Catching Up

This blue composition was the cover image for Pavelle Wesser's story, "Divine Destiny."

I knew Lydia Manx had some water pictures in her gallery, so I (she lets me play with her toys, really) pulled a segment and leached out all the color, messed with the contrast, inverted it, and then put some color back in. And then filtered it with "Paint Daubs." Creepy, wet and surreal -- that's what I was aiming for.

I really have been creating something every day. During NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write 2000 words every day, thereby finishing up on the 25th, which I did.

Gratefully.

In past years, and indeed, over the course of the past year and some, I have written some dreck. Some dull, I'm sure, and some maudlin and hokey. But I don't mind writing dreck if I enjoy the dreck.

This 2008 NaNovel was sort of dreck. I think that it could, if tended to and coddled and paced and researched, be a readable tale... but I absolutely hated writing it. The characters were all kind of stupid to begin with, and I had little respect for them, and no time to find a way to respect them. I wanted them to be funny, but they weren't. They were desperate, and what scenes were supposed to be amusing sounded more like whistling in the dark.

Most of what I wrote relied on uninteresting word fill, until I was within whacking distance of the 50k word goal, and then I just skipped the damn tortuous story and wrote the end. The main character made a counter-cultural choice that will probably mess up the rest of her life, and the secondaries were either unaccounted for or did things they will regret. Good riddance to them all.

The previous Monday, I did this cover image for Tyler Willson's story, "The Prisoner."

Using a photograph I took, I deleted the original sky, amped up the contrasts, drenched the landscape with redness, did a sketch filter, put in a gradient for the sky, and put some bars on it.

Yeah. I like red.