Art

Last weekend I read Undead and Unwed, by Mary Janice Davidson. It was an absolutely terrific book. Think chick lit where the "chick" is a vampire.

Betsy, a former model turned secretary who loves designer shoes, just had a really bad day. First she got laid off, then she got run over, knocked right out of those fancy shoes. The next time she wakes up, it's in the funeral home, a creepy turn of events if ever there was one. She pretty quickly figures out that she's one of the living dead, and, in fact, she's the Queen of the dead. She can still see her reflection (good thing, given all those shoes), she doesn't burn up in sunlight (although she does have a really hard time staying awake), and she has a crucifix that she wears as protection from the bad vampires.

Just a wonderful, very fun book. This weekend I'm reading the second book in the series, Undead and Unemployed; the third book, Undead and Unappreciated, will be out in hardcover in the Spring. In the second one, Betsy decides she'd better get a job to pay the bills, and lands the "job of a lifetime"--selling shoes at Macy's.

Last night I was looking for something at Amazon, and ran across a new book by Nick Bantok, Urgent 2nd Class, a book about collage and what he calls "faux mail." From that starting point (actually, I now remember that the starting point was Misty's wish list, always a good source of inspiration for me), I looked at a few other books on collage and altered books.

I've been intrigued by Keri Smith's daily collages, and thinking about doing something like that, and the Bantok book last night had me getting up out of my chair looking for a suitable notebook and thinking about cutting up old magazines, then I came to my senses and made a collage on the computer, in Photoshop, using images that I had saved (click the image for a slightly larger version). Almost as satisfying, and much less messy.

Coincidentally, there were some great online art tools linked in Blogliners today, including a collage machine.