Heather's Secrets to Avoiding Melancholia

Secret # 1. STAY BUSY. This is really the key to all following secrets, so let me break it down. My go-to activities: reading, painting, more reading, cleaning, organizing, basically any and all frenetic activities are welcome. Oh, and beer (I'm nothing if not classy). The most interesting of these of course is the painting. Voila, more in my graveyard statues series. Kind of macabre, I know, but that's not the point, I just find them gorgeously visually appealing. This one I painted tonight is of a pretty well known statue:

I figure I can use this week to do a couple paintings before classes start, while I'm in between everything and waiting and going crazy. My friend D sells jewelry at fairs and market days and things and keeps looking for people to share her stall, so I think I'll try to go with her and sell some of these. So I'm being productive, not just busy!

Secret #2: Reading for classes before classes start! I emailed my profs to ask for reading lists. I'm going to be knee deep in Renaissance lit and then Wordsworth for my other class, so I know it's going to be dense reading all semester, which I will surely get behind in. So I spent all day today reading Sir Sidney's Arcadia. Which is 800 pages long. I shit you not. It was written in 1593, but it's actually not as bad as I feared. It was my second day just reading all afternoon, and I'm a hundred pages in. Yeah. It's gonna take awhile.

Secret #3: More reading! Catching up on all the delightful YA books I've got from the library, and the others I've bought. I just read an Advanced Reading Copy of Nightshade by Andrea Cremer that I got off Ebay (shh!), and out of all the ARC's I've tracked down, this was the first to actually live up to the internet hype. I read it last night and it was surprisingly good. It was really smart, but still lusty, my two major criteria in my off-school-time reading material ;)

So, until school starts up again or I hear back about other projects, busy remains the watchword. Ooo, and maybe get some more done on the background of my Mucha tattoo!