Getting the job done

Things stalled earlier this week... midway through climbing over a stack of work, the pile toppled over and buried me. Enter two days of not getting a lot done, and feeling the worse for it. There are few things that I hate more than feeling like I can't make progress anywhere I try to.

In contrast, today is bugbear-beating day - a day for finding the tasks that have been haunting me for too damn long, and tearing them off my back. I'm sick of seeing the same important jobs stay with me from week to week, so today has a list of jobs that will get finished or axed.

Auspicious Beginnings is virtually finished - final read-through and a legal notice are all that it needs, and then it's off to the Eos website. The final product is a sixty-page module, with Loresheets, locations, characters and NPCs written by bishi_wannabe. My job was to turn it from 18-odd Word documents into a shiny-looking finished product, and that job is more or less done. I've also learned some valuable lessons for the next issue of Insurgent, which will be assembled over the next month or two.

Hive Fleet Naga is well underway, although I haven't had a chance to take photos of this week's work. I've experimented with a two-strand wire armature for sculpting (it gives the putty much more grip than a single strand frame), and I've used Sculpey (an oven-hardening polymer clay) for the initial couple of layers in the sculpts. Sculpey holds detail quite well, although needing an oven to cure it is a bit inconvenient. I think I'll switch back to two-part epoxy putties for the next few layers, to minimise the number of trips to the kitchen... To help me get a feel for the materials and the techniques, I've started with the three largest models: three Carnifexes, which are standing about 8" tall when coiled onto their bases. I have some Yuan-ti-looking genestealers, too... although I'm out of pieces for converting any more of the models.

I have one final Syd model to finish painting, from the post-Arcanacon orders. If anyone knows Stephen White, could you let him know that his Arcanasaur should arrive in the mail next week? After that, I'll have to track down someone (Alex, at a guess) to get a cheque from the convention for the WM prizes and the Arcanasaur painting. The prizes still haven't appeared, although they were posted from Seattle on January 4th. designadrug (if you've already moved in to the new place), could you keep an eye on your mailbox? I gave them the address from Alex, as we were in Tassie when the prize pack should have arrived.

Last but not least, I have some letters that I'd rather I didn't have to send. For the last few years I've been making monthly donations to Oxfam (Community Aid Abroad) and the Salvation Army. Unfortunately, I no longer have any income beyond what I'm making from painting, and even that's not very reliable. Two donations a month is starting to add up, and it's something I just can't afford to do any more. Hopefully I'll find work quickly, after I finish the course this year - I can see the value of a regular donor base to these organisations, and I'd like to go back to it when I start earning money again.

In other news...

Eos is putting out a new game, called "Unhallowed" - neo-Victorian horror, set two hundred years after the first outbreak of a zombie plague. Jason Soles & Nicole Vega are writing it, and I like what I've seen so far... goggles, steam, zombies - what's not to like? They have a website at http://www.newdarkage.net/