Way back in the day, I worked in acrylics, and I got to the point where I could do a reasonable job of painting what I was looking at. (Astronomical scenes were a specialty.) But I haven’t transferred all of this skill over to the digital media I work in now. Some of it, yes — I created all the graphics for this site. But I need some practice with Painter’s brushes to get up to speed. (I’ve been working with Painter off and on since version 2.0. I got a demo with my first digitizer, and was hooked. In those days, the software came in a paint can.)

I also need to improve my figure drawing, if I’m going to paint a cover. That’s always needed work, in any medium.

I spent my leisure time this weekend working through Painter tutorials. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to handle a cover painting by the time I need one, but it won’t hurt to try. If I don’t get there, I found an artist whose work interests me.

That’s many, many more useless mouse clicks than I should engage in, if I want to keep my carpal tunnel syndrome from flaring up.

So I’ve ditched Twitter.

It’s not my preferred method for social interaction — I prefer a medium with more room for nuanced remarks (which Twitter’s 140-characters-per-post precludes). I thought it might be good for word-of-mouth advertising of The Winds of Winter, however, so I was taking part in writers’ chats and carrying on other individual conversations. But this recent policy of Twitter’s means it’s just too darned much work for any possible return.

There are definitely people I’m going to miss. I probably won’t run into them much anywhere else, as I’m not much of a blog-commenter. I regret it.

Goodbye, Twitter.

Later: I have uploaded two more scenes also. We are nearing the end of Book III.

Work proceeds on The Winds of Winter. I’m working on adding a scene to the mid-section of the story. After that, I have only the ending left to write.

The pneumonia is interfering with my work a lot, but I’ve made some progress on The Winds of Winter. I’ve begun the last interpolated scene. I have some minor editing for tone to do, and the end scene(s) to write. I’m pleased overall.

I’m making pretty decent progress on the poem, and on some projects unrelated to fiction-writing.

In fact, I may be too tired of Microsoft’s weird inability to write browsers that handle normal CSS to fix it, period. The page looks fine in Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome, and it was OK in IE8 when I had IE8 installed.

But I’ll have a look at it, sooner or later, just to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid with the journal CSS.

I’ve done a lot of work on The Winds of Winter:

• I finished three scenes near the end of the poem. That leaves me with the last scene (or perhaps two more scenes) to write. I now know how the whole plot develops, and it’s only a matter of execution.
• I’ve rewritten two scenes at the beginning of the poem, to improve the story setup.
• I wrote another scene that belongs in the revised beginning — either the whole thing, or the guts of it. Maybe I’ll decide it needs a few lines of fleshing out, but I’ve got most of it.

All of this means that I’m well on track to finishing the first draft of The Winds of Winter this year — probably early this year — after ten years! (I started writing it in 1999.)

And that’s why I’ve been quiet. I write about writing when my story is stalled — when I’m too tired to keep writing metered verse, or when I’ve hung up on the plot, or don’t know how to approach a scene. When my story-writing is going well, I don’t want to interrupt it for complicated essays about writing.

So I’ve been story-writing.

Merry Christmas, all.