bloodygranuaile

When I went to the Edward Gorey house I bought a "mildly damaged" copy of The Glorious Nosebleed because I had forgotten I already owned a somewhat-more-than-mildly damaged copy of The Glorious Nosebleed. In fairness to myself, the copy I had was orange and the copy in the bookstore was red, so obviously they looked like two different books, and it's nice to have a red copy anyway because red is great.

The Glorious Nosebleed has nothing much to do with the nosebleed illustrated on the front cover, which does appear to be quite intense. The book is an abecedaire, much like the excellent The Gashleycrumb Tinies, except instead of the "A is for..." phrasing, each page is a sentence that ends with an adverb, and the adverbs, which are capitalized so you know they're important, go through the alphabet. They are all quite charming and silly and I started laughing actually out loud around "He fell off the pier Inadvertently" and it only got funnier from there. The illustrations are peak Gorey, with women in patterned drop-waist dresses and men in big old fur coats much like Gorey's (there even appears to be an author cameo right at the end), and lots of really exquisitely patterned carpets and wallpapers.

Reading so much Gorey in such a short period of time also gave me the itch to sketch, a thing I have not done in more than a decade, but I took a stab at it with little Darkboy Zaraz and I feel better? I've really been in quit a pit lately about not doing anything creative for months and going to the Gorey house sort of made it worse, so it was good to quit whining and do even a tiny thing.

Anyway, I just want things to be whimsical and delightful and gothy all the time; why is that so hard?