Nathaniel Payne's Blog

"There was a knowing look on Elder Ro’s face. A look that Logan instantly recognized. It was a look..."

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:52:55 -0500

“There was a knowing look on Elder Ro’s face. A look that Logan instantly recognized. It was a look of pity. One that suggested to Logan that the Desdemonian elder likely felt at least some amount of sympathy for the young helpless boy whose father had been missing for far too many days. Logan hated pity. But living in a small village on a small planet, with small-minded people living equally small lives, it was unavoidable.”

- Quick excerpt from chapter two of the novel I’m writing with my son

Novel update

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:50:49 -0500

I’ve mentioned before that my 9-year-old son and I are working on a fantasy novel together, aimed at his age range. I’ve just finished chapter two last night, clocking in at around 3,000 words at the moment. We’ve planned out 40 chapters, so at an average of 1,500 words per chapter, we could be looking at a 50k+ novel, which is a bit longer than I had intended (and some chapters will undoubtedly be longer than our introductory chapters). Editing will be tough on this project.

That’s why I intend to have a substantial amount of help with advance reading once the main story is completed. I will be calling on many of our friends and family, especially those with kids aged 9 through 12 or so, to read through the novel for us and suggest changes. It should be a big project, but I have no doubt that we have many gracious and heavy-reading friends who would be willing to help once we get to that point.

In the meantime, it’s back to writing. I’ll be posting a short excerpt a bit later.

Okay, so I’ve got to get caught up. I was away on a...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:17:50 -0500

Okay, so I’ve got to get caught up. I was away on a business trip last week, all the way to beautiful Belgium. And I didn’t get a moment to myself the entire time, so I never got the opportunity to complete a creative project last week.

This week has been a bit of more of the same. Actually I’ve been spending most of my free time working on two different writing projects that I won’t be sharing here. One is the wedding ceremony of a beloved cousin of mine that I will be officiating next weekend. The other is the novel that my son and I are working on. But between those projects, I did get a chance to put the final touches on something that was mostly completed prior to this past week. It just needed a couple of tweaks in order to finalize it, and I’ve managed to do that this week, so I could use it for this week’s project.

Now, I promised myself I wouldn’t work on a website, but yeah, that’s what it is. It’s my new personal games site, one where I can manage my game collection: video, board, card, dice, etc. It’s designed as a mobile site (thus the ‘m’ sub-domain), so it’s best viewed on a phone. It’s really just the next evolution of the Nerdshelf site I had been working on once upon a time, but abandoned because I decided that I had no desire to manage a public site on an ongoing basis for strangers.

It is incredibly likely that this will be the only website I make for my creative projects this year, and only because it was already 95% complete prior to this week.

So, I need to find another project for last week to get caught back up, but this is my week eight project, with seven coming back sometime in the next week or so.

44 left to go!

"The book is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler-inspired murder mystery set in Heaven. Imagine..."

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 14:04:23 -0500

“The book is a Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler-inspired murder mystery set in Heaven. Imagine central casting for a 1930s detective novel juxtaposed with all the strange and terrifying members of the heavenly choir: Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Thrones, Dominions, Powers, Virtues, Seraphim, Cherubim… Swell dames and femmes fatales, dirty priests and the Voice of God.”

- Ian Tregillis describes his new novel, “Something More Than Night”, that will come out after the conclusion of his Milkweed series. Sounds phenomenal.

"Here’s an idea I’m just going to throw out there, considering it’s 2012. If you can draw and you..."

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 02:39:22 -0500

“Here’s an idea I’m just going to throw out there, considering it’s 2012. If you can draw and you have the equivalent brainpower of a creative six year old, try making up your own characters. Then draw them doing interesting things. Post those stories online, develop an audience and charge $75 to sketch your own characters at cons.”

- Scott Kurtz may be a jerk from time to time, but he’s a very SMART jerk. And as far as this particular situation is concerned, he’s absolutely right.

PvPonline » Archive » Reality Check

You get a bunch of random doodles for this week’s creative...

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 22:08:16 -0500

You get a bunch of random doodles for this week’s creative project. That’s all I got.

Sorry, it was a busy week.

thepoisoncontrolcenter: The Poison Control Center are honored...

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:37:56 -0500

thepoisoncontrolcenter:

The Poison Control Center are honored to be one of the 50 Things Juice Magazine likes about Des Moines!

We are number 26! Wow how exciting.. Coffee only beat us by 1! Thanks to Juice magazine for including us in this rad list and thanks to Des Moines for being so awesome and supporting us for so long! Read the whole list here…

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120207/JUICE/302080018

Love these guys, and I’m glad they’re getting the recognition they deserve.

(I also love Juice, but I’m soon to be aging out of their demographic, so I guess I’m not contractually obligated to like them for much longer)

Esmerelda by T-Bird and the Breaks

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:35:41 -0500

Esmerelda by T-Bird and the Breaks:

This song just popped up on my Pandora trombone jazz station and I was extremely happy it did.

Good, funky mood enhancer.

nerdflood: Skylanders: Giants coming this Fall. My kids will be...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:50:29 -0500

nerdflood:

Skylanders: Giants coming this Fall.

My kids will be THRILLED. My wallet, not so much.

(Via GoNintendo)

Tonight I drew you a tentacle monster. Because I love you.

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:57:48 -0500

Tonight I drew you a tentacle monster. Because I love you.

Today while the super sportsball competition was going on, I was...

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:29:31 -0500

Today while the super sportsball competition was going on, I was asking friends on Facebook to give me things to sketch. So I drew these. I am not ashamed.

Okay, maybe a little ashamed of the Madonna one. But not enough to not post it.

"The Endermen", a Minecraft poem

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:34:54 -0500

Lest anyone think that this is nothing more than an art blog, for my week five creative project, I’m submitting this little poem, based on the 1.8 update to Minecraft, which introduced us all to the terrifying Endermen. I had started writing it then, while on a plane on one of the many overseas business trips I took in 2011. Since I’ve hardly been able to squeeze in any drawing time this week, I just finished up the last few stanzas the other day so I could present it here, to you, below the fold.

Next week, likely back to more drawings.

The Endermen are watching and waiting.

The Endermen see all that you do.

The Endermen are horrid and hating.

The Endermen are coming for you.

The Endermen are throwing and shaking.

The Endermen are wicked and cruel.

The Endermen are flailing and quaking.

The Endermen are coming for you.

They are lifting and hauling, denying what’s true.

They are scraping and mauling, and nothing you do.

Can stay their thirsting, hungering queue.

The Endermen, they are coming for you.

They are building and stacking, destroying what’s new.

They are breaking and cracking, preparing for you.

Preparing a feast for their Endermen stew.

The Endermen, they are coming for you.

I’ve decided that this will be my week four creative...

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 12:49:03 -0500

I’ve decided that this will be my week four creative project, instead of the previous drawing I was working on that I had posted earlier on the week. I just really like how the dragon turned out, even as my very first foray into using crosshatching for shading. The other one might end up completed as my week five project. Or it might not! Who knows.

In any case, I really like drawing. Four weeks down, 48 to go!

Doctor Who and a Dalek watch as I sketch a dragon.

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:20:32 -0500

Doctor Who and a Dalek watch as I sketch a dragon.

Here’s a work in progress shot of my week four creative...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 20:02:03 -0500

Here’s a work in progress shot of my week four creative project. Doctor Setebos and his granddaughter Haley. Coloring will come later this week. I really like how Haley turned out. And this is my ninth or tenth variation of Setebos, and I think he gets more and more interesting with every version I create.

Week three creative project has been completed. Another member...

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 22:17:04 -0500

Week three creative project has been completed. Another member of Team Bottlerocket, meet Flock. He can fly, obviously, and is assisted by a flock of robotic birds of various shapes and sizes, all manufactured by his brilliant teammate, Spin.

Flock - ink and colored pencils on bristol

Three weeks down, 49 to go. :)

Week two creative projects are in the bag. Or out of the bag. Or...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 21:17:52 -0500

Week two creative projects are in the bag. Or out of the bag. Or something like that. I have no idea how it’s supposed to be phrased.

In any case, I’ve created two members of my crime-fighting group, Team Bottlerocket. Ace is the leader of the team; courageous, but a bit headstrong and stubborn. Spin is super fast and intelligent; equally as headstrong as Ace, but constantly battling her own feelings for him.

More team members to come in the weeks ahead.

Also, two weeks down, fifty to go.

Here’s another drawing I did, but this one is from last...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 22:10:05 -0500

Here’s another drawing I did, but this one is from last week, when I was home on vacation and drawing something nearly every day.

My nephew is an avid Pokemon player, and wanted me to draw him as a Pokemon trainer. So I did just that. I even used some images of Ash as a reference to get the outfit right. But I stopped short of adding a dialogue balloon with him screaming “I CHOOSE YOU, MAGIKARP!”, but that totally would have been awesome.

Pokemon Trainer - pen and marker on bristol

And here’s the first creative project of 2012. My favorite...

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:05:00 -0500

And here’s the first creative project of 2012. My favorite superhero, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan version). It comes with a healthy dose of realization that I really need to work on drawing better hands. Yikes.

Green Lantern - Pen and marker on bristol

One week down, 51 more to go.

Things for 2012 That Sound Suspiciously Like Resolutions, but Totally Aren’t, so Try Not to Get Confused

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:51:00 -0500

NOT resolutions. Really.

They’re numbered, but they’re not necessarily in any particular order, so I guess I could have just not numbered them, but then it would have been harder for me to figure out how many I had written.

Onward and upward.

1. One new creative project every week, either artwork of some sort(illustration, sketch, painting, sculpting, etc.) or writing. No websites or anything complicated that can get me off track like last year. I’ll be tracking it with this tag.
2. Continue to improve my art and illustration skills and potentially start selling prints from an Etsy shop.
3. Read the entire Bible in a year, using the One-Year Bible reading plan.
4. No new video games. Continuing with Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, then I’ve got Xenoblade Chronicles in April. Beyond that, just focusing on Steam games I already own, with plenty of Minecraft mixed in here and there.
5. Sell our house and move closer to Des Moines. This one has been in pretty much every list since 2008, so hopefully putting it on here will eventually lead to something more than just idle pining.
6. Surf less (web, not water). The pointless Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter browsing gets me nowhere and takes time away from more meaningful pursuits.
7. Read more. I pledged to read a lot of books in 2011, and while I did read some great ones, including Bitter Seeds, The Name of the Wind, and Love Wins, I didn’t get to nearly as many as I would have liked. And my “to-read” pile isn’t getting any smaller.
8. Pare down. Stuff is stuff, and I need less of it. This includes not only material possessions, but also digital. I’m getting rid of some domain names and websites that I don’t want to bother with anymore, including the URLs for It’s Dangerous to Go Alone and Nerdshelf. On an unrelated note, anyone want to purchase a cool domain name? Give me a call.

I think that’s it for now. How many is that, eight? I was going to try to think of twelve for 2012, but that’s a lot of work, and I think eight is enough.

Yes, I just threw in a reference to an 80’s television show. That one was free.