Gotta love the person who copies the cover of a popular vampire anthology, pastes in a photo of Alexander Skarsgård qua Eric Northman, and tries to pass it off as an original design. Like no one would notice. Competing against 87 other designers to make a cover for a vampire novel, and this guy assumes none of them would be vampire fans, or even passingly acquainted with popular culture.

Anyhow, the Cocksword triumphed, I am victorious, my awesomeness prevails, etc. etc. And I'm also moving forward with the vampire cover, because I am not crap. It's not enough to retire on, but maybe I can get by on this.

Per my projections, being totally legit has already proven to be a ruthless bastard maneuver. I am guilty of a certain spiteful glee at having not only defended my work, but endeared myself to the admin in the process, and made the other guy look a right fucking sleazy douche. Go me.

I don't know how long I'll be able to keep this up, this level of competition and intrigue is exhausting and over time it messes with my illness. But I shouldn't have to do it for too long, and I'm confident I'll be able to bag a decent contract before the freelance hate-pit burns me out.

This is actually a really important moment for me. That's weird.

I'd like to do a study unpacking gender, where young children, around early primary school age, get asked a series of questions about gender expression. What do girls/boys wear/do/etc? What do women/men wear/do/etc? Get to the root of acquired gender-bias.

In my desperation, I didn't notice at the time, but I arrived in Ireland on Palindrome Day 21-02-2012. That's neat.

Rewatching Lord of Illusions the other day I realised that's probably the root of why I don't trust people who wear knee-length shorts into adulthood.

New Job is interesting. Competative in a giant way, because it's me and a thousand other freelance assholes eating each other like baby sharks over a handful of pissant jobs with incoherent design briefs. I compared it to Sparta for artists. Then I made this one guy's Giant! Magic! Sword! look like a cock. By accident, honest. Probably because I started giggling about how he kept emphasising the sword needed to be Really BIG! Like, HUGE! And the brief reads like, well, the Giant! Magic! Sword! is totally a cock-symbol.

But he noticed. I mean he noticed the sword looked like a cock, not that it secretly *is* a cock. Which is yet another reason why writers are the worst people to brief for their own covers, along with their tendency to want to put the Whole Book On The Cover. I mean, not that their swords are cocks, um, although in a way that kind of is the problem. They get all tangled up in their book and don't realise their knickers are showing when they say the Giant! Magic! Sword! needs to be really BIG! Like HUGE! And it makes the artist accidentally design a Giant! Magic! Sword! that looks like a cock.

At least the creative bankruptcy of a gigantic percentage of the other freelance assholes works in my favour. In a weird sort of way. I can knock out a bunch of the competition just by calmly pointing out to the clients that I will provide all the licensing info for all the stock I use. Just to reassure them, you know, that they're protected against lawsuits and such.

I mean, I understand the temptation to cut corners & just use google image search and steal the awesomest pictures from wherever to make an epic design, because it can be frustrating trying to find all the legit images and make them do what you want. Makes me a better artist blah blah blah, challenge adversity blah blah, whatever. What's important is it gives me a shiv to stick in the backs of the competition, and if that puts beans on the table then fuck it. Sounds odd to say that going 100% legit is a ruthless bastard move, but there it is.

There should be a cheev for that.

And then there's that moment when you legitmately tell your housemates you're discussing the politics of art with Clive Barker, one of the most influential writers & filmmakers of your teens, and you fuck it up by letting the page refresh and clear your entire brilliant argument, so not, ultimately, in fact discussing anything with Clive Barker after all.

Oh well. Better luck next time, kid.

N goes on these mad cleaning frenzies where the possibility of anyone ever being able to find anything ever again is thrown to the wind in favour of a kind of visual sterility. Everything has to be concealed from view, and if I can't find the towels I just washed or the saucepans or the bread well TOUGH FUCKING CRAP. Nothing on the bench! Nothing on the table! Nothing, anywhere! The hall closet is an impenetrable tangle of odd furniture and N's spare shoes, and every other bloody thing that doesn't fit anywhere else, and when the pipes start banging it's a fucking death-tango to get to the heater to stop the noise.

It. Shits. Me.

Mum would say it's probably a sign of something or other, and that N is repressed or something. And it's probably true. Mostly, though, it's just fucking annoying to live with, because she never puts anything away in the same place twice, never puts anything anywhere sensible or logical, and then pitches a fit about anything being left out anywhere. At all. Seriously. ANYTHING. She'll just sweep it all up and stow it somewhere, and ask pointed questions about when I'm leaving.

I may not be the tidiest person and my idea of clean is "clean enough" rather than "uninhabitably sterile", but I like a certain amount of order and logic. The sugar and the honey live with the tea and coffee, near the kettle, not scattered to the corners of the Earth. If the pans go here, then the pans go here, and when I'm looking for the pans, they should be either in the pan place or on the sink (or dishwasher where applicable), not in the fucking crawlspace, under a bucket, with a doona and the spare vacuum cleaner bags. It's like sharing a house with a squirrel on meth.

I'm probably distorting this really badly, or blowing aspects out of proportion, but I really want a shower and I've turned the flat upside down three times and I can't find my fucking towel because N has tidied it up somewhere, and that has gotten so far up my nose it's tickling my brain. The only place I haven't checked is N's room and I haven't yet gone so far off the rails as to believe that she would, for any reason, no matter how illogical, stow my & Y's towels in her room.

Such a shame. I really did like her. Now I can't fucking stand her, and relatively minor things I could have coped with have turned into gigantic fucking Issues.

At some point I'm going to have to explain to Y in no uncertain terms that I'm moving out because of N. Probably gonna leave that til it's fait accompli, though.

It's an odd feeling, feeling like you have time. I'm ill accustomed to it. A sense of future is starting to form, a sense of possibility. It's still small and fragile, so I'm at serious risk of disconnecting to protect it, things being what they are in the house-space currently. Your words won't help, here. You can tell me til the sun burns out that there's a tomorrow and a day after that and a next year and a whole life ahead of me that I can make plans for, and it won't make this feeling any stronger or more resilient.

But it's good. Even with the sense of seige whenever N is... well, just *is*, the noise is abating. That's why I have to move out, because if it abates just this much, but not completely, it will probably come back, and I'll die. And the fact is, it won't shut up completely, living with N.

I know I'll probably never be rid of it, not entirely. But if I can break the kindling cycle for long enough to make the noise an event, rather than a constant, I can live with it.

I've been in this precarious place before, and had it shattered, sending me right back down. More than once. That makes me fierce, possibly dangerous. I can't go that way again, can't be that monster again. I've done terrible things when the noise threatened loudest, I think it would be more than I can live with to add to that.

Angular eyebrows look kind of stupid. Not just on my face, on most faces. ^ shaped eyebrows just look weird. Usually. I guess there are some people that can rock them. Somewhere.

[ETA] Have heard back about course requirements. There... aren't any. As such. At present. There are 12 places and it's all down to the portfolio. Holy crap. I can totally do this.

N needs to come out of the closet and admit she likes Justin Bieber. Y needs to come out of the closet and admit he likes How I Met Your Mother. He's back to his usual unapproachable, inexplicable self.

The noise has ebbed enough for a plan to form. I'm going to get a place of my own ASAP, and next year I'm going to do this jewellery course, and from now until next September I'm going to focus on getting ready for the course, and writing, and such. So I've written off for the entry requirements, and yes I would do it this year except they're not offering it this year so I can't.

So I just had the "gve me a godamned proof of address so I can leave, I'm sick of the sight of you" conversation with Y. Frankly I don't see a reason to say a godamned thing to N about anything ever, so I didn't.