Artwork and thoughts

I didn't read anything this week, again. I had intended to, and I did do a review on Monday, since I read last week… what is my life coming to? I used to read several books a day. Then there was a book here and there, or a stolen hour in the bathtub with a bon-bon paperback (brain candy) and now… I read my text books, and academic papers. I did read a really interesting paper on smoking demographics in Italy? No, you don't want to hear about that… OK.

How about some art? I created the piece of work for the cover of the space opera novella, now titled The Eternity Symbiote. I took one of the planetary scenes I had been messing around with earlier this winter, and then superimposed a typographic portrait of a woman on it. The lettering for the typography is random amino acids coding, and stop codons. That was a fun project, and I am amused to discover that I can create art during school, but still can't write while the semester is going on.

I wonder why that is? What parts of my brain are worn out with math and chemistry, and what parts are stimulated by all this learning and studying? I do find that I tend to doodle during certain classes: epidemiology, chemistry. But never during math, I'm frantically scribbling what he's putting on the board the entire 65 minutes. Then at home I try to figure out what he was saying, using those cryptic notes.

But for whatever reason, I will be creating more art this weekend, I'm finding it soothing. I will also be preparing The Eternity Symbiote for publication in both electronic and print versions. At 45-50K words, it would have been considered a novel in it's own right, once upon a time. It's certainly large enough for me to make a print, 100+ page book available!

The Eternity Symbiote cover artwork