These last couple of months I’ve been learning quite a bit about what it takes to write a good story.  I’d love to write swashbuckling, fun, suspenseful adventure stories.  For a long time I’ve dreamed about writing, but haven’t had the courage to pursue it wholeheartedly.  I’ve decided to give it a go.

Previously I thought writing a book must be a fairly straightforward endeavor.  It isn’t.  So I find myself in the midst of what has turned out to be a rather lengthy study of writing, dialogue, characters, what makes for a captivating story, and all sorts of stuff that I hadn’t even thought of before I started looking at this in more depth.

One thing that happens consistently once I’m a few chapters into a story, I notice that some of the characters know a whole lot of things that I don’t know much about. And if I want to continue writing, letting these guys do what they have in mind, I have to do some research.  Consequently, I’m currently reading about loads of really interesting stuff.  One of the things I’m learning about is Sumerian civilization.  They developed over three to four thousand years ago many of the constructs and even inventions we have in our society today.  It’s really amazing.

Between research for the story I’m writing and learning about how to write and develop stories, I’m also trying to practice writing on a regular basis so that I can improve and get some experience with different kinds of writing.  I haven’t disciplined myself into a set routine or even given myself concrete goals yet.  It’s kind of difficult to do that when you don’t have a clue what you’re getting yourself into.  But I regularly write a spontaneous short piece in response to a ‘writing prompt’ (a suggestion given to start a writing topic) or a photo or just something out of thin air.  I thought that occasionally it might be fun to share these on the blog.  So every once in a while if you see this illustration shown at the top of the page, you’ll know that the post includes one of my little writing ditties.

I also plan to include one or two little illustrations to go along with the piece.  I’d love to hear your thoughts about these posts and their content as they come along.  Of course I love praise and you’re welcome to tell me if you like them, but also if you’d like to give me pointers for improvement that’d be super too.

I’m also in the middle of painting the next Gex Book painting.  This time I started with a quick watercolor under-painting, to get the watercolor texture, and have scanned it into the computer so that I can work with it in Corel Painter.  Creating digital paintings that look like watercolor is very demanding on computing power, and my computer doesn’t have enough RAM memory or processing speed, making watercolor digital painting painfully slow.  So I’m experimenting with creating most of the painting in watercolor and adding a few touches in Corel afterwards to get the best of both worlds.  I also have three more drawings ready for painting in egg tempera.

So that’s the news from DweezelJazz Art.  Thank you for coming to read this blog, it means a great deal to me.

Cheers

In whatever form we take to express ourselves, if we include in it something unique about the way we see the world, it’s an art.

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All creativity is expression, communication; and we all have a story worth telling.

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