Ice Storm Hell: Things just got a Little Easier…

It’s Ice Storm Hell! Ice Storm, my latest novel in development, has been one headache after another. But last night, I finally caught some good fortune.

Day 2: My Quest to Draw
Day 2: My Quest to Draw. The topic is Overlapping Spheres. Those tennis balls look almost good enough to play with right? Right???

Ice Storm Hell: 9 Days, 30,000 Words!

Today is Day 9 of my “open novel” experiment for Ice Storm, aka my “Development Hell” book. Yesterday was a surprisingly good day. I edited some old stuff, wrote some new stuff. When the dust was cleared, I’d finished another 3,000 words. 30,000 words down, 60,000 words to go.

Until last night, I’d been dreading this week. To make a long story short, Ice Storm consists of six parts. Each part is roughly 15,000 words long. When I first mapped out an editing plan for Ice Storm, I decided my third part was largely unusable. So, I decided to eliminate it and redraft the whole thing. I wasn’t looking forward to making such a drastic shift from editing to writing and then back to editing again. Then I caught a break. I took another look at my notes and realized I’d been too aggressive with my story map. So, I reworked it last night. And lo and behold, I figured out a way to reintegrate a lot of scenes I’d planned to throw out. So, Ice Storm’s third part will need far less rewriting than I’d thought. Needless to say, I’m stoked.

Drawing: Day 2 – Overlapping Spheres

I also completed my second lesson from You Can Draw in 30 Days by Mark Kistler last night. It was about overlapping spheres. Check out the photo to see my work. Essentially, there are three tricks to make a sphere look three-dimensional. First, you overlap it on top of a second sphere. Second, you make the closer sphere larger than the one that’s further away. And third, you place the first sphere lower on the page. Then its just a simple matter of casting some shadows and adding several layers of shading. All in all, this was a good lesson. I could definitely see the improvement in my spheres and thought I did a decent job drawing a pair of tennis balls (yes, those are tennis balls) to finish for the night.

Of course, it’s going to get harder from here. Probably a lot harder. And I can already see I’m going to want to go over these lessons again when I’m done to make sure I really know them. But I’m starting to think I might really be able to draw for real someday. Neat!

Other Stuff

This is kind of my wrap-up section to sum up non-creative issues. So, I noticed I’m at 99 Facebook followers. Join today and you can be #100! What else? Oh yeah, I’m still thinking about making adjustments to my sidebar (that one on the right with Chaos in it). I might expand it to include international bookstores. I sell far more E-Books in Amazon’s UK store than at Barnes and Noble. I guess that’s a testament for how good Amazon is at targeting a book to the right audience. Unfortunately, the link to buy Chaos at Diesel (see sidebar) is still broken. Diesel has a revised version of Chaos in hand so hopefully, this will be fixed soon. Finally, the Chaos paperback continues to be on sale for $13.25 at Amazon. Get it and review it!

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