Okay, since I’m angry at myself for interrupting my writing flow to write in here, I’m going to be succinct.
My new project’s going GREAT — I just hit 30 pages (ds). Because of all the parts of my own life I’m putting into it, it’s essentially writing itself. At the rate I’m going, it’s going to start off very short like Catcher did, around 100 pages. But that means I’m keeping the story simple, and that usually means I’m telling it better.
Also, I’ve been more creative in the last week or so than in the last few months combined. I bought myself a bunch of fancy watercolor-related items with my gift card from the art show, but I haven’t dove into those yet because I haven’t had the time.
I’ve been busy mostly producing digital stuff. I am continuing to experiment with satisfying digital styles, and my latest revelation is that I can sketch digitally too. I have never ever liked clean lines — I’ve admired them, but they’ve never resonated with me in my own work. Letting that rule go working digitally has helped a lot. I sketched Ashlyn from “Unface” and then recently did Micah and Ingrid, my power couple, when I was busy trying not to do any work for finals. Then with an urge to re-create the My Mental Breakdown part of my website, I did a pretty lovely little piece with Nikkei and Shani. I might still intend to do 9 of them for all my stories, but this was pretty laborious but it did itself. So we’ll see where my whims take me.
I’ve also been experimenting with limited color palettes — sticking with a tone and making the characters adapt to it, instead of going with what they would wear. It’s just a way to see how cohesive I can make my work, and maybe I’m trying to avoid my tendency to use the primary colors starkly and that’s it.
In addition to being very creative, I’ve also gotten the time FINALLY to get back into reading. I was planning on purchasing a simple, powerful little e-reader with e-ink technology because that’s the only way I would seriously enjoy reading a book on a screen, and I wanted something simple to bring with me to NZ. So I got one this weekend and have since gotten 100 pages into George R. R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones,” 40 pages into Katherine Howe’s “The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane” (a title I got from searching “related to” Susanne Clark’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell”), and 85 pages into Charles de Lint’s “The Painted Boy.” The lattermost is really exciting for me because Charles de Lint is probably the single most nostalgic fantasy writer I know. I’ve been reading him almost since I first got into fantasy and his books continue to pull me in with a violent passion. It’s reassuring to read his work because I remember how much I like reading: sometimes, school makes it feel like a chore and I forget that I love escaping into fiction.
Anyway, picture dump!
