One Year of Writing

Just a quick note to mark the occasion of the my made-up anniversary of beginning work on my book. It's a made-up anniversary because many ideas formed earlier, and there are even chunks of text still in the manuscript now that were written back in mid-2009.

But Memorial Day weekend last year stands out in my mind as a point when I became more earnest about the whole project. Here's an example: I started developing other characters beyond the protagonist that weekend. Maybe a better example: it was on June 1 a year ago that I drew the map of the land where the book takes place. I'd been rolling along for some time, but on that holiday weekend things started picking up. One year ago, the book started getting real in my mind.

Here's my little observational tidbit for today. And I'm sure the same idea has been expressed plenty of times before, because I think it's just true. I don't think writing every day ever gets easier. Not exactly. I think the difficulty gets more familiar. So to keep going, the challenge of it has to become like an old friend. Or a worthy opponent. The big hill on the running trail. Whatever image fits. Of course, the same can be said for numerous activities. Maintaining discipline in anything you do is always going to be hard. In the case of writing, you just have to sit down at the keyboard again and say, "Yep. Still difficult." And then start typing anyway.

Homeboy Salsa - Amazing!

I've known about Homeboy Industries for a while. Founded by Father Greg Boyle in the late 1980s, they provide jobs, services, and support to former gang members in Southern California. Their slogan is "Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job." Up until now, however, I'd only heard the stories of their good work, I hadn't had an opportunity to actually experience the fruits of their labors.

Then today, in the grocery store, I see a table offering samples of chips and salsa from Homeboy Industries! I admit, I did not know what sort of expectations to have, but I was excited to give it a try in any case.

I was blown away. This might be my new favorite store-bought salsa (beating out Trader Joe's Salsa Especial). We tried the Morita variety, I believe there are two EDIT: FIVE others I'll have to try at some point. We had actually already bought our groceries when Kimberly alerted me to the sample table, and the sample was so good, we happily went through the checkout again.

What's the salsa taste like, you ask? Well, the Morita flavor is a quite spicy salsa with a fine smokiness from the morita peppers. It doesn't hold back, it's not overly sweet or salty, and it has a fresh texture that's a little on the smooth side. Really excellent, the kind of salsa you would expect from a good Mexican restaurant. It's also nice to read the ingredients, which are, in their entirety: tomatoes, water, garlic, expeller-pressed canola oil, morita peppers, and salt. Simple and straightforward. And not only is it delicious, but all proceeds benefit Homeboy's free programs (which include things like counseling, tattoo removal, education & training, community service, etc.). I definitely recommend giving it a try if you find it in the store. So far I believe Ralph's is the only supermarket carrying it, but hopefully other grocers will offer it in the future.

Nerves

Everybody gets 'em. Doesn't matter your lifestyle or profession—there's always something to be nervous about. I liked Patrick Rothfuss's blog post today about how he's feeling about the expectations for his second novel (expectations which are orders of magnitude higher than they were for his fantastically successful first novel). He describes a dream about the kickoff signing of his upcoming book tour:

[...] it was such a big event in my dream that the bookstore had brought in another author to do a signing before mine. Sort of like an opening act.

The opening act author was a weird cross between Tobias Buckell and some guy I knew in grad school. He got a pretty good turnout for his signing, about 40 people. A respectable number.

But when he was done reading and signing books, all those people left. Nobody stayed around for my signing. None of my fans showed up. The store was pretty much empty. There was just a podium and ranks and ranks of empty chairs.

When it became clear that nobody cared I was there, I walked around the store for a while, more than slightly depressed and despondent. Then I found a quiet corner, covered myself up with my coat, and fell asleep on the floor.

When I woke up, the store was dark and I realized they’d forgotten about me and closed the store, locking me in. So I got up and wandered around the dark, empty bookstore, all alone….

I like his work quite a bit, and I'm personally very excited to read the new book, called The Wise Man's Fear. I know I'm not alone, so I don't think Mr. Rothfuss's tour will go that way. Still, it's one of those things. It doesn't matter where you are in your life, nerves can creep up, and you just have to press ahead anyway.

Last Ferry 1

I've been fiddling around with this for too long not to at least post a version of it. I like a lot of things about it, but I really struggled with the character's face and hair, and I'm still not happy with it. Modeled and rendered in Blender, touched up in Photoshop, with the city in the distance added as a backplate from a photo I took.

Here's a version without the background plate. Click to see larger.

Chaos & Evolutions brushes

I made the above image in literally a few short seconds testing out the nice brush set created by David Revoy for his DVD workshop on 2D digital painting, Chaos & Evolutions, produced by the Blender Foundation. It's a great workshop resource with time-lapse painting videos and tutorials, made especially nice because every software tool he uses is free and open source.

The brush set is available here. He created the brushes for GIMP, but I spent much of yesterday evening converting them into Photoshop brushes. I couldn't retain all the functionality of certain brushes that use animated brush tips to simulate eroded strokes. On the other hand, I found some of the brushes seemed to be bending over backward to mimic behavior that Photoshop's brush system implements much more effectively. Those brushes might actually work better in Photoshop with the right settings. I like the GIMP project a lot, but I feel it is still not quite mature software, particularly in OS X. I keep testing it out, thinking I might be able to ditch Photoshop, but I get easily frustrated running in X11 and GIMP's other quirks.

Horse

Here's a test render of a horse I am working on. Perhaps I'll name her Bela.

Cute Things Being Eaten

I've started a side project blog. It's pretty self explanatory, it's called Cute Things Being Eaten.

If you have any examples or links about things that are cute being eaten by something else, feel free to pass them on to me. Nothing cruel though, obviously.

Entrance to my lair

I made this well-like secret entrance to try out some more detailed texturing strategies. I used a baked AO map as the basis for my UV texture, and painted over it with texture details cloned out of several photos of stones that I took. Click the images for larger versions.

Water come to me eye

Well Gmail actually is back up now it seems, and even when it was down I was still getting fetched messages on my iPhone. But this was not the moment for a gmail outage (if there ever was one) since it provided an unfortunate setback in the middle of all sorts of other computer failures happening at work the last few days. Gmail was my safety net in this situation where people's computers were being repaired, with Gmail fetching mail from our work email servers so people didn't have to rely on the outlook that was on the down computers. Suddenly my safety net was gone.

But that wasn't the only thing bringing water to my eye. Here's a picture taken yesterday, a few blocks down my street. The pic is not about that Honda S2000, it's about the smoke from the Station Fire in the distance. Yesterday the fire grew from around 45,000 acres to over 100,000. Even the white part that just looks like cloud is smoke from the fire or the steam from water dumped on the fire. There was not another cloud in the sky. I would post a picture from today, except that today just looks like an overcast day, where the cloud cover is slightly brown. The smoke is covering the whole valley now, slightly darker to the northeast in the direction of the fire, and you can smell it everywhere. My heart goes out to everyone evacuated, whose homes are threatened, and to the firefighters in combat with this monster. They say they do not expect containment until Sept 15th.