Hayley E. Lavik - Fantasy Author

Classical paintings improved…with cats

Hayley E Lavik — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:52:19 +0000

So.

I was looking around for something to share with all of you today.

And then this happened.

This is the work of the Great Artist’s Mews, Zarathustra, the best cat in the world, who deigns to sit for the masters from time to time.

Says Zarathustra, “Mona Lisa’s smile is a mystery no more. She smiled beacause We were there. Let you have on your knees 10 kilos of the immeasurable grandeur and have no smile. Afterwards Leonardo reluctantly painted out Our image. He was afraid of the reaction of the art criticists and gallerists who were normally treating the pictures with cats as not serious. But the smile of Mona Lisa remained on the painting. That is the true story.”

Here are a couple more of my favourites.

And now I can’t stop giggling. Go check out the entire gallery at Great Artist’s Mews.

Writing a month of letters

Hayley E Lavik — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:47:48 +0000

I live in the middle of nowhere.

It’s a two hour drive to buy groceries (and then two hours back with said groceries). The nearest neighbouring town is nothing. There is only one road in or out and sometimes it snows in, or the river washes it out, or it turns to mud and traps delivery trucks, postal trucks, and campers in its soupy maw (seriously, why are people bringing campers up that road?). If I mail you a parcel, it will take a week to three weeks longer (the scientific method has produced varying results on this) to reach you than it would if I mailed it in a city.

That is why, perhaps understandably, I am bad about mail. I just sent off the last of my Christmas gifts a week ago, and I still have one more that hasn’t gone out. I get serious stress at the thought of mailing anything that doesn’t take a standard stamp in a standard envelope. I don’t know why, I just do. All my correspondence is by text, tweet, and email (don’t ask about phone calls, that’s another conversation), and all my packages go from online merchants so someone else has to post it instead of me.

On the other hand, I have a major love of paper. I do much of my writing longhand, I adore fountain pens, I love the weight and texture of a good piece of card stock, and I have lost track how many journals I have lying around the house waiting to be used.

So I’ve decided to join Mary Robinette Kowal’s Month of Letters challenge. It’s simple.

In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

In my case, I’ll be batch mailing things when I get into cities (twice this month, WOO!) so my letters have a slim chance of actually arriving before the end of February.

Would you like a letter from me this month? Drop me a line and I’ll write to your address.

Letters will likely contain doodles of cats.

Here, have a Hunger Games trailer spoof

Hayley E Lavik — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:00:22 +0000

Katniss’s face at 1:30 absolutely makes this for me.

Gazing into eyes can kill you — if you’re a fictional character

Hayley E Lavik — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 15:00:06 +0000

This is a public service announcement, paid for by the Concerned Genre Fiction Readers of the Interwebs.

Ladies! Stop looking in people’s eyes!

32 women a year die by drowning in someone’s eyes.

More than 100 women a year experience the near-fatal depths of someone’s dark, unfathomable eyes.

4 out of 5 readers know someone who has drowned in a pair of eyes.*

THIS MUST STOP!

To curb the tide of eye-drownings, the CGFRI has put together the following suggestions to help minimize the likelihood of drowning if you or a love one find yourself in the vicinity of deep eyes.

Do an activity together: 98.3% of cases where a woman drowns in someone’s eyes occur because neither person involved had anything better to do than stare at the other person. Instead, try bowling! You’ll find with your attention on the pins and both of you moving about, the chance of a sudden rip tide pulling you in has greatly reduced. Heck, even dancing. You can rub up against each other all you want, and it’ll build all that same wonderful hot tingly stuff, without the perils of inexplicably drowning in your partners eyes.

Cultivate other interests: Try admiring his hands instead, or that nice shirt with the dashingly open collar. That’s nice, eh? Or how about that sunset tonight? Even lips are okay, I guess, since you’re probably about to kiss them anyway. Eyebrows? No! What are you thinking? That’s much too close to the edge. If you’re not careful you could slip and fall and then Search and Rescue will have to come and dredge you out. Seriously, just focus on your meal or something.

Stop describing his eyes: Maybe it’s too late for paeans about the play of light over a bowl of minestrone, but honey, it is never too late to quit describing the myriad colours, shapes, emotions, childhood traumas, hopes, fears, and dreams all swimming about in that man’s eyes. No matter how amber-honey-butterscotch-ochre they are. Seriously, just stop it.

Exercise discretion when selecting the eyes you’ll drown in: I don’t know about you, but drowning in honey sounds like a pretty horrible way to go. Likewise for drowning in someone’s deep brown eyes. I mean, what’s in there? Sludge? Sewage run-off? Either way, it doesn’t sound too swoon-worthy and it definitely doesn’t put me in the mood for sexytimes or beautiful romantic imagery of two beautiful people being beautiful (and probably naked) together. At least with a pair of blue eyes, it has some logic. There’s the whole obvious water thing, even though, yeah, I totally wasn’t blown away when you used that metaphor because — look at the statistics! This stuff is all over the place! Drowning in eyes like the sea after a storm kind of works though?

And at least…at the very least: Drown in someone’s eyes because it’s a bad thing! Not a good thing! Does it really seem like a good idea to throw yourself into the undertow of some dude’s eyes and then have him save you from it? (Double or nothing it’s done with a kiss) His eyes just tried to drown you! Which means dead! And he tried to do it! If there simply must be drowning, do it in the sexy villain’s eyes, rather than the sexy hero’s eyes. It’ll still make no sense, but it’ll be free from Unfortunate Implications and that’s a start.

This year, show your support to the victims of death by eye-drowning (the readers) by wearing a mini blindfold on your lapel.

And if you look across your dinner table and find yourself confronted with a pair of deep, dark, fathomless…steel blue…endless as the wild sea and no one around to stop me going under I felt myself sinking down down and yet oh how I wanted it I was drowning with nothing to grab hold of until–

JUST LOOK AWAY!

* And 0 out of 5 readers know an actual person who has drowned in a pair of eyes.

Five games guaranteed to kill friendships and alienate people

Hayley E Lavik — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:00:47 +0000

It started out as an innocent little suggestion. “Hey, let’s all get together for a game night!” A little wine, a few snacks, a clear table, and five happy couples all gathered around for an evening of fun and amusement.

It…did not end that way.

So here are five games to keep clear of — or plan your evening around, depending how much you like your friends.

White Elephant Gift Exchange

Also known as Chinese gift exchange, Yankee swap, this game never fails to rapidly devolve into a social litmus test. Players bring gifts, either good or tacky, and then take turns either choosing an unwrapped gift or stealing one already open. It seems like a simple enough concept for a group who don’t know each other that well, but that’s just what the game wants you to think.

First, there are the rules. Does everyone choose a gift before opening? Can you open and steal? Can you steal back what’s been stolen from you? What about trading? Price limit?

Then, there are the gifts. You get a bottle of locally made hot sauce, how neat! The next player gets two bottles of wine. The next player gets a complete barbecue set. One of these things is not like the other. One of these things stuck to the price limit. Whether you mean it or not, something will become the dud gift, and if it’s that thing you carefully picked out and put thought into, then your evening sucks just as much as that unlucky soul who got the hot sauce.

Then, there’s the stealing…

Picture this. You open a gift, and it’s a lovely box of chocolates! Oh, but there’s something more too. It’s…$5 worth of scratch cards! Um, thanks? That’s basically just $5 less of a gift than all the rest. But then that gift gets stolen, “for the chocolates.” Ha ha, sure, I bet. And then I–I mean you–spend the rest of the evening wondering if I’ve just had $1,000 dollars snatched out of my life forever. You sneaky jerk.

Or there was the time with the tacky gift exchange when the 12 year old got to join the adults from the office opening their gag gifts, and got one of those ice cream punch toys, which was totally super cool and clearly the best gift there! And then the 12 year old had that gift stolen by some 40 year old who totally wasn’t going to play with it or anything, and the game wasn’t fun any more. I’ve clearly gotten over it.

Scrabble
Scrabble, you say? That nice game with the word tiles and pictures of people drinking tea? Yes, Scrabble. Don’t let the packaging fool you. Beneath that friendly veneer of language merrymaking and crossword shenanigans, lies an evil, malicious purveyor of Bad Times. No, I’m not talking about the people who won’t play me because they know I make money with words (Thursdays down by the docks, winner takes all Scrabble throw down — bring it!) I’m talking about The Scrabble Dictionary.Many a charming evening pursuing triple word scores has been ruined by those foul pages…and by the players who would seek to open that cursed tome. You must not read from the book! Inside lie incomprehensible charms and phrases capable of summoning flies, locusts, and all the petty “I totally knew that was a word” spelling combinations known to man. The Scrabble dictionary sucks time into its black vortex, and whole quarter hours can go by staring at the game board trying to plan your next move while one player thumbs through the dictionary trying to find a word to make out of k-w-y-j-i-b-o.

Or, if your group is truly doomed, you will have among your company that player, who reads the Scrabble dictionary in advance for valid words, so when the time is right, he might play the word “ng” and laugh in your face when you try to challenge it for not being a real word.

Dokapon Kingdom

This little known rpg/board game features a vibrant combination of monster killing, hilarious quests, and swearing profusely at your closest friends or loved ones. This is a game that proclaims, in very positive words on its own back cover, how it will destroy all the friendships you hold dear. Let me explain…

Dokapon is a game about a kingdom under attack, and about a king who values money over absolutely everything else. To get ahead in the game, you need to level up, so you can fight monsters and reclaim towns, because towns are worth a lot of money, and the more money you’re worth the better chance you have of being crowned next in line for the throne when you save the day. The catch is, while you’re levelling on those monsters, you can also turn on your best friend or loving spouse while he’s severely injured from saving a town, and kill him. And then take his town. Or all his money. Or destroy his weapon.

Or if you’re feeling kind, you could just rename him Turd Ferguson, write graffiti all over his face in permanent marker, and change his hairstyle to poo. I am not even kidding. You can also send assassins after one another, rob each other, and poison your friends, them give them foot sores so they can only walk a single space each turn the whole way back to the temple for healing, getting attacked by monsters every step of the way. And then kill them right before they get a chance to recover their health.

The smack talk runs rampant, the stakes grow ever higher, the hurt feelings fester and fester, and eventually, amid all the swearing and near-throwing-down of controllers, that thing you’re thinking but not saying becomes that thing you’re saying, and then my husband and I are apologizing to each other later that night for being total dicks to each other over a cute cartoony video game.

Also, he stole the win from me the first time we played after I took down almost all the boss’s health. Just saying.

Goldeneye

At one time in your life, you were the best at this game. You beat all friends, played the hardest, unlocked all the impossible to beat achievements, including that fake one that Nintendo Power screwed everyone over with one April Fool’s Day. You were amazing.

Now you’re grown up, and you and your adult friends decide to pull out the N64 for a classic video game night. Or maybe you pull out the Wii for a little shiny new Goldeneye with motion control. Either way, you know you’re the best, and you’re going to mop the floor with these poor saps who never knew you in your heyday. Trouble is, they were all the best too. They played more than all their friends, they unlocked all the secrets too, and they’re about to mop the floor with you.

Goldeneye is one of those games everyone was the best at, once upon a time. At least, we all think we were. Then, all innocently, we stumble across other so-called Goldeneye masters in casual conversation, and now it’s time to whip out our controllers and see who’s control stick still has the most snap to it. That’s when things get ugly.

For a while it’s all casual, just feeling each other out. A win here, a loss there, but oh, she doesn’t know my true skill yet. Then it’s on like Donkey Kong and there’s no going back. The fancy moves come out, the spawn-kills, the bullet-riddled corpses just for that extra “F YOU!” at the end. In the end, it always devolves to slapper fights.

Thank Nintendo those N64 controllers can handle so much throwing on the floor.

Risk

The granddaddy of all hate-inducing games. Risk is the epitome of friends getting together around the dinner table for an evening, engaging in a little friendly competition, rolling some dice, and then never speaking to each other again.

It starts, like so many things, with arguments over the rules, over placement of troops. That sly, superior tone begins to creep into someone’s speech. Oh, that’s how you play? That’s never how I played. Then there are the accusations of copying someone else’s strategy. There’s the “I didn’t mean to roll my dice right through your army” move, the “I forgot to place guys at the beginning of my last turn so I’m going to do it now,” and the ever popular “I just like Australia, okay? That’s why I stuck every single one of my guys there and reinforced it beyond all possible attack.”

More than any of the others above, this game encourages alliances, deception, sneakiness, backstabbing, and power tripping. Risk is especially deadly with couples, because suddenly some people are off limits, or vicious looks are lowered across the table when troops start piling up near Honeydearest’s border, and remarks about couches/sleeping on them start popping up.

And then there’s the smack talk. Video games are awful for it, sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard worse insults and taunts thrown around a game night than over a Risk board. People who barely know each other, who are trying to get off on the right foot still, suddenly start outright mocking one-another and laughing directly in their faces. I’ve seen swearing, insults, legitimate threats for separate sleeping arrangements, and lots and lots of crying. Oh my, the crying. I can think of no other game that provokes the sheer level of tears that Risk does. You make one little slip, leave Europe open on one of its way too many damn entry points, and spend the next ten minutes with someone you barely know laughing in your face while mowing down your entire remaining forces.

At the end of the night, it’s all anyone can do to shake hands, mutter something that doesn’t quite sound like “That was fun.” No one suggests you do it again. No one says to have a safe drive home. You all just hate each other, and you’ve learned the worst of each other.

Risk, in many ways, can be perfectly summed up by this quote from the Joker, a la The Dark Knight:

Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all of the little emotions. You see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are.

So what game has destroyed the most of your friendships?

Maurice Sendak on art, inspiration, and creation

Hayley E Lavik — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:00:53 +0000

“Artists have to take a dive, and either you hit your head on a rock and you split your skull and you die, or that blow to the head is so inspiring that you come back up and do the best work that you ever did…but you have to take the dive, and you do not know what the result will be.”

Or just click to hear the author of Where The Wild Things Are say “Go to hell.”

So how did you spend your New Year’s Day?

Hayley E Lavik — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:03:21 +0000

Various schools of thought about resolutions, change, and fresh starts on January first suggest what we do on the first day of the new year sets the tone for how the rest of the year will go.

Want a better year? Start with a great day. Want to be more active? Go for a walk on the first. Want to be more productive this year? Yep, spend your first day writing.

So…

I spent my first day of 2012 eating chips, popcorn, and chocolate while lying on the couch in my PJs watching an Avatar: The Last Airbender marathon on TV.

This is totally going to be a productive and fulfilling year for me!

Based on yesterday, how’s your year looking?

Five Weirdest Search Queries of 2011

Hayley E Lavik — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:00:46 +0000

It’s been another year of posting opinions for all the Interwebs to see, and another year of Analytics ticking away quietly in the background logging all sorts of data about the site.

Now and then, that data is truly hilarious.

Here, in no particular order, are

Five bizarre search queries that led people to my site

blood splatter from a shotgun blast to the face

This query stands in for ALL the people who came to my site this year looking for information on what happens when you’re decapitated, how much blood spurts from a decapitated head, what type of blow creates a fine mist of blood…I could go on. I know what brought them here, and I’m just gonna hope they’re all writers. Writers need to know about shotgun blasts to the face, right?

rivers of poop

Okay, now I had a lot of poop queries this year. Some of them were pretty bizarre, a lot involved fetishes, but this one takes the cake… because it had a 0% bounce rate. Somebody found what they came looking for.

sex anima lavik life vedio

You know…learning there are nude photos out there of someone with the same last name still doesn’t top learning that this site is a better match for those keywords.

dear god this migraine fucking sucks

I hope you feel better now.

not all stories end with the characters living “happily ever after.” consider the importance of a happy ending in a work of literature. is it necessary for the story to be satisfying? explain your opinion using specific examples from the texts you have read in this unit and elsewhere.

Okay, this is my favourite. Not only is this a blatant test question copy-pasted into a search engine, but this query brought multiple hits to my site, including some with variations on phrasing. Someone tried so hard to avoid doing their English work.

Do you track your search results? I’d love to hear the most bizarre things that brought someone to your site!

Things I have absolutely no intention of changing next year

Hayley E Lavik — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:58:10 +0000

In the midst of all the end of year resolutions and excessive critiques of one’s flaws and failings, I’ve had a tradition going here for the last few years.

A list of things I have absolutely no intention of changing next year.

Change and improvement is all well and good, but spending the last few days of the calendar year carefully eviscerating every small flaw, bad habit, and second helping of dessert from the last few weeks…not so much a fan of that. It’s time to show some love for the quirks that make us who we are, which don’t need any remodelling come January.

Unresolutions for 2012

I will drive five hours through snow and wind and rising water for a few hours with friends, some meals not cooked by my own hand, and a break from life in the bush.
I will continue with a sleep/wake schedule that has no internal consistency whatsoever (this one’s made the list every single year).
I will take naps at whatever time of the day strikes my fancy, because I can always stay up to 5am to finish the day’s work.
I will play music very loudly throughout the house, singing along to the parts I know, and make up rude lyrics to fill out the rest.
I will count chocolate and popcorn as an acceptable dinner substitute.

I will happily sacrifice being ‘nice’ in social situations for the sake of laying a smackdown on anyone who crosses my personal lines.

Have you thought about unresolutions for the new year? What things do you plan to continue doing loudly and proudly in 2012?