I did a color test on the botched head. The painterly quality tends to hide the glue spots, which is a bonus. Unfortunately, the hard line under her mouth shows where I didn’t get the seam tight enough.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Coraline only has one ear. The way her hair is done, only one shows so there just wasn’t a reason to put the other one on.

Her paint is asymmetrical, partly because I want to match Mr. McKean’s art, but also because I don’t like symmetricality in puppets. It is unnatural. Sure, people are mostly symmetrical, but not totally. For instance, my nose pulls to the left. One of my eyes is bigger than the other. If you look in the mirror, you’ll spot all the variations in your own face.

More importantly, though, creating an unsymmetrical face gives the illusion of life to a character, because the audience thinks they see the face change expression. Most of the time a face can be wildly asymmetrical and the audience won’t notice — but they will respond to the “changing” expressions on the character’s face.

This is the last of the head posts for awhile. I’m moving to the body next and will come back to the heads when I’m building the finals.

Mmm…. our favorite Icelandic treat is at Whole Foods.

Now if I can just convince them to carry the pear flavor.

Woot! Look what I got in the mail. My story “Suspension and Disbelief” is in Destination Prague and one of the only two stories I’ve written with a puppeteer as a character. It normally seems like such a dull job, but it made sense here.

Hey! Until recently, almost everyone I knew was a puppeteer. Now there are all these writers running around in my social circles. Wacky.

Anyway, as you can see by the fact that I have a police box bank on my desk, I’ve been a long-time fan of the good Doctor, so having my story in this book — which is also my first hardcover — makes me go all kinds of fangirl goofy.

So that’s the question du jour. Should I get a New York number for my cellphone or keep my Oregon number? I can keep the Oregon number active, so that’s not an issue.

The question is about getting work. I feel like the area code on the phone is becoming a sort of non-issue these days as more and more people switch to cells. On the other hand, it does instantly label me as an out-of-towner.

So what do you think? Switch to a 646 number or stay with the 503?

Edited to add: Thanks for the comments everyone. I decided that the continuity was probably worth more than the “local” number. Especially since I realized that I can just forward my 646 Skype number to my cellphone. It’s the best of both worlds. So, the 503 number stays.