Meanwhile, Across the Sea...

So I came short of 50,000 words in this year's nanowrimo, somehow managing to come in about 1,900 words under.  First time in the last three years I didn't clear the 50k mark.  I ain't even mad.  My main problem this year might have been too much research, too much getting caught up in the world-building and not concentrating on pushing through and not looking back.   I suppose I probably could have finished if I hadn't spent a bunch of time putting stuff like this map together:

Then again, that's part of the fun for me.  Coming up with a semi-believable world to explore and hopefully have the readers or audience or whatever explore it too.  This isn't even a final map.  There are rivers to carve, some mountains need to be moved, and a massive forest to cultivate at the foot of those Northern peaks.  Also, Starshadow Bay is a little bit too far north, so some tectonic shifting may be necessary...

See what I mean?  I blame the folks over at the Cartographer's Guild for this sudden fictional geography fixation, even though they don't know who I am, because I only lurk those forums.

NaNoWriRe? (National Novel Writing Research)

Add a copy of the documentary series "Going Medieval" and I'll be ready to rock this November.  I've been working through the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, and George R.R. Martin's fanatical attention to detail has inspired me to be a little less carefree with the anachronisms and actually make a trip to the library to pick up these weird paper rectangles with words written in them.   Most likely won't be as detailed with the food though.  I don't intend to reach the 50k word count on meal description alone.

Since I've already done a ludicrous amount of world-building for my webcomic "An ArrowIn the Moon", this year's novel is going to be set in that same world.  Drawing a full color comic, it turns out, takes a bit of time and there's a whole (fictional) world out there, ripe for exploration but I won't ever get to share with anyone if I want to keep the comic story moving at a reasonable pace.

The books in the picture are: 

Daily Life in the Middle Ages

Life in a Medieval Castle

Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders

Medieval Underpants is probably the best for writers.  Life in a medieval castle feels a little dry, but it's got good info.  Daily life in the Middle Ages is a good quick reference.

Making Drawrings

I write this blog post as Samsung is on the cusp of releasing what the media (other bloggers) are calling "the most powerful tablet ever".  The Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition.  You'd think they'd have come up with some cool name, like the X-99 Velocirapter Diesel Face Punch, but I digress.  To do my part in maintaining the perpetual tech-hype machine, I've gone and bought... a good condition unit of last years model.  Dude, I'm not made of money, what do you expect?  I ain't one of those chumps what camps outside the Apple store because they're releasing a new thing that's the same as the old thing, but with color options.

But I didn't start this to talk about planned obsolescence and Apple and all that noise.  I just wanted to do a quick rundown of a pretty cool app called Layer Paint that in my opinion, was the best solution for drawing on the go with a fairly slow android tablet.  Layer Paint doesn't have quite the feature set that Sketchbook Pro does, but I was on a Le Pan II and the lag in combination with the crayon-sized stylus was just too much to overcome for most purposes.  Not so with Layer Paint, which at a mere three bucks from Google Play gives you layers, canvas sizes up to whatever your device can handle, and a decent selection of brushes, along with the basics like fill and gradient.  Here's two of the better drawings I squeezed out of the Le Pan II / Layer Paint combo:

 

Both of those are from requests at a sub-reddit I frequent: /r/redditgetsdrawn  It's great for drawing practice by the way.

After upgrading to the more powerful processor of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, I still used Layer Paint and to scrawl this image:

5 Layers, 1800 x 1800, the Galaxy Didn't stutter at all.

Truth be told, I intend to start using Sketchbook a little more now because the horrible lag is gone, but I'll still fire up Layer Paint for quick sketches.  It's just simplistic and doesn't get in its own way, like those weird word processors that have minimal features and just edit text, looking like an old DOS screen.  It remains to be seen if the current setup is good enough to maybe try a page of An Arrow in the Moon.