Yes, Every Day

A couple of people know that my New Year's Resolution for the past two years has been to create something every day.

Last year fell short of the goal as my life plummeted into abject misery with my mother's illness, my sister's death, and my own winter of Endlessly Being Sick, but this year, I'm pleased to be able to say that midway through May, I've succeeded in my goal.

Most of what I've done has been to write; along with a couple short stories, I finished an untitled sequel to my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel, "Truck Stops", and am 50k+ into a novel called "Transitions."

I've done some cover art for the Piker Press, and even a Fever Dreams cartoon a couple weeks ago.

For a while I maintained a blog about the creative effort, but after I kept writing, "Well, I wrote another 400 words last night," over and over, I abandoned and deleted the blog, and promised to update the project here instead.

I was very pleased with the result when I did this graphic for Mel Trent's story, "Angel Hunter" from her book The Immortal Guns of Talon Constantine. Mel, Lydia Manx and I brainstormed some images, which was most helpful, and then, when I started to work on it, a weird thing happened -- the art began to flow in the same way my writing does ... it just began to happen.

This is unusual for me. Ever since I was little, I hid while I was drawing or sketching, and if I couldn't hide, I kept to conventional subjects and ways of drawing them. Someone was always looking over my shoulder, saying, "What are you doing?" or far worse, "Oh, that's going to be soooo good!" As a result, art work is stressful for me. Writing isn't, usually, because I'm downright shitty about it and if anyone pesters me while I'm writing, God help them, because I will roar at them to take off.

The above graphic -- well, I got into it so deeply that I didn't care if anyone saw me, and if they had said something, I'd have roared at them to leave me alone. Sounds rather rude, but for me, it's a big, big step forward.

Also, I give credit to the ghosts in the machine; Photoshop glitched in one layer and did the gradient of color a twist I didn't ask for ... and it made all the difference in the result.