"Because the world is suspended in her tiny hands..."

Sometimes, I find my daughter to be a most astonishing person. Truly, I do.

She drives me nuts at time, especially when she gets hormonal, and her brother can seemingly do nothing right, and I have to intervene before World War Three and the gushing of blood begins.

And then sometimes... she blows me away.

Y'all know she wants to be a manga artist, and she is constantly drawing, and she now has at least three manga she's working on at this time, right? I haven't been able to scan them, because of a software issue between my Mac and my HP printer/scanner, but now I'm motivated to fix it because... omg, y'all, her current project is just...

*is nearly speechless*

Let me put it this way. It left me in tears. Because while the artwork is still a bit rough, it is light years from what I last posted from her sketchbook. There's this one panel that I just stared at, and it was just a three quarter side view of a clock, but it was executed so well! She must have sat and pressed her face against the wall to get that angle right...

And another, a sequence where she has a winged character landing. You see the shadow of the character with moonlight behind it, you see the wings spread and back-winging to slow the descent... then you see one foot touching down, a rather worn, ratty sneaker, and... a circular puff of dust pushing away from around the tip of the shoe. I know where the influence came from, I know the specific scene in Kiki's Delivery Service but... she pulls it off in a 2-dimensional setting in freaking pencil and... she's only twelve!!!

*dies*

You guys, I swear... I have no doubt my daughter is going to be published by the time she's fifteen.

*jaw-drop*

And all I can think of is those years I spent, lying on the floor with her when the crayons were nearly bigger than she was, a big 18 X 24 inch pad left over from my days as at art student at UH opened in front of us, coloring and drawing whatever she wanted me to draw, and guiding her hand to help her draw circles, squares, loops, cats, dogs...

... and here we are now.

She is going to be something, I really, truly do believe that!