April 2016

Aggggghhhhhh! I did not know that the re-design would kick in today! So bear with me while I clean up the usual minor glitches, including a very awkward Comment button (click onto the READ MORE box at the very end of this post) And now, back to our regularly scheduled chat:

Usually this space is reserved for garden-y painting time, like this:

But today I have two important non-garden-y questions on my mind. The first one is, in regards to the illustration below,

Too Twee?

Twee: excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental. And oh yeah, that (above) is twee, and I should know because I did it, by collage, by piecing together bits of a rose garden and bits of tea table for an illustration that, in the end, didn’t work because it was too damn twee. But I like the way I did the spoons. And the cranberry muffin isn’t half bad. But I digress.

Now here’s something that I think is

Not twee:

That (above) is my Tea Cup Triscuit Quartet (pictured with an actual Triscuit, the delicious whole wheat snack cracker from Nabisco which I mention because I call my teeny tiny paintings Triscuits and I don’t want to be sued for trademark infringement so I give credit where credit is due).

Twee is bad for illustration because it’s lazy. Twee depends on cliche for its effect, and cliches (whether spoken, written, or painted) are way dull — cliches are the easy way out, something for the shallow or cynical-minded to fall back on when they don’t want to put in the hard work of having an original thought. Don’t be fooled by the prettiness: “pretty” (as we all know) can be dead boring. Which, now that I’ve explained it, I’m sure you can now clearly see the twee in this picture:

I had planned to use this illustration in my book Gardens of Awe and Folly, and I was going to drop text into the blank area in the left-center of the picture but, when I took a third look at it, I saw that it was way too cute and dopey and I in the end I saved all you Dear Readers from this eruption of sickly sweet and removed it from consideration. But hey, that’s life — sometime twee happens to the best of us.

My Tea Cup Triscuit Quartet is not guilty of twee because there’s no hot cross bun in the picture. In other words, I don’t exactly know why it isn’t twee, it just isn’t.

You might remember that one-quarter of this quartet began life as this:

But those two cups were boring and ill-composed (even for a Triscuit) so I re-drew it:

And re-painted it to be less boring:

And now, because Dear Reader Nancy S. asked me to, I am giving you all the drawings that made my non- twee Tea Cup Triscuit Quartet possible:

And then we come to this baby:

I know you’ll want to put your own design here!

Side view: Lord lordy lordy, it is sooooo much easier to paint stuff if you don’t have to deal with perspective, which turns round things like tea cups and saucers into ovals which are very tricky.

And so, while you watch me paint a tea cup the painless way . . .

. . . I want to discuss the second question of the day, inspired by The New York Times’ Social Qs column.

Social Qs is a very popular feature in the NYT Sunday paper in which Philip Galanes gives “lighthearted advice about awkward social situations“.

Recently I read this question in Social Qs:

I am a woman in my 20s and work in a small, friendly office of 20 people. My given name is Andie. I have a male colleague, who goes by the nickname Andy. To cut down on confusion, my colleagues started calling me Andie Girl or Miss Andie, and him Andy Boy or Mr. Andy. I hate it! It’s infantilizing and condescending. But I didn’t nip it in the bud, and now everyone in the company uses these nicknames, including Human Resources and our C.E.O. Is there a way to address this that doesn’t seem as if I’m suddenly overreacting?

P1070652

This query was signed, ANDIE, PORTLAND, ORE.

P1070655

As I hope tens of thousands of you know, I will be in Portland, Ore. on May 5 and 7, and I would like to meet ANDIE, PORTLAND, ORE. to tell her that I think “Andie Girl” is an ADORABLE nick-name, but I won’t because I totally agree with Mr. Galanes’ answer which is (short version) (long version here), that heck yeah, Andie should go have a talk with HR about putting a stop to this “Andy Girl” business because:

We should all be called what we like.

I love this answer because I happened to have had a recent falling out with someone — a relative, in fact — over this exact same issue! In my case, it’s not about a nickname, it’s about the fact that I’m an identical twin.

I’ve been an identical twin all my life, so it’s no big deal to me. Being an identical twin — believe me — is about the least interesting thing about me, so I hardly ever mention it.

However, when I was growing up, being an identical twin was a huge pain in the ass. I’m talking from an 8-year old’s point of view when I say that I hated being a twin on my birthday and Christmas, when me and my sister were treated as one unit, meaning that we got one birthday gift to share, one birthday cake to share, one Xmas gift to share. . . you get the picture. Now, as a grown up, I have a more mature understanding of the gift-giving situation and I understand that my relatives were simply being cheap bastards so, for the most part, I have disowned them.

But the one thing that still chaps my butt (as they say in Texas) is when me and my sister are still referred to as “the twins“. If I were a singleton, I’d always be called by my own name — a common courtesy that many of you non-twins take for granted, right? But because I’m a twin, I don’t get a name, I get a unit designation, a stupid catch-all, a de-humanizing label, etc etc etc. — I think you get my point, that for whatever reason, I hate it when me and my sister are called “the twins”.

So when a relative recently wrote an email in which me and my sister were referred to as “the twins”, I emailed back, and I said please, don’t call me “the twins”. Thank you.

In reply, not only did this relative answer “No”, she responded “Absolutely No” with a long, angry note about how it’s ridiculous of me to object to being called “the twins”, how it’s the truth that I’m a twin, that she likes it that I’m a twin, she can’t fathom why I don’t like being called a twin, etc etc.

So I gave her the old FU and we are no longer on speaking terms.

The point is that I don’t have to justify it, I don’t have to explain it, I don’t have to come up with a good enough excuse to you; you don’t have to agree, you don’t even have to like it. All you have to know is that I don’t like I don’t like being called “the twins” and say, as any kind-hearted or civilized person would, Oh, I didn’t know that but now that I do, I will not call you “the twins” because

We should all be called what we like.

So the second question of the day is:

Right?

The thing I like about this tea cup is the way it sits on the paper, like it’s an ideal tea cup, or the idea of a tea cup, or a design for a tea cup, a pattern for a tea cup. I think this form would look nice in a trio (suitable for framing), like this:

Each tea cup would be painted with a different pattern, maybe even modified in homage to some memorable cups of tea you’ve had in your travels, like, say, that tea cup with the square handle in that Paris cafe near the Louvre:

Or that delicious cup of Assam with the tea bag hanging out of it, at the boulangerie in the Opera metro station:

Or that nice hot cuppa with a sugar cube and spoon the cafe facing Sacre Coeur:

Paris cafe near Sacre Coeur

The possibilities are endless, and not at all twee.

Before I go, I must thank all you Amazon Commenters for your lovely 5-star reviews. No, wait — I can do better than “thanks”! Remember, I did this:

And this:

The Super Duper Triscuit Quartet Give Away is destined for one of you lucky Amazon reviewers to win (you don’t have to buy the book on Amazon, you just have to review it there, such is the reality of the modern day book biz).

But wait there’s more — WE HAVE A WINNER!

We have a winner of my Monet’s Boats Triscuit and that winner is the Commentor who goes by the name of:

SNAP!

Top Cat chose #72 as the wining number for this contest, and Snap had the guess that came closest to that number without going over it — and Happy Birthday too! Snap, please email me at vivianswift at yahoo dot com so I can send this miniature masterpiece your way.

Another big huge Thank You goes out to everyone who tuned in to GardenChat with Bren last Wednesday to watch me LIVE on internet TV and joined me in my little fake talk-show set and saw how smoooooth I am in front of a camera:

One last thing: If you have a story about how you got rid of an odious nick name, or if you’ve chosen to be known by a name other than the one you were given at birth, please please please let me know in a Comment below. To me, it’s a wonder that so many of us hang on to the randomly assigned name we were given by people [parents] who , let’s face it, have their own agendas when it comes to naming their offspring. Right?

Have a great weekend, my Wonder Ones.

See you in Seattle on May 3! And Portland (Oregon) on May 5! Check me out on the EVENTS page!

And next week, as I have promised Commentor Lynn from NOLA, we will do this:

April 21, 2016

Garden Talk, Because I’m Such A, uh, Real Gardener And All.

Just because I know nothing, absolutely nothing about actual gardening, that doesn’t mean I don’t “garden”.

Why, just TODAY I “gardened” a baby Japanese maple tree growing about six feet from the big old Japanese maple in my front yard (bottle of Saint-Emilion for scale, because we have to be scientific):

And here’s me showing the Japanese maple tree that we “gardened” last year when it was a baby growing in Top Cat’s tomato patch in the back yard, which he re-planted and is now a sapling way back in the woods (yeah, that’s the same bottle of Saint-Emilio there, for scale, because it was still TODAY when I took this pic):

Yes, walking around the yard with a bottle of wine is what I call “gardening”. In fact, sitting around with a bottle of wine is also what I call “gardening”. In my world, you can also “garden” while sipping tea, flipping through a J. Peterman catalog, or otherwise re-arranging the mental furniture up there there in the brain pan.

I am bringing this up because later this week, on Wednesday April 27 I am going to appear LIVE on the internet with the marvelous Bren on GardenChat (chat is French for cat, so you see — I knew that, at least) and you all can tune in and type me questions in real time and we will “garden” together. Youse and me. Is technology awesome or what?!

LIVE on the internet means that I will be on camera, in my house, so I will have to make my “gardening” space camera ready . . .

. . . so I’m going to have to clean up even though it’s not even close to Thanksgiving, when I usually do my housekeeping.

AFTER

Lights, Camera: OK now! Let’s do some “gardening”!

And when I say “gardening”, I mean: Let’s paint!

Monet’s garden in Giverny, by me

Yes, we’re heading back to Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny, this time we’re leaving the flower garden part (above) and we’re heading to the famous lily pond (below):

Let’s start with my photo of Monet’s famous Japanese bridge . . .

. . . and I’m going to point out what attracted my attention, in this photo — something in the background there, on the right hand side . . .

I saw these boats, and the reflections of the bamboo on the water, and the back-lit stuff, and I thought:

Triscuit!

So I take out my “gardening” tools. . .

. . . and I get down to the dirty work:

This is the only time I use a flat brush (below), when I dip it into clear water and swipe over a painted surface to pick up pigment, and leave these streaks of white lines that imitate the ripple of water. Cool, huh?

Now I’m going to use white acrylic paint to paint over those dark bamboo plants in the background. . .

. . . so I can put a light, bright, lime green paint on top of the white acrylic bits:

And this, my Wonder Ones, is how we “garden”:

GIVE AWAY * GIVE AWAY * GIVE AWAY

AND In honor of my LIVE internet debut later this week — Wednesday, April 27 — I am giving away this Monet’s Boats Triscuit! This contest is open to everyone, whether or not you have Commented recently, even if this is your first visit here to VivianWorld!

Just leave a Comment to this blog post, and pick a number between 1 and 100. Top Cat will do his usual random picking of number and I will announce the winner next Friday, when we meet here again and discuss our GardenChat, and whether or not I still do that weird thing that I do with my mouth when I speak, which always looks 1000% worse on video than it does in real life. I also tend to make faces, which I will really try very hard not to do in front of the camera.

Before I go, I must give you the latest picture of Taffy “gardening”:

. . . and tell you the latest in GoAaF news:

Sweet Dear Reader Anne alerted me last Wednesday that the generous and kind Elizabeth Gilbert posted this on her Twitter and Facebook:

GARDENS OF AWE AND FOLLY, by Vivian Swift. I love the work of watercolorist/explorer Vivian Swift (her first book WHEN WANDERERS CEASE TO ROAM is on my personal Top 10 Books of All Time list), so I was delighted to see this new volume of hers, which is a study of public gardens all over the world. As a wanna-be botanical historian, this one is right up my alley. It’s beautiful, thoughtful, whimsical, and smart (and would make a perfect mother’s day gift, by the way).

I got all teary-eyed, and then the GoAaF shot up to No. 1 in Garden Design on Amazon:

Thank you, Maryanne S., for the screen grab. That #1 Best Seller in Garden Design means, I think, that 100,000 copies of the GoAaF flew off the shelves thanks to the wondrous Liz Gilbert. On days like this, I feel kindly towards the whole book making process and I get all sentimental and I think to myself, Hey, it might be worth it to stick around and write another whole ‘nother book. Maybe.

P.S. to Nancy S.: Sorry, but I bumped your tea cups to next week’s blog, but trust me: I made it really special for you and all us tea cup fans out there.

P.S. to Lynn from NOLA: I loved your question, and I will dedicate an upcoming blog post to you in answer, about that missing Chapter 10 from Gardens of Awe and Folly. Here’s a h int:

Have a great weekend, and go forth in awe and folly, my Wonder Ones.

P.S. Re: Monet Boat Triscuit Give Away — As of Wednesday noon, these numbers are taken (so please mind-meld with the universe to choose your own special digit):

April 15, 2016

Beyond Bourbon. As in “Street”.

Ah. . . New Orleans . . .

Just got back from NOLA and, as the saying goes, all I brought home was a great big hangover. Or maybe that’s just a saying in our house. And yes, I did find the perfect tea cup whilst I was roaming Chartres Street in the old French Quarter:

This is what the best red beans and rice ($13.00, hold the sausage, with substitution cole slaw on the side) in the French Quarter (with Pinot Grigio in a tea-shaped Go Cup) at 801 Royal Street looks like :

Bowls with herbs displayed on a wide brim = “fine dining”.

And this is what red beans and rice looks like at half the price ($6.00) at the great, old school, down home Majoria’s Commerce Luncheonette in the CBD (Central Business District):

All the dishes are melamine, sure sign of a high-quality dive joint.

Ah, New Orleans . . .

You know what they say when they quote Tennessee Williams:

Photo taken in the Bywater neighborhood of NOLA.

America has only three cities:

San Fransisco, New York, and New Orleans . . .

Go Cup holders on the rental bikes at our hotel. That’s my kind of ride.

. . . Everywhere else is Cleveland. (Sorry, Cleveland.)

And a big Holy Cow to R. Stephanie Bruno, special correspondent at The Advocate, for making me feel like a rock star with her fabulous review of my humble little book, Gardens of Awe and Folly:

And Thank You, Octavia Books for hosting a Wine and Books evening on Wednesday, April 13, featuring Moi and the Little Book that Could.

Here’s me, signing pre-ordered copies:

And here’s me, bloviating about everything I know about writing’ and painting’ and book making’:

Thank DoG I found this great Ellen Tracy top in NOLA, because after four days of living it up in my favorite American city I could not fit into the rather form-fitting blouse I’d packed.

There was even an After Party in the garden of the wonderful Lady of the Roses who you know from Gardens of Awe and folly, Karen Kersting (that’s Karen in the butter-colored brocade jacket):

And for those of you who already know Karen from Chapter 4 of the GoAaF . . .

. . . then you also know about her sweet little Bee, the pup in the lower right side of Karen’s rose garden (on page 70). So I know that you’ll love this pic of them together, and the look of love in sweet little’s Bee’s eyes:

Then it was time to pack up the bags, call a cab, and head to the airport:

I know what it means to miss New Orleans.

A Dear Reader and Commentor asked me, last week, to re-invent the Internet Thing we invented when we did watering cans, only with tea cups. . .

. . . so next week’s post will be dedicated to Nancy S. and All Things Tea. Or Tea-Adjacent. Or All Things Served in a Tea Cup, or All Regionally Evocative Bevvies Served in a Tea-Cup Shaped Go Cup.

Have a great weekend all you Wonder Ones, and roll some good times for sure, cheres.

April 15, 2016

TGIF, Except If It’s Your First Day Back From New Orleans

New orleans

All will be explained. Later. Give me until noon. Because right now, I know what it means to miss New Orleans and also, I know what it means to have a low-level hangover that feels fabulous in the French Quarter but feels totally different when you bring it back home to normal life.

I can’t begin to tell you.

But I will. . . stay tuned. I’ll be back later today.

April 8, 2016

In Which We Invent a Whole New Internet Thing.

You ask, I giveth. Dear Reader and Commentor Marg-o asked if I could put up drawings for the Triscuit watering cans I’ve painted for the super-duper Triscuit Quartet Give-Away:

So I enlarged the waterings cans and re-drew their outlines so they’d be nice and clear, and here they are, for your printing and painting pleasure, both the Before. . .

. . . and the After:

Before:

After:

I couldn’t find the drawings I used for the other two/quarters of the Super Duper Triscuit Quartet,,so here’s another drawing I did that you might like to paint anyway:

Don’t forget to enter the Super-Duper Triscuit Quartet Give Away!

Did we just invent the latest internet craze????? Probably not, because artists can be stingy giving away their stuff. But not me. Right, Monique?

Last week, Dear Reader and long-time Commentor Monique mentioned me and the GoAaF in her beautiful blog — Merci Monique!, and she also wrote about the painting lessons I offer here in VivianWorld. Monique thinks my generosity is the sign of a very confident and mature human being. Ha! I have no idea how I’ve pulled that off, giving the impression that I’m a grown up. Although it is true that, when I bitch and moan at life for making me the Wrong Swift, that is, making me Vivian instead of Taylor Swift, I do use very grown-up curse words, so there’s that in the “mature” column.

Now, you might think a grown-up writer of my, ahem, stature, would wish to be the other famous Swift, Jonathan Swift, but nope, not me. I don’t want to be remembered for my wit and smarts 269 years and counting after I die: I want to be 25 and in Paris and wander rooftops in a gauzy gown right now, right this damn minute.

Did you watch it? Did you see her in the Square du Vert-Galant?

She even sat under the willow tree I wrote about in Gardens of Awe and Folly!

But getting back to my actual non-Taylor/real Vivian Swift life, and to Monique’s compliment as to my mental state, I want to say that I have no qualms showing you all how I do what I do because, to me, it’s not giving away professional secrets. In my opinion, it’s the same as teaching someone how to write cursive script (not that anybody’s doing that these days). See, I could teach you how to form a cursive A . . .

. . . or B. . .

. . . but you’d still end up writing your As and Bs in your own, unique, organic, unavoidable you-style anyway:

Right? So here’s me showing all you crazy individualists everything I know about painting a tea cup Triscuit:

The rotten part of painting tea cups is getting the perspective right, which means getting the oval right. So, since it’s my No. 1 Rule to always start a picture buy painting the hardest bit first, I began with the oval shadow under the saucer, and the oval “tea” in the tea cup. Notice that I shaded the “tea” lighter around the edges: if you’ve ever looked at your tea, you’ll see that that’s how it is in real life, because of physics, or math, or gravity, or something.

Next, I use acrylic gold paint to outline the decoration on Tea Cup No. 1 in the foreground:

You have to use acrylic paint here, because watercolor simply cannot do what acrylic does, i.e., shine. See how it shines when I put it in a raking light? (See: below.)

Oooooooo…pretty!

Anyway, the rest of this tea-cup waiting thing is pretty much an Instagram so here goes:

And DONE. Or, I should say. . .

One – Quarter DONE.

Next week there will be three more from where that came from in order to, you guessed it, make a Super-Duper Tea Cup Triscuit Quartet to be given away in May along with the Super Duper etc etc etc (because not everybody likes watering cans). And Thank you, all you Dear Readers and Wonder Ones, for your kind 5-star reviews on Amazon. Your words are like champagne to me, and you all know how seriously I take champagne.

I have to go now and pack for New Orleans, baby! Because of this:

Wed., April 13 2016 6PM

at Octavia Books in New Orleans, cher!

513 Octavia Street in fabulous Uptown, NOLA

You know what you get when you get three or more New Orleanians in one room? You get a party! Because in New Orleans, every day that you’re alive is worth celebrating!

So if you’re alive on Wednesday, April 13 this year, here’s the deal:

You bring your Go Cup and I’ll bring mine, and we’ll let the good times roll.

Come join the fun and convo about life, gardens, Triscuits, roses, voodoo, cake, hurricane parties, etc. OK?

(It’s the “etc.” that New Orleans does best.)

And on May 3, Seattle, here I come!

And on May 5, it’s Portland, here I come!

And on May 7, it’s Canon Beach, here I come!

Are you in?

Note:I think we broke the Internet. Several of you Wonder Ones have emailed me about not being able to leave a Comment this week, and I am so sorry about that, being as I love Comments, being as they are the Internet equivalent of sweet little kitties purring in my ear. I will look into the problem and try to curse my way to a solution so we can all “talk” by Friday’s post, in which I exceed all your expectations of what a blog can do. Really.

April 1, 2016

To Bitch and Moan Is Human, To Purr is Divine.

Around the time I decided to be an illustrator . . .

Yep, that’s me working on page 96 of Gardens of Awe and Folly, with help from Coco.

. . . I also decided that painting would be a better way of picture-making than sewing, so I packed up my embroidery needles and threads and stashed them away. I stashed them so well that, when I recently got the urge to see if I could still pull off some blanket and stem stitching, I had to wander around the house for half an hour asking myself, “Now, where did I stash my embroidery kit?” before I found my answer: top shelf, upstairs linen closet:

Yes, that’s the same adorable vintage lady’s case that I illustrated with the rest of my collection of old timey luggage on page 123 of When Wanderers Cease to Roam:

You can tell I’m a Capricorn by the way I am meticulous about sorting and color-coding and my embroidery threads:

Seeing these embroidery flosses reminded me of the one advantage that thread . . .

. . . has over paint:

No mixing necessary. You want to make something green in embroidery, you just pick a thread. You want to make something green in an illustration, you have to futz with all its variables. Like this:

That (above) is me watercoloring the flower bed in the background of this (below):

I was stalking the gardeners in Giverny because I like wheelbarrows.

So let’s take a quick digression to Claude Monet’s garden (the most famous garden in the world) in Giverny so I can prove my point. Which is something about comparing paint to non-paint, which might not be the most important point to be making right now when I have so much work ahead of me, digging my way out of the dungeon of being a low-mid-list author with a book not on the NYTimes bestseller list and all but hey, it’s either me typing away at this pointless point I’m making, or me crawling back to bed with a large pizza and a vat of Pinot Grigio and spending the day watching HGTV.

So here goes:

I mix all my shades of green almost from scratch, using just water, Hooker’s green, two different shades of yellow, and sometimes a little black. When I paint grass and flowers, I like to let watercolor “do” what watercolor “does”, which is, technically, “pool” and “splotch”.

I read my first Ann Rule book last week. Ann Rule, as everyone from the Seattle/Great Pacific Great Northwest knows, is the million-selling author of true crime books. What I found out about Ann Rule from reading the Acknowledgments of my first Ann Rule book is that Ann Rule used to belong to a very exclusive writers’ group, made up of best selling Seattle authors.

The name of Ann Rule’s best selling writers’ group was The Bitch and Moan Club. I’ll let that sink in for a minute while I mention here that the more I painted this pic, the more I realized that it’s tricky to paint hunky gardeners from the back, for the simple reason that you have to deal with their butts:

I’m trying to make this guy’s butt NOT be the center of attention in this little illustration, so I’ve ove-laid some white gauche onto the two back pockets on this guy’s trousers in an effort to decrease their noticeability. And then I dabbed in some white acrylic paint in the form of tulips in the fore- and back- ground:

Getting back to Ann Rule, and reading about her Bitch and Moan Club: For the life of me, I could not imagine what best-selling authors have to complain about. But here’s my guess:

That every time they cash their royalty checks the bank runs out of hundred dollar bills.

How easy it is to confuse Dallas with Houston while on yet another all-expenses paid 20-city book tour, and don’t even get them started on how horrible it is that room service at the Four Seasons has dropped crab cakes from their Night menu.

How much they miss Jon Stewart, who was such a huuuuuge fan of theirs that he made those pesky TV interviews almost fun.

*****

Paint-wise, I put in all the shades of rose, lavender, and violet that those tulips needed:

And then I decided to ruin the pic by painting in the box-shaped lime trees overhead:

I was actually looking up Ann Rule’s contact info, to write her a letter asking just what does go on in that Bitch and Moan Club, when I discovered that she had died last July(I use “die” instead of “passed away” or the even more dreadful “passed” because I’m a grown up, and because Ann Rule, the maven of true crime, would not have wanted me to punk out). Merde.

*****

So here’s what it’s like to not-paint an illustration:

First, I spent a few hours drawing some bad sewing ideas until I hit upon an idea that wasn’t half bad, and then I traced it onto my muslin, took a seat (not the comfy seat — that one belongs to Coco), and started sewing:

That (above) is what I can do in an hour and a half. This (below) is when I decided that there was too much of the same dark green thread . . .

. . . so I ripped it out and rooted through my palette to choose some other shade of vert:

The ripping out and the re-stitching only took an hour. You can tell I’m a Capricorn by the way I keep time sheets on all my projects: in total, I spent 8 hours sewing this piece. And then it came time to wash out the pencil marks . . .

. . . and to rinse out the soap and dry it out a bit . . .

. . . and to fetch my handy re-useable canvas board. . .

. . . to staple and stretch the piece out to dry:

I have learned the hard way that it makes life easier when you make stuff that fits into standard-size frames. So the last step was to make sure that the piece would still fit in a standard 8 x 10-inch frame:

And that it would also fit into a standard 18 x 24-centimeter frame:

And this is how it looks when all is sewed and done:

Point made.

And you can tell that I’m a Capricorn by the way I can complain about anything. Just yesterday I was complaining about daffodils. Too yellow, and for me, yellow flowers lack sophistication.

Hey, I just thought of something real that best selling authors can bitch and moan about:

How it’s you million-selling authors who prop up the entire publishing industry but it’s that no-show Thomas Pynchon and his crap “literature” that gets the MacArthur award.

See, Seattle best selling authors? I get you! (please please pleeeeeeeeese let me come to your meetings).

Now, before I bid you all a bon weekend and un-cork the Pinot, I have something very important to share with you:

That’s supposed to be the French Quarter.

At 6:00 pm in New Orleans, my favorite American city, on April 13, I will be at Octavia Books talking about going forth in awe and folly. I’ll probably also mention something about cats; how to get published even though you are not famous and you write odd, illustrated, memoir-ish books; and The Secret of Life. The Lady of the Roses, Karen Kersting herself, will be there!

Octavia Books is a great independent bookstore known for its happy events, so I know we’ll have a good time! I am soooo looking forward to hamming it up in my favorite American city!

In conjunction with this event, the wonderful Susan Larson, New Orleans’ first lady of the literary scene, interviewed me for her radio program, The Reading Life. Don’t worry, I kept my blabbering answers short, and I only got lost on one question Susan put to me (about finding solitude in a Winter garden) but I was assured that, as our talk was being taped, that the producer would go back and edit out all my stupidity (head bowed in prayer). Stay tuned.

Book events are always such fun for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll be traveling to Seattle in the near future, so I’ll let you know the details as they become available. And no, it’s not because I’m stalking anyone — I went to Seattle and Portland for my first book and I really, really need to get together with all you Wonder Ones of the Great Pacific Great Northwest.

P.S. It’s Wine O’Clock chez moi and I’ve got the nightly news from NPR on the radio and oh dear DoG, I did not know until now that it was April Fool’s Day, until I heard the usual, painfully lame April Fool’s Day joke news item. Please, NPR, I beg of you: don’t try to make funny. You’re too nice, and humor is all about having a slight mean streak.

Thank you.