Around last November, I found myself in an untenable situation. I was unable to find part-time work, and the GI Bill was not providing enough money for me to continue living on my own. This was coupled with a growing frustration with the college I was attending and the fact that their 'Game Art and Design' program had only a single introductory class to the 'design' part of game design that I actually want to do with everything else being geared towards making art assets.

While valuable skills, and I should draw more to stay in practice, they are ultimately not what I want to be doing. I am more interested in the programming and scripting side than modeling and animation, yet it is world building, story and character design, and design and balance of mechanics and systems that I truly love doing.

In the end, I withdrew from the Art Institute at the end of that quarter. Starting in January, I began looking for full-time work. Finally, as of one month ago now, I have found a job...and the pay will be pretty good once I get past the temp period (So late August...). I should be moving into my new place either this weekend or next, and will have much more time in the coming months for my writing and what little art I do myself.

Well, those few folks watching me probably have seen by now that chapter 4 of Afterimages is overdue....though I doubt that anyone is surprised with my posting history.... Regardless, I am working on it, and almost halfway through the chapter.

In other news, at the repeated suggestion of my Life Drawing and now Anatomy instructor over this quarter and the last one (and I'll have him for Sculpture and Advanced Life Drawing as well), I'm going to start checking a tablet out from the school to practice drawing for at least an hour each night. I suppose eventually even I'll have to get better at it. So I'll be posting the stuff I draw into my scraps, but be warned that it is going to be absolutely awful junk. I'm only going to be posting it because he wants to monitor my progress.

So I've taken some time and gotten my head back together on Afterimages. I'm going to try to have chapter 3 finished by the end of this month. In the meantime, I have finished the first chapter of Starcaster and posted it. Lemme know what you think! I like it so far, but would certainly like to hear what other folks think.

Ugh....why do I never back things up until it's too late? The drive that chapter 3 of Afterimages was on crashed. I was about a third through, but now I'll have to start over. So there's gonna be a delay for anyone waiting to see the third chapter.

In other news, I've got some other story ideas that are really clamoring to be written. >.> While I try to find a way to recover what I've done of Afterimages chapter 3, I think I'll put down some of my ideas from one of those. Perhaps alternating chapters on stories will help me to avoid falling into doldrums on one. Still, I'm not likely to try to write more than two stories at once. Even that may be stretching it, but it's something to try.

Wow. Things are inexpressably better than they were a couple months ago. I've actually got a good internet connection (for here), and pretty decent quarters. To top it off, I'm actually in a pretty good mood and cheerfully writing! And I'm having fun with it instead of it just being a release. This is so much better.

How this all came about is coincedental enough as to be far-fetched. When I went on leave back in May, my return was delayed by two days because of tornadoes and storms in the Dallas/Ft Worth area. Because of that, the job I had got given to someone else because they needed to go out and I ended up with a job as basically a tech support technician for some rather high ranking folks. It's certainly a bonus that I like the folks I'm working with now!

So, chapter 2 of Afterimages is out now, and I should start chapter 3 pretty soon. Still probably won't be anything explicit there, but there's a fair deal of character development coming down the wire and there might be something more explicit in Chapter 4. Still debating whether or not I wanna put something like that in there, though. I certainly don't want it to just turn into smut, and that's something I've never tried to write before, either.

As the title says, I probably should have started doing journals a long time ago. I guess now's better than never, anyway.

I'm still working on the second chapter of Afterimages. It's a lot more dialogue than the first chapter, and so it's going a bit slower. Gotta expand on Damion's world quite a bit, too, without it losing cohesion and without accidentally putting in obvious spoilers. But more is coming. I just have to wait to get home on leave to post it. Hopefully I'll have the next two chapters done by then, but I should at least have the second chapter.

The connection here in Afghanistan is so horribly slow that I can barely say I have one. It can't handle SL, even a text only client, nor can it handle any of the online games I play. It takes most of a day (close to ten hours) to download a 300 Mb file, and it would take many times longer to upload the same file.

I guess in closing, loneliness and depression still appear to be good catalysts for writing for me. Too bad I have to rely on such negative emotions for inspiration. I'd much rather have had inspiration like this when I was relatively happy back stateside.