Grappling with Cheese

I should stop using health as an excuse. Basically I feel so incompetent about writing it is hard to bend down back over that grindstone.

I realized while doing clean-up on the big parkour training scene at La Defense that I needed a lot more five-senses stuff. I'd been intending to go back with a "symphony of cheese" pass and add more detail about the foods, but this bit of a physical activity reminds me of the places where the Kyoto book really worked. And that was the very five-senses experiences of running and exercise.

And this should help decompress some as well. Part III has been dropping too many story beats without enough breathing space around them. Adding some "you are there" sensuality should give me some space to reflect on each beat, time for the reader to digest, before I move on.

I went through one scene and it was easy enough. I've still not learned how to write faster, but I have learned how to re-write much more easily. (And faster.)

A week of COVID. Two insane weeks of work without any recovery time, right up to the last working day of the year and delivering the big project just two days before. A week off for the holidays but I was so wrecked (and had a massive asthma attack Christmas Eve) I took another week sick, then only made it in for a day or two the week after that as well.

HR hates me now.

One thing that dragged me back to the shop was finally throwing together a prop for the new cover art. While I was recovering from sick/COVID/exhaustion I opened up PhotoShop, did the repaint for the figure on the fourth cover and sent that off to my cover artist. And came up with a new overall cover concept I'm at the moment pretty happy with. But I wanted a prop for the cover and I thought it would be more fun to build then to try to source in royalty-free images (or trust AI. Shudder.)

There was a tiny bit of project creep. I really should be using my laser for something, so I finally spent a little time in Fusion360 and Lightburn and, yeah, that new 20W head burns through 3/32 basswood like a laser through softwood.

I also tried to shave time by using glue and paint and plasti-dip as surface preparation rather than the usual round of Bondo spot putty and sandpaper. It didn't work; neither to save time, nor to get good surfaces. But since the final prop will be a few hundred pixels on the actual artwork, it hardly matters.

The bracket for the spool is laser-cut wood. Laser-cut EVA foam for the strap (which I had to dial down to 40% power!) Gears off Thingiverse (there's a very nice DXF/EPS gears creator online, but downloads of the models are on a subscription basis.) I did get fancy and the grapple is steel rod, bent with MAPP gas and brazed with my little micro-torch (MAPP/oxygen head). 

Some of the parts were found objects so I wasn't really able to come up with a design first and model it properly in CAD and break out the right parts from that. Instead I just had to push ahead building stuff I knew wasn't quite right and hoping it would work when I glued it all up. So; project management mistakes as well as surface prep mistakes. That's why we do these things; to learn how to do better.

(There's another thing that's always been part of my design work. I especially noticed it in sound design. And that is trying to find those quintessential cues or clues that the audience will be able to read and thus grasp what it is the design is trying to say. I think the grapple and reel shapes are defined enough here, with telling details like the ring with the knot tied to it, to communicate the "throws a grappling line out and then reels it in." In actual design, some kind of sling or harness is absolutely essential because you don't lift your body weight on a pistol grip. But for visual purposes that isn't on this prop.)