First Anniversary

Dear Reader, today marks a first full year of blogging.

A few interruptions,yes, but an almost daily look at the life of a regional theater set designer.  For those of you interested (I see you three!), the "Set Design Process" tab above leads to an almost complete index of this year's set design related posts.

For the really determined Reader, the rest of my general Culture Diary posts - deadly, um, deathless prose on books, movies, museum exhibits etc. - can be found by skimming the monthly archives waaaay at the bottom of the blog.

It's been heartening to see Readership grow - thank you.  In this new year, Design Diary will continue to report to you from the front-line trenches of scenic design.  (And sometimes from the front row of the movie theater too:  War Horse!  Good.  And, from the front row, a very very tall equine.)

New Year's Eve - public domain image.

Happy New Year!  Thanks for reading.

My First-Ever Blog Post

I just ran across this... an old Culture Diary entry on poet John Siddique's blog.  My first.  Kinda got me hooked on this blogging thing.

A Riff on Creativity and Blogs, Tweets, etc.

Musings by musician John Mayer about the siphon-off-the-talent effect that blogging and tweeting can have.  Cautionary.  And, ya know, I think he's gotta point...

public domain image courtesy of wpclipart, by Tenniel I believe

I'm struggling with momentum on the next book myself - one on creativity and the design process, meant to replace the hoary standard text used in many architecture and other design studios.  Blogging isn't helping!  

Lunch 'N Learn on Blogging etc.

Rainmaker Advertising held an interesting lunch seminar recently on how to create web-content.  (Like this.)

The secrets of SEO and Cloud words and Tags and other arcana were demystified.  It seems the way to Attract Traffic and Clicks and Stuff... is it just flat write things worth reading.  No escape from hard work, huh?  Along with the resident Rainmaker expert was a very interesting speaker, Joseph Crisalli, who is a writer of historical novels and a blogger at StalkingtheBelleEpoque.com.  For me, it was really useful to hear an author talking about using the internet to promote his books.  The old Author's Platform... all those blogs, articles, interviews on Oprah needed to shill a few books.  More work than writing the book, frankly.

Oh!  BTW  I have now sold my first copy of Alice Through the Proscenium overseas!  My book, you know.  In Great Britain.  It sounds so swanky: "I have foreign sale."  It'll sound all the better when I sell another:
"Foreign Sales!"  Should have made that one book a two-fer deal, huh?

New Poetry

British poet John Siddique has a new book out - Full Blood.  Ours is one of those blogging-acquaintances where we've never actually met in, you know, person, but he seems cool even virtually.  Anyway, here's a poem from the book that I really like:

Thirst
Imagine thirst without knowing water.
And you ask me what freedom means.
Imagine love without love.
 
Some things are unthinkable,
until one day the unthinkable is here.
Imagine thirst without knowing water.
 
Some things we assume just are as they are,
no action is taken to make or sustain them.
Imagine love without love.
 
It is fear that eats the heart: fear and
endless talk, and not risking a step.
Imagine thirst without knowing water.
 
Fold away your beautiful thoughts.
Talk away curiosity, chatter away truth.
Imagine love without love.
 
Imagine believing in the whispers,
the screams and the gossip. Dancing to a tune
with no song to sing inside you.
Imagine love without love.
 

© John Siddique 2011
from Full Blood (Salt Publishing, 2011).

Pimping My Ride

One unexpected result of this blog is that I've started practicing with computer graphics.

Blog entries just look so empty without an illustration!  So, after recycling all my sketches I can, I find myself searching for public domain images - like Tenniel's wonderful Alice in Wonderland illustrations - then tweaking and combining and coloring and...  There's no end to it.

The illustrations are starting to develop a life of their own:  like Alice with her newly pimped ride:

Alice just wasn't satisfied, even after I painted on the name of her vehicle (learning how to distort lettering was a trick).  Not satisfied until she had both colored wheel rims and a hood ornament of the muse of theater painting, Scenosmearia.

(My late buddy Wade Giampa would have laughed hard at "Scenosmearia."  According to him, there are scenic artists or painters and there are "smearers."  I, alas, am only a smearer, but Wade was a beautiful painter.  I remember visiting him on stage once as he was painting - a flick of his brush became a birch tree, half an hour and he had a whole birch forest.  Amazing.  Good painters are amazing.  I miss Wade.)