Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

According to my big list* of holidays, today is a holiday that's very near and dear to my heart. Not quite as near and dear as Virus Appreciation Day (October 3rd), Waiting For The Barbarians Day (November 4th), or Cuckoo Warning Day (June 21st), but still both near and dear.

Today is Australia Day.

Today we celebrate the fact that Australia exists, the fact that Australia is full of things that want to make us all die, and the fact that Australia pretty much hates the human race. Specific things to celebrate about Australia include venomous snakes, spiders the size of dinner plates, marsupials, really interesting money, the koala (which will totally rip your face off if you poke at it), and the cone snail, which is the size of a man's thumb and can kill you extremely dead. This is why you do not fuck around with the native wildlife of Australia.

Tonight I will continue my celebration by watching several episodes of H2O: Just Add Water, an Australian teen sitcom about three girls who wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time and wind up getting turned into mermaids. It sounds incredibly twee, but even Chloe -- the wuss of the group -- would kick Hannah Montana's ass without so much as breaking a nail. In Australia, even the kiddie TV can kill you. And next year, I'll celebrate Australia Day by actually going to Melbourne, Australia, for the glory of WorldCon.

Thank you for existing, Australia! Today is your day. Your venomous, deadly, kicking-your-ass, being eaten by koalas day.

Hooray Australia!

(*I seriously have a holiday for every single day of the year, and sometimes more than one. Because the world needs more to celebrate.)

And now, my third set of art cards. The thing about art cards is that they're small. So going end-to-end on one of them is a matter of an hour, tops, and that assumes I can't find the colors that I want in the big bucket of markers, or that something got screwed up somewhere, or that my TV show got really interesting all of a sudden. So I just keep doing more of these. (In the meanwhile, I've also totally rewritten Discount Armageddon. Let's see if anyone notices.) Anyway, here's the next set of six art cards. Again, clicking the graphic will take you to the larger version.



From top to bottom, left to right, you have my second Grants Pass art card, featuring my protagonist, Mercy Neely; a random picture of me (as drawn for my ongoing comic strip) with a pumpkin; a set of three cards modeled around Jim Hines's The Stepsister Scheme (my mother asked me to, and I tend to try to keep her happy), and my third Discount Armageddon/InCryptid art card, introducing another of our major cryptid races.

My next set of six art cards is finished, and will be scanned tomorrow, or possibly Wednesday in-between 'getting home from work' and 'running for the airport.' Either way, I'm busting ass to get things done around here before it's off into the wild blue yonder, and back to Seattle.

Excelsior!