Day: January 25, 2024

I had a Speech teacher recently mention that I need to have more venerability to connect to a an audience. I don’t know how much I actually believe that, social media really demands that we lay everything bare and claims our attention at all times; and that’s really not me. I like being able to come up for air, you know, touch grass and what not.
So I tried to come up with a compromise. I thought that I would start a little blog of sorts to let people know more about the “making” part of the comic. And also have updates in one place that don’t require you to jump from social media platform to social media platform (But please, feel free to follow me on instagram- that algorithm is evil to artists. ). Also I really want to make this webpage/website work for me rather than me just logging on every once in a while to mutter angrily “what the fuck is this? What the fuck is that? How the shit does that work?” and then crossing my fingers that people can actually use the toggles and navigate the website.
Plus it helps me keep to a deadline! A deadline which has been pretty nebulous so far- I come and go when there are pages to post. Before we moved (the most recent one) I actually had a buffer scheduled to release a bunch of finished pages by-weekly. I’d done it! I’d finally become the adult comic maker that I always wanted to be! Oh Joyous day!
That was until I found some old notes, read them, and ironically it felt like the revisions I had done over time actually took away from the story. The only way I can describe it is that suddenly creating dialog and sketching and inking pages felt like a fatiguing, painfully long slog through waist deep mud. Kind of like Artax slowly sinking into the bog of despair.
It wasn’t writers block, it was worse- a sudden realization that I hated, hated the next planed part of the comic. It felt banal and contrived. The jokes weren’t funny, Merman’s decision to become human wasn’t clear, the time-line didn’t make sense and it abandoned the whole overarching theme of different types of love and how they bond us together.
Now, again, I really want to stress that we moved- and I realized this maybe two weeks before we were literally loading boxes into a 22 ft truck. Not to mention I had major surgery three months ago. Of which I’ve only recently been recovering from. I was hoping the fog of multiple pain meds and the shock of my body getting used to having three less organs was the reason I hated it. That I just wasn’t ready to return to work.
Then I looked at the notes again while unpacking, and yeah, no, I definitely need to rehash the whole middle of the story-which involved a Karaoke scene, some hanging around, a distinct lack of wine and cheez-its and little to no rising action. I am assuming that means that if I hate it. Then the reader will probably hate it too.
The good news is I have time to fix this and I have a plan. My next quarter doesn’t start until April. But don’t be surprised when some pages go missing and then pop back up with alternate text.