Main female character from the aforementioned first-successful-NaNo. (You may notice I’m taking great pains not to name the title. That is because it was dumb.) I always thought of Holly as a girl with very pretty individual features, put together in a very slightly unsettling, disproportionate way.

The main character of my first successful NaNo attempt, a 90,000 word monstrosity that I wrote in 11th grade, when I had that kind of time on my hands. (I participated the previous year, but didn’t even find out about it until partway through the month, and so failed rather epically.) It was the sort of story you write when you’re 16 and spend most of your free time watching anime, but I still have a weird affection for my poor, deformed book-child. Cole was a friendless, dorky sort of kid who desperately needed some less-stupid glasses.

A major event in my life is the yearly coming of National Novel Writing Month. Each year, in November, NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. I’ve been participating for close to a decade now, and so have a backlog of some 8-odd novels, some of which I have plans to go back to someday, some of which are gawdawful and beyond hope. I’m fond of all (well, most) of them, though, so I’m taking this month to do portraits of past NaNo characters, to get me in the mood for this year. (Portraits, because I’ve been in a “how do I heads” mood lately; need a chance to focus in on facial structure.) If it seems odd that I’m doing this in October instead of November, well, I’ve got something ELSE in mind for THAT month…

And so ends another month. Although it got off to a shaky start and had a couple of stumbles, this one was relatively painless, probably because of the strictly enforced time limit, which kept these from getting out of hand – an hour’s a good amount of time to spend on this sort of thing. And it definitely got my digipaint muscles working again!

It’s been grey and gross this week. But it makes an interesting atmosphere for a picture!