Hi, everyone!

Some of you have heard of this already, so a brief explanation. For my little sister tencups_i_swear 's birthday the other day (ahem. Happy Birthday, tencups!) I gave her copies of our favourite books, The Thief and The Queen of Attolia. Before I sent them, I printed off some chapter headings kindly translated from the Japanese edition of these books by ninedaysaqueen , and illustrated each heading with a scene from the chapter, and slotted them and some other surprises between the pages.

Those of you who know tencups know that she's a MUCH better artist than I, so my efforts aren't anyway near such entertaining caricatures of the characters as hers are (try http://goat-foot-baa.deviantart.com/gallery/#Queens-Thief ) but here they are!


( The Thief illustrations )
( The Queen of Attolia illustrations )Tons of thanks (and international cookies) to everyone who contributed to the present, and also to the people whose work I used without warning them, namely peggy_2 (for the original Japanese photos) and ninedaysaqueen . Also, thanks to thelasteddis for her very helpful feedback on the pictures. She'll have noticed that I didn't take her advice, for which I can only defend myself by saying that I ran out of time, and ink drawings unfortunately don't lend themselves to much last-minute revision. But it was very much appreciated :D

Also, I *am* aware that I spelt 'thief' wonky. Mea Culpa!

Dear Sounisians: You won't believe this. 

Remember this post?

Looks like our esteemed authoress has taken a break from 'Eugenides and the Bath Bomb of Doom', upped sticks and taken a stealth visit to New Zealand.

With her knitting needles.



Cuba Mall, Wellington

( Looks like this is the Summer version of the tree cosy ( )
I think this was actually part of the Cuba Street Festival, which was on last week.
</div></div>

I finished my map!!!!!!!!!

Yes, I officially have too much time on my hands, and so I tried to research and map the geography of Eddis, Attolia and Sounis. And tried. And tried. And screwed up drafts and threw them at the walls.
And finally, I have something geographically coherent. Even if the river does run uphill. 

Anyway, I'm going to wait till the results of the song contest on Sounis are up (lol. I can't wait to see who wins!) and then I'll post it on there. I just wanted to celebrate!

Here is a snippet of what the finished map looks like:


Since I drew it longhand and scanned it in, the colours are just slightly off - a bit faded, I think. Ah well!


Edited: Exclamation mark overload, anyone?

Because people on Sounis made some and reminded me that I love wordles. Go here to make some. What you do is just paste in a bunch of text and it'll make a word cloud out of it. And the cool bit? The more you use a word, the bigger it will show up in the cloud. It's very awesome.

And here's one I made earlier:


( Wordles under the cut, so I don't spam up people's flists... )

Hmm, these uploaded piccies are not so awesome. I think I may have to learn to use photobucket before I post any more. Edit: Oh, look at that! You can click on them and it will take you to a better version. Goody :)