f(x)=x

I haven’t said much since the completing the first draft of The Resurrectionist, mainly because I’ve been spending my time editing The Erasable Man and working the day job. As of Friday this week, I have ~50600 words of TEM edited (that’s relying on Scrivener’s compile filter to pick out the completed sections). There’s probably about 10~15k left to edit and a few new scenes to add before I’m willing to call this version done, which will hopefully be sometime in the next month or so.

There’s about an hour to two hours a day that I can effectively write, assuming all the stars align properly.  In actuality, that’s broken up between my bus ride into work in the morning and what time I can prune out of my lunch hour. By the evening ride home, my brain isn’t very usable for working on the written word.  But, I’ve discovered something else that is just different enough from writing (words and code) to not add to my exhaustion and still in the creative vein.

About a week ago, my wife pointed out a Painting With A Twist event happening on a weekend and we decided to give it a shot. She’d been to several of these before hand and I hadn’t picked up a paint brush since middle school. That led to this:

#pwatcptx first time behind a brush … pic.twitter.com/S3k7CXGszi

— Christopher Salch (@arlaneenalra) November 13, 2016

Which finally turned into:

It was fun to play around with and got me thinking … Overall, the picture wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t too happy with the polka dot ground. The entire process wasn’t that tricky to pull off either, six colors of paint (if I remember correctly …) two brushes, canvas, an easel, something to use as a palette, and a little time. More or less. So, I blew some money at the local craft store and came up with this:

Yeah, I was even less happy with that one, the water effect didn’t quite work out and I overdid the clouds a bit, but it was a start. Now I had the equipment and decided to play around a bit and spend a little too much time watching Bob Ross on Netflix.

That led to:

And then too:

Where my wife thought the waterfall was a little unnatural looking so I did this:

And last night to:

Which is sort of based on a Bob Ross composition (finally found the channel on YouTube ).  I wouldn’t call any of it particularly good (heck I’ve only been playing for a week!) but it’s interesting to work through and who knows where it will ultimately lead. Plus, it’s pulling me away from less productive forms of procrastination that were eating into my semi-non-productive time anyhow.

Keep your eyes out for the next update.  My current plan is to have TEM ready to go by late December to Early January. Or at least be well done with this draft by then and handing it off to someone else to edit.  We’ll see if I make it!

~ by Chris on .