June had seen my life calming down a bit, but it had also seen my hobbies shuffled around when it comes to the time I gave to each of them. Especially as there were some new things…

Personal

As I’ve said in my May update, things have settled down after my move. Now it’s about sorting out some smaller things. Many of them can stay on the to-do list for a couple of weeks, so I’m not too pressured about them as they affect my day-to-day life as a very minor inconvenience.

Reading

Reading is one of the hobbies that took a hit in June. I read three books in May, but in June, I’m at one finished and one still in progress. As the series I started reading in May has six books, that means finishing it is bonked in July (hopefully not too far down the month). This was because my attention was turned elsewhere.

Hiking and sport

In June, I managed one hike each weekend, which is pretty much the ideal case. This amounted to ca. 93km total for the month, putting me just a bit short of 500km for the first half of the year. Given that I’ve taken a break in April, that’s quite a good result. I hope the weather cooperates just as much in July…

That said, I haven’t posted anything from those hikes yet – there’s a lot of photos to go through, so it may take me a while.

I haven’t managed to go rollerblading this month – though I hope to change that for July. However, the town had an event where anyone could come and try rock climbing and I, of course, had to get myself over there. My respect for climbers, I felt like my fingers and feet stopped obeying me quite fast. With that, here’s me pretending I know what I’m doing, which I don’t…

Writing and art

If you think that using “writing and art” instead of just “writing” as the header is suspicious, you’re right.

I mentioned doing some light checks on book three, which I continued, even if in a smaller scope. I was, however, blessed (or cursed) with a couple of random scene ideas for… pretty much random parts of my whole project. This resulted in two expanded and one new scene for book two, one expanded scene for book three, and one new and one expanded scene for… book 0.5 which I haven’t touched for years (not to mention that I haven’t finalized the concept yet – but hey, I have maybe 10 scenes now…).

So, here comes the suspicious part – if your sense of art is sensitive, I advise you to stop reading now. So, long story short, I picked up a pencil and, after more than 15 years, decided to try drawing again. Just black and white sketches – which is already pushing my drawing skills a lot. The first few attempts… had issues with proportions almost everywhere.

The last picture I’ve made so far (above) doesn’t seem to be that bad, though there’s still a lot to improve – and I’m not speaking about the missing body parts because I have no idea how to pose them, but about getting things to look at least decent. That said, my phone camera recognized the faces as faces, so maybe I’m not as lost cause as I thought…

If you’re wondering about the purpose – I’d like to be able to put together at least very basic drawings when I get to the dreadful point of considering what to put on the cover of the future books, because trying to describe things just with words was clunky.

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Anyway, that’s a look back at the past month. Hope yours has been going well (preferably better than my doodles) and that I haven’t managed to hurt your eyes.

All the best into the next month and see you next time.