Yay! All-Star Stories just released the cover art for the Twenty Epics anthology. This is the first time that one of my stories has appeared in a book, so I’m fairly excited. I’ve been trying to figure out which character on the cover is related to my story, “Bound Man”

Not much excitement today, initially. I helped Julie roll into a shot because her rollie cart kept getting stuck on the dugar.

Speaking of dugur…The ground at work is called dugar. It’s this vinyl stuff that they roll out onto the floor to create the look of the ground. I’ve been working on this show since 2004 and just found out that it’s the Icelandic word for vinyl flooring. I thought it was a brand-name of some specific flooring type. I felt better when I found out that all the other english speakers had the same misconception that I did.

We had a long break while they shot some stuff with Stefan and Magnus. And then I spent an hour being Bessie’s live hands. The shot was fairly standard. Bessie’s had to come through the door of the Mayor’s office carrying a cake. We’d done this sort of thing a lot and the prop department made a lovely cake. It was very light.

But. Stefan had to enter the Mayor’s office, so there was a platform for him in the door. Normally, this is Hollywooded out (moved during the take) so we can get through, but Bessie was right behind him so there was no time. This meant that the only way we could get through without showing lots of head was to put one rod arm and one live arm on Bessie. We taped the rod hand to the plate.

At the beginning of the scene it was easy to hold this cake above my head with one hand. Now, you have to understand that I couldn’t hold it with a standard waiter grip because I had to make it look like Bessie was using both hands to hold the cake. By the time we finished that scene, and the different shots, my fingers were cramping from holding the plate.