I last made a multi-project update post here, and I’d like to start doing one every quarter. They help me stay focused(ish) and might help you make sense of my scattered updates.
Here are my projects this quarter.
• Research quest: I have a new lineup to read, as well as a couple of posts to write from last time around. I’ve defined the project here. I’ve made a little progress, and yet I’m feeling strangely confident about getting through it. Expect some more updates on my reading soon!
• YA fantasy novel: I’ve been sharing updates here. My goal for this quarter is to finish the ‘long draft’, which is what I call the draft that has everything I want to put in, and can then start cutting down.
Currently, I have all the scenes I want, though a few are in outline form.
So my next task is to flesh out the newest scenes and paste the material hanging out in various note-taking apps and my (transcribed) voice memos into the main draft.
My second goal is to finish sharing my novel’s (real-world) backstory, which I started here.
• Art & Painting I don’t usually have any goals to speak of related to art, since I prefer to just draw or paint when I feel like it. But this time, I have two goals:
1. To upload my recent watercolors and vector art into galleries in my Painting category. 2. To make vector drawings of all the plants (and fruit and vegetables) in my house. I’ve also been using my art in blog posts and other media. So I want to continue to do that.
Monochrome paintings of trees and hills. Click on a picture to see it zoomed in!
Dipping back into the archives for these.
I last shared some of my botanical ink paintings here. As I wrote there, I’ve been enjoying drawing from my old vacation photos, looking deeply at the zoomed-in pixels of dappled green leaves and foliage.
Here are the last few I managed to do before running out of ink, some time in 2021. I was already well and truly out of blue. (Yes, I do need to buy some more. I keep forgetting, and now I’m on a watercolor and digital art kick. I’ll circle back to ink eventually!)
A bit of background on each, going clockwise from the top left:
I painted this on location, and not from a photo! One of the first times I did that. It was while camping in the Angeles forest. Since then, I make a point of packing art supplies and painting on every trip.
From a photo I took in Madrona Marsh in Torrance, California.
From a vacation photo from Flagstaff, Arizona. I had to mix in some regular fountain pen ink for the dark branches.
From another Flagstaff photo taken at high speed in the passenger seat, probably.
Expect a few more art updates, woven in among all the other activity, as I catch up on sharing my recent work!
…and experimenting with eco-friendly art supplies!
Watercolor paintings on Forestry Stewardship Council certified paper, from around September 2021. Click on a picture to see it zoomed in!
Here are some watercolors I did last year! As I mentioned in my botanical ink post, I’ve been experimenting with eco-friendly art supplies. These were done with Natural Earth Paint*, which come as bags of powdered pigment that you have to mix with a binding agent yourself, and spoon into the little watercolor pans. So that was fun!
Here is a bit of backstory for each picture:
The four pictures that make up the top and left borders were painted on location (or plein air if we’re being fancy and French) while camping on Santa Cruz Island. I did some outlining with a fountain pen when I got back.
It took me a while to get the hang of watercolor again, after doing so much monochrome, which is why the first two have a subtle rainbow effect going on. I like it, though it’s not quite intentional.
The other three that make up the right and bottom borders are painted from photos of the Himalayas that my sister took. I took two scans of the first one with slightly different settings, and I can’t decide which I like better.
More pictures to come as I get them scanned and uploaded!
My research batch for April-June 2022 is in full swing. I’ve been finishing up the blog posts from the last batch, which I’m listing here. (The posts themselves are over on my Medium page.)
It’s possible that I bit off a bit too much this time around. Considering that I have blog posts from last time to complete, and I selected more reading materials this quarter than the last.
However, there was a long stretch in the middle of last quarter where I was waffling around and being stuck, until I figured out a better reading process and really picked up speed towards the end. I’m hoping that I can get more done this time by avoiding the waffling stage.
These are the questions I usually ask myself while I’m skimming:
What is the document, in simple terms?
When is it from?
What type of language does it use – legalese, engineering-speak, or layman-friendly?
What am I looking for in this document?
How many (readable) pages is it, excluding appendices and references?
What cited resources do I want to add to my TBR (‘to be read’ as the Booktubers say)?
I don’t have the answers to all of these questions for this document yet. Here’s what I have so far.
What it is: The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is proposing a rule that requires publicly traded companies to disclose the risks they face from climate change, so that investors can make informed decisions. This document describes that rule in detail.
When it’s from: March 2022.
Type of language: Lots of finance-talk.
What I’m looking for:
An interesting aspect of this rule is that even though it’s mainly about companies’ risks from climate change, it also asks about their effects on climate change, such as their greenhouse gas emissions and emissions targets.
That’s because being a high emitter is actually a risk to the company as the economy transitions to being lower-carbon. New regulations may force a company to cut its emissions.
I’m looking to understand what kinds of information we can expect from companies about their emissions, and what we can do with it.
Secondly, the document says that this change was made because large numbers of investors use climate impacts in their decision-making, and want more detailed and consistent information.
I’m looking to learn more about this trend and how we can be a part of it.
Number of pages: 490, which is long, though part of that is because it’s double-spaced. I’m not sure yet how many of the pages will be relevant or readable.
Way back in 2019, I was traveling a fair bit by plane and train. People-watching on the train especially got me inspired to write because some of my favorite stories are set on trains.
I came up with a challenge that every time I got onto a plane or train, I was going to write a short story.
I’d spent the previous year or so writing a near-future dystopian political technothriller thing that I had started in early 2016.
That got less and less fun to write – as real-life turned into a dystopian political technothriller.
I reluctantly shelved that project as my motivation flagged, and began casting around for new story ideas.
The ‘travel short stories’ were an easy and low-pressure way to experiment with fiction. Soon, I had a stack of stories collected as stapled-together ruled pages in a small cardboard box.
November 2019: I was flying back to California from India. I boarded around midnight, well-caffeinated and determined to stay awake if I could to preempt jetlag when I got home.
I noodled around with pen and paper on the flight, and arrived at the beginnings of a story. I’d been watching Avatar the Last Airbender and Frozen 2 on repeat for a while, and I was drawn to the idea of a magical wilderness setting for my story.
Very quickly after that, I arrived at my main character, magic system, and a few scenes close to the climax of the story. I scribbled down a couple of pages before finally going to sleep on the plane.
When I got home, I took a few days to settle back in after my trip. I remember being up at around dawn because of jetlag and sitting at my kitchen island reading the half-finished scenes. Over the next few days, I wrote down everything I knew about the story.
That excitement about the idea didn’t go away. And there was something about this fictional world that felt like a breath of fresh air, and I wanted to keep exploring.
I let it sit and keep simmering in my head for a while. I kept having ideas for it and jotting down notes.
January 2020: I started writing a ‘discovery draft’ by hand in a dedicated notebook.
I put in bookmarks I made out of construction paper to mark the quarter, half, and three-quarter waypoints in the notebook, to signal where the three-act structure milestones needed to be.
The notebook I wrote my discovery draft in.
Aside from that, and taking some brainstorming breaks when needed, I completely winged it, starting from where I thought the beginning of the story should be.
I wrote about 25,000 words in 6 months and got to the end of the story.
I now had more of a sense of the story arc, more of the forces working against my main character within the story, and more of the theme.
I also got my first glimpses at the side characters, maybe their names, and just a few key moments for each of them.
June 2020: I signed up for a writing class where we all made book plans and set word count targets for each week. Then we tracked our word counts together for three months, shared statuses, and cheered each other on. This class turned out to be pretty helpful (though unfortunately, the second time I signed up, it didn’t work as well with my process).
I made a word count tracker in Excel and intended to write about 70,000 words over three months. The plan here was to weave together the various plot threads, arcs, and random elements I had collected into a coherent narrative.
I think I wrote 50,000 words and reached the end of the story, which continued to take shape and yet kept raising more questions.
That’s when I started to arrive at my writing process (which I now use in all forms of writing): to go through multiple passes of the story, and keep adding material until it’s finally time to start cutting or rewriting.
