Author Archives: littledragonblue

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About littledragonblue

Dreamer, Writer, Artist, Lover

End of the Line

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You may have started out as unremarkable composites of nickel and iron, cast out from your birthplaces and sent hurtling through the cosmos like so much space detritus casually tossed into predictable orbit, but today you are all shooting stars!

Obviously, we went out into the desert to observe last night’s meteor shower, which explains why this comic is nearly 14 hours late, in case anyone actually noticed. It was a really nice display, although being way out in the desert on the other side of the mountains (so that they blocked a lot of the city light) and not even starting to look up until after midnight probably improved the viewing. We have a place we go on BLM land and no one ever goes there. It’s weird that no one goes there, because it’s the best place for a lot of nighttime in the desert activities, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone else there.

Someone joked about what meteors might be thinking, if meteors could think, and I maintained that it would be “AAAAAAAHHHHHH!” Because if you can think, we assume you can feel, and if you can feel, I can’t imagine the process of being ablated while tearing through the earth’s atmosphere is a pleasant one. After a thousand years of hanging around, smashing into anything at high velocity would be a shock. Although maybe being ejected from a comet is heartbreaking enough. Maybe they’re happy to burn up and fall to earth as perhaps a tiny granule of iron. Maybe it’s nice to be grounded again, even if you lose a huge part of yourself in the process.

I need to stop anthropomorphizing space rocks and go acquire food.

Silver Bullet

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I gave up yearning for normalcy decades ago, but sleeping at night would be nice. 

It’s been a weird week.

Yesterday I went to the store to buy my favorite kind of chocolate–organic, fair trade, sustainable, yadda, yadda, yadda–and some angel had left a coupon for my brand tucked into the shelf display! Hooray! But then I ate all the, and that made me sad. Contemplating the absence of chocolate pushed me over the edge. And that’s where this comic came from.

 

Real Smooth

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All I’m saying here is that, if I decided that I needed to shave a substantial portion of my head, I would at least mention it to the person who has to look at my head the most first. 

So The Man stated the other day that, if I wanted to draw comics about more personal issues relating to him, I had his permission. Granted, I’m 100 percent sure this isn’t what he was talking about, but this is what I drew.

It’s not even like I’ve never seen him without a beard–he was beardless when I met him–but it’s been a long time since he’s shaved. It was a rather conservative beard by any standard, but he refused to grow a more preposterous one, and I had grown used to his facial hair, and rather fond of it. And apparently the look on my face when he walked in like that really expressed my feelings wordlessly.

I would like to point out that panels 2-4 demonstrate Kübler-Ross’s 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, and bargaining in panel 2, depression in panel 3, and acceptance in panel 4.

Anyway, he promises he’s growing it back out, and the beard will return before I have a chance to get used to its absence.

Purr or Scratch?

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The dilemma is real, the struggle eternal. Fortunately, the kitty flow chart is a simple one.

Apparently, my genius cat, whose terrible behavior has been documented elsewhere in this blog, decided to swipe at The Man because–get this–he stopped petting her. You can’t win with cats. And yet, just as I’m sitting here writing this, she politely tapped on my hip to signify that she wanted to sit on my lap. So I should change my posture to accommodate that fleeting desire. Which lasted all of 25 seconds. Now she’s sitting on the desk looking suspiciously like she’s going to knock a mirror on the floor. I should take care of that.

In the meantime, you can consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.

5 Tomatoes Mandala

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And then those are olives on the outside, I guess? And some kind of columbine flowers. 

Per usual, my weekend consisted of me compiling long lists of imperative tasks and then not doing them while I messed around on the internet, hung out in other people’s houses, went swimming, and played Pokemon Go. Also spent most of Friday night sitting in a bean bag with Misses Kitty, playing the ukulele and singing.

I’m also reading the Owl’s book, which was just released last week, although I probably read 4 complete and 12 partial drafts of the manuscript before its publication. It wasn’t fresh enough in my mind to write a book review. Soon I hope to write that review, and then there may be a little news regarding where that review will be published, but I’m not supposed to talk about it just yet, and I don’t have all the details anyway.

This mandala is nice and cheerful and juicy, probably hailing from a time in my life where I didn’t neglect my plants for days at a time and instead took good care of them so they remained healthy and bore fruit. Not this year. This year I murdered two tomato plants and sorely abused a couple of peppers.

Should try and take another stab at that logo design. My first was rejected for being too cute. But I thought the original design was too ugly. So we’re shooting for something in between.

Goth Mom Knows How to Suffer

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You don’t understand me! You’re probably not even my real mom! You probably kidnapped me from my real mom! My real mom is probably Marilyn Manson! Or Bela Lugosi!

It’s slightly troublesome to me that I really have no clue where this comic came from. Usually there’s some gamete of an idea–an event, an action, a memory–that spawns each comic. Yeah, there was the sort of goth PTA mom in last week’s cannibalism comic, but that connection came to me afterward. First was just the idea of a goth mom offering an upset kid absinthe and laudanum (the eyeliner idea came later, too, on the realization that even goth mom wouldn’t start with the hard stuff). Then the thought of how the kid of a goth mom would respond (exactly like the kid of any other mom) and then the Taylor Swift thing (her music is just so joyful, even when she’s petty or angry) and finally goth dad, who, naturally, will always assume the worst. Maybe that was a line out of an Addams Family movie or something like that. But what could be worse for goth parents than a kid who listens to upbeat pop?

Not sure what they’ll do now that they assume the worst. Search the kid’s computer for evidence of a Pinterest account? Arrange an intervention? An exorcism?

I happen to know a fair number of goth parents and they all seem to be doing a pretty good job of it. They can dress their kids in skulls and pentacles until they’re about 5, and then the kid turns around and only wants to wear polo shirts or pink tutus or something like that. It’s hard to rebel against goth mom. But goth mom expects your betrayal. She’ll love you even if you become an investment banker or a priest. Goth mom understands that the world is cruel and nobody understands you. Goth mom understands that better than anybody.

Dragon Comics 140

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Or unmelted cheese, I would imagine. Any cheese, really.

Another little slice of life here in Dragon’s Cave.

By the way, the trick to homemade mozzarella sticks is to freeze the cheese after you’ve breaded it but before you fry it. Otherwise, it melts before the outside gets crispy and loses its shape and leaks out everywhere. Of course, some people like that sort of thing.

The experimental breading is basically just pakora batter without the spices: garbanzo flour, water, and salt. Very tasty. Makes light and fluffy mozzarella sticks. Pleasing to children and other cheese-eating organisms.

 

Brave Back-to-School Bulletin Board

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The great thing about this is that, the more you doubt it, the truer it is. Theoretically.

Once or twice a year, my insomnia gets so bad that it comes full circle and after a week of falling asleep around dawn, my circadian rhythms get pushed back so far that I literally miss my window of opportunity for that night and never get to sleep at all. Last night hurt. Probably by 10 a.m. or so I could have slept, but at that point it makes more sense to power through for another 12 hours and get back onto a schedule that puts me in alignment with the majority of humans.

But I had to make a bulletin board! On zero hours of sleep! Fortunately, I had hung the orange background Friday and cut all the letters Monday, so I just had to reinforce the background, space and attach each individual letter, and then get some graphic elements. Due to the no-sleep, walking-around-basically-hallucinating situation, the lion cubs somehow came out half the size they were intended to be but by that point my brain was done. I scarcely felt competent to hold scissors, let alone pilot a car, and I really needed to use the reserve for the driving part, since The Man randomly stopped by, hung out for a while, and then left the Girl in my keeping.

So, I feel like this design could have been 10 times better but I also feel like it’s good enough, and if I get tired of looking at it I can change it later. School starts Thursday in my district (the kids to the south went back last Thursday; the kids to the north, including the Boy and the Girl, start next Thursday). The teachers all seemed to like it.

Normally this is a weird color combination for me. I don’t care for orange unless it’s food and typically I only like secondary colors if they’re right next to their primaries, but it’s just as with the mandalas: I forced myself to choose a different color (orange, to go with the yellow lions) and then convinced myself that purple would stand out against orange, and it really did.

So Many Books, So Many Books

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I mean really, in the grand scheme of things, what’s one more unread novel?

Back in the wild days before the internet (and, not coincidentally, before I spent 5 consecutive years doing literally nothing but studying books and how to write them), reading a couple novels a weeks came very naturally. Now it’s a big deal if I read a couple a month. Even graphic novels start to pile up; there are 2 on my desk right now, that have been sitting there for 6 weeks. I read 2 graphic novel (digital format) yesterday and one hard copy the week before. Tonight I was trying to finish up this very weird Roger Zelazny book I’ve been pecking away at in my down time all month, but I just couldn’t push through to the end.

This week alone, I’ve been sent 2 digital copies of novels I know nothing about, by people whom I have every reason to believe are perfectly cromulent authors whose books are totally worthy of being read, along with 2 hard copies last week, sent by authors I know quite well, of books I’ve already read but need to read again for professional reasons.

A couple years back, I spent about 3 months organizing my existing library, which comprises maybe 3000 volumes. It’s very spiffy, mixing a few different systems to suit my needs (most Library of Congress) and incorporating spine labels so I always know where particular volumes are and can always reshelve them properly. But that work doesn’t do anything about the sheer volume of volumes that keep arriving, covering every horizontal surface. I’ve always been OK with being a person who only reads maybe 2/3 of the books she brings home, but lately that number is skewing even less impressively. Maybe if I stopped screwing around on the Internet and playing Pokemon Go, I could clear away some of this work. But that’s not what’s going to happen.

What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t a comic strip drawing, but rather an actual image of me in my office. Please come dig me out. Bring librarians.

Amethyst Mandala

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The crosspieces look like a Chinese finger trap. Today I learned that the Chinese finger trap has a medical application and can be used to straighten human fingers with traction.

Another weekend draws to a close, and I confess that I didn’t start crossing things off my “imperative to do today” list until one hour to midnight. In fact, this month is drawing to a close and I have barely scratched the list of “things I must accomplish before autumn to justify my existence and create even the slightest possibility of personal success.” Maybe I need a manager.

This weekend, in addition to the above face about Chinese finger traps, I learned that one of the things authors are apparently supposed to do upon uploading their books to the Kindle store is get 25 or 50 people to leave Amazon reviews. Maybe some part of me understood some element of that concept, but it literally didn’t occur to me that I was supposed to be asking random, non-writer friends and relatives to give me 5 stars. In a general sense, when it comes to Amazon reviews, it turns out that it doesn’t matter if half of them are written by your mother’s friends from folk dancing and the other half are by the people your Aunt Hattie played canasta with during the Nixon administration. According to my reading, it’s just a numbers game. So any time I spent thinking about how to ask successful writers for endorsement was wasted when I could have been demanding my relatives do the job for me. Although that might necessitate teaching my relatives to leave Amazon reviews, which wouldn’t save me any time in the long run.

What else…got to hang out with the SFWA crew on Saturday, for another thrilling and productive writing party at the Historic Y. It’s just as glamorous as it sounds.

Oh, August, give me strength. And determination. And concentration. And focus.

And, as always, the confidence of a mediocre white guy.

And if you can’t give me that, please consider buying my book, supporting my Patreon,  or ordering my merch.