The Abyss BLINKED!

Madness, thy name be Arkham Horror. If you don't know what I'm talking about, get off your chair and come back when Cthulu has alleviated you of a little bit of your sanity. This will make more sense after. It's a board game modeled after the horrifying, brain twisting stories of H. P. Lovecraft. And even though it's only a boardgame, there's something cathartic about running around the sleepy little town of Arkham annihilating eldritch monstrosities and hurling yourself headlong through portals leading to a plethora of nightmarish netherworlds in order to save reality itself from a hideous elder god. You know what I mean?

For Sale?

So...I may just have a job illustrating a childrens' book! Trick is, I've never done anything freelance professionally. I have no idea what to charge! I'm excited to do the job, it seems like a fun challenge, and I don't want to scare the client away with a high price, but I don't want to undercharge for a major undertaking either. What are standard rates for this kind of thing? What kind of price tag do you put on creativity?
Oh! And does anyone have a couch I can crash on...preferably on a non-American continent? Fenris is going to kill me when he gets out of those ribbons.

DERP!

Amazing how a single, stupid syllable changes a creepy eel into something much less menacing. It's also amazing how freakishly difficult it is to find design work here in Provo! It might have something to do with the sheer number of doofuses (DOO-fu-suz), myself included, who lurk around the college and want to draw pictures for a living. If any of you three people who regularly check up on this thing hear anything, be sure to let me know.

Der Erlkönig

Recently I was listening to some classical music, you know Mozart, Liszt, Gershwin, that sort of thing, and came across Franz Schubert's setting of the Johan Wolfgang von Goethe poem Der Erlkönig. It's a great Baritone art song and I sort of fell in love with the poem. The poem is about a father and son riding home through the woods. The son tells his father that the Erlking (Alder king if you translate it from the German, but could easily be a transliteration from the original Danish legend which would be translated Elf king) is following them and promising him beautiful things if only the child will come away with him. The father dismisses his child's fears as the product of an overactive imagination while the Erlking's promises become more extravagant and his demands more urgent.
This is a draft of the first page I would make for an illustrated book of the story. Or maybe a second page.