Last Night's Thursday Night Art Jam
ACEO Peregrine Falcon and
ACEO Wolf Mountain were what I did last night when Lisa came over for our weekly Thursday Night Art Jam. It was great. I had both of these started earlier in the week. I did the sky on Wolf Mountain and the background on Peregrine Falcon separately, fooling with wet in wet and lifting out clouds on Wolf Mountain. Then didn't get back to finishing them till Lisa came over and it was our time to art.
She finished up a beautiful elements-and-goddess Inktense painting that came out 11" x 13" finished on 12" x 16" paper. Then started a new one in graphite with a wolf from a reference I lent her, which turned out to be Artemis behind the wolf and a tree, with her wolf and a quail and a bee and her crescent-moon bow floating in it -- wonderful symbolic piece.
I don't usually do symbolic art. As we were talking about it and I'd just done the distant mountain, she picked out a wolf's face in the central snowpatch so I added a rock outcrop for the eye of that wolf and she noticed it was biting a second one that's howling with its mouth open. So Wolf Mountain actually has three wolves, since I added another peak in the foreground with mist and snow in between to keep to the theme. It's cool. It's not like most of my art, it has that other layer.
Kitten and I talked this evening about my writing and I got sorted out on something that's been puzzling me -- not some burning deep painful inner change but a minor "Eh?" important but not all that painful one. I'm finding a new direction for my fiction. Not so much a change in genre as changes within genre and a subtly different type of theme. The way Karl put it, a different type of hero. I have written heroes who had nothing to lose sticking their necks out with a certain type of courage, but I haven't written the kind of hero who very much has something to defend, a patch of land, a few people who matter that much to him. It's a different focus more than a genre change.
I like heroes, so I'm not going off doing heroes. It's more that I may set up a different starting context for my next round of novels and see what happens. I seem to be drifting away from vampires and other Outsider archetypes toward something else. It should be good though, I'm looking forward to writing it. Tonight I may dream. I'm in a strange mood that's a little like a fisherman seeing ripples in the water and starting to slowly lower the hook. I may be onto a big one. What I hope of course is for a novel that just grabs me so much the whole process of writing it is a Nantucket sleighride, that I can't put it down while I'm writing and that energy, passion and joy comes through when it's done.
What's cool is that tonight I have a sense of setting off into completely unknown country, no idea what will come into this novel, where it'll start, where it'll head, what the antagonist is, what the conflicts are, even what kind of magic it is, but knowing cool stuff is just down the road and about to start soon. Very soon. It'll be fun. That is the one thing I know about it -- this one is going to be fun.