Fall has Officially Begun!

Artober has officially begun! 

I'm doing well so far. I've finished 6 pictures, as seen below. I am counting the sketch of Towa as well as my finished, since they were not only done on different days, but also both were inked. 

While the bottom three are original drawings of mine, the top three are based on character designs by Rumino Takehashi. I may draw them each in my style later on in the month. 

So what else am I up to? Well, my last couple of days were a write-off. My hubby and I seem to have caught a minor stomach flu. I am already writing again and trying to get book 3 finished. I'll just stop updating until I have something concrete to share here. Hopefully, it will be soon though. 

Aside from that, I haven't been up to much aside from reading. One of my favourite authors, Annette Marie is releasing two books this month, the last two in this specific Guild Codex series, though there are two other side series in the works as well. I made the overall bad decision to read the entire series again to move up to these last books. Now, I have another 3 books left to go before I can pick up the new books and its kinda killing me. No spoilers if you've read them yet! Not that I mind spoilers, but its just polite to wait a few weeks before you start dropping them. 

Oh, which reminds me. As part of my language studies, I have picked up a few children's books in Japanese. While I am making a lot of headway learning how to say, "my Asian studies class is on Thursday at 1 o'clock" I wanted to start learning more basic words. What better way to do that than with a book that you would read to children. Other than a few hitches (the language being used is all the casual form, not the polite form I'm more used to), it's been going well. I am currently translating しろくまくろくま which translates as "White Bear, Black Bear". It's a fun story if a bit creepy (as is the way with most children's stories, if you look at them) and I'm having fun going through it and writing down the vocabulary in an attempt to learn. 

What have you been getting up to? What are you reading?

Learning Languages: The Super Difficult Way

 I have never been quiet about the fact that I have huge admiration for people who can learn multiple languages. I took Spanish classes in high school and Japanese in university. Since then, I have done online studying and taken books out of the library, bought language learning software, and more. All in all, I am bad at learning languages. One of the things that has really worked for me, if in an excessively slow way, is Duolingo. I've been using it for around two and a half years now. I'm not very far into it, I only know about 500 words. 

All that said, I am an eager and active study partner, if slower than I would like. So when a friend of mine asked if I wanted to study with her for her university class, I jumped on the chance. Since the class is offline, I spent some time trying to answer the test questions she sent me on paper. That was when I discovered something very interesting that I hadn't realized before. 

Part of my inability to grasp the language is due to my aphantasia. 

How did I discover this? On my phone, I can type Japanese really quickly, identify the characters, and even a good couple dozen characters I am starting to pick up on.  However, when I tried to write down the answers on paper, I couldn't remember what any of the symbols looked like. 

This isn't particularly new to me. I remembered, very vaguely, having that problem when I took Japanese in university. What I hadn't realized then was that part of the reason I was having trouble is that unlike many of my fellow studies, I couldn't just recall what the specific hiragana or kanji looked like and draw it from there. I was left suddenly wondering if I hadn't actually learned them. However, it couldn't be that since I've actually found myself able to read lyrics in Japanese on some of the videos I've been watching lately. 

I finally realized that it was because of my aphantasia. I can't see the pictures, so I can't recall them that way from memory. The only thing I've found that works so far, is forcing myself to learn from muscle memory, where you do the very dull work of writing out words and letters like a kindergartener on coffee. By giving my fingers and hands muscle memory, I can commit them to memory, forcing them to stay in the little box I have set aside for them. 

The main con of learning languages this way is that its slow. Very slow. As in I'll have to spend hours daily, simply writing out the alphabet, over and over right now. That said, I don't know if there is a faster way to do this without keeping a picture beside me at all times. I will research and continue forwarding the long slow work of putting pencil to paper, but if any of you have suggestions, I'd love to hear them. 

Busy Week!

Wow, has it ever been a busy week! Most of that is all because of the love I'm getting from all of you out there! I've been keeping myself occupied loading my book to Kindle, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, the library apps and making sure that you can even order the physical book from Chapters Indigo as well as from Amazon. Then there are the links for each, ordering physical copies in, talking with local chapters to get my books in their stores and setting up an author page on Amazon among other stuff. With so much work getting done, I haven't had a lot of time to do the base work of editing, let alone for the stuff I do that isn't writing and editing based.

Today I thought we'd talk about what some of that other stuff is! For the record, I'm not going to include time with friends and family in this list. Just assume that they are there.

Okay, with that said, the most important things that I spent time on outside of my books right now can be neatly summed up into two neat boxes. Art and Japanese.

Starting with art, I can say that I always have something on the go. Currently, I'm working on an acrylic picture of a fox using the Golden Open slow drying acrylics. I recently ordered in extra colours and now have 16 in the line. I have more colours that I'd like to get of course (mainly purples and oranges), but I have to say that for right now, I quite like the pallet I have. With some basic mixing, I can get almost all of the shades and colours I may be looking for.

I also picked up some of Prismacolor's Col-Erase coloured pencils. These are not your average pencil crayons. First off, and most importantly, they aren't wax-based, but graphite based, so you can use and erase them like you would any normal pencil, without having to worry about smudging the wax everywhere. I'm still getting used to them, but I am really happy with almost all of them so far.

Since my coloured pencils just came in, I decided to take part in the #100headschallenge. This is a challenge happening on Instagram right now where you're challenged to draw 100 heads in just 10 days. I wasn't able to finish 10 today or yesterday, so it's looking like I'm going to be drawing hardcore for the next few days... Regardless of that depressing fact though, my first (the sailor moon type hairdo chick below) almost discouraged me enough to quit. Then I remembered that I can use references. Amazingly, even when I only use the reference as a base and then start changing everything to match my vision, my pictures got 10x better, just having a reference, even when I don't stick to the reference (since realism is not my jam as an artist). My husband identified the style as a post-modernism style near the end of the style. I have no idea if he's right or not, unfortunately. What about you guys? Do you know what style this resembles?

The other thing is a smaller draw on my time, but still a draw. I got started on Duolingo this year and so far have only missed one or two days since the beginning of January. I'm learning Japanese and while the first four or five lessons were essentially stuff I knew, we've now moved into stuff I actually have to work at. I've put myself on their "Insane" learning which means I'm doing a minimum of five of their lessons daily. I'm learning quickly, and I may eventually start in on Spanish as well. For now though, its hard enough just keeping up with just this. 

And finally, I have links to share with all of you! My novel can be preordered from pretty much anywhere! 

Physical Copies can be ordered from 

Amazon
Chapters Indigo
Barnes & Noble

And E-copies can be ordered from 

Kindle
Kobo
Apple
Nook

While I have put my book in to be released to library apps, I don't know if you guys need to request it first or not. Take a look and let me know if you do see! Hell, I'd love for you guys to tag me with pictures of your book when you get it! Post those pictures to my FB page or tag me on Instagram (@foxy_writer) or Twitter (@FoxyWriter), even if you're just showing off an electronic copy! I'd love to see people enjoying my novel out in the wild!