Category Archives: Uncategorized

My Book Is Not about Dead Trees

Leave a reply
screen-shot-2016-11-23-at-12-58-34-am

DON’T CLICK ON THAT LINK! IT’S NOT A REAL LINK! IT’S JUST A SCREEN SHOT!

Someone thought I wrote a book about dead trees. But it’s not about dead trees. It’s printed on dead trees! Big difference.

That’s right, The Hermit is a paperback now. I certainly hope that the legions of people who told me they really, really, really wanted to read my book but they really, really, really couldn’t read it digitally will buy it. The ebook is $5 and the dead tree version is $15 but my margin is about the same on either one.

Do you want my dead tree book? You can buy it by clicking on this sentence.

I’m terrible at marketing, but, with much difficulty, I did manage to send out an email blast. The Man will do some more specific marketing of the book when we get back from Thanksgiving, but for now, I sent out this broader email, which sort of outlines all the ways a person could help my career simply by clicking links on the internet. It’s great if people buy things, but they can help out even without spending money. This is what I sent:

Let’s face it: I am hilarious. And talented. And deserving.

If you disagree, go ahead and click on something more stimulating.

If you believe that my work does not suck and that the world would be a better/prettier/more exciting place with more Monica, then I hope you don’t mind taking 5 minutes out of your life to give me a little boost, keeping in mind that I’m a person who rarely asks for help and who has never sent a mass email blast, and this probably makes me more uncomfortable than it makes you.

How can you help Monica? The possibilities are myriad and varied.

For example, you could purchase my contemporary fantasy novel, The Hermit, in electronic or in its long-awaited paperback format.

Have you checked out either of my QWERTYvsDvorak sites?

On QWERTYvsDvorak.com you can enjoy out a visual history of my artwork, including the increasing popular Dragon Comics, which are apparently pretty funny, and even funnier if you already know me.

On my RedBubble site, you can buy T-shirts, pillows, tote bags, travel mugs, art prints, cell phone cases, stickers, and numerous other useful and attractive household items featuring my original design.

Click around and you might see something that appeals to you. If you do, all I’m asking is that you share it with your social networks. Like a page on Facebook, or Tweet it on Twitter, add a heart on RedBubble, hurl it into the void on Ello or Google+ or Livejournal, or email it to your grandmother.  Of course, if you want to buy a hoodie, notebook, or coffee mug from my shop, I’ll be eternally grateful, but if I’m not selling anything you want or can afford, you can still help. Please take 5 minutes out of your life to help shove my work out into the universe and convince Google that my life has relevance. Every click, upvote, and repost counts.

Of course, if you don’t believe my life has relevance, feel free to delete this email.

Not sure where to start? Here are some of my more popular pages:

Comics (I’ve drawn hundreds!)

Funny: https://qwertyvsdvorak.com/2016/08/17/superkids/

Controversial: https://qwertyvsdvorak.com/2015/12/15/the-problem-with-symbols/

Political: https://qwertyvsdvorak.com/2016/02/02/2-ways-of-looking-at-socialism/

Sad: https://qwertyvsdvorak.com/2016/02/03/the-things-you-carry-a-comic-from-my-subconscious/

Designs  (I’ve got dozens! And most designs are available on most products!)

A T-shirt for kids who love My Little Pony and seahorses

Blue morpho butterfly notecards

Dress with a Rainbird design

Golden Barrel Cactus Flower duvet cover

Quick links for the technologically timid:

Click here to buy an electronic version of The Hermit on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Hermit-Monica-Friedman-ebook/dp/B01HAN68L4

Click here to buy a paperback copy of The Hermit: https://www.createspace.com/6729470

Click here to browse my RedBubble design portfolio: https://www.redbubble.com/people/QWERTYvsDVORAK/portfolio

Click here to read my blog:

https://qwertyvsdvorak.com/

If you don’t want any stuff, but do want to financially support a working artist, you can donate directly through my Patreon. Patreon is a site where patrons can directly support artists by making small monthly donations. Even as little as a dollar a month is welcome. Donate $15 more and you can receive a small token of my esteem.

Click here to donate directly to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/QWERTYvsDvorak

All the sites mentioned here are trusted, secure sites through which you can safely make payments.

If you would like to purchase a copy of my Bonnie Jo Campbell Mothers, Tell Your Daughters you can send $5 and your mailing address to my littledragonblue@gmail.com PayPal account.

Perhaps it’s just my biased opinion, but I happen to think that both the real-paper version of my novel, or any of the charming products in my RedBubble shop, would make spectacular Christmas, Hanukkah, birthday, unbirthday, or just because presents for all of your loved ones. Other people buying my work would certainly make a spectacular present for me.

In any case, I wish you a delightful, happy, and whimsical holiday season.

Rawr,

Monica

(Dragon)

Watermelon Quilt Mandala

2 Replies
img045

It reminds me of pie. But maybe that’s just because it’s pie season. 

Here’s a jagged pink Monday mandala, straight out of that time that Laura Ingalls Wilder ate those funny mushrooms after Pa told her not to. Little House on the Psychedelic Plain.

Saturday was my birthday, and I tried to spend it being true to myself, even I had to do it in the state of Kansas, which would not have been my first choice.

What follows is a more intense political-ish essay that I also ran on Facebook:

I want to thank everybody who wished me well on my birthday. It’s my “life, the universe, and everything” year (42), and the day went as well as could be expected. It’s hard to celebrate when your prevailing emotion for the last 2 weeks has been “terrified,” and, like a lot of people, I’ve had to check out from social media a bit. Even though 97% of the friends in my feed have political values more or less in line with my own, it’s still scary. Maybe it’s more scary that way I’m not scared so much for myself, even if I am a genderqueer, pansexual, Jewish/animist/Buddhist/pantheist, because I can pass under people’s radar pretty well most of the time or get a pass as an artist even if I ping as a subversive (that’s class privilege). But I’m terrified of a world where all people are not created equal, and I’m nauseated over what’s certain to be an ongoing assault against the first amendment. I don’t know how to be an American under an administration that’s vocally opposed to the values that, to me, are most representative of America.

It makes me happy to know how many people are mobilizing, how strong the resistance is going to be. We’ll need that power to withstand the assault against human rights that has already commenced. But at the same time, more than ever, I believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that only the ability to build bridges and will save us in the long run. We can’t tolerate bigotry, but we can’t pretend that bigots are not American too. Yes, racists, yes, misogynists, yes homophobes/transphobes. They live here. They aren’t going to go away. They probably aren’t going to change. But they are human beings. They are Americans. I hope some of them can be won over with love. I hope that things are not as bleak as they seem, and I hope that this country finds its way back to the 21st century. Those of us who have gotten this far are NOT GOING BACK. Obviously. You can’t kill an idea. You definitely cannot kill 100s of years of ideas.

I support everyone working to ensure that it doesn’t happen, to mitigate damage. Personally, I’m not very good at in-the-street activism. Just being near a crowd of angry people is kind of debilitating to me, even if I share their anger, but I know it’s an effective tactic, and more effective the bigger it gets.

After 9/11, like a lot of people, I kind of went a little insane with grief and fear, but after a few days, I remembered that I am a fantasist, and that I’m fortunate to be one of those people whose purpose in life has always been clear, and has only become more clarified with the passage of time. I create things–art and food primarily–and that’s basically all I know how to do. And that’s all I can do. And that’s what I will do. And I hope that, in doing so, I remain true to my purpose, and my values, and to the people doing what I cannot. But I can’t abandon a doctrine of love. As a pantheist, I can’t draw a line between myself and the rest of the world. I refuse to answer hatred with hatred. I will stand up for the oppressed and I will oppose oppression, but I will not hate.

The Very Large Array

1 Reply
img_4343

Is there anybody out there? Any pulsars? Can I get a show of hands? So to speak.

Today we returned to a place I’d been through once before but hadn’t had a chance to stop and really get a decent look at: The Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array. This telescope comprises 27 massive (82 feet across) radio dishes that can be moved around the desert on train tracks into different configurations in order to gather an accurate picture of what space sounds like. A computer capable of 16 QUADRILLION operations per second sews all the data together to create images of various sectors of the universe.

This dish was fairly close to the road; the dishes are so big you can see them probably 30 minutes before you reach them. For scale, those concrete blocks on which the entire apparatus rests are about as tall as I am.  The dishes are 94 feet high. For $6 ($5 with the military or AA discount) you can take a guided walking tour of the facility and get even closer to a dish along with some other interesting astronomy related objects.

We also saw a herd of antelope grazing near the telescopes, which was a treat for me, as I’ve never seen them in the wild. Should have stopped to take pictures, since they were right by the road. On our way out they were too far away for a good shot.

Ensomnus, A Wide Awake Wyrm

Leave a reply
img064

Someone read me a bedtime story? Please?

Per usual, the very idea that I have to be up early in the morning turns me into wide awake wyrm, no matter how tired I might actually be. In fact I’m to exhausted to even bust out the tablet and draw a Dragon Comics that’s already written. All I could draw was this armless, legless, wingless wyrm while doing 12 other things and thinking about 27 ways I could forget something important in the morning. Today was really another artistic bust. It took 3 hours to fold the laundry; that takes a good chunk out of a dragon’s day. And soul.

The next 3 weeks are going to be even more unpredictable and out-of-reality than last weekend was. Blog posts may be spotty.

Grayscale Mandala

Leave a reply
img044

I recognize that some of that’s drab olive green but that doesn’t make a very good title.

If someone were to grade me on my commitment to my art for this weekend, I would flunk, but if the grade were for running around like a crazy person and accomplishing half of everything that requires doing: A+. The Man and I are gearing up for a couple big things plus I had to celebrate my upcoming birthday with all the people I won’t be able to hang out with on my actual birthday.

Saturday, The Fox and Ms. Kitty took me out to one of our favorite restaurants, Feast, which is what we did, and then to a Japanese garden where I fed koi. And pet them. Because that is a thing dragons enjoy. And then there was a big party that night, and then we went to another big party Sunday night. And now most of my tasks remain undone.

It’s important to get to gatherings like these, though, because they remind me that there are good, caring, compassionate people in the world, that there are whole communities of Americans who believe in a doctrine of love and will never support hatred, who will actually speak out and take action and defend others.

Diamond Flowers Mandala

Leave a reply
img043

If you look at them too closely, flowers are really obscene.

Wow! I survived this weekend. Tomorrow, my feet will hurt, but walking in the All Souls Procession is always worth it. This week I will finish the Portage Printing comic and create my holiday bulletin board and then next weekend is my birthday celebration with Tucson friends, since I won’t be in Tucson on my actual birthday. It works out like that a lot, if I go to my parents’ for Thanksgiving. However, this will be my very last Chicago Thanksgiving, since the folks are finally retiring, and I will never again have to freeze myself in the Windy City in order to spend time with my family. Most likely I will again have to spend 6 hours stranded in O’hare because the weather is awful, but at least I won’t have to go outside.

I mean, I like Chicago. Between May and September.

Back to the Portage Printing comic. The last page is the easiest for layout, but is taking forever due to the fact that I started it in a style that involved drawing really realistic versions of pieces of audio-visual equipment, and page 3 involved 3 large old-fashioned televisions. But the TVs are almost done, and the images of what’s being shown on the TVs should be much easier.

How and Why by Robert Graves

1 Reply
how and why

How and Why by Robert Graves

This is sort of a repeat, in the sense that I’ve posted the image before, but sort of not, due to the way I started blogging, which was to create 6 months’ worth of posts in a week. It always seems so sad when someone’s just started something like a blog and you go there and barely find any content. So I decided to backdate the entries to make it look like I had been blogging for 6 months before I started publicizing new posts in any way. Consequently, there’s some wonderful content that’s been viewed by about 6 people.

I love this piece; it’s always been my intention to clean it up in Photoshop and, if I can get permission from the estate of Robert Graves, to sell prints. The original hangs beside my desk and has for years, and yet only now I’m noticing a missing apostrophe. There’s a few higgledy-piggledy lines. Ink used to make me more nervous than it does now. It’s weird that the text isn’t straight even though this was all penciled out before inking, and I used a ruler and everything.

My hand is getting better; next week comics will return. Originally I wanted to post a picture of some kids wearing QvD merch today, but apparently it’s not a good time to get permission from the family so I’m waiting to see if I can’t get a photograph of some different kids in my clothes. Otherwise I’ll share another of my favorite Trickster’s Hat projects.

A Fish Is More Than Nothing

Leave a reply
img062

You clean your brushes your way and I’ll  clean my brushes mine.

By doing the bare minimum with my thumb for a couple days, I have taken it from ~5% to maybe 50%, which is an improvement, but still not optimal, so I’m sticking by my resolution to draw no comics this week. What we have here, instead, is a quick painting of a fish I did last after I had painted all those origami fish and didn’t want to waste all the unused paint I had squeezed out on to my palette.

What I’d like to do is more drawing/painting from live models. Seems like the only way to improve. Most artists have a better connection between their memory and their art; I’m still more a writer than an artist, and I can hear/see words in my head much more clearly than I can see pictures, although apparently it’s possible to train oneself to understand things like light and shadows across 3-dimensional objects, even though they’re harder to grasp when you lack depth perception.

Real Paper Comic Books

1 Reply
img_4302

You may not know you want then. You may not want them at all. But I have them.

If you would like to own this one-of-kind, limited edition Bonnie Jo Campbell Comics comic book, and you are unable to travel to one of Bonnie Jo’s readings, or to the Michigan News Agency in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where they are being sold, I have a small number of comics for sale, meaning you could receive this stunning collector’s item and help a starving artist at the same time.

If you know me personally and can come to my house, come over and I can sell you one at retail price. If you don’t know me or aren’t near Tucson, you can still harness the power of the internet. PayPay $5 and your shipping address to littledragonblue [at] yahoo [dot] com. But don’t do this if you are my grandmother, because I mailed you one yesterday.

These are really beautiful, high quality comics, professionally printed. If you’re a fan of Bonnie Jo Campbell, or of QWERTYvsDvorak, or of weird, uncategorizable, literary indie comics, or of supporting people who create art evert day that it doesn’t feel like their thumb is about to fall off, they come highly recommended.

Likability

Leave a reply
electibility_edited-1.png

Clearly, I just haven’t been trying hard enough. I can be more unlikable with a little effort.

The world doesn’t make any sense, does it? I’m more of a random act of kindness and senseless beauty kind of person. That only goes over well in smaller communities, apparently. The first school election I ever ran in was for secretary of the English department graduate committee the last year of my MFA progrm, a position for which I was nominated in absentia and ran unopposed. It was basically a forced appointment because no one else would do the job.

Obviously, anyone who practices as much random kindness and senseless beauty can never run for public office.