Writing and Art in 2020

As everyone knows, 2020 has been a hell of a year.  I entered the new year planning to attend to a few weeks of attention-intensive work-matters before getting hot on my writing.  Then the novel coronavirus pandemic hit, work remained intensive, and personal tragedy began to strike.  For months, it’s been hard to do much more in free time than delve into books and Netflix.

None of that has really changed, but I’ve been growing increasingly aggravated with not creating anything.  I can’t say at this point that I’m going to suddenly start writing every day again, but I have been increasing my planning in fits and starts to work up to it.  The Asimulant Series is approximately 25% written, and is one of the projects I’ll be tackling first, followed by some other projects I’ve had on the back burners.

One of the things I wanted to do for Asimulant (and other stories) is include one or more illustrations with them.  To that end, I’ve been doing some SF-related sketches from time to time to get in practice—mostly space ships, but also beginning to delve into other kind of scenes.  I can’t lie, I have a love affair with drawing space ships which dates back near thirty-five years.  One of my side projects (fallen somewhat by the wayside, as well) has been teaching myself again how to model and render space scenes, and after working up to it a bit, possibly illustrating SF scenes in watercolor and colored pencil, one of my favorite illustration combinations.  And with the nice new journal I was recently given, I might work on a SF-themed sketchbook as well.

So these are some of the things that will (hopefully!) be forthcoming:  new writing, new sketches, new illustrations for the writing, and maybe some interesting 3D-rendered artwork.