The past couple months

2019-12-01T15:18:06Z

October was a good month. Stories were accepted for publication next year in Eighteen (XVIII) and Corvid Queen. I also had stories make it to the second round in the slush piles of some well-regarded places, so even if none of those pan out it still makes me feel like I'm not totally wasting my time (or the editors'). I meant to be more consistent about Inktober, but I'm glad I played around with the art pens at least a bit.

November was a month of rejections, which was neither surprising nor demoralizing (see "second round" above). I signed up to do NaNoWriMo--as a rebel, with a list of short stories I wanted to finish or at least make progress on. I have...not finished any of them, and worked on only two. (I edged past 10% of the 50K NaNo goal, which was not my personal goal, but still. Not terribly impressive output.) So much for the helpfulness of self-imposed deadlines. It was also a heavy day job month and I'm pondering ways to integrate writing time into my new schedule.

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Inktober

2019-10-02T00:22:32Z

I've been meaning to start sketching and drawing again. I picked up some art supplies at Michael's back in the beginning of the summer but hadn't done anything with them. (The last time I intended to do some art, two years ago I think, I did a few sketches with halfway decent pencils and have no idea where they've gotten to since.) Inktober is a good excuse to start.

The Day 1 prompt was "Ring" so I (and, I'm sure, many others) went cinematic. I tweeted out a snapshot; maybe I'll put together a gallery of better-quality images later on. I did a still from the movie and used a Strathmore mixed media pad, 2H Faber Castell for sketching/blocking, and Pitt artist pens. I mostly wanted to experiment with the different tips. The foreground is S, the grass and some of the underbrush is F, underbrush is M and the trees, plus Samara's hair, are B. The stone texture is an old standby doodle for me. I'm not sure I should've used the brush for the trees, but they got covered anyway. As always, I am wary of overdoing the cross-hatching, à la The Drawing of the Dark. I'm not fond of the grass; I still need to work on the whole foreground-dark, background-light thing. I should've left a little more space around Samara's head---it gets a bit lost in the cross-hatching giving the well depth---but I do like the brush pen for that application.

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A. P. Howell

The past couple months

Inktober