Greetings and salutations, bleatings and salivations, my dear, flying, rabid lambsies. This here is another open thread and I usually open these things with sharing a bit of my week.
Been a fuzzy week. Spent last weekend tearing the lining out of my kiln and digging out what was left of the chimney. Will start to rebuild it next month. Finally got some good steel pipe for the chimney— should hopefully survive a bit better than the mess I had in there before. Harvested a few beets, carrots and beans from the garden. And one tiny zucchini; the plants have about had it.
Back home in the big city I got a call to make some corrections to a design project that I thought was done and dusted. No problem, matter of an hour’s work. Everything is back in the hands of the printer.
Tuesday Mrs. the Werelynx flew off for another conference in London. How much longer she’ll be making that trip, what with Britain leaving the EU, is a matter of speculation and a little trepidation.
Then the lads and I went out for a haircut. Yes folks, this fuzzy head is a bit less fuzzy— or it would be if I didn’t manage to catch a cold and now, well, everything is fuzzier.
So it has been a bit difficult to get much done around here, but, even through the fuzzy fog of a clogged head, meals were cooked, laundry done and the first real bit of my graphic novel project was posted online...
It’s only one page of story at this point, but there’s at least something to look at. It’s been a real struggle that I’m sure many of you can relate to. How to get from an idea bubbling away in your brain to actually creating something based on that idea. I have a head full of ideas, but getting all that creativity to bubble over and at least make a mess is difficult for me. If given a job and a deadline I’ll be burning the midnight oil to guarantee that the deadline is met. But when left to my own devices I’m more likely to procrastinate.
I consider myself an artist, but what I really am is an avid watcher of YouTube videos.
It’s so hard to get started. There are so many doubts that cling to my heels. I ask myself too many questions when I should be following the advice of an old, wise friend who told me that the important thing is to get something done, anything— just get something done each day. Bottling up that creative instinct, letting myself get distracted, allowing self-doubt and criticism to stifle me…
I’m an expert at all that.
What I’m also pretty good at is drawing.
People seem to like my drawings, so why do I find it so hard sometimes to share them? Sheesh, another fragile arteest wallowing in self-pity. Yeah, that too. If I’d stop kicking myself I might actually get somewhere.
So, um… yeah.
I’ve had this strange world tugging at my sleeve for about a decade. About two years ago I started taking it seriously and began to draw little sketches of the inhabitants of this world, to write short descriptions of these characters and where they fit in what was slowly becoming a story. I’m not really sure where the story is going even now, but I felt that if I didn’t begin telling it then it would never get told— and frankly, I’d like to know what happens.
One last kick and I’m flying.
I’m sort of new to the world of webcomics. I hope that by publishing my work page by page on a web comic hosting site I’ll slowly build an audience. I picked Smack Jeeves— not only for having the weirdest name of any of the free hosting sites that I found, but because somebody over there seems to be taking an active role in keeping the site up to date and looking good. There’s an active community over there that I really don’t know much of anything about. After I posted my first picture (sort of a cover image for the comic) back around the start of August someone wrote me a message asking if I’d like to collaborate on a comic drawn in the Japanese style known as Manga— yeah, no. I don’t understand the fascination and I’ve been to Japan, part of my family is Japanese. And just looking through the one copy of Young Jump that I picked up in the airport prompts me to ask the question, “which of the dozen artists, each with their own unique styles, publishing comics in this magazine, draws Manga style?” It’s all Manga. It’s Japanese comics. Not everybody drawn by Japanese artists has a chin you could use for poking holes in the ground for planting flower bulbs. Not every character in a Manga book has glistening eyes the size and shape of tennis balls. Not every Japanese artist shuns drawing noses. But, it’s popular enough and copied enough to be the accepted stereotype.
Otherwise, folks have been just quietly creeping over to take a peek at the new kid in the neighborhood.
I don’t suppose many people bother to comment on these things.
So, I’ve taken the plunge. I’m getting something, anything out there for folks to look at. It was a bit delayed due to my own boring health issues. Blessed be the glories of antibiotics, I say. I’d wanted to be posting one or two pages each week from the start of September. But here we are, right at the tail end of the month and there's just one page of story published. But it’s there and I’m pretty sure there’s more to come.
And that’s what matters.
Getting started.
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Thanks for stopping by.
This is an open thread.