Spammers, Writing, Painting

The reason there was no blog last week was because someone I know had a so-called emergency that needed help right away. I should've known better.

I ran across an interesting article the other day that was talking about good guys versus bad guys and how it's a modern invention that never existed in fairy tales and old stories. It explains the modern origin and how it came about through the rise of nation-states and modern national identity. It's worth a read or worth a skim at least.

So, a while back I got a new cell phone and a new number. I started getting a ton of spam calls, multiple calls every day except weekends. Frustrated with that, I considered getting a newer number. Maybe the last person to have the number was the problem, and a different one would fix it? What I settled on doing was killing the calls as they came in. Guess what? That makes them not call back. I can go several days now without a single spam call. And sliding that red circle to send the call to oblivion feels good, too. It turns out there's an app that does the same thing. I haven't installed it, but it's out there.

I've been working on pre-work for the next book. It's not going very fast. I've also been working on that cat painting I've mentioned several times before. I've been able to put maybe an hour or two into it every night. I'm hoping that a side effect of doing it is to figure out a way to do book covers that have that illustrated feel rather than a painting feel. Although I'm not happy with the painting as it is today, it's slowly coming together. I'm having to learn things and figure things out. I have some doubts about my skill to make it look the way I want it to look.

I have the painting on an easel in the living room. When I come home and sit down a few minutes, I can stare at it and try to work out fixes and ways to progress toward the finish. It's not the hardest painting in the world, but cats have fur. It has colors that can be hard to match even with all my past experience mixing colors. The ears have a reddish orange color near the base that's not really quite reddish orange. One of the eyes has a dark pinkish sort of red color near it that isn't the same color throughout. Part of the fur is white. The shadows(greys), mid-tones(light grey) and highlights(white) all have to look white. It's not as much hard as it's time-consuming. The eye will think it's all white. It just has to be done right.

I've painted fur before, but this has to look like the person's pet. The eyes are a bit tricky as they have multiple colors in them. Anyway, it's taking a while. If it works, I'll post it after it's done.

I finished Heidi in French. That's what I was going to blog about last week. It had a lot of missed opportunities. Maybe I'll discuss that next time.

Have a great weekend.