So in the middle of my exhaustion, I figured I might as well paint, so... I did. Not just "Willow"; I hauled out a couple more to work on between her layers drying.


I made a crazy painting parlor out of the living room, with pillows, candles, music and incense. It wasn't intentional, I'm just so used to cleaning up that room for company that... well, I was on auto-pilot. But it was really pleasant, even if it did feel a trifle decadent, like painting in some kind of artist's seraglio.

I've also started keeping all my color tests/thumbnails in one clear folder, which you can see on the floor there.


This painting is almost done! I'm so close I can feel it! Another session? Two? It would be so good to be done...!

But as I said, I started a couple more to keep myself working:


In this case, it's "Just Because (I Love You)" and "Hadara and the Sun King," which I've always wanted to finish and at this point seems like serious low-hanging fruit, compared to the complexity of the things I do now!

New folks, feel free to click on the painting titles... that'll show you closer views of the pictures than these photos. :)

Tomorrow I have something special planned... plus I want to muse on reading and RPGs. But for now I flop.


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Tags: art, brushes, photos, progress
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Cowboy Bebop OST 3 - Blue

A couple of days ago I went to a couple of genre websites I used to read religiously, sites that specialized in reviewing new and existing books... and I felt lost. It was like I was reading some alien language, or looking at something through a smoky glass. I felt completely removed from it. Yet another "subversive" book, undermining the tropes of the genre. Yet another Tolkien come again. Yet another ground-breaking book... breaking ground for... what? More of the same. Everything felt so... derivative. Of itself.

It reminded me suddenly of how I felt about furry fandom a few years ago... that sense of people feeding off one another, everyone crowded into a small pond, writing for one another, reviewing one another.

And I thought: "This is my genre?"

Not anymore.

And yet, you know... I still love science fiction. I still love fantasy. I still love wizards and dragons and boys with swords making their fortunes. I still love gallant space captains and multi-generational empires and robots. But the mainstream of the genre feels like an insular fortress and I'm not interested in what's behind its walls anymore. When I read these days, it's either authors I've already tried and still like, like Jack Campbell writing his Jack Geary military space operas, or it's new things I had to hunt around on the fringes to find, like alex_beecroft's The Witch's Boy.

More and more the thing that fills that void, oddly enough, is the RPG. Not because I have the time to run a new campaign... but because I know a lot of people who do, and they often say, "What would you be in this system?" or they describe their own characters. Or I look back at my older games and find something new in them. Or I read rulebooks—akaihyo sent me one recently. I get my playing online when I can, with a couple of people who make it worthwhile. This is the place that feels open-ended to me still, where you can go "Wow!" at things that people make, and where if you don't like what people make you're completely free to make up your own.

It makes me think a little about the future of storytelling, and about tailored or custom-fitted stories, where you have some influence over what you want to see; not entirely, because then how could you be delighted and surprised? But enough to be invested in the story.

If you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be uninterested in the genre mainstream industry, that the offerings in the bookstore would mostly be boring me, that I'd be turned off by the way many of those authors talk about themselves and their work, I would have been shocked. I wanted to be them. I don't anymore.

I have a copy left over of The Aphorisms that I bought to send to one of those sites. I haven't yet. I don't think I will now. What to do with it now? The possibilities seem endless. I think I will make a gift of it.


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Tags: gaming, writing
Current Mood: vaguely disappointed