Howdy, circus freaks!

Right now I’m doing some stuff online that’s inadvertently bringing people to my site for the very first time and I’m feeling the urge to scramble around cleaning things up because my site is a bloody mess. So, the first thing people should know when coming here is that THIS SITE IS UNDER HEAVY HEAVY CONSTRUCTION AND DOESN’T ALWAYS LOOK THIS BAD. It’s never been the most well-designed site, in its almost 7 years of existence, but it’s always been a HELL of a lot more organized than it is at this very moment.

So hello new people, my name is Sunny and I’m a writer, an artist and a semi-retired muse. I’ve been living my life publicly, online, in front of an audience (so to speak) since 1997 for reasons even I’m not completely sure of. Over the years I’ve had a running webcam (which I’m probably the most “well known” for), an IRC channel, forums, I’ve sold my art and writing and things I’ve made through a website that no longer exists called Merch Bitch (this was in the days pre-Etsy). Half the internet’s seen me naked, knows my kids names and knows where my husband works. I’m an open book, there’s very little I hold back (and when I do, it’s usually as a courtesy for others), and that’s why people read and have followed my crap for so long….I think, anyway. I live an extremely examined life and truly ascribe to the old adage pertaining to such.

In 2006 I had a (very public, as it happened online) psychotic break and I’ve pretty much spent the last two years in a living hell that I never thought would end. Between the unparalleled terror of psychosis and its aftermath, the lack of aftercare I was given upon my release from the hospital and then 18 months of hellacious trial & error with psychiatric drugs, I’ve really been through the ringer. Throughout it all, I was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder and it’s been a slow crawl back to who I was before. Only recently have I become stable-ish and I feel myself becoming a better, if battle scarred, version of who I was before. If there’s one thing I’ve learned throughout this whole ordeal, it’s that life is just a series of processes. I feel like I’m just beginning another, which will eventually end or change and another will begin again.

So that’s me. Oh and I’m 29, married, with two kids, a dog & a cat. This isn’t a current pic, but is, more or less, what I look like (when I’m not sick, anyway):

Part of my “coming back” from mental illness has a lot to do with art and currently I’m enrolled in Suzi Blu’s online workshop “Les Petite Dolls“, which I gushed about here and here and my dear friend Raya paid for me to do because she was glad to see me eeking back towards my old creative self.

When I was starting to “lose it”, just before (and during) my psychotic break, I began working around the clock on a few creative endeavours that I thought were “genius”, including a painting I entitled “Camp Tampon” which to this day I still feel really captures where my mind was at the time. I mean, there’s a definite contrast between that and the way I usually paint.

Because my creative mind was so affected by the mania and because psychosis felt like I was “stuck” in my own imagination and I couldn’t get out, I’ve been afraid to be creative or use my imagination ever since. I’m afraid that if I let my mind “go there”, I’ll get stuck again and that was the single worst experience of my life. I’ve been beaten, I’ve been raped, I’ve been homeless, but psychosis was scarier than all of those things
put together and naturally I want to do everything in my power for it never to happen again. In my mind, that meant stopping all creative activity because to be creative meant I was risking losing it or going over a line that I had no way of seeing. It’s taken my shrink a dozen visits to convince me that as long as I take my medication, it’s okay to be creative and only now that we’ve found what I think is the right medication, have I been able to trust my creative self again.

In the Suzi Blu workshop, you have a profile where she asks specific questions so she can help teach you better and one of them was “What has kept you blocked with art in the past?” to which I answered, “Fear of my own imagination/mental illness. (It’s a long story.)” And this is that long story. You get a blog there too, but I figured if people from “Les Petite Dolls” were clicking the link to my site in my profile anyway, I might as well just write it all out here and be able to post pictures and links to better explain myself.

So there ya have it. Art has always been a huge part of my life (my mom’s an artist, I just grew up with it) and it feels good to have it back.

I’ve been talking to Jay Holben, the director who’s doing the documentary, Camgirls, and a person I consider a pretty decent, creative, guy and thinking about where the cam world is going. I’ve been more watching and reading than performing in recent years, but I’m still a part of the community and while no one’s asked me about “the book” recently - except Jay Holben - who wasn’t being a douche about it.

The book I’m talking about is Digital Burlesque: When the Girl Next Door Goes Global, which is/was the working title for the book I am/was/will always be sort of working on, I just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. Basically all I do is cram myself with tidbits of info and hope like hell one day it’ll all come into place, if only as a memoir when I’m 80.

But lately I’ve been thinking sooner than that, but no time soon. The documentary sounds interesting though, from what I’ve heard about it from both Jay and my “sources”. ;D

It’s true, I’ve been cut pretty much completely out of it, but I’d been hoping like hell about that since before we even started because I’m shy about cameras, I much prefer the other side of the lens, outside of my webcam and even then I prefer stills because I’m less goofy looking/acting. So thank god for the cutting room! I do happen to know approximately what footage had been left in and where it’s going, but it’s still in post and I signed a contract and stuff, so I’ll just say it all sounds so very interesting. I love the camworld.

It occured to me the other day that when Jennifer Ringley was on Leno or Letterman or whatever the hell I posted, I bet half the audience didn’t even have the internet. Like half the people in the studio audience OR half the people in the viewing audience, I don’t know, but I bet there were a lot of people who really didn’t understand what she was doing and what it all meant. But everyone I know, at least from back then, did. And it’s stuff like that I’m trying to convey in the book, or at least I’d like to, but I have trouble when it comes how to present it. And in what order. And how long it should be. Plus the cam world keeps changing. The focus has been on YouTube for a while but there’s been a lot of undercurrents that the mainstream media, the “world at large” hasn’t caught onto because for a while there, it appeared as though video killed the camgirl. It didn’t, but that’s a whole other chapter.

Then there was also this pesky USC 2257 law (that was recently struck down), that I was trying to follow but personally, I find US politics really fucking boring. I find Canadian politics really fucking boring. (Unless either affects me, of course.) While I saw the effects of this law and saw how it was detrimental to both legitimate businesses (Camwhores for example) and our rights and freedoms should that kind of insanity spread north of the border, I paid attention, printed everything out and stuck it in my box of “book stuff”, which is slowly becoming two boxes, badly in need of proper sorting and filing. I’ll go through that crap later, I was too busy watching YouTube and trying to keep track of this iJustine thing. And the current state of the girls I’ve mostly been watching since I decided to write a book.

Anyway, I’m gonna shut up now. I just felt like addressing the world today, so hello! I hope you are having a good Thanksgiving to all my neighbours to the south and enjoy your festivities!

…but the thing is, I don’t have the time nor ambition to make another site right now, so this is what I’ve got. Not the prettiest page in the universe, but whatever. I’m waiting for Ditsy to figure out WordPress so she can teach me haha

I was going to make this a video blog, but it’s midnight and I should be going to bed soon. Plus, I’m not feeling very photogenic these days as my hair’s a funny length and looks extra stupid right now. I look not unlike Grover, as in the muppet.

Anyway, what’s new in Sunnyland?

Well, my real life friends Alex & Krissy seem to have been bitten by the YouTube bug and have started doing their own video blogs. Here’s Krissy’s first attempt, which is entitled “WoW Rant”:

Right now I’m on this medication which has a lovely side effect of increasing one’s appetite, so I’ve been eating like a cow and I’ve actually gained a few pounds as a result. Since I’ve been doing so much snacking, I decided to make meringue cookies this weekend, two batches, which didn’t last very long in this house. They’re really easy to make and I don’t think they have any fat and they’re sort of like…cookies made out of fluff, they rule. Anyway, here’s the recipe:

Meringue Cookies
4 large egg whites
1/4 tsp Cream of Tartar
1 tsp vanilla
3/4 cup of sugar

Beat egg whites and cream of tartar with an electric mixer at high speed until soft peaks form (3-5 mins). Gradually add in vanilla and sugar while beating. Drop by spoonful onto aluminum foil lined cookie sheets, bake at 225 F for 50-60 minutes. Makes 2 dozen.

Seriously, they’re amazing.

Other than that, I’ve just been focusing on staying sane until the snow melts. I’ve posted my last post in CammityJane for a while, so if you haven’t gotten caught up, now’s a good time. I’ve still got some things to work out in my head before I start working on that again.

Anyway, hope all is well with you folks. :)

…have all been given out. Sorry to those who e-mailed and I couldn’t get one to. (I only had 5 this time.)

I also posted two new CammityJane posts last night, if anyone’s interested.

Today I’m playing with plastiscene and stop-motion, so I’m gonna get back to it. :)

I re-read the CammityJane entry I posted yesterday and I’m not entirely happy with it, but I’m not going to go editing it until I DO like it because I don’t believe in 2nd drafts. I’ve never gone back and edited anything I’ve ever written in my whole entire life, so I’m not about to do doing that now. SO THERE.

Once it’s finished (if it’s ever finished) and I’m thinking about turning it into a book, THEN I’ll play with stuff. Right now I just need to get the story out of me and slowly but surely, it’s coming.

Fiction’s weird. I’m not sure I’ve really talked much about the CammityJane journal, but last year when I went nuts, I had this huge explosion of concrentrated ideas and it was as if I got stuck in my own imagination and the problem was that A) I didn’t realize I was “off” and B) I couldn’t bring myself out of it.

It was during that period where the story of Jane (or more to the point, the other people she’s going to encounter) came into my mind and I spent most of my time in the hospital sketching scenes in my head with these characters (none of whom have been introduced yet), but not writing down a single word.

When I got out of the hospital, I got out my pencil crayons and drew every location of every scene, maps, character sketches and right now, I guess the name of the game is moving characters from point A to point B, which is actually a lot harder than I originally thought it would be and I find as I obsess with that, my characters lose a little depth.

For example, the “strange man” Jane encounters in the latest post is seriously glossed over from what’s in my head and I know that my descriptions aren’t sufficient if the reader’s going to come away with the mental image of him I have. At the same time, I also know he’s going to show up later so that gives me a second chance and the opportunity to round him out a little more. (How he moves, for example, is important, but in the restaurant setting I had a hard time trying to figure out a way for him to move because everything takes place at one table and it was important to the over all story that Jane come to him and not the other way around.)

Anyway, this isn’t a serious project or anything, just something I work on when the mood strikes or a character walks into my dreams demanding attention, which was the case with Good Eat Part 1 and “the strange man” himself.

In other news, my 10lbs of plain ol’ grey plastiscene arrived on Monday and I’ve spent a good portion of the week screwing around and seeing what I can do with it. So far I’ve only made a really stupid looking girl with a lot of hair…

I realize the face is dumb, that part took maybe 10 mins but each “strand” of hair was hand-rolled by yours truly and took about 30 hours total.

I’ve been on Wikipedia practically all day researching dragons, I think that’s what I’m going to make next and there’s a reason; when I was in grade 5 or 6 (hard to say since I had the same teachers and the same classroom for both grades, it was a split class) an art lady came to our school to teach us about using clay and I made this really awesome Chinese dragon, that’s now long gone, and I wanted to see if I could do it again, but better since I’m no longer a chubby little kid with chubby little fingers doing things the way someone else tells me to.

All week, when I’ve told people that I bought 10 lbs of grey plasticine, they’ve all asked the same question: “Why grey?” Well, it’s all gonna end up grey anyway, isn’t it?

The reason I got it was mostly to help me visualize certain things in 3-D and to better figure out where shadows would be (when painting) and I don’t need colour for that. In fact, for my purposes, I think colour would be distracting.

Some folks have suggested that I do stop-motion videos since I now have all this plastiscene and believe me, I’ve been thinking about it, but if it’s gonna happen, it’ll be a long time from now. I’ve got too much on the go between now and the spring and once the warm weather hits, using plastiscene is going to suck because it’ll be way too melty. So, if I ever do a stop-motion video, it’ll probably be next fall. (And if I did do one, I’d have to buy coloured plastiscene, so I’ll wait until I have a good idea first. :))

And finally, this brings me to YouTube and video blogging in general.

A few people have subscribed to my YouTube channel, which is fine, but don’t bitch about there being no context, because sometimes I’m uploading this stuff to be used for other things. For example, there’s a few videos that friends asked me to put up there, that have absolutely nothing to do with my site or blogging or anything, they just wanted to be able to share them with their own friends or post on their MySpaces. There’s probably gonna be a lot of that, so basically, if I don’t embed the video in a blog post and write about it, I uploaded it for someone or something else.

Another thing that keeps coming up is the lack of Madison (my daughter) in the videos I’ve uploaded thus far. Well, there’s a reason for that, a few of them actually.

The first is that, unlike Wes, she understands what a video camera does and as such, she tends to not “be herself” or becomes a different version of herself when it’s around (which is a nice way of saying that she tends to get obnoxious). She grew up with me following her around with a digital camera, so she doesn’t do this with stills, just with video. Wes is the opposite. If I get out the digital camera, he turns into an obnoxious little brat, but with the video camera, he acts himself because he’s too little to understand that it’s recording. He’s seen the videos of himself, but he just doesn’t understand the concept of video yet and he’s barely even aware of the internet, let alone YouTube.

The other reason is simply that she doesn’t want to be in videos that are of just “real life”.

She wants to put on plays and dress up and do fashion shows and stuff like that, which we do videotape for her, we just don’t put them online because she’s self-conscious and doesn’t want us to. We respect that. :) Basically any footage of Madison that gets put online is with her final approval and this is the kind of stuff she wants out there:

(That was from her school’s Xmas concert.)

Since that’s the case, most “kid videos” are going to be put up by Blake over at the kids’ site, Bunnies & Bees, for their aunts & uncles & grandparents to watch (and whoever else wants to, obviously, but it’s mostly a family thing).

In other news, it’s Wes’ 4th birthday on Tuesday and last week a few people e-mailed me to see if I’d gotten a wishlist set up yet, so this afternoon I cleaned up the kids’ old wishlist (deleting unavailable items/stuff they’ve kinda grown out of wanting etc), which can be found here.

And with that, I’m out.

Something I’ve been (half-assedly) working on over the past several months is a fiction blog called CammityJane, which I update whenever the character(s) send me scenes. There’s not a whole ton of posts there yet, but with the way things have been going, I think it’s gonna pick up a bit throughout the winter.

Originaly I wasn’t going to make this a public project because, being my first stab at fiction, I’m well aware of how rough it is and didn’t feel like dealing with the mean-spirited “criticism” that often comes from putting anything on the internet. That’s why comments are disabled. But then I decided that once the main characters’ voices were established in my head (and there was no fear of “losing” them), I’d post about it here…so that’s what I’m doing. :)

I make no promises to actually finish the damn thing, but there it is all the same. (Also, being a blog, the first posts are at the bottom.)

Over the next few weeks I’m hoping to put a little work into the Keep Off the Lawn blog, which I’ve been seriously neglecting since the leaves fell off the trees. As per usual, if you have any Canadian Tire Money to donate to the project this spring (or real money, seeds, bulbs or other gardeny things), you can do so here:

Sunnyland
c/o Sunny Crittenden
PO Box 3042
Elmvale, ON
L0L 1P0
CANADA!

I’ve actually had a BIG BIG BIG gardeny project in my head since the day we moved into this house that I think, if I can pull it off, I may start executing this spring but it’s going to definitely require some help from the internet both as far as materials and figuring out how to actually do it. Like I said, I’m gonna do my best to update the KOTL blog soon and details of that project are (hopefully) going to be a part of it.

Sometimes I’m just too effing creative for my own good. :/ (<—And THAT should be a goddamn smiley!)

Oy, I’ve got so much to do today and I don’t feel like doing any of it….better git a move on…

So obviously, this is going to be the new site. I’ve had a lot of comments and e-mails of protest and confusion about the whole thing, so if there are any questions, ask ‘em here and I’ll do my best to keep everyone in the loop. (Honestly, a lot of times I forget that I’m not the only one looking at/reading this shit) Just do me a favour & mind the mess over the coming months, it’s probably gonna get a hell of a lot worse as I fuck things up completely trying to learn a whole new system I don’t even have the first clue about.

As an aside, there’s the Visual Quickstart Guide to Wordpress on my wishlist if anyone wants to help me out.

Someone asked me what’s going to happen to good ol’ LJ once this site is up & running the way I want it to be and I don’t really have an answer for that question yet. What I do know though, is that I feel gross mentioning movies or books or whatever in LJ and using my Amazon affiliates links to link to anything because it feels like I’m advertising to my friends and I think that’s wrong, so that was one reason to move away from LJ a bit. There’s also the drama involving cut tags and NSFW images, that really, I just don’t want to deal with anymore. Plus…some other stuff that’s a little more deep & neurotic that I might get into one day, but today’s just not that day. There are reasons, good reasons. :)

The “Sunnybananas” LJ will probably always exist, I mean I’ve got 5 years worth of my life archived there….I dunno. I just don’t know yet.

People have been asking me for like, a year now, what’s going to happen with Camwhores because it’s been pretty obvious that I’m not as into the site as I used to be - or at least, that’s the surface perception. The truth is that I got married, had another baby, bought our first house far far away from everything I’ve known my whole life and then…2006 was probably the worst year of my entire life. Our roof started caving in, I went crazy (like literally crazy, hospitalized, medicated & the whole works and I even did so in front of the whole fucking internet! I’m such a prostar.), I disowned damn near my entire family and then a few days before Xmas, I had to call the police on my mother which is this whole thing I promise I’ll get into publicly eventually, but not right now.

I just wanted to clear up that my activity over at Camwhores (or rather, lack thereof) has absolutely NOTHING to do with the site itself, the people who are there or any of that other crap. In fact, I’m a little bummed that I’ve been missing out on some of the changes over there and as I’ve been planning changes in my life and planning for the changes to come, Camwhores has played large in my mind. Truly, Kevin’s gonna have to drag me from that site kicking & screaming one day. This bitch ain’t goin’ nowhere. :D

Plus, some of the changes coming sound pretty goddamn interesting and I wanna be there for ‘em. :):):)

Some other questions I’ve received recently involve the cam book I’ve been “working on” for like…ever, called Digital Burlseque and the camgirls documentary myself and a bunch of other girls in the “scene” were filmed for.

So let’s start with the book…here’s what happened (well, the Reader’s Digest version, anyway):

Three or four years ago this guy named Brad King messages me on Yahoo (or MSN or AIM, I forget now) and basically I was all, “Cooooool, you’re a writer! With a real published book on Amazon & everything!” So we began talking and he tells me that I should write a book, I laugh and say “About what?” and he says “this webcam stuff”. Well, I didn’t take that seriously but then I got thinking and decided he might be right, so I started collecting and printing out articles on the subject and started throwing them in a box, knowing that eventually, this stuff wouldn’t even be on the internet anymore and if I was going to write a book on the subject, I should start squirreling away these things now.

About a year later, Brad tells me that he’s starting this small indie press that’s going to only cater to geek and internet culture, “it’s going to be to geeks what Sub-Pop was to grunge” were his exact words, and that Digital Burlesque would be the perfect book for such an endeavor, so get working on it! So I did. I conducted months and months of interviews both one on one and through forums, I wrote a proper outline as I was asked to do, I even got the first draft of the book about 3/4 finished, but then everything sort of went to shit.

First of all, I don’t know how to write a fucking book and writing books is hard, especially books that deal with dates and facts and doing things “first” and oh so many egos. I got absolutely zero support from Brad, my so-called editor and then I didn’t hear from him for months until he messages me to say that he’s taking a teaching position at some fancy schmancy new media & communications university. But of course, this means “big things” for Demon Press, right? He started telling me how this means that Demon Press could potentially become a univiersity press blah blah blah and this means good stuff blah blah. So great, I get excited again, resume working on the book and then I’m blown off for like, another year.

So while I waited for SOME KIND OF GODDAMN DIRECTION AND/OR COMMUNICATION or I dunno, HELP, I worked on another book, called Textibitionism, which I was going to just publish myself but I sent it to Brad and from what I understood of the conversation, he was going to publish it and I’d finish Digital Burlesque next.

The last message I got from Brad was 6 months ago saying that his students will be doing layout during second semester, which would be like…now. So I said, “great, lemme know if I need to do anything” and the response was “Write your damn book!” so I took it that he was talking about Digital Burlesque and not Textibitionism.

Well, sorry honey, but I can’t finish a book in 6 months and in the 4 years I’ve been “working on” it, Brad hasn’t even managed to edit what I’ve sent him, so well…fuck you! And hey, guess what? Newsflash, I’m not dropping everything because you’ve decided you’re gonna get your shit together. I mean, I’m sorry it just doesn’t work that way. I’ve been sitting here literally starving, often struggling, worrying, stressed out, going to the goddamn Food Bank on occassion to keep my kids fed and you’re gonna dick me around KNOWING ALL OF THIS? No, I’m sorry, the book, whenever finished (and it will be one day), is not yours anymore.

To add insult to injury, a couple of weeks ago I get a comment on my MySpace from Brad saying that as difficult as I am, happy new year anyway and that maybe “someday” I’ll communicate with him again. *eyerolls* Just…fuck off. I’m probably one of the easiest people on the whole goddamn internet to get ahold of and you wanna pin bad communication on me? Dude…

So that’s the saga of “the book”, more or less. I’m still working on it, in the sense that I live cam culture and speak with people within cam culture every single day, I print and collect everything I can and one day, the book will be done, but I don’t care if it’s finished one year from now or 30 and I don’t care how many books are published on the topic in the meantime. (Well, unless they’re inaccurate…. ;))

As for the documentary, honestly your guess is as good as mine at this point. Last I heard it was still in post-production and god only knows when it’s gonna be finished. Truthfully, I hope they cut me out of it completely (and they just might). I don’t regret doing it or anything like that, I just didn’t think this “my face on a big screen” thing all the way through when I agreed to do it…it’s just….creepy….

Anyway, screw all this “shop talk”, let’s get down to WoW. :D

This is Posey, she’s a lvl 60 bad-ass tree druid who’s really looking forward to Lifebloom because it sounds as bad-ass as I know she is. :D She hasn’t done MC, she hasn’t even seen Onyxia yet, she’s a long ways off from AQ20/40 and since 3 of the best people in her guild (who, unlike just about everyone else in the guild actually knew wtf they were doing) left today, she probably won’t be doing any of the above. Regardless, I’m gonna do my best to get her to 70 anyway because I really like being a tree.

Now, notice that I didn’t mention the server she’s on. There’s a reason for that. See, when I first started playing in June, I posted on LJ that I got an account and that I’d be playing on such & a such a server because some of my real life friends had made a guild there. Being a newb, I didn’t know this was a dumb thing, I was just writing about what’s going on in my life like I always do and it never ocurred to me that random people who read my crap on the internet every day would follow me to a WoW server, but some did and it’s caused some minor issues that I’d like to keep from blowing up into major ones in the future.

My guild leader last week made it clear that she doesn’t want “people in that industry” (meaning the internet porn industry because y’know, that’s all I do and you’re ALL nothing but a bunch of degenerate pedophile perverts who are ALL going to hell in a handbasket :D) in her guild, so fuck it, this week I think I’m gonna start a new one. On Tuesday when the expansion begins, Blake & I are going to choose a brand-spankin’ new server (as I’m sure Blizzard will be adding a few) to start the lvl 1 blood elf toon that’s been in my head since we found out that, indeed, BEs would be the new race. And we’re gonna play these toons, farm some gold - hopefully with some of you - and then when we’ve got enough people in our posse to sign a charter, this new guild will begin.

And yes, it has a name and yes, a tabard’s already been designed, but those are gonna be a surprise. :D The only rule (so far) though, is that all toons in this guild have to be blood elves, with two notable exceptions:

1. Druids, since they have to be tauren.
2. Transferred 60’s. (If anyone wants to go that route…)

Oh, and if you’re a ninja-looting douchebag, under 18 years of age or an egomaniac, don’t even bother.

Obviously I’ll post more details in regards to all of this next week, but if you’re a WoW player and aren’t sure yet what to do with all this new content, there’s an option. :)

I haven’t really thought about ranks, guild rules and what kind of guild this is going to end up being, but I figure that can be played by ear for the most part and a lot of that is dependent on the group we get anyway so we’ll worry about that later. All I know is that I’m pretty flexible & just wanna have FUN godammit!

Questions? Input? E-mail me (Sunny @ SunnyCrittenden.com) or leave a comment.

And with that, I gotta go work on some other stuff…