Where I've Been...Sorta

I'll open this post with the obligatory apology for my absence. I have not posted anything for over a month and I'm not super happy with myself over the fact. If nothing else, it nags at me that the entire month of August will be unrepresented in my blog archive.

June, July...September. Fail.

I also apologize in advance for the amorphous nature of this post and it's total uselessness. If anything, it exists purely to assure anyone curious enough that I am, in fact, still quite alive, and have not given up on the blog.

Still, in my defense, a lot has happened since July 29th, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to give you all a bit of a rundown to bring you all up to current events.

First, we completed the move from New Jersey to Seattle. This involved two stays at two different temporary housing facilities, two stays at two different hotels, and finally an apartment. It also required a tractor trailer with a driver called Virgil, and about six weeks of time total to get us and our stuff out of the Garden State and deposit it in the Evergreen State (which over the summer took on a brownish color in Seattle).

Second, we managed to completely unpack. Normally, this would have been a slightly more leisurely event, but I kind of needed to get my stuff squared away before the 19th of August for reasons I will get to in a moment. I also had painting to do and apparently have an inability to think clearly when all our worldly possessions are crammed into boxes. Rather than painting, I felt the need to help our stuff escape its respective corrugated prisons so that I might create chaos from order only to enstate a new order, which allowed me to finally start painting on a "Blue Monday" with a clear mind.

See what I did there?

The short version is that we got moved in and settled. We even managed to take the time to clean the mystery stains out of the basement carpet.

Mmmmm... mystery stains.

Third, as mentioned above, on August 19th, I started a two week stint as a concept artist. It was a short burst and it was intense. But it was also awesome. During that two weeks, I did lots of stuff I can't talk about. Some of the stuff I did was with a pencil. Some other stuff was digital. And when I was finished doing stuff I can't tell you about during the daytime, I would come home each night and paint more stuff I can't talk about.

Funny how secretive I must be about what it is that I supposedly do all day. I mean, I'm not exactly starting coups and unseating dictators. Not exactly. Steve Belledin: art spy.

Anyway, with those three big events, time became a very precious commodity. I was busy. Really busy. Too busy, even, to get stressed about any of it. I had so much on my plate that all I could do was focus on one small thing at a time and ignore the bigger picture. I just had to trust that the bigger stuff would fall into place while I slowly completed things on a checklist. Fortunately, my faith in things working out was well founded because they did, in fact, work out. Plus I got all the things done I needed to do.

Except write anything for this blog, of course.

Now, I do have some false starts of posts begun over the last month that I'll be looking over again — mostly to do with moving one's studio and the kind of people you deal with when you move (people who tell you you're wrong for liking cities you like and such). If they're worth something, I'll try and bang them into shape. They just won't be particularly timely anymore. But, there might at least be enough useful information or entertainment value to excuse their existence.

Of course, all this depends on how the coming months go. I've got a few art posts that need writing and IlluxCon to prepare for. Then there's the painting that I need to turn in before the con. And then it's off to do more concepting once I'm home from the con, plus more painting. I'm sure I could afford to skip a meal or lose a few hours of sleep to make a post or two happen. No one will notice. Right?

How did I get so busy? And why am I so happy about it?