My Mini Midweek Vacation

We are kicking off our Get Pop Cultured Week at work. 

Basically, we're having several days where we're celebrating almost everything in pop culture. There's going to be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle day, a Comic Con preview day (I think), Frozen Friday (yes, the movie), and more. 

On the 19th of this month, there's a Get Pop Cultured costume day. And it has been strongly advised that as employees ... we  have to dress up. 

I was even offered money to help go and MAKE a costume if I needed to. There was no way I could do that. 

Therefore, I made the decision to take my two days available off work to disappear to Grand Rapids to raid the thrift stores for costume ideas. 

I landed on doing the cosplay that I really wanted to do for JAFAX next year. 

I decided to dress up as Ponyo's mom from Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo. She's the Mother of the Sea and she's in charge of ALL the oceans and its inhabitants and she basically sets her husband straight when he tries to control their daughter in the movie. She was just so cool. So I decided to go as her. All I need is a dress, a wig, makeup, costume jewelry, the works. 

Go thrift stores! 

<---- Ponyo's mother as she arrives on the scene.

And the second photo featured here is Ponyo's mother at the END of the movie. So you can kinda see where I'm going with the costume. It looks simple ... but she has little elements that are going to be difficult to pull off. Like her very specific jewelry. For the 19th, I may have to skip the necklace, but I KNOW I can pull off her headpiece. I've seen some pretty phenomenal cosplay for her so far, so I hope I can pull this off. The end result should look SOMETHING like this ...

Then, to complete the look, I'm going to create my own little Ponyo and her sisters for me to carry around. THAT secret I am not revealing in my blog until I create the final product. I'm not very artsy or crafty and the way I'm creating Ponyo ... not giving it up until I know what it looks like. All I know is that after my day of shopping today ...I'm feeling a bit more confident about this more and more. 

Sometimes, I wonder why I wasn't ever MORE crafty. If I could suddenly learn how to make something or create something that was actually pretty epic, I would leave everything and travel the Renaissance Faire circuit as a career. I really would. I'd be awesome at it and I know I'd love it. Travelling from place to place, meeting new people, seeing new cities, and .... being able to watch a joust on a semi-regular basis? Yeah, that would be heaven. The only thing I think I'd miss was the regular-ness of life and being near a Biggby or Barnes & Noble. 

With the Renaissance Faire season fast upon us all, it just gets me more amped up to go again. I love the ren faire. I just love it. *sighs happily* 

With my writing, I have drastically been improving the original draft. I've got a decent bad guy and he has MOTIVE for hating the main characters now. So yay me. Also, I have some motivation to keep going. I always got kind of bored with rewriting and re-editing. So I had a feeling that my readers would get bored as well. When I had finally figured out the fatal flaw ... which was the bad guy having no reason to even BE a bad guy, I feel like life has been given to the pages of the novel. I haven't brought him in yet, but he's been mentioned and it makes me type that much faster until he arrives on the scene in all his red-haired, topaz-eyed, twitchy glory. ^_^ 

There have been many instances where I have been so into a novel and mostly it's when I'm reading one ... but now? I'm feeling it for the one I'm writing. What a difference! 

So it just means that I sit in a lot of coffee shops, drinking chai lattes or large pots of Glitter and Gold tea while typing furiously at a keyboard.

It has just been an interesting couple of weeks. 

I think it's time to put this blog post to bed, however. What do you think? As a close, I will tell you the books I am on the brink of beginning. Yay books! 

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery is about the lives of two very different people. A concierge who would rather not deal with people at all, but has a secret passion for life and a fear of pursuing it. And a 12 year old child prodigy who hides her true nature from everyone around her to maintain the visage of 'normalcy'. Together, they learn more about themselves and each other.
That's really all I know so far about this book, but it's been on my To Read list for a while and for our August's book club, we're reading it. 

Half Bad by Sally Green is about the battle between good and evil in this teen novel about a young boy named Nathan. He's trapped in the middle of an ongoing fight between White and Black witches. 

Again, that's all I really know. THIS one was an ARC I found at work and pretty much I just looked at the cover and said 'Sure, why not?' because of course that's how I roll. I'm a cover judger. I admit it. 

So those are the books that I am finally going to be beginning. Let me know in the comments if you've read these before or if you've heard anything about them. I'm always anxious to talk books and share ideas. 

Until I write to you again ...

Be Open, Be Loving, Be Yourself

Taryn