These Days …

I’m not at home. I won’t be at home for a while. Not being at home means I can’t use my Wacom tablet or Clip Studio Paint. So you’re getting words from me.

You’ll also continue to get my daily sketch posts (mostly daily – as long as my website posts posts as I have scheduled them (and as long as I’ve scheduled them correctly)) because I’ve got posts prescheduled until sometime in early July.

I’m visiting with family in California. A family member is in hospice. We’re expecting that he will be passing soon.

This is the third time I’ve come down this year. This house has a lot of books so I’ve gotten some reading done. That’s been really nice. I feel like I don’t read much these days. I do read but mostly online stuff and, for whatever reason, that doesn’t have the same feel as reading a book.

The second time I was here I was reminded that I’d been working on an expansion of Daughter of Spiders. I got a little bit of writing on that done then. I’ve done some more since I got here.

I am missing being able to work on the art projects I had going. I finally figured out a method of sketching in CSP that would allow me to produce approval sketches for the Oz illustrations I’ve been commissioned for. And I was working on another short comic for David Mann. (I previously collaborated with him on a short comic about OCD.) And I think I’d figured out the coloring style I want to use on Sunk Cost Elegy.

I still don’t know how Sunk Cost Elegy ends. I would consider that a problem if I weren’t now the writer of the thing. I give myself a lot more latitude than I would if someone else were giving me a script. It’s my fault if I have to redraw, or draw new a bunch of pages. I have half a dozen potential endings and I’m now willing and expecting to do a lot of expanding of the original art. All the practice I’ve done with CSP has made me comfortable with redrawing anything and everything. I make mistakes faster. I make corrections and edits faster. I suspect that, ultimately, I take almost long to finish a drawing as I did when I worked on paper but I am cutting out the time it took to scan and prep the art so that’s something?

But that’s when I get back home. For now, I read. I write. I try to be useful. And I wait.