With the stray moments I manage to scrounge I've been struggling my way through a few fairly tepid Wagnerian rehashes just to cover the subject and keep my mind steeped in it, but until I began this Shaw treatise I hadn't found anything stimulating to wrap my brain around. But G.B. has got me well back into the groove, and I'm more excited than ever to put myself into it with gusto and see if I can meet the challenge. For all of Shaw's excesses and extremes (he was a proponent of eugenics and a defender of Stalin, to name just two), his social and political commentaries are as thought-provoking and insightful today and they were a hundred years ago. He is at times astoundingly profound, and at the same time fiercely witty. The Perfect Wagnerite is as much a joy to read for its piercing humor as for its poignant analysis of the human condition. Oh, yeah, and Wagner, too. I highly recommend it.
Anyway, it's back to the desktop for me this week, working on building more characters to populate the Ring world, and hopefully finishing up some rough drafts to accompany the opening volume. Creating the scenes and characters is taking considerable time, but once I have my cast and sets finalized things should begin to move along quite swiftly. In addition, I've been working up some concepts for the visual style I plan to use, and I've pretty much locked in what I want. Other than that it's just a lot of work on honing my skills at 3D rendering and digital art, and writing up rough drafts for each scene. I plan to read my Art of Poser & Photoshop book during the break, and take up Secrets of Poser Experts from where I left off some time back. So that should keep me busy for awhile, though I might try to get a little rest in, too.
