Hello, everyone! I hope August is treating y’all well!
This past week went rather well for me. It was a very productive week on several fronts. I’ve made some good progress on my current book. I’ve read a little bit. There was even some surprise painting to be had. I’m also still making progress on learning Irish as part of the “100 day Gaeilge Challenge” on Twitter, though I haven’t been posting updates there. Currently, I’m on day twenty.
This week, I got some good words down for the first draft of Book 11. In addition to that, I’ve been developing several of the upcoming plot elements. I’m excited to see how it will all come together once it’s on the page. Since this is the second-to-last book of my current series, this has definitely been a long time coming. I am also preparing for the editing phase for this series after I finish the next book. There are definitely a lot of moving parts this late in the series. As such, I want to properly set them early enough so they don’t come out of nowhere. It’s kind of the other side to writing ahead in the series to make sure I don’t write myself into a corner.
Reading has largely been slowly making my way through James Lovegrove’s Firefly novel, Big Damn Hero, and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. Admittedly, my progress on both of those has been a bit slower than I expected due to other projects, but I am still enjoying both of them.
Progress toward my “100 Day Gaeilge Challenge” has mostly included working through lessons on Duolingo. I have been meaning to do a bit more reading up on assorted other Irish language things, but that didn’t quite work out for this week. However, I did learn quite a few new words.
I mentioned earlier that I had been doing some surprise painting… shortly after I posted last week’s update, I decided that it had been quite a while since I had done any painting. Most of the reason for that was that the assorted landscapes I’d done weren’t exactly quick, and I wasn’t looking to start a long project. As such, I decided to limit myself to a 30-minute painting. That painting was mostly me trying to figure out what I was wanting to paint as I went, but it led to me deciding to try painting a 30-minute painting every day for the past week. As a result, I now have seven new paintings, all of which involve an animal, mostly because I wasn’t feeling another landscape just yet. To be fair, I did also spend a good bit of time looking up references and figuring out how to create brushes that would give the effect I was looking for. In some cases, that didn’t quite work how I wanted, but I tried to take those experiences and apply them to the next painting.
My plan for this upcoming week is actually a bit similar to how this past week went, possibly with a few tweaks. I will continue drafting Book 11. I’m also planning to continue working on character development stuff with the goal of drawing my characters. All things considered, the painting I’ve been doing this week was part of that process (namely trying to get more comfortable with creating, even if I don’t have much of an idea of what I’m doing yet). Other than that, I would like to continue Big Damn Hero and Neverwhere. I am looking forward to continuing my “100 Day Gaeilge Challenge,” and since I had so much fun painting this past week, I’m thinking I might try for a second round.
I think that’s everything for this update! Thanks for reading!
~ Theresa
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