Happy New Year, 2018

Happy New Year to all!

Yes, we're a day ahead of most of you, but in Aus the old year has just seven hours left on the clock, I spent the morning making Mom's Classic Trifle, and we'll be setting up a buffet dinner very soon. It's been a slooow New Year, not so hot, but hot enough. I've spent it messing about with art, reading, trying to control the pain in my back without taking pills (which is a tough job).

Like everyone else, I'm hoping that 2019 will bring good things! So, Happy New Year, everyone ... and I'm out of here to make fresh tea. As they say, "See you next year!"

In honor of a record-breaking heatwave ... Colors of Winter!

We're just recovering from a heatwave that set records: parts of the state scored 47 degrees ... that's SHADE temperature, on the assumption that you have some shade. What if you don't?! Right now it's just humid ... we're in the familiar "pregnant pause" between hot spells. Right through Christmas it was so hot, you couldn't even think ... and the a/c was running full-throttle (still is), and it was still an oven in here. I'd intended to do art during the holidays -- there's some experiments I want to run in CG, for a start, and a couple of paintings to play with. But, in that heat?!

On the other hand, I was rummaging through images and stumbled over a collection I put together the winter before last (2017). Uploaded them to facebook or something, never to either blog. So, I thought, "Colors of Winter" ... oh, yes. And here we are.

In honor of a record-breaking heatwave, let's have a WINTER photo shoot, and keep the art for another day. Here, have some more while I'm uploading...

Merry Christmas to all

The card says it all! Happy Holidays, folks!

Settling in for the holidays

Everything done ... tree up, gifts wrapped, groceries stashed, menu set. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and there's nothing left to be done, just put on some seasonal music and enjoy!

I confess, I wish I felt more "Christmassy," but it's difficult when you just passed the summer solstice, you're thinking about turning on the a/c, the cricket's on tv, and ... and ...!

This is our second Christmas without Mom, and I do miss her a lot. Especially at this time of year. I imagine I always will, so it's something that has to become part of the landscape. You shed your tear, heave your sigh, and battle on.

Otherwise, life is very slow and steady. Dave is happy at work (he won New Employee of the Year, which is a measure of how good he is at this job! Good on you, Dave!), and we got a lease to stay in this house another year, so even that worked out well. Mike is busy with stories and projects...

For myself, it's all about the art. Painting. Okay, it's digital painting, but I'm enjoying the heck out of it -- getting a kick out of art that I haven't had in thirty years. I'll upload a few more pieces here to chart my progress. That's what blogs are for, right? Right...

Honorable Mention, no less! We're doing something right.

Not too shabby ... Honorable Mention in the SF Writers of the Future contest ... for Root and Branch. The story is about a living city, maybe 700 years from now, when cities (and airships!) grow themselves. And this city is sick. In fact, she's dying ... question is, what do you do about it?

Just finished another SF story, Islands of the Mind, which is out on submission at this time ... wish me luck with that one! 

Also, managed to do another painting today, though I do confess, this one was painted wholly in Photoshop. My right hand is so painful, I'm going to have to suspend "doodling" in Krita until some of the sheer agony subsides. But I'm very pleased with this study of the shoreline on the far side of Petrel Cove, which is on t'other side of Rosetta Head (aka The Bluff) at Victor Harbour. So...

...and let me share some detail shots that show the fine work:

Am having a ball, painting. Really enjoying it, and I think that comes through in the work. I'm getting better at this, and learning ... oh, a lot. This painting was done from another "meh" photo. The lighting conditions were awful, the images were flat, dull, boring. What could could do with them? But here and there was a shot fulled with potential as a painting. This is the fun of painting: seeing a pretty dreadful snapshot turn into a very nice image indeed.

Art ... because I've been painting again after a long hiatus

No real news to tell, but if a blog is supposed to be a journal charting the course of one's life, then one ought to blog about what is on one's mind at the time, right? Right.

And at the moment, it's painting. In fact, I've painted so much lately, I've given myself a very sore and achy right hand!

Also just finished another story, Islands of the Mind, which is out on submission at this time, but it takes months to sell a story (when, in fact, they sell at all), so that note is just a "note to self," to jog my memory about where I was in mid-December this year. Otherwise what's a blog for?

Ain't the weather been strange?

Not my images: borrowed from various news sites: Sydney and Brisbane getting hammered. Believe it or not,
SA had it easy by comparison, with coooold, winds, drizzle, gray skies ...

Hasn't the weather been strange?

That's the strapline from a  rather good 1977 Aussie movie called The Last Wave, and -- dangitall, you'd swear it was coming true. The weather is being peculiar. This is not just summer, it's high summer, just a week short of Christmas. It should be wall to wall heat 'n dust right now, and what's happening?

This:

You can see the stream of water-laden air being drawn up from the Southern Ocean, and you can imagine how cold it is when it arrives here. How much water it's dumping on us. Conditions are a lot like July or August, which is, uh, winter. And all this, while the Christmas trees are up and mince pies are being consumed by the gross!

So, naturally, Dave was out in it. Riding. Of course. Proof, you ask? Okay:

Yep. Down to Myonga Reservoir, stop for donuts and coffee with cycling friends, and home to the southern suburbs. All those years in Alaska add up to a "meh" attitude to Aussie weather ... and some great photos along the way.

From here on down, these are Dave's pictures, from the camera phone (or is it phone-camera?), with a little bit of enhancement on the desktop:

The conditions were so odd, the light levels so low, sometimes these photos look like art.I love the way the trees ghost into the low cloud -- and the lone roo in the yellow paddock under storm skies, in the first shot. Beautiful. Kudos to Dave.

If course, most folks would say he's a little nuts, being out there in this weather! They'd have a good point, but then again, when it's fun ...! And it does appear to be fun:

Good on ya, Dave!

News! Third short story goes to contract!

No, NOT my art. Found it on Pinterest
and would love to give a credit here
if anyone can provide it???

Am very thrilled today, because my third short story has been picked up by a fantasy anthology soon to be published in Queensland. The volume's theme is dragons ... always a favorite subject; and yesterday I signed the contract for Pet Shop Dragons, to appear in Hordes of the Great Fire Wyrms: a dragon anthology, in around June, 2019.

This is tremendous news. It marks my third story in print. The first was Pearls That Were His Eyes, a science fiction piece which appeared in Shoreline of Infinity #11, in the UK. Then came Father O'Neill's Confession, a historical urban fantasy in Terra! Tara! Terror!, from Flatiron Publishing in the US. Pet Shop Dragons could also be called historical urban fantasy, in that it's an a/u 1905, without being even 0.5% steampunk.

So nice to be placing stories here and there! In fact, after doing volumes and volumes of art in the last six months, I need to get my head down and write some more.

See below for the covers to the two issues that are currently in print. I'll blog again when the dragon anthology is released. Might even have sold another short piece by then ... nothing is impossible. I've come to love writing as much as art, so ... let's do this.


Otherwise, things are slow and steady on the run-up to Christmas. The gift shopping is all done, the tree is up, the presents are wrapped -- even half the grocery shopping is done, anything that could be stuffed into the freezer or cupboard. We should be able to sail into the holidays with nothing to do but kick back and enjoy.

This will be our second Christmas without Mom, and I have to be honest: I'm missing her a lot. A few days ago, December 10 would have been her 89th birthday, but in all honesty, with her health so broken down, she's in a better position, watching the festivities from a dimension removed.

(Me? Ha!Torn ligament in lumbar, plantar fasciitis, patella tendinitis, hip bursitis ... and you wonder why I haven't blogged since before I had two surgeries to fix my gallbladder problem last year?! I could tell you a story called Hell Year ... but I won't. Before you were halfway through, you'd be glazed over and reaching for either the vodka or the valium. So I'll spare you, and we'll pick up the pieces and drive onward...)

For the moment, it's mostly about art for me, since I recently discovered a new paint program, Krita. It's open source, and almost the equivalent of the top-end programs, such as Corel Painter -- which I couldn't afford without wining State Lotto, if only because I'd have to update all my hardware before I could run them. However, Krita runs happily on my hardware, and the program itself is both vastly challenging and vastly rewarding. Am starting to do some very nice work in it, and this is still very, very early days. Got my big toe in the water. Next comes the foot, then the ankle... I have high hopes that in six months I'll be showing Krita art on line with good reason to be proud of it.

Christmas lights, 2018

You know, something, just something has me convinced that it might be Christmas. Off hand, I can't think quite what it could be, but ...!

Seriously, people do amazing things with the new LED light systems, and there's one particular street, Nari Drive at Lonsdale (the map at left is uploaded full size for readability: click on it) where residents really get into the fine art of turning their homes and gardens into miniature theme parks for the holidays. What they've done with lights must have cost a fortune, and also it wouldn't be quick to set this lot up (and take it all down again in January or February ... Aussies tend to leave the decorations up for a long time. We're also spoiled rotten in terms of climate: notice that these lights are strung among green trees and shrubs). Uh huh: summertime down under.

As you cruise up to the curve in Nari Drive, you see that the whole street's illuminated:

...and that street is full of cars cruising slowly, and people walking by to see the show. It's quite the event. I took a lot of photos, because I knew half of them would be blurred (after dark, in a moving car? It's borderline astonishing that I got good shots at all), and here are the best:

And to top it all off, the crescent moon was high, setting in the west and bright enough for the whole disk to be visible to the naked eye. The night was warm and lovely...

...and thanks to Dave for arriving home from work at about nine at night, and saying, "Grab your camera and jump in the car. You have to see this." Great! 😃