Development?

Seems I like to have one character who's an artist in my stories. Not all of them, but several. And I have one in APoS-NWFO. Everett does commercial art but wants to do better works, and it seems Brendan has become his muse. He does an oil portrait of him, not long after meeting him, and presents it on his 18th birthday. But it turns out he doesn't think it's any good while Aunt Mari and the B-girls love it and want him to do one of their family.

This parallels me, to an extent. For years until I started college I wanted to be a fine artist. Portraits. Faces. I loved doing them of guys, almost always. Got a couple of commissions, even, though I worked in acrylics instead of oils. I like those as well as colored pencils. But I had zero self-confidence.

Even when I shifted to film at Trinity University, the class I most enjoyed was a life drawing class where I did works off real models. But I got drawn more and more into the demands of film and sort of lost my way. It seems I'm using my writing to reimagine that part of my history.

I develop very slowly. Learn at a snail's pace. Always have. I was always standoffish and weird to people, something I've let become part of Brendan. Losing interest quickly. Having to fight with myself to finish scripts or books unless they caught me in som deeper way. Looking back, I wonder if I might have been diagnosed as Autistic or having ADHD or something like that.

Maybe that's why I started writing MM Erotica with a vicious bent. To keep up my interest in the story I'm working on. I dunno. Right now I'm just amazed I'm this close to finally finishing A Place of Safety, which it straight and regular fiction. Still, having an artist in this part of the book is helping me keep going. Having a gay man infatuated with a young man who's not interested in him that way keeps me interested.

It's weird, but as noted...I always have been.