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Another night that wiped me out. I was doing so much other work that I almost forgot to even shoot anything. This one was barely remembered before I went to bed.
Pileup
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Author Archives: Tom Harold
Woody wood wood
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I was so exhausted Monday that I only took three pictures all day, and two of them were of this right here. I went up to mom and dad’s to say hello. Ended up hanging out with dad and we talked about some wood for some rolling ball sculpture projects I have going on (okay, they’ll be going on sometime kind of soon…I hope). So we went through his scraps and found some nice stuff. Should look when it’s done. For now, well, it’s just pieces of wood, I guess. I just couldn’t make anything else happen tonight, went home and almost immediately went to bed.
Letting the sun in
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Finally got some sun today! Had to go out and shoot the leaves again. Gotta take advantage of the sun in fall. I know this subject is getting a lot of coverage from me, but in another week or so there won’t be any leaves on the trees, and then all I can show is mud and rain. Bah!
Lookin’ Out My Back Door
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Actually, really it’s looking toward my side yard, but yanno, there’s no song with that lyric. I’m working with what I got at the moment.
Covered with Color
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It rained this week and brought a lot of the leaves to the ground. Now my yard looks like it’s blanketed with oranges and reds and browns and yellows. It really looks kind of magical when it’s like this. Makes it nice to pull up in the driveway. This is definitely one of the highest highlights of living in the Midwest. Simply beautiful, even on a cloudy day like today.
Morning Sky
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I LOVE THESE COLORS! This is not the greatest picture I’ve ever composed, but I love the color and texture in this sunrise! I had to put it up!
I was on my way to work this morning, and as I turned the corner to head west I caught a view of the sky that I couldn’t see on my block. It was simply amazing! I stopped for a second and thought, “Man, I’m running late. I gotta get going.” I drove down the street a block, stopped at the stop sign, looked in the rearview mirror, and went, “I HAVE to shoot that!”
There was no one behind me, so I put it in park, jumped out, flipped the camera on, and squeezed off two quick shots. One was blurry, as I used slow shutter speed and wiggled it, but this one came out. The clouds were just amazing. Unbelievable! I wish I could have stood there for another 120 seconds, because two minutes later at another light I looked in the mirror, and the whole sky had gone brilliant gold. It was just one of those moments when everything looks beautiful.
Triangle, Triangle(s)…5
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Number five in the series of installments, and look how close we are to being finished! I have just a few minutes left to put in on one of them, and then we’ll be done! Per Melissa, I’m thinking on ideas involving circles for the next one. I didn’t own the color black until we were halfway through these, and tonight Jem decided that she was going to add tons of black around the squiggly things. Personally, I think that was brilliant, really made the colors jump off the page!
Pre-NaNoWriMo Worries
It’s nearly upon us. The web is abuzz with literary twitter (not that other kind, this is…well, it has no capital “T”) over the month of November and what it means for writers all over the world. It’s NaNoWriMo, folks, and during November hundreds upon thousands of writers sit down at their laptops or desktops or notebooks or typewriters or whatever they have, and they write. A ton. Within 30 days thousands who started will have completed a novel of not less that 50 thousand words, a daily average of just a hair over 1,666 words per day.
Last year was my first year for NaNo, after having laughed it off as either “stupid” (What? Those people think they can write a REAL novel in 30 days?? Please!), or “too hard” (That’s too hard!). I actually ended the month with 76 thousand words (gadzooks!), but wasn’t finished with the novel. I chipped away at it over the next several months, and finally put the triple-pound on it at 92,165 words in June 30th. (See how much faster you work when they only give you a month to do things?)
I had an excellent time last year, met a lot of great people, and realized that *gasp!* I actually COULD write a novel! It’s not a great one, but I did write one. I guess I’m officially a novelist, even if said novel is a rough draft that not even I am very excited about ever looking at again.
So, your fresh, newly-minted amateur novelist is all fired up about NaNo again this year. I’ve been visiting the forum (at the sight handily linked above nothatI’mtryingtoencourageyoutogothereoranything) and posting about our kickoff meeting and the various write-ins around the city that we’ll be having throughout the month, but despite all my enthusiasm, I have one nagging problem. I have no story idea. Nothing, zero, empty.
Oh, sure, I have some ideas, but it seems that, while I’ve been gorging myself on some pretty fantastic short works by a number of authors from the West Coast (Charles Beaumont and everyone connected with him notthatI’mtryingtoencourageyoutoreadhimoranything) it seems to have gotten me into short story mode, and all of my ideas can be wrapped up in about twenty pages or so. Twenty pages is just a *little* bit shy of the 175-page tome that I must turn out by November’s end.
I’ve been reading Writer’s Digest a bit lately, and thinking about what I’m wanting to do. Writing has taken a back seat lately to all the visual arts I’ve been working on, but it’s not like I haven’t been doing absolutely no writing whatsoever. Journaling should count for something, shouldn’t it? No? Um…apparently not, not where this endeavor is concerned, anyway.
I hope by November 1st that something shows up. It was fun last year. I’d like it to be fun this year, but I don’t know how I can do that if I’m sitting there going, “Okay, I have a character, this guy, and he….he needs to do………..something…………..”
Wish me luck, kids, and my hat is off to those of you who join me on the journey this year.
Fall Colors
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Fall has arrived in the Midwest. The maples are especially gorgeous right now. It’s very hard for me to have time to shoot stuff outside of the work day, but these are in my yard, and I just had to try and capture some in the fading light of a cloudy day. Aren’t the colors gorgeous?
Smoothing Things Over
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And, following on yesterday’s post, here we have pop giving me a hand with the rolling ball sculpture project. I wanted to put a wood base underneath it so that it would be a little easier for the kids to pick up and move and possibly not quite so likely that they’d grab onto the frame itself and bend it. (I hope, anyway.) Plus, it eliminates the possibility of the bare wire scratching any tabletops.
I asked dad if he had any scrap, and my only desire was that it not be plywood, because the sandwiched nature of that wood looks unattractive when viewed from the edge, which this would show. Pop leads me over the the scrap box and says, “Well, here’s what I have – some pine…here’s some mahogany if that’ll work…” and he has real wood! I grabbed this kind of streaky-looking piece and said, “What’s this?”
“Oh, that’s some spalted maple a fella gave me. Most of it was too water damaged and I had to throw it out.”
It was awesome looking, but an extremely rough cut.
“Sure. I can plane it or maybe sand it.”
So here’s dad doing some sanding on the piece after we got it cut down to size. Turns out it’s going to need some planing, as it’s just too rough for the sander to do an adequate job, but it’s going to be awesome. Spalted maple has all these black lines in the grain where water got in and discolored it. It’s a very unique look. Can’t wait to show it to you guys when it’s finished!