Happy October, courtesy of my daughter’s plastic-free, Montessori-friendly toy collection.
(My daughter has a huge collection of these toys, thanks to the efforts of my wife, and I credit them for our toddler’s unusually large vocabulary: Around six months, she was constantly picking up these toys and showing them to us to learn their names. And yes, for the record, some of these are here just for the picture: We keep the small ones out of her reach for now to avoid choking hazards.)
In which I again attempt to carve one of the world’s most famous silhouettes.
Jack-o’-lantern carving is a newly established annaul tradition in our house. Last year, I attempted to carve the famous silhouette of Sailor Moon. It proved too much for my modest skills, and the result was a total loss. This year, despite my wife’s derisive laughter, I made a second attempt.
We got our pumpkins earlier this month. Like last year, we bought them at the local “Pumpkin Patch,” which is not actually a pumpkin patch but an annual event, like a miniature theme park, where pumpkins are showcased and sold. I didn’t post photos of the Pumpkin Patch this year because all the photos I have include my daughter, and I’m trying to keep pictures of her on the internet to a minimum.
At the start of the jack-o”-lantern making process, I cut a stencil out of paper, a process that probably took an hour. I didn’t save the stencil I used last year, but I was able to find it again with a quick internet search.
Applying the two-dimensional design to the pumpkin’s surface is always a challenge. It’s important to maneuver the paper to keep Sailor Moon’s limbs and the crescent moon from getting distorted.
Once I got started carving, I realized that I would be better off doing this as a two-tone design. Someday, I may be able to cut this intricate design all the way through the pumpkin, but not this year. Instead, I picked off the skin and much of the meat so the light could shine through.
After I finished Sailor Moon’s figure, I cut out the moon shape. This was the most dangerous part as the long curve of the moon weakens the pumpkin considerably.
Here, you can see my finished jack-o’-lantern alongside my wife’s. She chose a simple design, but she had a good reason: We were having a party that evening, and she had a lot of other tasks to complete while also pumpkin carving.
This is your annual reminder that we know next to nothing about Samhain or its relationship to Halloween, that all Halloween customs have supposedly Christian origins just as convincing as their supposed pagan origins, and that none of this should matter anyway because every agricultural society has harvest festivals and cultural borrowing is the norm.
Anyway, in our last episode, I mentioned that the magical girls and I purchased pumpkins for carving. I planned to create a magical girl-themed Jack-O’-Lantern; I wanted such a theme both so I could display it on this blog and also just on principle. However, my main magical girl hadn’t carved a Jack-O’-Lantern before, so she wanted a more traditional one.
Since I’m not a master pumpkin carver and was not working with any fancy tools, I wanted a simple pattern.
I chose this:
Now, I already know what you’re thinking: It looks simple at a glance, but it actually has a lot of small, delicate details and very little to hold the construction together.
At first, I was doing pretty well and thought I would get this right, but I eventually made some wrong moves. I lost the area below her arm, so I had to reattach it with toothpicks, but my biggest mistake was carving the moon out last, thinking I should do the delicate work first. I ended up with this:
That’s the magical girl diligently working on her own in the background there. She was also laughing at me.
If carved correctly, the design has delicate spots that leave large parts of the image supported by tiny bits of the pumpkin’s rind. I broke through a couple by applying too much pressure. The result was what you see here: I shattered the entire image like an eighth-century iconoclast.
My wife, who judiciously wanted a simpler, more classic design, was entirely successful in her carving endeavor. She and the other magical girl who can never leave her worked diligently, and now their Jack-O’-Lantern, made from a stencil my wife chose because it made her giggle, adorns the top of the post. I don’t have any tea candles to show it in all its glory, but I’ll undoubtedly display it lit up at a later date.
Yesterday, I, the magical girl, and magical girl 2 went to a local seasonal attraction, the misnamed “Pumpkin Patch.” I guess I was actually expecting a field of pumpkins growing on the vine, but it was actually a square of grass with pumpkins on pallets. Nonetheless, its creators had brought in lots of props and some kiddie games and such, so it made for some fun photo opportunities.
We ended up purchasing two pumpkins. The magical girl wanted to carve a traditional Jack-O’Lantern, but I wanted to use a stencil and carve a magical girl-themed pumpkin I can display on the blog.
So, anyway, we have our pumpkins. The question is when we’ll be able to find the time to carve them. I’m also contemplating turning their insides into pumpkin pie, but since these are large ones with probably stringy insides, that might be a bad idea. I’m sure we can bake the seeds, though.
Featured image: “Chibi cute witch” by SweetCherryVenus.
I’m currently finishing up a project, so I am behind on what I want to do with the blog, so behind that I even missed International Cute Witch Day yesterday, which is a serious sin for a magical girl fan.
I have some new posts and reviews I want to write, but for now I’m in the “I have to get this novel out of the house or I’ll go crazy” stage, so that takes precedence. Here are the updates I have at present:
Everything is finished on my end for the sequel to Jake and the Dynamo. I honestly though it would be out last month, and I’m not sure why it wasn’t, but I’m not here to point fingers, so I probably wouldn’t tell you even if I did know.
I’m going to start harassing some people to find out what’s going on. In any case, the good news is that I should have two new novels out in the near future, in rapid succession.
I am in the final editing phase. I’ve made the changes my editor requested and I’m now going through the printed draft with a red pen. After I make the final edits, I’ll run the whole thing through a spelling/grammar checker, which is tedious, but which also catches a few typos and other errors that even close editing can miss.
After that, it will see the publisher’s proofreader, and then I’ll make any final edits and be quit of it. I pride myself on submitting very clean drafts, so if Rag & Muffin is like Dead to Rites, the turnaround time will be quick and the final changes will consist of little more than a few missing commas.
The submission draft should be out the door by the end of the weekend.
This is actually my first novel, and it’s a long time coming. It took this long to build up my skills and actually produce this version, which is now worthy of publication. It also took a fair amount of research. I’m glad it will soon be seeing the light of day.
I do, admittedly, regret somewhat that I didn’t get it published earlier. It’s a dark subversion (of sorts) of popular children’s stories, and it would have been more unique in that regard some years back, before the current dark phase of magical girls became so prominent. However, Rag & Muffin might not exactly qualify as a magical girl story anyway: It’s more of a grim take on the “Wake up, go to school, save the world” motif, which to my knowledge has never got this exact treatment before. On overarching theme in the book is that childhood heroics can have unintended consequences.
Also, some of the obscure medical issues in the book are now less obscure. At the time I first started working on it, hormone blockers for children were an esoteric medical subject rather than a national debate. But so it goes.
I had a long weekend with the magical girl, and one of the things we did while she was visiting was go to the Nightmare in the Country Scream Park, an annual attraction near Woodward, Oklahoma.
We had a lengthy drive to get to the place. I’d never been before and neither had she, so we didn’t know what to expect. In the end, I think it was more elaborate and impressive than we anticipated.
Nightmare in the Country is one of those haunted house walk-throughs in which people in makeup and costume jump out and try to startle you. I’ve been to some of these before and even participated in one once, but Nightmare in the Country is the most elaborate I’ve ever seen. It is constructed on a farm and opens annually for a few days in October. It has grown both in size and in popularity over the last few years. The creators promised that this year was much more elaborate than the years previous, and much more immersive.
Once again, it is Halloween, the second most important holiday in the magical girl calendar. Tonight, magical girls can go abroad without calling undue attention to themselves.
This year, I am dedicating International Cute Witch Day to Little Witch Academia. I much enjoyed the short film (it came out in 2013) some years back, but I admit I’ve not seen the widely popular television series that came after it and became available in the U.S. last year. It’s on my list.
For some reason, I barely remember what the short film was about, though I remember enjoying it. It was was an obviously Harry Potter-influenced story of quirky girls going to witch school, and it had some high-flying broom scenes with the kind of creative yet jerky animation for which Studio Trigger is known.
Speaking of Trigger, I finally got around to watching Kill la Kill about a year back, and it completely blew my mind. It might be the best skewering of the magical girl genre I’ve ever seen, because it not only mocked it mercilessly, but unlike the slew of grimdark shows we’ve had lately, demonstrated in the process that it actually understood what the genre is about. So I trust the studio to know how to handle magical girls.
If they could do magical girl warriors so well, they could probably do cute witches well, too, and the popularity of Little Witch Academia tends to confirm that.
Okay, I confess: I intended to have a JAKE AND THE DYNAMO short story ready to go for Halloween, but I have been so busy, I didn’t get it done. Perhaps it will appear later in the week, and you can enjoy it while eating the candy corn you picked up for fifty percent off out of the discount bin while you contemplate stuffing a rotten pumpkin into Mrs. Shushley’s mailbox because she gave you a toothbrush for Halloween instead of candy.
Halloween is, as you might expect, the most important day in the liturgical calendar of Urbanopolis, more important even than Walpurgisnacht (April 30) or the birthday of the Moon Princess (June 30). On Halloween, at midnight, it is the Witching Hour, when the girls’ power is at its greatest. At that hour, they customarily renew their oaths to their familiars and sign with fresh blood the contracts by which they have sold their souls.
It’s also a good time to pick up free junk food. Halloween is the one day of the year on which it is socially acceptable for children to take candy from strangers. Just don’t eat the apples; they contain razor blades. At least, that’s what my mom always said.
It’s also a good time to engage in disgustingly unhygienic pastimes like bobbing for apples. Do you realize you’ve indirectly kissed, like, the whole town when you play that game? That’s gross, dude. And you should’t be trying to catch apples in your mouth anyway—they contain razor blades.
Although I’d make an exception if the other players were ponies. It’s my lifelong dream to indirectly kiss a pony, though that’s not the kind of thing I’d admit to complete strangers on the Internet.
Um, where was I? Anyway, in honor of Halloween, have some images of cute witches:
