A hobbyist artist dreaming about becoming an author…
Author: WindySilver
I'm a Finnish student studying IT at a university and a hobbyist artist fighting a war against procrastination on the losing side. I mostly write fanfictions (the currently active fandoms being Code Lyoko, Star Wars and Transformers) and some original writings such as annual Flash Fiction Month, random stories, poems and my first novel.
I'm primarily a writer, but I do draw art for my stories when I can/want to/have the idea and the time for it. I'm better at writing than drawing, but I'm improving my skills at both.
Currently the best way to reach me is on DeviantArt (https://www.deviantart.com/windysilver).
If you follow my Twitter account, you have noticed a lot of automated posts from WordPress. These are from posting my portfolio-worthy pieces here to have them in a neat portfolio. I have some IT things I still need to brush up and upload to GitHub before putting them to my portfolio, but as for everything that is already available online, they are now in place and sorted. I posted each story individually here to have them on a platform that I know to remain eye-friendly (which, unfortunately, DeviantArt has ceased to be).
If you’re anything like me, you’re sick to death (but, like, figuratively; upon contemplation that particular metaphor might be a bit too on-the-nose) of all this global pandemic whatsits. Quarantine this, lockdown that, lots of people dying, empty shelves, &c. Perhaps you’re hoping for a distraction that’ll take your mind off things?
That was actually a terrible lead-in, because honestly Quarantine Quest is not, in fact, all that dissimilar from reality at this point. I mean, it’s a little dissimilar, but not in the way that lead-in implies.
Honestly, I’m not dealing very well with all this. My routine’s hardly changed, but… well. The whole situation is affecting me far worse than I would’ve guessed. So I’ve been trying to manage my stress proactively wherever possible, taking on as little as possible, taking the chance to rest, &c., which is also a terrible lead-in because somehow I ended up taking…
I’m writing an overall art update with this case discussed on DeviantArt at the oment, but I figured that since I have my Greenfield data here, I’ll post here first: I’m done with writing the core of the first Greenfield novel now, but since I am still lacking around 15000 words from the target, I revisited the first chapters (since they make the majority of the chapters that require lengthening) and figured that I can’t deal with them now.
I’m not entirely sure whether it’s just because the chapters are crap or because they’re at least kind of crap and I’m tired, but I just can’t deal with them right now. Therefore, I’m putting the project on hiatus until my courses (the main cause of my fatigue) let up, which is probably somewhere around May or June. When I resume working on Greenfield, I will begin to edit the book, adding the needed words as I go.
That’s all for now. If you want to read more of my ramblings, be sure to check my newest Currently on art journal when I post it!
We’ve spent half of the first January of this new decade already and after two and a half weeks of procrastinating, I figured I should do this now before the last full week of January begins: a retrospect with statistics, even neater than my already neatened approach on the statistics on DA (you can read it and more of my ramblings on 2019, the decade of 2010 and my thoughts for the future here).
First of all, what I managed to get done in Q4 2019 and how it related to Q3 2019:
Q4 2019Q3 2019 to Q4 2019
Like you can see, it had its ups and downs. More downs than ups, but still ups too.
Now that I’ve made my first yearly statistic infograph, I must say that doing this statistics stuff has been both fun and interesting. Had I not done it, I wouldn’t know how much I actually wrote (I gotta say, the number surprised me as well).
2019 in total
I don’t expect the number to be this high since I’ve got less writing projects now: first, I finished Lyokostar 2 during the year and now I’ve scrapped Winx: The Path of Mysteries as well. Not that the latter, as it was constantly on hiatus, matters, but it’s off the list now. Although I’ll definitely cover Lyokostar 2‘s wordcount with Greenfield‘s 100-words-a-day pace in the first half of the year, I’m expecting lower daily wordcounts on other stories especially since Behind Armada is reaching its end, at which the Armada-Energon trilogy will be put on indefinite hiatus and thus lower the total wordcount. We’ll see what happens, though; perhaps I get inspiration spurts on other stories so that I surpass this.
I’m not entirely sure if I take part in Prose-ject 2020 (given that it’s held) but if I don’t, it’ll be hard to reach 2019’s total wordcount since Prose-ject 2019 accounted for 24383 words out of the 221795,5 words written (11%).
Like I said, we’ll see what happens.
I wish you all a fantastic year and decade 2020! Take care!
Disclaimer: Term clarification: neural networks aren’t the same as artificial intelligence but a part of it, at least as far as I’ve understood. Putting AI instead of neural network or ANN (Artifical Neural Network) sounded so much better in the title, so I put it there and wrote this disclaimer.
I stumbled upon Talk to Transformer, which is about a neural network completing text given to it. Since the FFM writer I found it through, Flammenfeder, asked its opinion on politics, I decided to ask it the question “What is art?”
This neural network gave me the most beautiful answer I’ve ever read:
What is art?
Art is not a scientific concept, but a human one. To us it is something more than the study of things, or the creation of art. To art we are all born, and to the human race we belong. We are born to love art, and to be the inheritors of our ancestors’ art and traditions. We are born to be artists.
As an afterthought while writing this post, I also decided to give it a small dose of Damon L. Wakes (because why not) and fed it 18 bananas. This is what it gave out:
A good deal later than usual, but still in good time for the holidays, this year’s FFM collection is finally finished!
Shiny!
Phoenix might be the best of these yet, though it’s hard to say. It’s hard to even put it in the same category as the others: most of the stories in Phoenix are interconnected, making it more like a mosaic novelette interspersed with unrelated shenanigans than a collection of individual stories. But that overarching story is one I’m pretty well proud of, for more reasons than one. I think it’s worth reading!
If you have followed my posts on DeviantArt, you have noticed that I have taken up the habit of recording how my art projects are progressing and putting the data into infographs after each quarter. I never got around to posting Q1’s stats here, but I figured that since I have more extensive stats now, I could make myself post about it here.
First, there’s my infograph on how much I got done in this year’s Q2:
Then, Prose-ject 2019’s stats (which were not counted for the upper infograph’s wordcounts due to ocurring only in one month):
And, finally, what the difference between Q1 and Q2 is:
As you can see, there is either increase (sometimes drastic) or no increase. Some of it can be explained with my university timetable and workload growing more lenient from Q1 as the summer approached while part of it also comes from either inspiration, as was with Lyokostar 2 which I finished during Q2, or the commitment to actually get more work done, as was with Behind Armada and The Fate’s Way, the two projects I work on only once a week and thus need to get more done in one day to have a proper progress going on. While TFW is now approaching the story area I’m most interested in and thus gains an inspiration bonus, BA has been in progress for ages and I’m more than ready to finish it, which explains the recent time skips I’ve made. I want to advance in the Armada-Energon trilogy at some point, hopefully even during this year, so getting BA‘s core story done is more than welcome.
What will happen in Q3? Only FFM 2019 statistics I can say for sure. Will I see a decrease in productivity once the studying year begins? Probably not, as the actual work will cover only about a third of the quarter. In addition to that, I’ve now committed myself to work more on my stories: firstly, to write at least 100 words to Greenfield every day in order to get a decent pace of progress I can keep up (meaning I should reach a chapter’s target wordcount in 40 days at most if there is no usable material already written). Secondly, to work more in a day during editing or finalization so that the phases when I don’t write basically anything on the projects in question will be shorter, which then gives me more days in a quarter to write. Naturally, as Lyokostar 2 is finished in Finnish, it will be dropped out of the statistics until its turn to be translated to English comes up, which will definitely be a long time away; I suspect that it could be in 2021 at the earliest, depending on how much work the three quarters of Lyokostar 1 I have left give me; I have needed to completely rewrite three parts of story 4 and there is a lot of reworking to be done with the rest of the parts, so it definitely isn’t looking promising.
Anyways, that should be all about that. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me!
This is an old sketch from school days that I happened to have scanned. You can see the layers of lines built up as I felt around for the shape I wanted and then started to nail down the ones that landed where I wanted them.
When I was in fourth-year architecture, I took an elective course in multidimensional geometry. (Yes, I did this on purpose. It was a great course.)
In the opening lecture, the professor stood at the front of the class and asked us whether anyone could imagine an equilateral triangle with three right angles in it. Nobody could – it breaks all the rules about what triangles are. He then threw a transparency on the overhead (this was 1995 – ask your parents if you have no idea what an overhead was) that contained an image of the earth – a line was drawn along one…
I decided that, as one of my final deeds at art this year, I will finally translate the poem that got published this spring. Luckily, it was not very long, so I could do it in one sitting. Both the original Finnish version and the translated English version are now on my DeviantArt page. I’ve also updated the page of the poetry collection here on WordPress to link to them.
This is an old sketch from school days that I happened to have scanned. You can see the layers of lines built up as I felt around for the shape I wanted and then started to nail down the ones that landed where I wanted them. 