Category: CGI 3D Images

2024: A Space Odyssey

I recently picked up a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey (the novel by Arthur C. Clarke – not the Movie) and the sequel novel 2010: Odyssey Two (the movie had a different title… The Year We Make Contact). It is 2024 and well, I finally got around to reading them for the first time. I’ve seen the films several times but it was great fun to read the novels. In fact, I think I might like the 2001 novel more than the movie (I know… heresy right?)

The books (as is almost always) give a much deeper insight into characters and plot that the movie genre’ just can’t generally match. That can be said of a lot of novel / book combinations, but I think this is especially true of 2001 since the beginning of the novel gives you access to the point of view and internal pre-human thoughts of the character Moon-watcher. Clarke gives him recognizably human-related thoughts but also he has a very alien / animal mentality about things. For instance his father dies in the novel and Moon-watcher basically thinks little of it… he just takes him to the garbage heap. (this is all before he is changed by his encounter with the monolith.)

The 3d model I created of the Discovery One in Blender 3d.

It was also interesting in the 2001 novel that their destination is Saturn, and they do a flyby of Jupiter. Apparently that was something that was changed in the movie (just to simplify it?) but Clarke left his novel as it was even though he wrote it in parallel with the screen play. His sequel novel 2010 picks up however based on the movie’s premise that the destination was Jupiter. Makes for interesting reading as you need to have seen the 2001 film to understand this discontinuity in the novels.


I wrote up a review of 2001 and 2010 on Goodreads if you would like to check it out. Glenn R. Frank’s review of 2001: A Space Odyssey | Goodreads

Preview of New Marketing Images

New posts about to release for Nine Streams of Consciousness

I and my fellow writers from the Nine Streams of Consciousness anthology have written marketing blurbs for each of our individual stories in the book. I am in the process of creating images and art to go with them. The intent is to post the series one at a time on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and test if promotion of the individual stories in a series of posts over a number of days / weeks will be of more interest to potential readers than a promotion of the overall book in general.

I am releasing these six as a sneak preview
of those posts coming later this month.

New Promo Videos

I created two promotional videos for our anthology and have been posting them on Facebook and Twitter. I am trying to walk the line between putting them out for marketing purposes and going overboard and spamming. Here they are for your viewing pleasure. Publish day is coming!

Promo Video # 1 for Nine Streams of Consciousness
Promo Video # 1 for Nine Streams of Consciousness

Designing a Ship

The anthology, in which I’m going to have three stories in, needs a cover design. I’m playing around in Blender (3d computer rendering program) to create the colony ship that is part of several stories in our book. It might be used as part of the cover art… or might just be for my own entertainment. Here is what I created so far…

The colony ship Providence, which plays a role in several stories in our anthology.

My Three Short Stories

I have been involved with a small group of writers (about nine of us) for a little over a year now. Some are experienced, published authors, others are new writers like myself. Author Drew Wagar has been leading, directing and teaching us how to write and publish a book through this hands-on project. We designed a sci-fi timeline, back history, and star system in which each of us wrote one or more short stories. The stories are tied together by the overall timeline and presented chronologically in a single anthology novel.

Most anthologies I have seen are a group of stories that are unrelated except maybe by a common theme or topic. This should be a fun to read since they are all independent stories but will tell an overall larger tale as a complete book.

I was able to write one larger (10k word) story and two shorter stories, of a few thousand words each, for the project. It was a learning challenge and a lot of fun.

My three stories are entitled:
• Off Target
• Shattered Worlds
• Justified Accidents

We are in the phase of final drafting, proofing, compiling, and creating cover art. The plan is to have it published as an e-book and print-on-demand paperback on Amazon in March of 2020!

Thank you Drew for teaching and leading us in this great project!

NaNoWriMo

I have taken up the challenge of writing 50,000 words in one month in the form of a first draft of a novel. I registered to participate in the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) annual challenge. I’d not even heard of this before despite it being an organization that is celebrating its twentieth year. (Yeah I am a noob).

I had a concept and a partial story idea already started, so I signed up late, and I’m going to give it a run and see how much I can get done during the month of November.

A quickie fake cover image for my yet t be written story, with working title only!

Changing

The kinds of work I have done over the years has followed a progression, an evolving pathway that started with photography, led to print design, to writing and interviewing and added web design. This grew into website and interface design and inevitably led into the world of programming and database integration with web applications. In all that time I have loved the variety, but I find I am coming back to the thing I started with and enjoying imagery and writing again. These have been in the form of 3d modeling and redering, and in creative fiction writing. I am currently involved in a project with a few other aspiring authors of various experience seeking to collaborate on an anthology of sci-fi stories. We have been world building a place for these stories to come to life, and I have used my 3d design to bring some visualization to it as we start into the actual writing of our stories. I will post a few fun images here to tease a bit about the project.