Using Illustrator CS3

When I started drawing again my son gave me the program Illustrator CS3. As I spend so much time on the computer, he thought I would enjoy drawing on the computer as well. The program excited me. There are so many neat things you can do with it. Maybe you can, but I spent more time trying how to figure out how to do something than actually creating anything. I would get frustrated and abandon the program for months at a time, but I kept coming back to it.

I read the manual that came with the program. I bought books guaranteed to make you an expert. I watched the videos released by the company. I was running out of options when I stumbled across a series of videos made by Rick Rice on YouTube. He has published over 70 different tutorials. For a longtime user of Illustrator the lessons are probably too simplistic, but for a beginner like me they’re perfect.

Seduced by Moonlight, by Laurell K Hamilton

I just finished reading Seduced by Moonlight. It is the third book in Laurell K. Hamilton’s Meredith Gentry series. The series was recommended to me by a friend. She knew I liked reading fantasy fiction. I was skeptical when I picked up the first book, A Kiss of Shadows. I started reading Hamilton’s Anita Blake series several years ago, but never finished the series. A little violence and a little sex can add spice to a story, but it will not carry a book if the plot is weak.

I read A Kiss of Shadows and enjoyed it enough to go on to the second book. It wasn’t as good as the first, but I liked the theme behind the story and wanted to see where it would go. I downloaded Seduced by Moonlight and kept reading.

When a story bogs down with too much sex or violence I’ll skip a few pages and get back to the story, but with Seduced by Moonlight I found I was skipping more pages than reading. The plot was almost nonexistent. It was page after page of sex and violence. I finished the book but I will not be reading the next one in the series. I love a good fantasy fiction and I enjoy reading romance, but sex and violence for the sake of sex and violence is too close to my definition of porn.