FreeRead #56
Welcome to my free Substack newsletter about my fifteen year voyage as a self-publishing Science Fantasy author & artist.
Speaking of Art
Full Circle
I grew up surrounded by artists…visual artists, musicians, singers, potters. It seemed as natural as eating a good meal or playing outside in the sun to scribble a picture or write in my journal. I watched my mother create beautiful paintings (oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels) and design costumes for theatre and dance. One wall in my home today is a mini gallery of her watercolors, including a Grand Prize winner.
My father was an artist in a different way. When we moved to Bermuda, when I was ten, he began turning Bermuda Cedar logs into stunning frames for my mother’s paintings. When he took my two sisters and me to the beach, he gathered small sea shells and used them to create shell maps of the island.
My middle sister has an extraordinary voice and plays the piano and the guitar. She sang in a group called Up With People and toured Europe with them in her late teens. I am envious of her talent, since I only sing where no one can hear.
My youngest sister is a gifted potter whose work includes pottery dishes, cups, and mugs. She creates elegant vases, pottery boxes, barrel fired flutes, masks, and other original clay pieces that blow me away. She taught me how to make a mask of my favorite animal…the wolf, my only attempt at working with clay.
My great uncle was a watercolorist who, when I was in college, tried painting with oils. After two or three attempts, he decided to stick with watercolors. Luckily, I was visiting my grandmother when he was experimenting. He gave me my favorite of his “attempts” for graduation. I still have it hanging in my home along with two of his watercolors.
Needless to say, artists abound in my family.
I scribbled throughout my life and even tried to paint with watercolors…not my thing…so I decided to try oils. My one and only completed attempt hangs on the wall in our kitchen. I painted it soon after Tom and I were married. It is entitled Life. It wasn’t until I got hooked on photography that I began to look at art in a new way. I love choreographing, but I also love learning new things. Photoshop opened up a whole new artistic world for me. The piece below was done around 1998, early in my exploration of how to create art using my photos.
Digital art soon became a passion, one that continues to grow. In 2006, I visited Tom in Alaska and took a class from Tony Bridge, a visiting photographer from New Zealand. My final digital art from the class, Alaska Dreaming, won second place in a state-wide art contest entitled: Wild People, Wild Places and Wildlife: Images from the Tongass.
When I printed and framed my award winning picture for my mother, who didn’t believe art made on a computer was true art, she hugged me and said the words I will remember forever… “Alaska Dreaming is true art. You, Sharon, are an artist.”
And so, life brings me full circle. It has been a journey of creating stories on the dance stage and now on the printed page, and finally in the digital art I create for my novels.
How lucky am I to have absorbed a love of the arts from my entire family, my friends, and former colleagues and students.
Life is art in the making…each of us an original created by the choices we make.
From Tom
Mac Monk Mode
Over the last decade plus, S.K. developed a process for focusing on her writing and art while using her computer. It includes setting up a separate user and disabling certain features to allow concentration on one's creative craft.
This week we discovered in a newsletter from MacMost (Patron Subscription) that such a process has a name and also learned some additional tweaks we could do to that computer setup.
One of the suggestions was to get away to a quiet place to work. Me thinks S.K. is a winner of any award for that. With almost ten years at anchor for the summers in a quiet cove in an Alaskan rain forest with no internet access, no cell phone service, no TV or radio, and no other humans (but with many other creatures of the air, land, and sea)...she was good at getting away!
Computer Systems Update
With the death of my second-hand, medium resolution, older Apple 27" monitor, I had to make due with a low resolution 24" monitor. I threw in the towel. My new 27", high resolution Apple Studio Monitor just arrived. It's only money and who knows what the price or availability of this foreign made device will be in the future.
I learned the hard way how much I love the high resolution displays of Apple devices! If I had not wanted to duplicate S.K.'s computer system for system support and ready spares, I would still be happily using the 24" iMac I purchased over three years ago.
A suggestion for writers and book formatters, unless you are a digital artist and must have a 27" screen, and are thinking about getting an Apple Mac...take a good look at the 24" iMacs.
But if cost is not an issue, a 27" Apple Studio Display works fine with all the current Mac's! S.K.'s system for her live-aboard days was a MacBook Pro laptop on the boat and a 27" high resolution monitor connected to the laptop when house-sitting ashore in the winters.
Bye Bye MS Office (Microsoft 365)
Both S.K. and I have been using Microsoft Office for over four decades.
Corporate requirements at my employer, a once famous two-letter named tech company, and evolving abilities of home PC computers with Microsoft operating systems, pulled us into the "standard" system of office tools at work and on our home computers.
S.K.'s skills with MS Office were honed as the Director of Dance at two boarding schools. Presentations on Power Point, budgets in Excel, and the never ending communications and reports using Word all done on PCs running Microsoft operating systems. To her joy, she moved her department along with the music and art departments to Apple computers in the late 90's. A happy day since she was already using Apple for her home computer as she taught herself Photoshop. MS Office stayed with her, a version built for the Apple operating system was used at her employers and on her personal Mac.
Apple was not static over the years, they evolved their own office software. They developed, tweaked, scrapped, then redeveloped a suite of applications. Pages (word processor - Word), Numbers (spread sheet - Excel) and Keynote (presentations - Power Point) are all free apps from Apple. Apple has wisely built their apps to easily input and output files in Microsoft format, like many other publishing apps do.
MS Office Word, like Apple Pages, is an excellent writing tool for personal use and business. But, as a tool for authors, they are akin to a pencil and paper, or a typewriter. Better software tools have evolved for authors that liberates them from the confines of secretarial tools.
Today, S.K. is fully invested in Scrivener and ProWritingAid on her Mac and had relegated MS Word to typing email drafts and letters. She gleefully gave up Excel and Powerpoint the moment she came aboard our retirement houseboat in 2010! I found Apple's suite of office applications acceptable for my needs.
This January, when our MS Office subscription (Microsoft 365) was due, I cancelled.
Things have been going quite well as we detox from Microsoft 365. (We diverted the money saved toward a case of wine to ease the transistion.) Thanks to MacMost training and tips, we are becoming more comfortable with Apple Pages. S.K. has not voiced any major complaint (she is not bashful about asking me to solve any computer problem :-)
But I found a problem for me, as expected, with the ability of Pages to build multiple custom spelling dictionary of S.K.'s fantasy vocabulary for all her 20+ books in the series. MS Word is a better tool for this task. For now, I am brute forcing my way through the job using Pages.
Does anyone know of a stand alone, spell checker with powerful, multiple custom spelling dictionary files ability that runs on a Mac? If so, please send an email!
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Post #56 of March 16, 2025
S.K. Randolph, Science Fantasy Illustrated by the Author
Speaking of Art
Copyright 2025 by S.K. Randolph
How blessed you were to be surrounded by artists, and how blessed they were and are to have your love for what they do. Thanks to you two for sharing these beautiful ideas.