Elf vs. ninja death match

[mrissa]

When I let the wee beast out this morning, our outdoor digital thermometer read 2.7 F. Meep. I hopped in the shower early (for me -- I am fond of having long mornings in my sleep-clothes) so my hair would dry so I can run a few errands and walk the beast before we take her on a five-hour car ride. I dressed like a northern girl this morning, tights and a close-fitted ribbed shirt under my jeans and bullet-proof ski sweater. In the tights (which are electric blue) and shirt (grey) and my big SmartWool socks (also grey), I look like an elf. Not a real elf. A theater elf. Still. I look as though I am about to break into song and a little caper. This is not the look we're going for. I put on more clothes.

Single digits mean layers. Negative single digits mean the dog does not get walked. These are the rules.

Yesterday I saw a day-glo unicycling ninja. It was someone clearly dressed as a ninja, with the head wrap and everything, but over top of the ninjasuit he/she had put a large day-glo green fleece pullover, presumably so as not to die of cold and to avoid being hit by a car while out unicycling. Still and all. My wishes for camera phones are exceptionally rare, but rather vehement when they do occur. I thought of you people. I thought you might like to see the day-glo unicycling ninja. I know I did.

There is no actual death match in this post. I just put it in there because it seemed like that was how that title went. In a story I would squint at it and either take it out of the title or put it into the story, but I'm not going to take off half my clothes and go hunt down the ninja for some smackdown, and I'm sorry if you're disappointed by that.

If you have a subscription to Baen's Universe, or if you buy one now, you can salve your disappointment by reading "Singing Them Back." I am very pleased with the artwork. I think it evokes the story nicely, and that's what I'm going for in artwork. Direct illustration is, in my opinion, highly overrated. What I want is for the idea to be evoked. Neither character nor setting are directly representative, but I don't think they should be, because then you get into long discussions of, "Her jaw is wider, no, not quite so wide as that, and that's the wrong kind of lichen completely," and how is this important to the purpose of having artwork with a story in the first place? By which I mean that Karin doesn't look a thing like the woman in the illustrations -- she is a good deal fairer and sturdier and has more jaw and...um...well, the thing is, Karin is quite explicitly Norwegian, and the woman in the illustrations is quite definitely not. But when they asked me if I liked them, I said yes, and I was telling the truth. The girl in the pictures they drew looks like she feels like Karin feels in the story I wrote. Does this make sense? This is not a rhetorical question: am I making sense to you, on the subject of evoking vs. illustrating a story? We refer to them as "illustrations," but I think that way lies madness and the infinite mailing list arguments about whether the dragon on the cover has exactly the right pattern of scale pigment compared to the one in the book. Better to appreciate the way the arms and the head are held, to appreciate the visual piece for what it is instead of trying to make it a direct representation that it isn't. It's like...um. It's like trying to represent something from the surface of a sphere on the surface of a saddle: both are two dimensional, but the curvature of the geometry is quite different, so you're not going to have something exact, so what you want is something decently analogous, reasonably reminiscent, and that is what I have, and so I am happy.

And that is more than I meant to say on that subject, so now I will go do a million and one other things.

Comments

[ckd]

Well, there are the early Vlad Taltos covers with a clean-shaven guy on them. Can't be Vlad; he's called "Whiskers" for a reason....

OTOH, the cover for lwe's With A Single Spell got everything quite nicely, except for the character who's supposed to be an albino. (Kind of the opposite of the usual melanin-challenged cover art character, I guess.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that Easterners were all "Whiskers." I also do picture Vlad as generally moustache-endowed at the very least, but ethnic slurs do not always rely upon individual accuracy.

[ckd]

I think there was some mention that Vlad had grown a mustache specifically because Dragaerans couldn't, but I could be misremembering.

[eposia.livejournal.com]

I'm re-reading the series now and that statement is definitely in there. Vlad has a moustache for at least the first several books (I seem to recall him shaving, somewhere around Orca).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, the bit I forgot to put in is that I might well feel very differently about whether things were evocative in this specific example if I thought pale, broad-shouldered, busty women were underrepresented in fantasy art, but I don't. (The broad-shouldered part for sure in the rest of the world, but less so in fantasy art.) So having someone a good deal swarthier than my character was not a problem in this specific case because I didn't think it was interfering with what the story was evoking. I can easily imagine -- not just imagine but name -- stories where changing the character's ethnicity in the depiction would be offensive. It's just that this isn't one.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

But that's not the same as "did we imagine this imaginary thing the same way," that scenario is just Wrong. No one ever says, "Oh, I know the protagonist is a woman and they drew her as a man, but close enough." Changing hair is also wrong but maybe small, without significant meaning; making a black person white is a major and meaningful inaccuracy.

Hmm. I don't mean that to sound like my quibble is "how large is the change," the key word is "meaningful." There's a lot of meaning, here and now, to having a black person on a book cover. Perhaps there is also the issue that some people read everyone as white. A non-white illustration evokes something "wrong" for them and that would probably be a good thing. Actually I think in general there's a goodness to an illustration that forces the reader to be less lazy or comfortable in their reading.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's just the magnitude. It's also the direction. If you have a character smiling ferally in the illustration of a scene where that character would have looked upset, it doesn't matter if you have drawn the exact portrait of the person the author imagined in every biometric detail.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

In linguistics, a morpheme is a unit of sound that's has meaning, and it's different for every language. For example, "bode" and "boat" are different words in English and are pronounced differently, but in Dutch they would be heard as the same sound. Is there a visual equivalent of a morpheme, so that you could say *this* difference affecs the meaning of a picture, but *that* one doesn't?

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

By golly, that's one heck of an interesting thought. Must play with it.

[fredcritter.livejournal.com]

…I'm not going to take off half my clothes and go hunt down the ninja for some smackdown, and I'm sorry if you're disappointed by that.

Not? Drat! Of course I'm disappointed…

You have the nicest habit of saying well-crafted innocently provocative things … or at least things that get my double entrendre and visualization mechanisms cranked up into high gear. [Yes, I consider this a *good* thing. (Okay, so I'm strange. What can one do?)]

[morr.livejournal.com]

I believe you spoke with my mother recently.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yeees. And I have known you since approximately the dawn of time, right?

If not, you will have to give me another hint as to who you are, or else e-mail me if more hints would be too public for an lj that doesn't seem to have your name attached.

[morr.livejournal.com]

I believe I remember being in a very small group of advanced readers with you in grade 1, so yes.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yep. Hi, you!

[morr.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'll attempt to email when I get to the office. Typing with a toothbrush hanging out of my mouth at the moment.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

What happens when the dog doesn't get walked? Where does the dog do her (none of your) business? :) Inside?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The dog does most of her business out in the backyard, not on walks. Remember, we live in a Midwestern suburb, not a coastal city -- we have a third of an acre, with Trees.

The main point of walks is not to let the dog excrete; she can do that in the backyard. It's not even to run energy off her; we can do that with the laser pointer (a.k.a. Red Dot). It's that she's a very smart dog and needs different things to think about once in awhile if she's going to stay out of mischief. So what happens when the dog doesn't get walked is that she's much more likely to drive us crazy running around barking at things and stepping on our heads and trying to gnaw things that aren't hers and generally being a PITA.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Why ... why did I not think of a YARD?

@_@

Been living here too long.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It'll warp your braaaaaain.