First a big thanks to those people who liked and commented upon my last post about submitting my first story to an anthology. It’s all very exciting and nervous. I think that the best thing to come out of that experience was getting to know my villain better. But I have no intentions of sitting still for a month an a half awaiting news of success or failure. Time keeps
Well folks, today I submitted my story “Tears of a Blue Priestess” to Grey Matter Press in the hope that they will include it in their upcoming anthology “Monsters”. Judging from their Facebook page they have received a lot of submissions. I guess that you have to be in it to win it. So let’s see how it pans out. It’s funny how I feel – so very nervous. Fancy
XFrog are a company that specialise in Organic Procedural 3D Modelling and Plant Models. Looking at their website and its gallery I am blown away. The plant models look superb. In fact, I so wanted to get my hands on some of their products… The only thing was that my favourite tool DAZ Studio was not mentioned among the products supported (at least I could not see it). This said, they did support
Australia Day Happy Australia Day! For those of you not from a land down under, today is my country’s national day of celebrating who we are. For many of us (myself included), that means grateful citizens born overseas who have been given chances they may not otherwise have had. Like most countries we have flaws, but I am proud of this place and would not live anywhere else. Wicked
Hi all! Sorry, today’s post is not going to demonstrate anything. Nor is it going to be some deep and meaningful monologue upon some artistic philosophy. Nor a useful insight. Instead it is a bit of shared happiness regarding my day of writing. Well, not really a day of writing. Perhaps four or five hours of writing. After all I did go shopping with my wife and daughter (surprisingly painless and
The current short story upon which I work features blue priestesses who tell fortunes using cups filled with tears of blood. So I wanted to make a picture of such a priestess. I envisioned a close up of her face with the blood tears flowing. The first step was putting the basic scene of the head together in DAZ Studio. As my renderer for DAZ Studio (and Blender for that
Every day I spend about an hour watching YouTube videos on topics ranging from the history of particular genres to various art “how to” guides. Recently I stumbled across one by a professional artist who spoke about his picture reference library. At the time I thought “That’s cool” and forgot about it. But later that day I realised just how valuable an observation this was. (Unfortunately I cannot find the
Recently Mustakettu over at Radium Demesne suggested that I should look at a free little graphics app called Sweet Home 3D. So I did. The makers of this application describe it as “a free interior design application that helps you draw the plan of your house, arrange furniture on it and visit the results in 3D.” That is so cool! So I opened it up and within minutes had
Over at the Pursuit of Happiness blog my blogging mate gave a challenge called Our Ways. Among the questions that could be addressed were the following: Does each of us know what she or he wants to do? Do we have realistic plans? Do we work hard to carry them out? At the time that I noticed this I was performing a bit of a personality deconstruction of my villain.
Hi all, Today I discovered an absolutely brilliant video tutorial on using Photoshop to create a space scene. It was so good that I just had to share it with you all. You can find it on YouTube at: As you can see, it is only 11 minutes long. I learnt soooooo much. So I have used the knowledge that it imparted to create a scene and then added a
A few days ago I introduced you to my villain Kerphulu with a picture. The thing is, I met him myself only hours beforehand despite knowing him for over a year. Sounds strange? Well let me explain. I have been writing about Kerphulu since September 2013. The novel-in-progress “Tempting in Shade” simply describes Kerphulu in physical terms as a short, sinewy, red-headed man with short-cropped hair and a sense of dramatic
As you know I am writing a short story about a key moment in the life of my chief villain: Kerphulu. I thought that I would create an image of him with one of his victims in this story. I hoped that this would give me a better sense for the man. It did. Here it is: I took the Hare psychopath scale into account as I designed him (see
This is a bit of a brain dump, so don’t expect cohesively structured thought. Me and computer gaming …or should it be computer gaming and I? Anyway, grammar aside, I was reading a blog called Musings of a Nerdy Girl, and I saw the article about computer gaming. (Please visit it – some interesting thoughts) It evoked something in me. You see, for about a decade I was an addict to
This is just a short post on something I recently stumbled across. In my research to create just the right villain I found myself watching the following fascinating documentary about psychopaths: Made by the BBC it discussed the characteristics of psychopathy. As a writer, one of the key things that came out of this for me was the checklist of characteristics common to psychopaths. This checklist of traits provides me
Aurelia’s Tempting My initial plan was to use DAZ Studio to create a Caravaggio-style image. As you see it did not quite work out. The colours were not as desired, being too bright and the entire picture did just not “feel” as intended. However I was happy with the light-dark contrast and generally like the picture as it is. So I will retain this and have another go at a
I’ve decided to change my blog title to “Home to Gregory Long – Fantasist, Artist, Author, Experimenter and General Eccentric”. As part of the course “Blogging 101” they said to consider making the title more appropriate. I think that this meets the specification. So why this? Well, besides the obvious I just felt that simple having “Home to Gregory Long – Fantasist” was a bit limiting. Probably the best descriptor
Truth be told, my compulsive pedantic nature is impacting my novel writing. I feel the need to fully explore and understand the backgrounds of my characters. Now I know that a lot of writing methodologies say that this is a good thing, but it so slows me down. As a result I ask myself “how can I turn this into a positive?” Enter magazines and anthologies. I stumbled across a call for submissions
