SheepSlave

Not literally, of course! But between some seriously annoying technology problems (99.9% due to my computer ignorance) causing me to fall behind, and me frying endless brain cells as I try to finish typing up six 22 page comic scripts for my pretend mini-series... I have not done well with "Intro to Comic Book Art." But that is no judgement on the class or the instructor. It's alllll me and my wretched luck lol!

I think what I need to do is back off of art for now and focus on this 6 issue mini-series comic script. This is a continuation of what I have been learning in the "comic book writing" classes at Comics Experience. Since I am a hands-on learner I am writing this as if I had the goal of submitting it to a publisher and for the express purpose of learning by doing.

Soon this beast will be typed up and ready for serious revisions. I am utilizing Comics Experience's brilliant service of hiring one of their various professional comic book creators for a "one-on-one" critique session. They sell these in 3-hour packages for what I believe is a really good price.

There are no free lunches in life! If I am ever going to make it as an artist and a writer then I need to invest blood, sweat, tears, and also money towards learning the actual technique (Minor detail!)

Phhhhpppt I'm so tired I can hardly type. We have a new puppy and she is sound asleep on her cushion - and obviously dreaming of chasing chickens and barncats from the looks of her legs going 100mph lol!

I will share my mini-series script after a few more revisions. And I have not given up on art, I am just going to have to focus on this first, get it finished, actually see it through to the end!

This Comics Experience place rocks! I've just finished the Advanced Comic Book Writing class (I'm going to re-take both writing classes in the future) and now I've signed up for the Intro To Comic Book Art class. Which starts August 30th so I have a month to do some serious perspective practice before I have to dive in...

Wow I've never done this before! It has been a very crazy birthday today: starting in France and ending in Scotland, celebrating my birthday in two countries LOL!

On a cool note: I share the same birthday as the Transformers artist Casey Coller. That's rather cool!

Ok, I'm sitting here in a hotel room in Edinburrrah (Edinburg) and starving. Time to go find some food. I sleep the night here and then tomorrow I am finally home with my dear husband and kids. Yay!!

Ever wonder what life is like on a farm in Scotland??

Part One:
A Typical Morning On the Farm...

6:30am
We wake up to the alarm clock and gaze, stupified, at one another through bleary eyes. "The kids only woke us up seven times last night." Erlend declares with a grin. "What an improvement!
We thank God for the minor miracle.

7:30am
We both wake up with a start and realize that we've overslept. Again. The children are awake and screaming for their breakfast. I dress to the mournful strains of Inga repeatedly howling from her room, "I want ouuuuuuuut! I want ouuuuuuut!" Accompanied by Benji wailing and Elspeth screaming. One of my eyeballs begins to twitch and I murmur a prayer for holiness as I yank on my socks.

7:45am
Ignoring the children, I slip downstairs and turn on the electric kettle. I then dive outside and feed the barn cats. They swirl in appreciation around my ankles as I spoon tinned food into their dish. Erlend is tramping through 3 feet of wild grass, hunting for the injured lamb, a syringe clamped between his teeth.

7:55am
I enter the house to a symphony of wails. The children are starving to death, wasting away, in the final throes of death-by-hunger...

8:00am
Released from captivity, the 3 kids hurl themselves downstairs in a tangle of arms, legs, and screeches. I am attacked while sipping my coffee in the chair. I praise the Lord for the blessing of my three beautiful children as they jostle for the best positions to gain kisses and hugs. Someone bites my leg and I spew coffee through my nose.

8:02am
Erlend returns from the jungle having found the injured lamb. While I sit in the chair sipping coffee and looking like an electricuted string mop Erlend swiftly dresses the howling children. They plead and beg for food. I finish my coffee and try to tame my morning hair.

8:15am
Breakfast is late. But hey, I'm too tired to care because I haven't had a solid night of sleep in four years. The kids sit in their bibs awaiting their food with eager grins. We place bowls before them and each child gazes down at the offerings and then up go the noses. Me and Erlend relase a collective groan as a chorus of, "No want!" and "Not hungry!" reaches our ears. One of my temples begins to throb.

8:20am
The screaming, wailing, howling kids, convinced that eating breakfast is a form of torture and a violation of their human rights, are removed from the kitchen and placed in the livingroom. They immediately throw themselves on the child safety gate and scream for their breakfast.  I can literally feel hundreds of new grey hairs springing from my scalp...

8:30am
I'm feeling holy. So I decide to be Happy Clappy Mom and crack out the activity books, crayons, etc. While doing so I notice that the activity bag reeks of pee. Pee! I stare in horror and vow to return and investigate this mystery.

8:33am
I sit the kids down with colouring books, stickers, crayons. I happily delcare that, "It's craft time! Let's have some fun!" The kids bolt to the wee table, sit down, and immediately begin tear everything out of each other's hands while screaming. I swiftly separate the kids and re-sort the various crayons, books, and stickers.

8:35am
The three kids are screeching back and forth at each other about how they want what the other has. I stupidly plead for them to "Have fun, yay!" and focus on their own bounty of crayons etc. They simply increase the volume.

8:40am
Inga repeatedly screams because she cannot get the stickers off of the page. So, wailing and screeching, she runs to me. I remove the stickers and hand them to a now-happy Inga. She returns to her spot at the table and Elspeth immediately steals the stickers from Inga's hands. The screaming begins again as the two of them tear at each other while they roll across the floor.

8:45am
Happy Clappy Mom flies out the window and craft time ends. Swiftly. I grumble to Erlend that I am a total failure at motherhood - I can't even get my kids to sit down and colour for five minutes...

9:00am
Oh yeah. That pee smell... While Erlend amuses the kids I investigate the craft bag and discover that someone has peed in the shape sorting box. Lovely. Gagging, I remove said box.

9:10am
Erlend says he needs to "slip outside for five minutes" and promptly disappears at the speed of sound. I spend a good ten minutes hauling hot water from the kitchen to the utility sink while the kids fight and argue around my feet.

9:15am
Benji has Inga pinned to the floor, two fistfuls of her hair firmly gripped in his chubby hands. Elspeth is wailing that she had to poop. I quickly grab the bottle of bleach and pour a liberal amount into the sink of hot water and bobbing shapes. As I turn and actually look at the bottle my eyes focus on... "Limescale Remover." Elspeth is pulling her pants off and beginning to squat over the Welcome mat. Inga has Benji's nose in her teeth. I almost scream. I really do! I almost throw the bottle of Limescale Remover and scream like an animal. But instead I manage to squeak out a prayer for help and quickly rescue the Welcome mat with one hand while prying Inga and Benji apart with my left foot...

9:30am
Once again I resemble an electrified string mop. I think I might be drooling as well. One half of my face is twitching and I'm wearing a rather scary smile. I am busy hauling bucketloads of hot water back to the carefully rinsed utility sink. I hear a tractor and Elspeth darts out of the door. I throw the bucket in the air and fly after her like some kind of demented super hero. Just as I catch my fleeing daughter I turn and find a herd of our cattle, escaped and racing down the public road... "ERLENNNNNNND!!!"

9:35am
Back in the house with the kids I pour actual bleach into the utility sink and stir the contents. I stand there giggling as I watch the bobbing shapes go round and round and round... The kids begin to unfold all of the laundry I so carefully folded at 2am ... hee hee hee! So funny, look at the shapes go round and round... so funny... Elspeth grabs my leg. "I need to go poooooop!"

9:45am
Erlend returns after capturing the escaped cattle. I hide in the bathroom under the pretense of "using the loo" - but in fact I am praying to God, asking Him, WHY AREN'T YOU HELPING ME? I'M CONVINCED YOU DON'T EVEN HEAR ME!!!!.... I suddenly realize that I am mentally yelling at God. Woops.

9:50am
I grab my latest "bathroom book" titled, "The Coffee Mom's Devotional." I slap the book open to the latest page and begin to read about the author's morning spent snapping, yelling, badgering, and being very impatient with her kids. She then writes, "I never knew I could even get angry until I had kids!" ...

9:55am
I can almost hear Erlend speaking over the roar of three howling kids. They are running in circles, flapping their arms, kicking their legs, screeching, imitating animals, bouncing off the walls - but this time around I don't feel myself bursting into flames because **they are happy.** Erlend moves closer and shouts over the din, "I'm going to take the kids outside with me..."
I nearly faint. I throw myself at my husband and grab him tight. "THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOUOHGODBLESSYOU!!!"

10:00am
The house is silent and empty. I grab my cleaning gloves and apron. All that I can hear is bird song and the sound of my broom. Just as I reach for the the "play" button on the CD player I pause and then decide to walk away and just enjoy the silence while it lasts.

So I go away for a mini-vacation on a monastery island where me, my husband, and our three kids can enjoy some solitude and some time unplugged from modern life. (In other words, no phone, no Internet, no TV etc.) Then I return home to find that while I was gone one of my stories ended up as a Daily Deviation. WOW!! That was a surprise! Thank you all so much for reading "Data Crunch" and for leaving lovely comments. (My writing came to a screeching halt when I realized that I needed some training. So I have been busy with some writing classes with Comics Experience. I will soon have an actual 5-page comic to post! And I hope to return to writing short stories soon!)

**Sigh** We had a lovely vacation, staying in the monk's big guesthouse right on the edge of the bay. Now you have to picture a rugged Scottish bay with beaches made up of stones, seaweed lying flat at low tide, swishing back and forth at hight tide, the wind still cold even in June - and past the shallows you have the sharp jagged skerries where the seals perch and sing their dog-howling songs. "WoooooOOOOOOooo wooooo!" And further out to sea you have the grey water meeting the grey sky, where at low tide you can make out white water that tells you there are loads of jagged rocks exposed. It's not your typical tropical beach scene: instead there is a harsh rugged beauty.

The monks guesthouse overlooks the little bay and also their monastery which is located on an even smaller island. This island is an ancent monastery island going way back to the 400's, even though it was abandoned after the Reformation and the monk's monstery of today consists of an expanded farm steading. They've converted several of the old stone outbuildings into the most astonishingly beautiful chapels and places of prayer! And then built 24 individual cells, little hermitidges for each monk to live in on his own - peace and privacy and silence, the perfect situation for prayer and meditation. The entire monastery is amazing - I am stunned by how much they have created from an old farm!

We had a lovely time on our vacation there in that rugged monasty place even with trying to keep up with three whiney toddlers haha! The kids loved picking at rocks and shells on the beaches and I loved the fresh sea air filling my lungs every day. Early in the mornings I would walk from the guest house to the monks amazing little chapel down at the pier, about half a mile. What a way to wake up in the morning - brisk Scottish wind (it is rarely hot up here this far north), fresh salt air, the gentle music of water lapping against stones. The seals, some of them singing their woooo-wooooo song, some of them bobbing in the water and watching me with big dark eyes.

The day before we left to return to our island (and our farm) we were taken across the bay to the monastery for lunch with the monks. Which is always awesome!! There's just something so cool about sitting there in a monastic refrectory (dining hall) sipping coffee and chatting, surrounded by men in long wool habits and dangling rosary beads tied at their hips, men that hail from nearly every corner of the world: and there are the three kids tearig around the long hall, and equally long wood tables, laughing and playing and making the monks crack up at their wee childish antics. Did you know that some monks drink coffee from bowls?? It is an ancient monastic tradition! But they gave me a coffee mug.

The only downside for me was riding on their Boat of Doom - oh man, I hate that thing! Their boat is this small ex-fishing boat and it bobs and bounces all over the place as it zooms across the water!! I had everyone laughing as I sat smack in the middle of the back of the boat clinging white-knuckled, yet still grinning, to the door of the wheelhouse!! Everyone else was inside of the little wheelhouse, kids inlcuded, but I was so paranoid about the boat tipping over that I sat outside in the cold wind and rain!! (Then again I am rather clausterphobic...) I went pure white with terror whenever the monks stood on the wee gunnals of the boat in order to free her from the peir or tie her off at the other side - oh how that boat would tip way over!!! But she was very safe just the same. There was no way that boat was going to actually roll over - I eventually calmed down and trusted that the monks knew what they were doing and The Boat Of Doom was not out to get me haha! But climbing on and off of that boat is another circle of hell: she tips and bobs while I try to climb up onto the slippery stone steps of the pier (or off of the steps, down onto the gunnals of that boat) and aaaaaaaah!!! But even though I was scared I still enjoyed the ride across the beautiful bay. There is something so lovely about the sea! And then we returned home via the big ferry - a two hour trip that is far less terrifying because the boat is much much bigger. It rocks and bobs but I'm not sitting RIGHT THERE with the water nearly at the same level as me! Our bairns are going to grow up to be undaunted sea-farers! At leat they won't be terrified of small boats like their mother haha!

Ah, and now I am back home on the farm. We had a busy day today with an "Organic Open Farm Day" - lots of people here to see our farm and my poor husband is now hoarse from all of the talking as he explained organic farming to everyone while giving presentations and a tour of the farm.

We are tired!