Gone Fishin’

Heading off tomorrow for my first real vacation in almost three years.

Why so long? Well, right after my trip to Greece in 2007, I began writing full time, taking something of an income cut to pursue my dreams. Soon after that my wife got pregnant and lost her job in the same month. Between the pregnancy and the baby and trying to keep afloat, getting away hasn’t really been an option.

But things are a little better this year and Cassie is finally old enough to travel without too much hassle, so we are taking a week in the Caribbean with another couple and their daughter (who is Cassie’s age)  to unwind. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to it. It feels like I’ve been doing 6 things at once for years on end, and after all that multitasking, I am looking forward to re-learning how to unitask. If I do two things at once on this vacation, I want one of them to be sipping a frozen margarita.

I have some great books to read on the beach, including Nights of Villjamur by Mark Charan Newton and Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes, both of which are not yet released here in the States, but I have all my cool author connections now and pulled some strings. I’ll have my iPad and can write if I want to, but I doubt I’ll do much more than a blog post or two if people continue to submit entries to the Warding Contest.

Speaking of which, here are the last of the pending entries, the first from Dave in the UK:

Dear Peat,

I follow your peephole in hopes of scrabbling information on the daylight war and the painted man movie (is that still happening??) I usually ignore these kind of art contests because honestly I’ve never liked art and it has never liked me. However I was playing a game (Aion) and was sucking at it and I thought to myself: ‘if only I had more DPS (damage per second)’, but all my buffs etc were already up and my gear was already as good as it was gonna get and so I thought: ‘If I can’t improve my gear, or my spells, I could improve my avatar’.

This lead to a quick new character customisation of what I imagine Arlen to look like, going off to an area where other players would not scoff at my posing and self named ‘Deliverer’ and then posing while taking screenies. I settled on a screenie of my toon pointing at the screen; used paint shop pro to erase the index finger and reform it into a fist, while also recolouring the robes to the brown priest robes I imagine Arlen in; and finally got some wards I had left over from my painted man video and inserted them.

Chances are I won’t log onto the Deliverer again but hopefully they are character transferable, funnily enough the names Arlen and Arlenbales were already taken, go figure.

From Dave

The next entry came to me in the form of a link from Google Alerts, pointing me to the blog GRRuMblers, which is apparently dedicated to being mad at George RR Martin for taking a long time writing his next book. My thoughts on that topic are well documented, so there’s no need to get into them further here.

Blog writer KrKreuk did a post about the warding contest in which she put in some pretty funny entries:

Pictured here is a brave man carefully applying Water and Swamp wards to our ocean’s buoys.  These buoys are meant to stop the oil slick from reaching our shores.  All that is required is the warding of the existing system of buoys along our coasts, and the oil (as well as the oil demons) will be stopped in their tracks. In fact, I don’t know why BP hasn’t begun implementing these, as the threat of oil demons is real along our coasts:

When someone asks you what time it is, you usually have a pretty standard response: look at your watch and tell them what it says. You can even tell them 5 minutes ahead (or behind) if you’re feeling obnoxious.

However, with one of these special Warded Watches, you have another option to the question “What time is it?”

“TIME TO KICK SOME DEMON ASS!” It doesn’t even matter what time of day it is.

Now water resistant up to 100 feet, as well as water-demon resistant (because of the Water Ward):

This exciting new item found at your local convenience store helps protect you from the ultimate demon known to man; children (and real demons).

Take of this what you will, but the wards were specifically chosen for this item. They include wood, swamp, and palm wards along the base, with a mind ward towards the tip.  At the head there is a lone Bludgeon ward; a man’s last line of defense in dire times when he finds himself abruptly kicked out into the night for whatever reason.

These wards are specially designed to resist the most resilient diseases, as well as prevent unwanted conception.  Consumers will be pleased to find that this item comes in a variety of sizes, so get yours today:

One week left to enter, so keep the wardings coming!

Posted on June 23, 2010 at 4:47 pm by PeatB
Filed under Contests, Craft, Fan Art, Fans, Life, Warded Art, World Traveler
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