I hadn’t read The Giver before I heard about this opera (although I must have read Number The Stars about ten times in middle school), but people had been recommending it to me for years. I’d been on the periphery of so many conversations about this book that I thought I knew enough about it to make reading it redundant. But I couldn’t very well see an opera based on it without having read the book first, right? So a few nights before the dress rehearsal, I downloaded the ebook and read it.

And then I couldn’t get to sleep. I lay awake in bed with the lights on, thinking about Jonas on the sled and the bleak, colorless landscape of the community and Rosemary’s story and the things that would probably qualify me for an early release if I were a character in that world. And then I tried to imagine how the hell this story would translate into opera, and I was finally able to sleep, because here, finally, was something my imagination couldn’t even picture.

It turns out, the solutions to translating The Giver were simple and elegant: a color palette all in gray and beige, a Greek chorus narrating Jonas’s inner life like they were retelling the story for future generations, and mobile scrim screens to project the Giver’s memories onto.

It was perfect. The gray apple was switched out for a red one, the actors froze, Jonas stepped forward to inspect the object while the chorus sang about his discovery, and I was hooked. I had trouble drawing through this opera because it was so engrossing, but I got down a few key scenes.

The apple.

Jonas’s first experience of snow. (A snowy day projected on the screens, the lighting soft blue, and the chorus on the scaffolding overhead sprinkling snowflakes down onto the stage.)

The Giver comforting Jonas after Jonas finds out what his father did to the smaller twin.

The relationship between these two was palpable. These actors had less than an hour to show the progression of a year-long mentorship, and they sold me on it. I’d be lying if I said a few of their scenes didn’t leave me teary-eyed. Which reminds me: you know how I said this show was put on by Project Opera? Yeah, the whole cast was actors 10-18 years old. Kids these days, with their talent. It was the most moving performance I saw all season – partly because the material was easier for me to connect to than, say, Werther, but also because it was an amazing cast. I wanted to get the Giver and Jonas’s autographs on my program book after the show, but they were taking notes from the director.

Oh, and did I mention LOIS FREAKING LOWRY WAS THERE? The YA lit nerd in me was making a constant high-pitched noise in my head for much of the evening. Lowry had a casual meet and greet with audience members before the show where she fielded lots of questions about the book and its sequels (Gathering Blue, Messenger, and Son, which she says is a whopper of a book from Gabe’s perspective coming later this year). I hung back trying not to trip over my own feet or stammer nonsense sentences, which are my go-to reactions to being in the presence of authors I respect, and was moderately successful. Lowry talked a lot about the reactions she’d gotten from fans and critics of the book and, when asked about the ambiguous ending, smiled and said she had a “Jonas Lives” t-shirt she liked to wear to events at schools.

I am so, so glad I got to go to this event. The Minnesota Opera Company does amazing work, and Project Opera, it turns out, is just as fantastic. I took time out of the hectic end of an already overbooked semester to read the book and see this show, and my only regret is that the show was sold out. If it hadn’t been, I would’ve made everyone I know go see it with me. As is, I guess I’ll just have to tell you to support the opera if you can, keep an eye out for more work by this amazing group of young performers, and go re-read my copy of the novel.

Look at those jerks. They think they’re so cool. The phrase “cold, hard, sparkly truth” is courtesy my friend Gerbil.

You might notice a bit of a name change. I’ve been going by Theo IRL, and given that there are approximately two million Nicole Lorenzes out there (I should know – I snagged nicolelorenz on gmail, so I’ve gotten half their emails), it makes sense to add Theo to my business name and make it easier to spot in a crowd. Plus, I’d rather have strangers at art crawls address me by a name I like. So Theo Nicole Lorenz it is.

Jerks is mostly done at this point – it just needs final beta reader edits and proofing – so it should be available by the end of May. Keep an eye on this space and/or my Twitter feed for updates.

Awesomeness #1: I’m going to be at the St. Paul Art Crawl all weekend! See the website for hours, but I’ll be tabling with my Black Hatters in the Cosmopolitan building (250 East 6th Street – right across the street from Mears Park). Stop by and say hi if you’re local! I’ll have plenty of copies of Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace and some promo/preview pages from Unicorns Are Jerks.

Awesomeness #2: I’m confirmed as a guest creator for SpringCon! That’s coming up in a few weekends. I’m hoping to have copies of Unicorns Are Jerks available by then – fingers crossed!

Awesomeness #3: Smut Peddler is up for pre-order on Kickstarter and just got fully funded in under 24 hours! Smut peddler is a lady-centric anthology of porno comics that I’ve mentioned on Twitter and alluded to here. Take a look at the list of creators – there is a TON of talent here! I inked a comic some friends of mine wrote and drew, so something I helped make is in there, too. This is going to be a fantastic book! Copies will still be available for pre-order for the next month, and the more money the Kickstarter brings in, the more money goes directly to the artists.

She belongs to my dear friend Bex, who asked me if I’d burn roses on her new spinning wheel before she put a finish on it. I had been absolutely flattered when she had me burn little dancing kiwi birds on her Ashford Kiwi wheel a few years back, so of course I said yes.

Actually, it was a bit of a dream come true. The only regret I have about my own Kromski Minstrel (the same model as Alice) is that I bought it pre-finished because I didn’t have the guts to burn and finish it myself. Minstrels have a lot of detailed woodwork that makes them a rather challenging surface to wood burn. I did little opening rosebuds on the flat bits on the inside the wheel:

And made use of the flat space on the treadles:

But oddly, the most satisfying part of the project was burning around one of the posts on the mother-of-all, which included a lot of carefully dragging the tip of the burner over bumps and divots in the lovely woodwork:

Bex finished her with Danish oil in “cherry,” which really shows off both the wood grain and the rose vines. Alice was a gorgeous wheel to begin with (I have a soft spot for Minstrels, obviously), but now she’s a gorgeous wheel who’s perfectly suited to her spinner. It’s an intimidating challenge, being asked to help another artist personalize the tools of their trade, but deeply satisfying to see finished.

(All photos courtesy Bex.)

Click for big.

(The finished page says “Unicorns bogart your fries.”)

Enjoy!

Step 1: Take your taxes seriously. Gather all the necessary forms and information, and then dress like you’re an action movie hero, because shit’s about to get real. (Ripped jeans and a stained shirt work well for this, especially if the shirt shows off your guns. Protective eyewear is necessary – sunglasses are best, but glasses will do in a pinch.)

Step 2: Get yourself a Dr. Pepper or other brand name soda of your choice.Product placement.

Step 3: Start an account with one of those online services that e-files your tax returns and does math for you. Action heroes don’t do math or go to the post office! They’re too busy walking casually away from explosions!

Step 4: When you make a mistake, pull off your sunglasses really slowly, drop your voice, and say, “My god…what have I done?”

Step 5: If doing your taxes gets so frustrating you can’t stand it, lie on the ground and fire your finger-gun in the air while yelling “AAAA.”

Step 6: Defeat your taxes – preferably in some sort of dramatic face-off.

Step 7: Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker. Eat some pizza – you just saved the world! (And by “the world” I mean “yourself from an audit by the IRS.”)

Here’s the thing: my work ranges across a lot of age groups. I draw coloring books that are sort of incidentally kid-friendly. I write both YA and adult fantasy. I just finished inking a comic some friends of mine did for a porn anthology. I have two webcomics in planning stages that might come out in the next couple of years, one of which is collaborative and probably R-rated, the other just mine and PG-13 at the highest. Also, I swear a lot in my personal essays, because I fucking love swearing.

So, how to present myself here? I could play it safe, tone my language down, not talk about things like all of that satyr junk I just inked, and aim to keep this blog family-friendly and try to be a good example for the youngest age bracket of my potential audience.

But that’s not me.

I’m kind of like a giant, foul-mouthed five-year-old most of the time. I had ice cream sundaes for dinner two days in a row this week. I want to quit my stable day job and draw unicorns full-time. In a given week, I spend more time reading fan fiction than I do working on my homework for grad school. I have all the lyrics to Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” memorized. I AM NOT A ROLE MODEL.

And more than that, I don’t like the idea of revising parts of my personality publicly to reach a certain audience. I’ve worked hard to become who I am today, and I’m proud of that person. (Maybe not so proud of her minor Ke$ha obsession, but y’know, everyone has their vices, and the video for “Blow” has unicorns so it’s totally relevant to my life.)

I’ve decided to stop worrying about appeasing any particular audience. If someone visits this blog and leaves because I swore or mentioned sexuality or used humor not fit for their six-year-old, that’s okay; they’re not my audience. And if someone rolls their eyes at my posts because I take glee in childish things and have a plastic stegosaurus as my assistant, well, they’re not my audience either. But I think there is an audience out there for me. Just me – unrevised and open and really this big a dork.

Here are some promises I can make to you, if you stick around:

1. All coloring books will remain G to PG in rating, although my goal is to make them enjoyable to grown-ups, too.

2. The content of this blog will likely stick around a PG-13 rating, mostly due to language, and will continue to be about everything from dinosaurs to queerness to book recommendations.

3. This blog will always be safe for work. When I work on a project that merits a rating above PG-13 (for example, this smut I just finished inking), I might talk about it but I won’t post explicit images or text from the project here. Any links leading to the project itself will have NSFW note by them.

4. I will do my utmost to be entertaining.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got some unicorn sketches calling my name.

I willingly skipped a night of fanart and new TV to go to Werther. I KNOW. I told you. Hooked.

Opera is a fascinating art form. You can sit in the theater feeling the actors’ voices surrounding you and know that, in most cases, this same song has been heard in just this way by generations of audiences. Technical aspects of the show may have been modernized since the tradition began, but the success of it still relies on the power of the human voice, carefully trained and unaided by microphones.

Werther was first performed in 1892. It’s a tragedy about a young poet, Werther, who falls in love with an engaged woman, Charlotte. When Charlotte marries her betrothed, Werther pines, convinced that she’d be happier with him. He sends her letters trying to convince her of this, then making implicit threats of suicide when his affections are not returned. Charlotte is tormented by his advances and his threats. The opera ends with Werther’s suicide, his head cradled in his beloved’s hands as his final song finishes.

I suppose it was meant to be romantic in its day, but to me, it came off as a cautionary tale about the ways we’re taught to think about love.

Werther tearing love poems from the wall of his small room.

Love is an all-consuming goal for Werther. He’s a poet, and he treats the idea of love like a grand ideal rather than a type of affection to be shared between two people. He announces his love for Charlotte at the end of the first night he knows her. Granted, they do have an awesome amount of chemistry, but chemistry and a night dancing do not a true love make. Charlotte points out that he hardly knows her, and he dismisses her concern, too in love with the idea of love.

Charlotte in one of her amazing gowns.

Charlotte seems to have a better grasp on reality than Werther, but his insistence on LOVE, LOVE, LOVE above all else – above her engagement and then marriage, above her own personal protests – outweighs her reasonableness. She asks if there’s not some other woman worthy of his affections, someone not married, and he dismisses her yet again. He won’t consider anyone else because she is the object of his love – and he treats her just like that, as an object. He doesn’t listen to her, he doesn’t consider her emotions except when her mutual crush supports his hypothesis that she’d be happier with him.

Werther haunts her life long after any well-adjusted person would have backed off. He stands at the railing singing about his woe, a hell he’s created for himself by refusing to listen to reason.

“I will not be so harsh as to say ‘never,’” Charlotte sings at one point. But anything short of “never” gives him the sliver of false hope he needs to fan the flames of his love.

There’s a chilling moment in the final act where Charlotte has been re-reading Werther’s letters to her. He writes about how lonely he is, how hollowed out by anguish at not having her as his, and how, if he doesn’t show up for Christmas, to see that he’s buried someplace nice. Charlotte is wrecked by these letters, collapsed sobbing into a chair, when Werther steps out of the shadows in the entryway behind her. During his time in her home this evening, he will plead with her, force her to kiss him, claw at her clothing and limbs when she tries to get away, and ignore every “No” until she runs away from him.

This is the image that will stick with me from this opera: Charlotte, emotionally broken, and her tormenter looming out of the darkness behind her, unaware that he’s the villain of this piece.

Because that’s what Werther is: a villain. But the scary thing about this story is, he’s a villain we all know. Walking out of the theater, I talked with my comic collective friends about how we’ve all known, dated, or briefly been a Werther. He’s that guy in your math class in eleventh grade who declares the world is against him because he can’t get a date. He’s the ex who insists you’re meant to be together and will hurt you or himself if that’s what it takes to prove it to you. He’s that part of your brain that says, “It’s okay if she doesn’t like you back. If you just keep showing her how much you like her, she’ll come around.” Werther is so driven by the idea of love that he’s blocked out the fact that it needs to be a two-way street.

 The cultural messages that shaped Werther’s story are still being taught today. We still say through pop culture, “If you love someone enough, they will love you back.” We still talk and write and sing about romantic love like it’s as intrinsic to life as oxygen. We still undervalue consent. And we still teach boys to put girls on pedestals and teach girls that it’s not okay to give a definitive “no” because that’s too harsh.

The real tragedy of Werther is that it’s not an unusual story. Maybe that’s why it’s survived for 120 years.

(And hey, that got depressing. How about a cute drawing of Charlotte’s adorable little sister Sophie, who spent the whole play encouraging other people to be happy?

Isn’t her hat adorable? Yeah, that’s better.)

2. My heart can survive that.

3. The lab losing your family dog’s remains can simultaneously be the most heartbreaking and hilarious thing you’ve ever heard. Of course – of course, the only time it happens in ten years of service, it would happen to the dog whose favorite hobby was being as inconvenient as possible.

4. Internet friends can hold you up when you’re a mess just as well as in-person friends can – sometimes better.

5. Be open to new people and opportunities to do new things. You might end up trying Ethiopian food with seven amazing mostly-strangers at a convention and realize halfway through the meal that their names sound familiar because  you’ve got some of their books and webcomics on your to-read list.

6. Derbies are always in fashion. Always.

7. Sometimes it takes traveling halfway across the world to meet a friend who lives a mile away. (Hi, Anna!)

8. The Giant’s Causeway is the most breathtaking place I have ever been, although it did kill my umbrella. Edinburgh felt more like home than my own neighborhood, and you can buy an umbrella in a tourist shop there for 99p.

(Click for big. It's worth it.)

9. European Fanta is the nectar of the gods.

10. “If you’re not failing at least 50% of the time, you’re not trying hard enough.” – the theme of every creativity-oriented panel I went to at CONvergence.

11. The word “outsourcing” can sting like a slap if you hear it enough times in relation to your own job

12. That crying in the ladies’ room thing that characters on TV do? That’s not just a trope. Bathrooms are fucking useful for minor emotional breakdowns.

13. Quitting…doesn’t always take. Even if you give 26-week notice. Maybe especially if you give 26-week notice.

14. If you draw a coloring book about fat ladies embodying sci-fi tropes, people will buy it. A lot of people, actually. And some of them will send you wonderful emails and reviews that make you cry because it means so much to people to see characters like themselves. My mantra has always been “fiction matters,” and nothing has enforced it more than Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace.

15. If your wee self-published coloring book is miscategorized right and has enough sales all at once thanks to internet buzz, it can beat Watchmen in a very specific bestseller list.

16. Writing a snarky limerick as your letter of resignation is a pretty great plan if your HR rep has a sense of humor.

17. When everything else is up in the air, fandom can be an anchor that keeps you sane. Even a fandom as out of its entire damn mind as Sherlock fandom.

18. I’m on the asexual and genderqueer spectrums. Relatedly: If your brain’s been telling you for years that some basic element of your identity isn’t quite right, listen to it. (And brace for impact. These things can happen fast once you give yourself permission to question.)

19. I am not capable of maintaining a blog, taking a thesis prep course, working fulltime, promoting a coloring book, making a reasonable amount of art, finishing a novel, being active in fandom, keeping in touch with internet friends, sorting out massive amounts of personal crap, and tabling every local show during convention season all in the same semester. The best I can do is pick the ones that are most urgent and the ones that best maintain my sanity and learn to let the rest slide.

20.  Being a Hufflepuff pays off sometimes. Like, “multiple job offers within your department” pays off. Everybody wants an employee who’s hardworking and loyal with a good attitude – who knew?

21. If you use the word “tumultuous” enough times to describe how your year’s gone, it loses all meaning.

In the meantime, please join me in giggling at the fact that my coloring book is up on Goodreads. I don’t know who put it up there, but it totally made my day.