Circles and triangles are good, but I’m getting bored with this minimalist style and I think it’s time now to go back to making “normal” art. (I expected this to happen sooner or later.)
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Lullaby
Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
I’ve learned lately that I quickly lose interest in the fiction I’m writing unless it has the following:
- A strong narrative voice. This seems to be more important for me than anything else. I didn’t realize it was so critical until this morning, when the bland porridge of my current WIP grew too boring to continue (because it lacks a strong voice).
- A concept that piques my curiosity. What this means in practice is flexible — it can be about a character, a relationship, the setting, a plot point, a mood. It just needs to be concrete enough that I can think about it.
- A plot that runs on the rails of change. Meaning, dynamic scenes where the world and characters are in a different state at the end than they were at the beginning. Outlining appears to be the best way for me to get there, at least at this point. Dwight Swain’s book has been helpful here.
- Theme, possibly. I sense that I do need it as a unifying force and to help me in scene selection, but I’m not positive it’s a requirement. (I did just read Libbie Hawker’s book on outlining and the theme part resonated with me, so it may just be that, though — an untested resonance.)
These aren’t massive, groundbreaking revelations, of course, but I’d somehow lost sight of them over the years or wasn’t fully aware of them before. Now that I’ve tugged them back into my conscious mind, though, I’m ready to start finishing stories again.
Mountain of the Lord
The yellow triangle and circle represent a statue of the angel Moroni, and the white triangle represents a temple. Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
Just saw this review of the reMarkable tablet, which I hadn’t heard of before. E-ink paper + pencil, basically. The tablet is a bit pricey — $599 plus marker tips once in a while — but I like the idea a lot.
Hear Him
A reference to Joseph Smith’s First Vision. Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
Came across a great tip on Python multiline strings using textwrap.dedent (so you don’t have to dedent everything in your code).
Reunion
Painted in Procreate Pocket, textured in Photoshop.
An interesting grammar note from a book I’ve been reading on Proto-Indo-European: Indo-European verbs require grammatical markers showing tense (past, present, future, etc.) and number (singular, plural, occasionally dual), but Hopi verbs require markers indicating whether you saw it yourself, heard about it from someone else, or consider it to be a truth. This is surely somewhat of an oversimplification, but even so, still pretty cool.
Over on r/Fantasy, they recently ran a poll to rank the top self-published books. It’s admittedly limited to the books read by those who frequent r/Fantasy, but it’s still a handy guide if you’re interested in self-published fantasy fiction: the results.
(I’ve only read a couple so far, but generally I’ve liked them a lot. Right now I’m halfway through Sufficiently Advanced Magic, the first Arcane Ascension novel, and it’s great.)