October 13, 2003 - 1:25 p.m.
OW OW OW my foot fell asleep OW. Oh jeez oh man.
Sorry, that's not how this was supposed to start, but as soon as this box popped up I went "right, time to start typin'" and I shifted my weight to a new position from its old position, which apparently was ALL OF IT ON MY LEFT FOOT.
Pins and needles pins and needles pins and needles. I'm fine now.
Anyway, I meant to update this over the weekend but the Diaryland server was too full up. I suppose it is about time I actually ponied up the moolah ('ponied up the moolah?' Who says that?) for a Gold account. I have been using the services of Diaryland for more than three years now. It's probably about time I made the full commitment.
Of course, knowing me, as soon as I signed up it would all fall apart and immediately have been the worst idea ever. I am always very nervous about making a decision that involves the future, because my future so far has been about as predictable as Plinko.
For example, I started drawing a comic and posting it to a website. There were enough people who liked it that I decided to actually make a creative commitment for once. I announced with much fanfare that I would offer, for a price, a special edition of my finished comic, printed up as an actual, physical product and then send it out.
Of course, as soon as I did this, my life's Plinko chip landed in the "upheaval" bin, and I had to move to Los Angeles on short notice. The comic, and I'm pretty sure it understands, fell by the wayside.
But I did finally finish it! Not quite in the form I would have liked, however. See, my original plan was to draw a cameo (including any line of dialog of choice, that I'd have to write in somehow) for everybody who pledged to buy a copy. It was an improvisational comic, but I was drawing pages regularily and I had a pretty good idea of where the story was going. I wrote the characters into a sort of bizarro negative-space universe, figuring that I could get away with a bunch of wacky non-plotted cameo characters and their non-sequitur lines if everything was happening in a fictional universe with no logic. Unfortunately, right as I got the characters there I had to put the comic on hold. When I finally got back around to it, I'd forgotten the whole purpose of the weird universe (as well as my idea for an ending) and so I wrote the characters right out of it. So the cameos didn't end up fitting anywhere.
It's not a big deal because none of the people I knew from the site actually gave me any money (wisely, it turns out) so now I can just send out copies free of charge. I'm willing to take the hit on the postage because the comic is just so darn late. I didn't really deliver quite what I promised.
But I DID finish it! That is a huge deal for me. I almost never finished anything I started. I had two or three screenplays-- well, everyone does, but hear me out-- that never made it to the second act. I tried writing some stories where the main characters usually ended up tripping and falling and dying or something simply to get out of the aimless life they were stuck in. I have a tape with a computer animated short starring a character named Blinky which is a little TOO short; our hero reaches the climax and the evil robotic Blinky raises his arm threateningly and then it ends. I don't even remember why I never finished that, maybe my computer crashed.
My point is that I have a bad habit of abandoning creative projects. So I'm really excited that I actually finished this one. The coolest part about it is that I wanted to make a test book on my dad's photocopier/printer, to see how I wanted to go about assembling it. I really had no clue, and my best plan was to go to Kinko's, hand them my finished comic, and say "make more of these." The first copies turned out decent, but it took a long time. Then my dad asked if I wanted to just use the printer at his work.
I totally forgot what happens when you give my dad a mission. If it doesn't have to do with housework, there's nothing my dad likes better than to tinker with a problem until it has a solution. So we snuck into his workplace after dinner, and at midnight exactly we left the building with a box full of comic books.
It wasn't that simple, of course. Since I wanted them to look good, we didn't use my low-resolution scans I'd done for the web and blow them up. We tried that, and it looked lousy. So we did our best to assemble my original drawings into an actual book using only the laser copier. It took seven hours because, well, you take it for granted when you read a book, but actually figuring out what goes where is no easy task. We ambitiously set out to print on both sides of 11x17 sheets of paper, two pages on each side, then staple and fold in the middle. The problem came when we tried to imagine what pages needed to be printed together.
Turns out that, for example, page 3 and page 22 need to be next to one another, with pages 4 and 21 on the reverse side of the same sheet. I think. See, it was like a story problem. I could not have done it without my dad, and eventually we worked it out, after a lot of diagrams and failed attempts. I was in awe the whole time of just how purely helpful he was being. Except for one moment when he almost started lecturing me about how I should really be doing comics for a living by now, he didn't even seem disappointed in me. It is now one of my favorite memories of him. Every now and then he would make reference to a time when he had to print things for my sister-- like the time she put on a musical out of nowhere-- and I realized that perhaps we were never very close because I never had any big projects for him to help me with. I never needed to assemble something for a science fair or convince some software to talk to a MIDI keyboard. I was just stuck in my room, doing my own thing. But for seven straight hours with no complaint we did one particular thing together. It looks really good, on smooth paper with sharp, solid black lines.
And now I've made something! I wish I could promise a free copy to anybody who wants one, but I think I've already promised out all the copies I have. I think in the future most of my publishing will be strictly Internet-based, because although I learned a lot in my adventures with the copier, it's not something I'd really want to do again.
Sometime soon I'm going to upload the entire thing somewhere and comment on it and such. I'll link ye right quick when I do. I'm not sure how I feel about it, from an artistic standpoint, but I feel like commenting on it with little annotations now that I look back on it. It's still hard, since I've now seen each page so darn much, to read through it so I will probably never be sure how good it is. Whenever I look at it, all I see is the mistakes. I guess a lot of "artists" have that problem. I told my friend Scott that if he laughed twice while reading it, then I'd be happy. He called me the next day and said he laughed twice on the first page alone. Whee!
So yeah, it just feels so good to have actually produced something. (It also feels good not to have the unfinished something hanging over my head!) It was a nice feeling to actually hand a printed book to housemate Eric, who incidentally is the only person whose cameo actually made it into the comic (even though I was disappointed in how it turned out and labeled it "not eric") by virtue of actually having somewhere, storywise, to fit in. It kind of gave me a false optimism about my ability to cram cameos into my plotline. Anyway, the comic is done! So yay.
In other news, I think I might need to just take Mondays off because I can never seem to actually make it to work on them. Heh. Actually, before I do that, I am going to make an effort to settle down earlier on Sunday nights. I think my brain isn't trying to get out of work so much as recover from the socialization of the weekend. I'm going to try getting more sleep and being more careful about how I handle Sundays. I keep deciding that, but every time I mean it a little bit more. I'm getting annoyed at my body for feeling very sick almost every single Monday morning and then, with a shower and lunch, making a recovery but remaining lazy. I shouldn't have taught it such tricks when I was in school. Because now I actually don't mind work... it's just that my mind doesn't seem to be in total control of my body. Body, behave. I'll give you an extra hour per night of sleep, how's that for a compromise? All right.
I finished the comic, whee!
