Tag: katnip

30 Days of Creativity 2013: Day 1–Toys

The Adventures of Katnip: 21


“Sometimes,” I said, “I feel like a monkey in a zoo.”

“We all do,” John Riley assured me.

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This is my fourth year to kick off the summer with creativity thanks to 30 Days of Creativity. The first couple of years my creations were random, and I rarely consulted the 30 Days calendar prompts. Last year I used the calendar to have The Ram direct Monster High dolls in various movie scenes.

This year, I hope to use the calendar as I do simultaneous posts here and to my Flickr set, The Adventures of Katnip. In case you’re not aware, Katnip’s adventures began back in February. She couldn’t understand why she kept being tossed from one universe and time to another until she finally got herself a sidekick, John Riley. John Riley figured out that a verbal cue or reference from Katnip is the reason she’s ended up in the worlds of Middle Earth, Wonderland, Jaws, Mad Magazine, and Firefly, among others. She’s been told she’s on a quest: to find Lil Eddy. But she has no idea what or who Lil Eddy is.

Doing The Adventures of Katnip is a fun way to feature some of the books, movies, music, or TV shows that I’ve enjoyed through the years. I also get to photograph toys and other random things I find around The Compound. I hope you’ll enjoy them, too.

As the 30 Days site begins to post other contributors’ submissions, I’ll include links with my posts. Also, if you go to my Flickr set to see the first 20 photos, I’m sorry the site changed their format so that you can’t easily see the accompanying text unless you click on the photo and scroll down. I don’t like Flickr’s redesign at all.

If you want to participate in 30 Days of Creativity on your blog or other social media, click here for more info.

More Day 1 creations here.

February Photo A Day: Playing


I wonder if playing is part of every writer’s life. Playing satisfies the need to create story.

We anthropomorphize animals, objects, and gods, giving them the qualities we know about humans and weaving elaborate tales about them. Sometimes those stories make it to the page–or the screen. Whether it’s a tragedy about Dionysus, a story about a brave collie, a book about a self-sacrificing tree, or a tale of cars left to rust in an abandoned town, it all springs from the imagination, first nourished when we played with our Lego blocks, stuffed animals, Matchbox cars, or dolls.

I’ve been posting photos of my action figure Katnip (based on The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen–and hey, shout-out to Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence) to weave a story for a creative friend of Tim’s who inspires me all the time with her photos, the toys she finds or creates, and photos and stories she once shared using one of her action figures. I don’t know how long my story lasts, or even all the details of how it will play out, but it’s teaching me to share a tale with photos and as few words as possible. It also sometimes gives me a chance to photograph books I’m reading or have read. (If you’re interested in following along, the pictures are in this Flickr set.)

Prompt from FMS Photo A Day. You can see a larger version with better map details by clicking here.