So you filled your hands

I am taking a break from a serious apartment-scouring, which is revealing two things to me: one, I have an inane number of weird little things that don't really go anywhere, and two, I cultivate dust bunnies like nobody's business. I have to do this now, not only because the marvelous oliviacirce is coming to visit in a few days, but this is essentially my last chance to do a thorough clean before December, because God knows when I'll make myself do it during NaNo.

I'm really enjoying ramping up into this endeavor: I find I've been doing a lot of notebook scribbling, and while I'm aware that I'm pretty firm on the beginning of the story and most of the end (though not the very end), there's still this big blank spot in the middle labeled "QUEST" in my outline. I like to think that if I world-build well enough, this will work itself out. (Or I can just fill it all in later: after all, I seriously doubt I'll have a satisfactory middle section on the first draft, when I want to write what I know.) Fingers crossed either way. I see this project as much bigger than 50,000 words.

Every so often, I'll be messing around and realize something. The ghosts, for instance, aren't traditional looks like the person in life but translucent. They're masked; they're disguised; they've been made into symbols. I got this because of happening on Betsy Walton's work on Etsy. Her prints look like something from a mindmeld between '50s and '60s surrealist animation (you know, like the hyper-abstract backgrounds from shorts about spacemen or Precambrian science) and William Blake.