Weekly thingy and the Eight of Cups/Gerda

Mooooom, the Snow Queen again?????

Yup, nope, never tired of this story. Also if you haven’t read the whole thing and only know it through adaptations you are missing a ton of intriguing side quests, including this strange little episode with the flower lady. In her searching for the DEFINITELY UNWORTHY OF HER Kay Gerda finds a cottage with a garden absolutely filled with amazing flowers, owned by an old woman wearing a hat covered in painted flowers. The old woman bewitches Gerda to forget Kay so she can keep her as a daughter- not in an overtly evil way, compared to most fairytales, buuuuut it’s kidnapping and fucking around with someone’s mind so NOT COOL – and makes her rosebushes disappear so they won’t remind Gerda of Kay. She forgets to make the rose disappear from her painted hat, though – Gerda spots it, remembers everything, and after collecting a bunch of random mini-stories from the various flowers runs away to continue her quest. I took a slight liberty – it’s always summer in the cottage garden, but when Gerda leaves she discovers it’s already autumn outside. I pushed a little further into winter – I just really wanted the high contrast of the lively garden world she’s leaving and the winter she’s running toward.

These little side stories are so odd and intriguing – most of the others move Gerda along in some way. The robber girl, the prince and princess, and the Finn and Lapland women all help her reach her goal. The gardener woman just kind of puts her on pause, and then the quest seems much harder and more hopeless compared to the idyllic dream of the summer garden where she lived for a while. There’s something there about choosing cold truth over comforting lie, but then this whole story ends up being about the importance of warmth and love and loyalty, not unvarnished truth?

Also – it looks like this deck really will become a thing. I have to look at some logistics but Make Playing Cards has a vendor space now where I could set up a shop and sell directly from them, so there’s another option besides having to raise printing money up front with a Kickstarter. There are downsides, though – they take 5% of my commission on top of the production costs, so I have to see how pricey a deck would need to be before it’s worthwhile for me. And they only pay out when you make $100 or more in commission, so it could be a long long wait while they pay me nothing unless I have an absolute flood of sales, and it seems likely I’d end up in a situation in the end where I never get my full commission from them? Sooooo I don’t know, I’m sort of playing with republishing the Neurotic Owl tarot as a test that way, so I can see what I’m looking at with a concrete example, but it may turn out that I’m still better off doing a presale and shipping them myself again to get costs down. Either way I have a lot of cards left to draw before I’m at a decision point, but I do think I’ll probably get this project printed one way or another.

Places to buy stuff!

• TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products.  Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
• REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff.  T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
• AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book!  Daydreams and Whimsies!  AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
• ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection

Did I miss something?  I think that’s everything.

What’s making me happy this week:

Stuff is very very hard right now and there’s a lot of health and work and other drama going on and I am doing my best to just knock over the blocks one at a time and not get overwhelmed. But it sounds like I have pretty firm plans with Magical Sparkle Muffin and her household next weekend so just keep your fingers crossed for me that work doesn’t interfere.