Life is Changing

Music in head: Battle Music from FF7: Advent Children

The turning a page in one's life is kind of a cliché saying, but as cliché as it may be, I really feel that way, for a variety of reasons that have happened in the last few weeks. Recently I have ended my job with the Forest Service to go back to school, half time as well as finishing a gaming creation pre req class. The plan now is to watch my kids part time, attend classes in the fall, and find a graveyard shift job to make the money I’ll need to pay for those classes. Preferably a job with down time for doing homework and writing. A high order to be sure. These jobs do exist though, I only know this because of famous author Brandon Sanderson’s author bio talking about him having a security job in the past that allowed him to write while working.

If you're reading this, maybe you’re feeling a little of my stress. Sorry about that. On another note if you have any part time jobs like the one described above, send me an email at kurtless64@gmail.com

In terms of some creative endeavors I’d like to share a couple, first is some work from that gaming pre-req class called content creation. We learned a few few programs I have had experience in, and some I had not. The above slidshow has a Pokeball inspired by the Megaman game franchise done in Maya that I made, as well as another project we did, which was to recreate some monster artwork provided to us in class inside a 3D modeling program called zbrush.

I am still participating in an author support group weekly, here are the last two writing warmups we had, having to choose 3 words at random, and make a quick story out of them within 5 minutes:

#1. Words: Circulate, bubblicous , bonfire

The wild man flung his body in front of the bonfire, the shaking shadows moving with the flickering of the flame. Circulating the fiery mass, he pointed his feet into the warm dry soil around him. Suddenly, a round object moved with the rhythm of the man, the reflection of the bottle of bubblicous showing the inferno clawing itself out of the pile of wood and ash. The being stood on two stump like feet, it's heat intense as it looked down at the man, it waved its forearms which came out of its torso, presenting the man with the opportunity of a wish. 

#2. Quagmire, vacuum, yellow

Lindsey had vacuumed up the various piles of filth that had accumulated during the day. Tired from various chores, she sprawled down on the couch underneath the yellow light bulb that flickered every ten seconds. "How did I get myself into this Quagmire? I don't want to live this life, I just work all the time. Life isn't about just cleaning up others messes. I wish I could leave something for someone else to do". But then she thought of the custodians, who, like her, would be exactly as she was at that moment. "This is a job meant for robots, I don't get any fulfillment in this. We have dishwashers and machine learning vacuums”. Something boiled over in her and she broke the mop she was holding in half, and walked out the door. 

I have written part of my novel within the last week, so no adding upon my hot sauce debt with the author group. If you didn’t know already, if any of us don’t write within the last week, before the writing group meets again, they have to take a baby’s spoonful worth of very hot, hot sauce, and not be able to drink anything for 2 minutes. Unfortunately, there was a two week sprint where I hadn’t written anything, so I got two spoonful’s to take for our next week. I’ll probably post a video of that here in the near future for your entertainment.

More updates to come in the near future, thank you for reading this week!