I really loathed this one as I painted it; nothing seemed to be working. But it doesn’t look so bad now. Watercolor, about 30 minutes.

Another kissing couple. Reference used for pose, about 20 minutes.

Listening to Shadows of the Sun always puts me in a sentimental mood. Reference used for pose, about 20 minutes.

Title: Companions of the Night
Author: Vivian Vande Velde
Genre: YA fantasy

Companions of the Night is yet another YA fantasy about a teenaged girl who unwittingly becomes involved with vampires. I like most of Velde’s books, though, and was pleased to find out that the story is mainly a thriller with only slight romantic leanings, and its vampires quite devious.

A teenaged girl named Kerry rescues a young man taken hostage and beaten at her local laundromat. It isn’t until the captors kidnap her family in revenge that Kerry realizes they are vampire hunters, and that Ethan, the young man she saved, is one of their targets. Although handsome and charming, she soon discovers that he’s a natural liar and manipulator. Who can she trust, the hunters who took her family or the vampire who isn’t an innocent victim after all?

There is a lot of suspense and action in this book, and the plot moved at a good clip throughout the story. I really enjoyed Ethan being such an ambiguous character; half the time the reader isn’t sure whether the vampire hunters were so wrong — and neither is Kerry. By the same token, the main vampire hunter Professor Marsala is just as complex; sympathetic yet fanatical enough in his belief to bring harm to all in his way, even the innocent.

There is a final, climactic scene between these three characters that resolves Kerry’s wavering loyalty to Ethan and serves as a final point to the undertones of the power of choice. I’d like to comment further on it, but unfortunately my library copy had ten freakin’ pages torn from it, including all but the first page of this scene. I hope the little dick that did it got a paper cut in the process.

Ahem. Overall, I thought it one of the better vampire books I’ve read, especially for YA.

Rating: B+.

Just an idea. More tree-people.

As a writer, I love words. Playing with them brings hazy childhood memories of building castles out of LEGOs. (Okay, so I still play with them, but that’s besides the fact.) All words are building blocks, raw material with which to sculpt my work.

There are no diseased words for me. Profanities aren’t collected and set aside from the other words like a little colony of lepers. They are stabled with the rest of the words because they are needed like the rest of the words, though perhaps tagged with a note reading “do not use during job interviews, funerals, and most weddings”.

I’ve read arguments and comments that profanity is a cheap, vulgar method of getting your point across. It is writing dumbed down, a cop-out.

I can’t agree with this view. Sure, there’s a problem if a typical sentence is “fucking fucker’s fucked”, but I cannot believe there is a word so useless as to be completely avoided. A proper time and place? Certainly. But useless? A big hell no to that! Profanity is still a part of language, used by people every day. As such, it follows that dialogue may be peppered with it. And really, there are certain properties to profanity that can be manipulated to such great effect. A sort of exclamation point or underline for a piece of dialogue.

I have plenty of characters who don’t swear; I have plenty who swear a lot. Do their potty mouths dumb down their dialogue and my writing? I’d like to think not. Certainly, I take as much care using a “shit” as a “perhaps” or other safer word.

No, the way I see it, the moment I begin twisting a character’s dialogue for the sake of a modest reader is the moment I truly begin to dumb down my writing. What is more vulgar, a few “fucks” or characters chopped down from their true incarnations?

A writer is an inherent manipulator, true. Yet I believe there still must be a ring of truth to the story and its chararacters, even if it means revealing certain unsavory or crass aspects. The moment a reader feels they are being played to, they will sense the artifice and pull away. Every time I’ve been turned away from a book, it wasn’t from a vulgar scene or piece of dialogue but a feeling of falseness, of (for whatever reason) the characters suddenly appearing as the author’s puppets. And that felt more obscene than any string of swearing.

Sketch for an upcoming watercolor. Reference used.

Penguins are fun to paint. And I hate how my scanner butchers pthalo blue. Reference used, about 45 minutes.

Well, it’s the last day of Villain Month, the awesome event created and spearheaded by Elizaw.

Even though I came to a stumbling block with my second villain Darren Hare, participating in Villain Month gave me a new appreciation for those characters belonging to the flip side of the coin. It not only strengthened my own writing, but opened my eyes to the villains of movies I watch and books I read.

So yes, a last hurrah to Villain Month!

Basically finished, except for some ongoing experimentation with the background. I actually really like this one.