thepenmonster

Okay. It kinda is you. But not in a bad way. After a few posts I just found Dreamwidth a bit too fiddly to work with behind the scenes and decided to go blog somewhere else. Complaining about it would be akin to complaining about cats being furry. Cats are what they are.

Dreamwidth Is.

My particular brand of spicy brain HATES trying to pile up a bunch of small things into one whole and putting it all together. Offsite hosting requirements. Offsite code. Onsite code. Tiny text. Typos. And topics. The system here is toeing the line just enough that I didn't look forward to spilling by brain goop into it.

Pity though. The DIY indie vibe here is good. The workflow just isn't for me.

Anyhoo. Taa~!

So yeah, this week and, hopefully next, I'll have gotten enough comic pages done to rebuild the buffer I squandered this past two months.

In my defense, I was suffering from a nasty bacterial sinus infection that was dripping gunk into my lungs through most of September to the end of November.

"Why didn't you go to a doctor earlier?" you would be right in asking.

I didn't want to sit in a walk-in clinic for three or four hours with a hundred other sick people while I was struggling to breathe, is the answer. Masked or no, a weakened immune system is a weakened immune system.

Now, I was busy being artistic that entire time the buffer ticked down. It was a lot easier to stare at a piece of paper for a few hours than it was staring at a monitor so developing new ideas was the order of the day. It's just that a bunch of rough sketches (I use my sketch books for sketching. Not for finished art I try to pass off as a sketch.) and concept notes don't make for art people care to see.

Also, I'll need to get a job this summer so anything creative needs to get done now.

I'm running a webcomic right now. I'm doing it because I needed to stay busy as I lived off of my life savings seeking medical help for my chronic back pain. Also to prove to myself that I could still make a comic despite a decade and a half of not doing so.

I've proven that I can still make a comic. That was great. Not so great: The Nova Scotian healthcare system has basically told me to fuck off and come back when my back is injured enough to put me in the hospital. I guess I'm supposed to self-medicate too? What a failure of a system.

As our political parties intended. Gotta make sure that tax money goes to our precious oligopolies and monopolies.

Complaints about the gutting of the Canadian social safety net aside... Every day I come into the den, grunt in pain as I sit down at the Wacom tablet, and open Clip Studio Paint. Digital comics for the ease of colouring. For the ease of adding dialog. For the ease of fixing mistakes. Ease. Easy.

It's not as satisfying as getting it done on a piece of paper.

The comic I'm running will end in about ten installments. Once it's done I plan to abandon both a regular update schedule and Clip Studio Paint. There's no point in tap dancing for an audience that vastly prefers the types of comics that I don't make anyway. The only logical path is to work for my own satisfaction.

Right now that satisfaction is on paper and shared whenever it's done.
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This will probably change after the fifth time I spill ink on my page.

Here's a photo to test Flickr as an off site image host.




Trying to remember how to operate a blog using 2001 methods is taking time.

A Tale
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So they were like, "Hey, you remember Dreamwidth?"

I was like, "Oh yeah. Scans Daily. Where you get to see the latest Batman no matter what."

And they went, "It's still there."

Then I went, "Neat. Let's give its early 2000s vibe a try then."

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The End