full of delight when peeing on me during the post-bottle snuggles this week. Did I mention I've washed three loads of laundry this week?

Cute little jerks

One thing I'd forgotten about bottle feeding is what a pain in the butt it is to get kitten formula to dissolve. 90% goes into solution in the first 20 seconds, but the rest refuses to dissolve. And it can't have clumps or the nipple clogs. Trust me, you do not want one more reason for the kittens not to eat a full meal. Your life is already consumed their weights: Elmer requires the milk to be warm, so he needs to be fed first, but sometimes he needs a few minutes to wake up or he won't suckle. Chungus eats more even when he's half-asleep but takes forever. And did Elmer really lose 10 grams overnight? That's time to panic, right? Or wait, is that because he finally pooped?

On about the third day, I stopped doing the Shake Weight(TM) dance in the kitchen with a bottle of formula at 3am and switched to the immersion blender. That was a game changer. The only drawback is I had to prepare multiple meals at one time, because my immersion blender doesn't work with less than about five tablespoons of liquid.

But it occurred to me there might be some sort of miniature immersion blender. My searches for miniature mixers brought a bunch of hits for things that stirred paint, which wasn't helpful since I needed something food-safe. So I did what any rational person does when faced with a question about mixing small amounts of kitten formula:

I asked the people at King Arthur Baking.

Hear me out. This totally makes sense.

First off, these are possibly the kindest, most polite people in the world. Maybe they're born that way, or maybe they just work out all their aggressions by punching dough, I don't know. But it's true.

And second, they know everything there is to know about specialized food-safe gadgets. Like, someone will write in saying their arthritis prevents them from fizzling the outer rind of the stigglefruit (or whatever — I'm not a baker) and the people who answer questions on the page will immediately offer links for wide-handled stigglefruit fizzlers, packaged dried stigglefruit fizz, and a suggestion that coconut flakes could be substituted in a pinch as long as an extra teaspoon of water is added. Seriously. They know everything.

So I said "Hi, this is baking-adjacent (at best), but can you think of something that will do this?"

Upon reflection, I'm not sure why I thought mixing kitten formula might be considered "baking-adjacent". I can't actually come up with a way to connect kittens and baking at all. But I haven't had much sleep lately.

Anyhow, Kat wrote back almost immediately, asking if a "milk frother" would work. See what I mean? I didn't even know a milk frother was an actual thing one could buy, but it is. And they aren't even all that expensive. (Kat also requested kitten pictures, which I was more than happy to provide.)

So if you have a bottle feeder friend, consider buying them a milk frother for May Day. (Don't wait until Christmas. It's kitten season right now.) The immersion blender does a slightly better job breaking up all the clumps, but if you run the coil of the milk frother around the container edges after you blend, it will pick up any clumps so they don't end up in the bottle.

Pick your weapon!

----------

And here are some affiliate links for convenience:

My immersion blender: https://amzn.to/4cZibjf

My milk frother: https://amzn.to/4d4nEoQ

Just a Little Fun

Realized late last night that the 8.1 person in Daz Studio has a slider to make elf ears. So I had to use it.

(When I mentioned that I didn't know what to do with this render I'd created, my friend H. said, "Write a book with an elf MC and her tiny dragon friend, obviously." 

Maybe a short story...)

Less a Disaster?

So I slightly modified the render from the previous post and then messed with it in GIMP and threw a background together and...

I actually like this.

(As discussed previously, I have no taste, so maybe this is unforgivably cheesy, but... meh, I like it anyway.)

I still need to ruin it with the typography, but I think this is what I'm going to go with.

Creating a New Disaster

I've been working on narrating the audiobook for Shift Happens off-and-on for the last few months. Let me tell you, this is the first time in my life that I've been really sorry I've never acted in anything. But that's not the point of today's post.

It occurred to me recently, that I need to have a cover for the audiobook. I have a cover for the ebook:

It's fine, but

1. Audiobook covers are square instead of rectangular (because of course they are, dammit), which means I would need to go back to the original designer and pay another $60, and
2. I really wish the dragon on the cover didn't look quite so much like a demon (but not so much that I'm willing to pay an artist to do it differently).

I've learned some stuff in the last few years, so I thought I'd make a stab at creating a new cover. It's very probable that I'll give up and just pay the $60 to get the square audiobook cover, but why not try a few things first?

So I bought a dragon. I went with the Millennium Dragon instead of the standard DAZ Dragon 3, because

1. The Millennium Dragon is $20. The other one would have ended up being about five times that after I added in all the other stuff I'd need so it wasn't pure white.
2. I just didn't like how demon-like the DAZ dragon is. I'm looking for more of a friendly dragon vibe.

I did a rough version of the render today to see how it would look and got this. (Pretend there's a background.)

I wasn't worried about the dang hair (which I've struggled with in DAZ before) because I knew I wanted to do a face swap. Have I ever done a face swap? No. But how hard can it be? I also made the dragon's eye blue so it would stand out more.

So this is my rough and dirty first version:

Things I want to improve in DAZ:

1. Add gloves so her hands don't look so weird.
2. Add a background (Maybe? Maybe I should just add a bunch of fire and fog afterward, similar to what's going on in the current cover.)
3. Change the lighting so it's coming from the left, just like the face
4. Figure out how to get rid of the bleb on the dragon's nose
5. Maybe move one leg forward on the dragon?

I'll need to do a bunch of post-processing in GIMP, but I need to get the render stuff right before I do that.

Sure. I can totally do this.

Day 29: Bad Magic

Welcome back to Thingadailies.

If I were plotting Thingadailies, I would be ending on a high point — maybe an image that showed off all the skills I've learned this month. But no. I'm ending the month with something random, which is totally in keeping with previous Thingadailies.

After trying to find something I wanted to do, I settled on this tutorial on Glowing Magic Effects, which would be practical for me to learn. Unfortunately, I wasn't really in a "follow the directions" sort of mood, and also, it turns out I have no idea how to determine the saturation of a color. So I diverged from the tutorial pretty quickly.

Still, it was kind of interesting, so I'm leaving it here. (Also, I have to post something.)

Step 1: Draw the basic shape with a color that has 50% saturation.

Or, if you're me, ignore that thing about saturation because it's a word that doesn't really have any meaning, and pick a color and draw a shape.

Step 2: Sketch out the curves so it looks more smokey

Step 3: Increase the saturation and add highlights.

The interesting thing here was switching the pen mode to "dodge". Also I had started messing with colors by this point.

Step 4: Ignore the tutorial and start adding random colors.

Does it look like a stream of magic? No. Did I follow the tutorial? Also no. But I did end up with kind of a cool swirled thing.

That's it for Thingadailies! Join me next year!

Tip of the day:

Switch the pen mode to get different effects. Dodge is a fun one.

(Just added the tags and it turns out the "Not following directions" was a tag that already existed. Excellent branding, T!)

Day 28: Northern Lights

Welcome back to Thingadailies. Today I decided to follow this tutorial on creating northern lights.

Step 1: Find a picture of the night sky

DepositPhotos is my friend here. (Depositphotos_243388432)

Step 2: Add a purple gradient as a background to the northern lights

The first time I did this, the purple disappeared when I switched the layer to overlay mode. I ended up desaturating the original picture and then adding the overlay. (Was there some other way to do that? I don't know.)

Step 3: Add some green

In this step, I used a brush with the jitter turned up so it gave me a bunch of somewhat random blobs.

Step 4: Linear motion blur

For whatever reason, I couldn't get the linear motion blur to work until I resized the canvas to something smaller, which was fine in this case because I started out with something huge — I resized it down to 3500x2500 pixels. It started out as 11850 × 7908. But still, I'm not sure why GIMP just didn't do anything with the linear motion blur instead of... crashing or something obvious like that.

You can see things are starting to take shape.

Step 5: Repeat (on different layers) those steps for a couple other colors

Step 6: Firm up the lower edge

Step 7: Warp it

Yes, this is where GIMP really falls down. So I moved into Photopea.

(Why didn't I use Photopea from the start? Mostly because I'm familiar with GIMP. But also because Photopea has a bunch of moving ads on the side and I'm too cheap to pay $15 to make them go away for three months.)

After warping it, we did another linear motion blur, this time horizontally, in order to get rid of the lines.

I think I switched the layer combination to "hard light".

Step 8: Repeat

Copy the layer a couple times, warp the layers, and change the opacity to make things blend.

And there we are. Northern lights!

I think I could have blended the lower band of light with the green band a little better, but it's a decent first try.

Tip of the day:

To warp in Photopea, Edit->Free Transform, then click the Warp button on the upper right.

Day 27: Everything is Better with Glitter

Welcome back to Thingadailies. We're currently working on a version of this Cat Butterfly Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial.

Today we're going to finish this image and prove that everything is better with glitter!

When we left off yesterday, Sabrett was facing the dragon:

Step 1: Get some glitter/sparkles

(Yeah, I went ahead and spent another $0.33 on this. Trust me, I'll use it again.)

Step 2: Use the "screen" option to infuse the sparkle layer into the image

I spent twenty seconds looking up what "screen" actually does, found the equation that explained it, and decided I would just accept it pulls bright things in and makes them brighter. We ended up with this:

Step 3: Create one visible layer and change the "camera raw" settings to make it look better

Okay. So for the most part, GIMP contains nearly every feature found in Photoshop. But this was one of the exceptions. It looks like I could download some filters to do this. Honestly, if I knew what I was doing, I'm sure I could do all of it through the other features already available in GIMP.

But today I saw a link to Photopea — a free Photoshop analog that runs in your browser — and I wanted to try it out. So I exported my file as a .psd file and pulled it into Photopea. I'm pretty impressed with how responsive it is. And it had most of the "camera raw" settings that were used in the tutorial.

Anyhow, I increased the temperature and contrast and it looks very spiffy. I'm calling it good.

It would look even better if I'd started with a less blurry kitten picture, but we can't have everything.

What should I do for the next two days? I'll wander through some available tutorials and see what I can find...

Tip of the day:

To get the sparkles to shine, use the "screen" option.