Colors!

The new curriculum has this book. Beautiful watercolors for each color. The preschoolers had fun finding the antelope on every page.

Trailer 1

I had an idea for some connected short stories that I was thinking I could try to hammer out for Nanowrimo. As usual though, as soon as I had some background characters for the main one to bounce off of, I fixated on them instead. It happened with the Besnicks. Marco and Yvette are the son of the trailer park landlady and the local tattoo artist, respectively. I got a friend who does research help me see what sort of imagery would be appropriate for them. Marco's grandparents came from Rimavska Sobota and Yvette' s great-great grandparents are from Haiti, but she's closer to her heritage than he is.

I tried to base their faces on Jennifer Hudson and John Leguizamo, but I don't think they look much like them. Marco was smitten at first sight with Yvette. He courted her with Victorian flower language, going to the tattoo parlor with symbolic flowers. He would tell her what they meant while she tattooed them on him. It didn't seem like he was getting anywhere until he realized she had tattooed on a rose leaf that he hadn't asked for . He had to look it up, but a rose leaf turned out to mean 'you may hope' and that was it. Marco had always been a mama's boy and pursuing a girl she didn't approve was the first time he had ever gone against her. Yvette got the blame for that, of course, but she let Marco name the twins after mom-in-law's parents and that soothed a lot of it. First draft of tattoo ideas for Marco before I got the idea to group the flowers into the skull image.

Starting Again

New year and soon a new job and I would be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about both. The first book of the year is So Dear to My Heart by Sterling North. Disney made a really sappy movie about it once upon a time, but I had already read the book before I saw it and was very disappointed. The movie doesn't have all the intrigue and otherworldliness of the Cat Hollow folklore that you get in the book. Most of the background plot was ignored to focus on the cartoon farm animals and the kid playing Jeremiah was working really hard to make sappily cute faces. Disney sugarcoated over a lot of Granny's hellfire and brimstone and her fear of anything outside her own little patch of a farm. It skims over how miserable Jeremiah was too, with nothing of his own, not even the truth about his parents, and always the threat of Granny taking what he does have away. (first the calf, then the lamb, the trip to the fair, the story of who his parents were and what happened to them.) The book is better. It brings the tiny little town and all the ghosts and legends it holds to life. There is more history and mystery and darkness and light in the book. The movie's cute enough, in a forced way, and I know that it's Disney and intended for kids, but I read the book when I was in grade school and really enjoyed the more complex story. Cartoon lambs are cute and Burl Ives can sing a little ditty with the best of them, but they are nowhere near as interesting as lovers running into fires to save each other, and ghostly violin music played by a mute hermit, a tree growing from the grave of the woman Granny thought was a witch, and all kinds of old mountain lore. It's just better.