A Robot, Two Stories, and some Doodles.

This blog has been gathering a pretty thick layer of dust this year. Blogging has never come naturally to me, and most of my updates get blasted out in snippets on social media. Well, here’s a bigger update!

This has been an extraordinarily busy year for work, which is great since last year was so dry. I spent the last five months working on Disney’s Big Hero 6. The hours were long, the workload intense, but in the end, I’m proud of the work I did, and the awesome stuff my team accomplished. I can’t wait to see it in November!

I did a lot of work on little teasers and other promotional images, but one of my favorites is adorable robot Baymax and his human pal Hiro playing with balloon animals (I worked on cloth, hair, Baymax’s squishy skin, and the balloons):

It was an amazing experience to work at Disney. Hope I get to do it again someday.

Things have been pretty slow on the writing front, as work has gobbled up most of my free time and energy. My story “The Spirit of Mars” appeared in John Joseph Adams’ anthology Help Fund My Robot Army. This is a great collection of stories inspired by Kickstarter and the crowd-funding movement. It’s still available if you’d like to grab a copy.

I’ve also had a story accepted to appear in the forthcoming Not Our Kind, edited by Nayad Monroe for Alliteration Ink. Speaking of Kickstarters, this anthology is gearing up for a crowd-funding of its own, so stay tuned for news. “For Outside Are the Dogs,” is my Clarion West “Week 7 story.” I conceived of it in the final days of the workshop but didn’t write it until I was home!

Some other projects are in the hopper, there always are, and that novel is still waiting for me to come back and prod it to life. It’s been a long time since I had the mental space to tackle new stories. I’m pretty excited about diving back into the waters!

One of the creative outlets I had a little space for outside the day job was rediscovering my love for drawing. It’s intimidating to go to classes at a studio like Disney and draw among the extremely talented artists there. For a while, I was posting a doodle a day, with a #draw365 hashtag. I’ve got a backlog of stuff to post, but I hope to keep it up all the same!

 

I hope you had a great summer, too!