A Few Announcements

By Terri

Have a photo of the Tuileries Gardens. You deserve it.

Well, it’s been a year, hasn’t it?

We haven’t released any new products this year, but we did manage to bring a nice selection of prints, stickers and originals to the Chicon 8 art show. We even sold the original Lady Astronaut painting! And we do appreciate those of you who have been steadily making online purchases. It’s kept a nice stream of income coming our way, which is nothing to sneeze at.

Which brings us to the first announcement - while our shipping prices have remained stable over the last several years, the actual cost of postage and supplies have gone up sharply. Inflation, it’s a thing! So in the coming year, we’ll be raising our shipping prices. Stickers ordered on their own will still be shipped for free, untracked. Everything else will see a price hike for shipping.

Speaking of shipping, the second announcement. Ariela will be moving house in the next couple of weeks. That means the bulk of our extant stock, not to mention the supplies to make new stock, will all be in boxes. Terri keeps some stock in Seattle, but not enough for most orders. We will be suspending order fulfillment until February 1. You’ll still be able to make purchases, but we won’t be shipping them out until 2/1/23. This gives Ariela enough time to unpack everything in her brand new studio. Think of this shipping hiatus as the ability to give a present to your future self.

As for the third announcement, it concerns awards eligibility. Neither of us are eligible for a Hugo nomination this year. To be honest, this is somewhat of a relief. The 2023 Worldcon is controversial at best, and don’t get Terri started from a SMOF perspective on it.

2022 has been one hecking chonk of a year, and we look forward to some new projects upcoming in 2023!

2021 Hugo Eligibility Post: Best Fan Artist

by Ariela

Woof, I had some stuff going on December through February. I’m almost out of time for this post, but I wanted to throw it out there that once again in 2021 I produced Hugo-eligible art.

The Art

The Fanfiction Diptych

Eligibility: These two companion pieces premiered on our website on December 30, 2021.

Middlegame

This licensed art based on the novel Middlegame by Seanan McGuire features an orrery surrounded by a quote from the book with the Standard Model equation arcing through the background as though written on an infinite blackboard.

Eligibility: Although this piece was not available for sale on our website until 2022, it soft-launched at DisCon III in December 2021 and was on display at the art show there.

Custom Art: Iron Man and Rhodey

Custom piece of artwork featuring a tuxedo cat named Rhodey perched on the shoulders of the Iron Man suit.

Eligibility: This piece of custom art was featured on our blog in August 2021.

Note: Due to the rules of the Hugo Awards, nominations will only be accepted for “Ariela Housman,” not for “Geek Calligraphy.”

Thank you for your consideration during this nominating season.

New Art Print: Middlegame

If you’ve ever dreamed the impossible into being or are just a huge Seanan McGuire fan, this one’s for you.

How It Came to Be

Terri is an enormous fan of Seanan McGuire’s work. While urban fantasy isn’t generally Ariela’s cup of tea, we’ve been trying to find one of Seanan’s many works where Ariela enjoyed the book as much as Terri did so we could do art for it. We pitched a Wayward Children piece way back in 2019, but the series is tied up in a number of film and television options that prevented us from securing image rights. When Terri finished Middlegame, she told Ariela that she was having ideas that including “words and fancy math.” Ariela replied that this was doable, though she did need to finish the novel first. Terri then decided to skim the novel for quotes, resulting in this:

Image shows the page side of a trade paperback novel liberally sprinkled with blue and pink sticky note flags.

In the end we decided to go with the heart quote of the novel, arcing around one of the recurring images of the single through lines it contains. Creating this piece involved a number of varied items, including eBay reference images and a hula hoop. Think of them as ingredients in the alchemical process.

We soft launched this print at DisCon III to great success and are proud for it to be the first product we officially release in 2022.

The print features an orrery, showing the planets in a possible significant alchemical alignment.* The background is the Standard Model equation in the Langrangian form, in sweeping arcs.

The quote is both from Middlegame and Over the Woodward Wall, and tells you that:

“To reach the Impossible City, you need to walk the improbable road.”

This is a limited edition run of just 100 art prints in the 11”x14” size and only 20 in the 16”x20” size. Each print is matted on a black, archival-safe mat and comes ready to hang or to put in a standard 11”x14” or 16”x20” frame. Ships flat. 

“The improbable road spools onward, and outward, and the journey continues from here.”

*By which we mean “this is the planetary arrangement that the reference image had and Seanan didn’t tell us we needed a different one.”

New Stickers: Fanfic Time!

Have you ever felt the need to proclaim that you read or write fan fiction and are not ashamed? Then we’ve got the stickers for you!

It’s been quite the couple of years, hasn’t it? Between one thing and another* we haven’t released a new product since the end of 2019. But the end of 2021 draws nigh**, and we’d like to end the year on a high note celebrating something we both love.

How it came to be:

Terri & Ariela are both big fans of Olivia Dade’s most recent novels, Spoiler Alert and All the Feels. We’re also long time fan fiction readers. During a semi-regular business chat, Terri asked Ariela if we couldn’t do a sort of calligram tribute to the fictional Gods of the Gates series involving fanfic tropes. While Terri’s fanciful idea involving an urn proved highly impractical, Ariela immediately replied with “What about stickers that say ‘Proud Fanfic Writer’ and ‘Proud Fanfic Reader’?” Terri immediately agreed that this would be a smashing idea, and off Ariela went to design them.

Like our Fuck You, Pay Me prints and stickers, these stickers use beautiful lettering and decorative flourishes to announce an unpopular opinion in a Very Classy Way. The stickers are die cut vinyl, and will look great on your fanfic consumption/output device of your choosing.

Pre order your stickers today!

*Those things include a a divorce, a transatlantic move, a global pandemic, and the launch of possibly the world’s snarkiest zine between the two of us.

**Yes, we’re getting this in under the wire. It’s 2021, we’re doing our best.

Commission: Iron Man and Rhodey (Cat)

by Ariela

I’ve been working on some commissions lately that are gifts, so I have not been able to talk about them publicly until the recipients got them (and then gave their permission).

The first of those that I can talk about now is this one.

The recipient is a huge fan of Iron Man. To the point that they named their cat Rhodey. So I did a portrait of their cat with Iron Man.

Image shows a black and white tuxedo cat with light green eyes perched on Iron Man’s shoulder. Iron Man has a hand raised to the cat and the cat is looking at the hand.

You can see photos of Rhodey on the recipient’s Instagram, @monkeybiziu.

This was my first time painting both a cat and a robot in watercolor, so I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. You can see photos of the painting process over on Twitter.

Ariela's First M'gillah

by Ariela

Those of you who follow us on Twitter and Instagram know that since November, Ariela has been working on a very special commission: her first M’gillat Esther, a scroll containing the entire biblical Book of Esther.

The process of writing a m’gillah is very different than my usual commission process because there are many rules in halaḥah (Jewish law) about how a holy text has to be written in order to be kosher. There was no art, but the text is long enough that it took me three full months of working diligently nearly every evening to complete it. There are 12,196 letters in the Book of Esther, which makes it ten times the length of the average ketubah text, and each of those letters needs to conform to those rules mentioned above. The scroll is written in ink on parchment, divided into 16 columns of 28 lines each (except for one special column), and written in the Spanish Portuguese traditional script.

First three columns of the Book of Esther.

Third and fourth full columns of the Book of Esther.

Twelfth through fourteenth columns of the Book of Esther. Column 13 is special and has only 22 very large words.

The clients picked up the scroll yesterday and they are really happy with it. The Book of Esther is read, from a scroll, on the holiday of Purim (or Pureem, as the Spanish Portuguese Jews usually transliterate it), which is falling this year on the evening of February 25 and the day of February 26. It is extra meaningful for my clients to have their own scroll starting this year, because the pandemic means that we cannot go to synagogue and fulfill our obligation to hear it read there.

While I hope dearly that no future clients will be reading from their scrolls under quarantine, I am hoping that this will be just the first of many scrolls that I will write.

Happy Pureem everyone!

Good Riddance 2020

by Ariela & Terri

Chibi Ariela, sporting a new, floofy green dress holds a closed champagne bottle, saying “Champagne is not the right beverage for this moment.” Chibi Terri in her regular gear proffers an uncapped bottle of bitters from which flames are spurting, saying “How about with a drop of ‘essence of dumpster fire?’”

2020 has been a trashfire by all accounts. Geek Calligraphy has been very quiet this year because, in addition to the disasters playing out on the national and global stages, Ariela suffered a significant personal loss this year and her emotional life for the bulk of the year was in shambles. She was in no condition to be producing art and Terri suddenly found herself in the position of having to provide significant emotional support to a best friend across an ocean in the middle of a global pandemic.

We’re in the process of recovery, but before we get back to producing new art prints Ariela is clearing a significant backlog of commission work. We hope to come back in 2021 with new art for you. In the meanwhile, we join the rest of the world in bidding 2020 a vehement goodbye.

There is a medieval liturgical poem that ends each stanza with the line תכל שנה וקללותיה, “let the old year die, and all of its curses with it.” That feels quite apropos at the moment. The last stanza, however, ends תחל שנה וברכותיה, “let the new year begin, and all of its blessings with it.” Here’s hoping for a better year in 2021.

Terri’s 2019 Hugo Eligibility Post: Best Fan Writer

by Terri

Image shows Chibi Terri holding a sign that says “Has Opinions (and shares them).” She looks immensely pleased with herself.

Wow. Was 2019 ever a year. I spent it (and a decent chunk of 2018) living abroad for the first time since 2004. I shepherded my business into its third year of life. I attended the Hugo Awards for the first time in a professional capacity, rather than a volunteer one. I turned parasocial colleagues into people I count as friends. I fell headfirst into becoming a not so Secret Master of Fandom. I launched and edited a whole zine in protest to a single decision.

And as the year came to a close, I realized something. While I want to reform the Hugo Awards criteria for artists from the ground up (in part to acknowledge that creative partnerships can exist when only one half does the Actual Art), I am Hugo Eligible in my own right. Because 2019 is the year that my Twitter feed started reaching a wider voice. And a lot of what I post there is writing of a SF/F nature.

So please consider my behind eligible for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award this year. You can find my most popular threads by either looking me up as @crewgrrl on Twitter or by heading over to this blog (to which this post is cross-posted). 

In addition, the zine I co-launched and edited is eligible for Best Related Work. The Very Official Dead Dog Art Zine doesn’t have enough issues to be Best Fanzine eligible, but as a commentary on the Hugo Awards, it certainly is new content that relates to the SF/F world. Ariela Housman and Terri Ash should both be credited as the editorial team.

The Very Official Dead Dog Art Zine’s 2019 Hugo Eligibility Post: Best Related Work

The cover of our zine

2019 has been an eventful year, y’all.

One of the things that happened was that in response to Lady Astronaut Nouveau being excluded from the Hugo Voter’s Packet, we created an Art Zine that definitively provides a zero-gatekeeping venue for artists to display their work. The Very Official Dead Dog Art Zine is NOT eligible for a Best Fanzine Hugo. You need a minimum of 4 extant issues to qualify for that.

What it is eligible for is Best Related Work. We hope that you will consider it for nomination on your Hugo ballot this year. Both Terri Ash & Ariela Housman should be credited as the editorial team.

Ariela's 2019 Hugo Eligibility Post: Best Fan Artist

by Ariela

I am very proud of the art I made this year.

Lady Astronaut Nouveau
Watercolor and Ink on Paper
Inspired by The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal.
Licensed by Mary Robinette Kowal.

Displayed at multiple convention art shows.

Dragon Naturalist Nouveau
Watercolor and Ink on Paper
Inspired by the Memoirs of Lady Trent series by Marie Brennan.
Licensed by Marie Brennan.

Published in The Very Official Dead Dog Art Zine.

Tech Serenity 2.0
Digital

Displayed at multiple convention art shows.

Dead Dog Art Zine 2019 Cover
Watercolor on Paper, Photography, Ink, Digital

Published in the Very Official Dead Dog Art Zine.

A Wonder(ous) Woman
Ink and Watercolor on Paper

Displayed at multiple convention art shows.

Translation of Text Blocks

1: Proverbs 31: 10 - “A valorous woman, who can find?”

2 : Proverbs 31: 20 - “Her hand is open to the needy, she reaches out to the oppressed.”

3: Proverbs 31: 25 - “She is clothed in strength and dignity; she laughs at the days to come.”

4: Proverbs 31: 26 - “She opens her mouth [and from it comes] wisdom, the law of loving kindness is on her tongue.

5: Proverbs 31: 31 - “Give her the fruit of her hands and praise her doings in the public thoroughfare.”

Hugo Category Eligibility

Once again, I am eligible for the Best Fan Artist Hugo category. If you are able to nominate for the Hugos, please nominate me as “Ariela Housman,” as the award is for the artist, not the business. (This doesn’t recognize Terri’s hard work and the way she contributed, because the world regularly ignores the value of managerial work and the Hugo awards are no exception. Any rocket which I may eventually win will be due in part to her.)

Explanatory Thingee About Hugo Category Eligibility

Some Hugo categories (Best Professional Artist, Best Fan Artist, Best Semiprozine, and Best Fanzine) are defined by whether the work done was professional, semi-professional, or fannish. The definition of what is a “professional” publication is somewhat technical. A professional publication either (1) provided at least a quarter the income of any one person or, (2) was owned or published by any entity which provided at least a quarter the income of any of its staff and/or owner.

-TheHugoAwards.org

For the purposes of Hugo categories, you are only a Professional Artist if your stuff gets published in a Professional Publication. So you can make a living, for years, entirely by selling your SF art directly to other people and still not be considered a Professional Artist for the purposes of the Hugos if your art was never included in a publication that earns according to the above criteria.

When making prints was harder and there wasn't much in the way of direct-to-fans selling outside of conventions, this made sense. Today it is ridiculous, but the rules are the rules.

A Note About Lady Astronaut Nouveau’s Consideration

Last year the Hugo Committee ruled officially that the Lady Astronaut Nouveau had not met their criteria for being “on public display” during 2018. Mary Robinette pointed out that this is very similar to what happened to the original “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” novelette, when it was struck from the Best Novellette ballot in 2013 on the grounds that an audiobook was not “published” but was rather a Dramatic Presentation. When “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” was self-published in 2013 in response to the Hugo Committee ruling, it was duly allowed on the ballot in 2014.

While Lady Astronaut Nouveau was completed in 2018, it was first put “on public display” as defined by the Hugo Committee in 2019. Following the precedent of the novelette, this means it is an eligible work from 2019.

At Dublin 2019 Terri submitted an amendment to the rules that would explicitly define public display as being fully viewable on the internet without having to pay. The amendment passed and, if it is ratified ConZealand, starting in 2021 no one will have to play weird “is it public display and therefore eligible” chicken with the Hugo Committee anymore.