Read "The Bulldog Ant is Not a Team Player" for Free!

I'm happy to say that my short story "The Bulldog Ant is Not a Team Player" is available to read for free over at the Plan B website. The audio podcast, featuring my story as read by Darusha Wehm, is available as well.

Please check it out and let me know if you like it! And if you get a chance, look over some of the other great stories available on Plan B, and consider picking up one of their anthologies-- they're a great market and deserve the support.

Pumpkin Challenge Week 5 (late edition)

A week late and pilfered by squirrels, but our Ogre still makes his appearance...

This week got a late start, though we did get to carve out a fun Ogre. Foster Kid and I ran into a couple issues with the pumpkin, but we still had a good time.

Happy Ogre with a healthy number of horns.

Sad Ogre with stolen horn.

First, the walls were surprisingly thin, which made our plan to use the deformed shape of the pumpkin much harder to implement.

Secondly, our clever, clever plan to use pumpkin stems as the Ogre's horns was stymied when squirrels ran off with the fresher of the two stems.

Foster Kid helped scrape everything down and suggested the stones in the eyes. He picked out and placed the stones in the eye. One quartz and one "just a plain rock".   

The Orange Ogre looks a bit better in person than the photos show. The horns really were a good idea. Too bad Rocket J. Squirrel made off with one. 

Next pumpkin I think we'll go a little simpler so that we can wrap one up and feel like we really finished one off well.  

Bonus Skull

We were a bit bored while watching a movie, so we took the enormous pumpkin from week 4 and carved a skull into its backside.

Our Foster-Kid-Who-Mustn't-Be-On-Social-Media did most of the work on the jaw/mouth, and laid out the overall pattern.  Learned that we're okay to be more aggressive next time with the amount of material we remove,  and we should remember to drop a candle in before we call it done-- it can be hard to predict how the pumpkin will take to the light.  For example, the cracks in the temples didn't show up as much as we'd hoped.

Fun way to spend the evening and a good warm-up for this week's yet to be determined challenge.

PS: the weird marks by the left eye socket are the wounds from where a squirrel tried to make a snack of our pumpkin. We tried to incorporate them a bit into the design, though you couldn't tell in the lighted version.

Next step will be to make it look sharper in daylight!

Pumpkin Challenge Week 4

This week we took a stencil and then modified it to give our own styling.

He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and I drove out to a farmers' market and picked an awfully large pumpkin, along with some smaller decorative gourds. 

We found a stencil based loosely on a Halloween movie poster, then tweaked it to meet the size/shape considerations of our pumpkin.  It was good practice, and really got him thinking about the idea that you're not beholden to the directions, as long as your end product keeps to the spirit of the original plan. 

We also got to make small gourd faces, and what could be more fun than that?

Getting Ready to do Re-Writes...

...and I found some inspiration from Amina Gautier's article in the Glimmer Train bulletin.

“Revision is the kick in the pants that propels the writer out of complacence, jars him from the euphoria that tends to come when he thinks he’s completed something. Revision is the inevitable and necessary faceoff between one’s lazy writer self who defends the good enough draft, “This sentence/passage/description/scene/character is fine the way it is” and one’s higher writing self who argues, “Yes, it’s good enough and it says what I want, but does it say it in the right way? Does it say it in the best way?””

— Amina Gautier

Check out the original bulletin here.

Week 3: The Shaded Stencil

Pumpkin Challenge Week 3

Tried to do this one on a weeknight, and ran into bed-time issues, both for FosterKid and myself. 

This one actually looks better in the light, rather than with the candle burning. I think we didn't shave deep enough in order to get the shading variation we were going for.  But hey, it's not a real Challenge if there isn't a little failure along the way, right?

It was still fun, and we're looking forward to next week.

Pumpkin Challenge Week 2

The Simple Stencil

Pumpkin Challenge Round 2

The foster kid & I took our second stab at a pumpkin, trying out a stencil we found online.  The Walking Dead zombie stencil from PinkRayGun.com did admirably for us.

Although it's not visible in the picture, I picked up a pumpkin with a great stem, lots of trailing strands, etc.  To get around damaging it, we went in from the back. using some dowl rods to hold the panel in place. 

Next week:  The Shaded Stencil

Breaking News

Update on Week 1:  Squirrels ate part of our first Jack's face, so now he's got a little more character.  Sort of like an old time movie actor snarling out of the side of his mouth. I like it.

Eehh... You kids get outta here, see? We don't DO trick or treat in this neighborhood, see?

Pumpkin Challenge Week 1

The Classic Jack

Our household is embarking on a bold journey into seasonal decoration by declaring this the year of the Pumpkin Challenge.  Every week from now until Halloween,  we will decorate, carve, or otherwise fancy-up a perfectly good pumpkin. The first week: the classic free-hand Jack O'Lantern.

For this project I was closely assisted by our foster child. (There are a number of regulations involved in foster care. One of them is no social media images or names for foster kids. This rule will be respected here.)

So anyway, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and I did a tag team on the layout and actual carving. His main concern was that it "look evil".  Mission accomplished, in an age-appropriate sort of way.

In Process

The goal is to kick up the complexity every week and see where we end up by the big holiday.

Next week, the Simple Stencil. 

Pumpkin Challenge 2014

Eight Pumpkins in Eight Weeks

Every year I am filled to the brim with intentions to do cool pumpkin carvings. And every year I end up with a single, moldering, uncarved pumpkin sitting in my backyard, sinking in on itself as its blank orange face mocks my lack of follow-through.

Well, THIS YEAR is going to be different.  With the help of our newest foster-family member, we are going to be lighting up the orange and black to celebrate the season.

A pumpkin a week from now until Halloween, each one more complicated than the last until we culminate an in unholy gorey gourd of terror the likes of which has never been seen!  (Or, until we screw one up, whichever comes first.)

Stay tuned, people. It's gonna get pulpy in here....

With bated breath...

Coming soon:

Pumpkin Challenge 2014