Chinese and Charcoal.

Two weeks and counting until the series of posts about the dumbest things I did when I was a kid. Do you want to know how excited I am about writing them? Well, here’s the percentage.

0%

It’s not that I don’t want to write about them. It’s just that I have a lot of other work to do. I had to make invitations for one birthday party in May. I still have to make banners for this b-day, and for a graduation party in June. I have two other birthday parties which I still need to contact the clients to make sure everything is still on target. I have a bridal shower/wedding in August which is on the back burners right now until the bride decides whether she really wants to marry the convict. Er, I mean the nice fellow who had found several stolen items in his car and was on his high speed chase to the police department to turn the things in but got wrongly accused of shoplifting . . . and possession of a controlled substance . . . and carrying a concealed weapon.

Anyhow, I’ve been very busy. I’m still perfecting my manuscript, which means I’m stuckstuckstuck on a part. So to get me u n s t u c k, I decided to draw a picture. No, this isn’t called procrastination, because the pictures I draw always reflect something in my writing. In fact, some of the photos in my slideshow are sketches from my first-first manuscript (you can click on any photo to watch a bigger slideshow of pictures.) The birds on the bridge, the book on the bed, the daffodils, the drunk lady on the table, all of them are in the other story.

Hey! Wait a minute! Where’s my drunk lady? I must have never uploaded it for the slides. Okay, here’s the picture of the lady.



Now don’t get judgmental of her. This was a dark fantasy manuscript. Besides slaying dragons and finding mystic artifacts, what else is a girl supposed to do in her spare time?

Let’s get back to drawing the other sketch. I need four things: a piece of paper, an eraser, a charcoal stick, and a tissue. Yep, that’s all I need. I had the tissue and the piece of paper. But the darn charcoal container and eraser are missing. I think the eraser (the gummy kind you can stretch and mold into shape) might be in my porcelain elephant pen holder. While I go check, here are some Chinese phrases I found on several fortune cookie slips on the desk. You can read them to keep occupied while I’m looking for the eraser.

Fruit: Shui-guo
Pot sticker: Guo-tie
Very polite: hun yao le mow
Painter: Hua-jia
The sun comes out: tai yaon chu lai
Banquet: Yan-hui
Sympathize: tung chean
Very fashionable: hun mor dun
Please pay attention: chean ju yee
March: san yue
No(not) : bu

I’m back. Wow. I sure do eat a lot of Chinese food to have so many fortunes. And not one of them has come true yet. Shucks. Oh, I found the eraser and the charcoal. So we’ll move on to my sketch that will be about the current writing project. Let’s see . . . I’ll put a line here . . . smear the charcoal to create shading and depth . . . ugh, erase that!

All done. Here’s the picture.



Huh? What do you mean you don’t know what it is? It’s a teddy bear wearing a tuxedo while laying on a car hood. No, I haven’t gone crazy - yet. Both parts are elements in the story. I wanted to do something more, like having the car in the background. In the foreground, I would put a playground swing with the teddy bear laying on the seat. Underneath would be a pair of sneakers and a prescription bottle with its cap popped off and several pills lying in the grass. But I came to realize one thing.

I can’t for the life of me think of what a playground swing looks like - I’m talking about the leather strap seats you could jump off at high altitudes and break your neck. Also, I simply couldn’t get the dimensions of the ugly swing right with the car. And I wasn’t going to spend the whole evening working on this sketch. So I decided to just have the car until I realized that I had never drawn one in my entire life. Never. So I winged it. Then I drew the bear.

And I erased the bear. And I redrew the bear. And I erased the bear.

Finally, I had it to how I want it to look like: a dead trophy on the car hood wearing a tuxedo and bow tie and two little buttons resembling bullet holes in its stomach.

No . . . that isn't right either . . . ugh . . . back to the drawing board.