Oops, I Missed It!

Merry belated Christmas!

Spent a nice day with family yesterday, and went to see Star Wars (2nd time) last night. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit and look forward to the next one.

2016 is already shaping up to be a busy and interesting year. Time will tell....

New Map of Aerde

So, I stumbled into a pretty nifty website called Inkarnate. They've got a beta-ready web app for drawing world maps, so I went ahead and gave it a try. Below is my second attempt, the first try being a practice run.

I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

There are some pretty good tutorials on YouTube for the app, which helped me get up and running quickly.

My verdict: two thumbs up! I will come back to this app and check on their progress, as they have more features that they want to add (and that I want to use).

Not Dead, Just Busy

Since my last post a month ago...

• My car was totaled in a 4-car accordion (the rear-most driver was 100% at fault, not paying attention). No injuries, thankfully, but I did have to buy a new car, and I had to wait for my insurance check to come through before I did it.
• Took a long weekend vacation with friends in TX and attended the Ren Fest northwest of Houston.
• My employer announced an agreement to be acquired by a larger company. While the deal isn't expected to be finalized until late January (and it could still fall apart), the impact on employee morale has been noticeable. I'm fine with it, as I've been through acquisitions before, on both sides of the fence. But it does tend to make you pause in the middle of your projects and ask whether they're worth completing. Maybe the new company does things differently, and you'll just have to do it all over again in six months.
• I wrote down a pretty solid character description of the antagonist for my next Balfrith novel. Includes motivations, some history, his strategy and tactics, and more. I've heard it said that the villain should be more than just a generic evil-doer. He must be the hero of his own version of the story. I've got that pretty well nailed for this one.
• We moved to a bigger apartment within the same complex. With rents being down compared to when we moved in, we were able to get an extra 200 square feet, including a full extra bathroom, for not much more than we were paying before. Even though the move was a short distance, we still had to work hard for a few days to get everything transferred over, clean out the old apartment, and get organized in the new place.

So yeah, the days have been very full for the past few weeks. And this week will be business travel working on a big project out east. Next weekend, and the following week, will hopefully be pretty quiet. And then we're taking a week off for Christmas with family. So I probably won't be posting much between now and the end of the year, except maybe the week after Christmas when I have time off and am able to relax for a while.

Until then... Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year to you all!