How did that happen? Wasn’t it just August like two days ago?
I’m glad October is finally here. The area I live in doesn’t start cooling off from the 90s and 100s until around now. It’s finally starting to hit temperatures I can stand.
It’s also not that long until I turn 44, which just boggles me. I think I felt about 44 when I was 16. But now Yar makes me feel about 16, and I’m turning 44. My mental age and my real age never meet. And given the reason for that the last four years, I’m more than okay with that. I just wish I could spend my birthday actually with Yar when it rolls around in a couple weeks.
When I was in elementary school, we learned a song about October. In the years since, the imagery was such that the song stuck in my head. I did eventually lose one line of it, but otherwise always remembered it. It became how I picture the arrival of October.
October is a gypsy lass
Who dances through our town
Scarlet is her flying scarf
Many-hued her gown
On her dusky hair she wears
A crown of bittersweet
Maples spread a golden carpet
For her dancing feet
I found the lyrics online a few days ago, so I have the missing line back (the line about the scarlet scarf). And it inspired me to work on a picture of the dancing gypsy lass. I’ve got the bare sketch down, and a little bit of shading and highlighting done. It’s a big (for me) picture and will take a while. But thus far I am pleased. I’ve had this picture in some form in my head since somewhere around the third grade or so. It’s about time it got realized.
I’m finding as I work on it, and the comic I’m doing, and the sword and sorcery picture that I’m also doing currently, that I have really recaptured a lot of the skill I lost when my hand was injured and I couldn’t do much artwork at all for years and years. I am so happy to be getting it back. It was hard to lose the ability to do much artwork. I not only had the need to create, but had also had a self-identity as “artist” for most of my life. Having that taken away, especially through the abuse of someone who claimed to love me, was one of the hardest things I’ve gone through. Harder in some ways than being raped (by the same man, even). But the way this picture of October as a dancing gypsy is coming out so far shows me that some of the last, lingering effects from that relationship more than 20 years ago are finally over. I’ll always have visible evidence of it – the injuries to my hand are visible if you know what you’re looking for – but it no longer stops me. I hadn’t thought that it was possible to heal from it, but here I am, finally back to being able to do the kind of work I did back then. It has been quite the cause for joy as I’ve been working on projects the last month or so and noticed the vast improvement.
Now I just need to keep the discipline I have been trying to train into myself, and not keep starting new projects before old ones are finished. That was my biggest problem before my hand was hurt. I always had a zillion partially finished things, and a zillion more I was rushing off to start on, because my brain never stops having ideas. I’ve been trying to train myself to dash off a quick sketch of a new idea, rather than run off to start drawing it fully, only to leave that unfinished when the next round of “OMG, I must do this new thing *now*! It is imperative!” hits.
Regina Noctis 