Yup, so deer camp happened...I had fun. Didn't get anything, though. Saw one doe walking along, but I let her pass, thinking "There's probably a buck behind her!" There wasn't. And nothing for the next three days. Grrr. Weirdly, the probability of getting a deer drops off exponentially after the 15th of November: the lack of hunting pressure beforehand surprises the deer, and with all the hunters blasting away, they keep moving. Afterward, all except a few die-hards have gone home, and the deer remember their anti-human tactics: stick to the deep, thick stuff. Another possible factor was the niceness of the weather, which is a double-edged sword - great for sitting, bad for getting the lazy old whitetails off their asses. I mean, come on, guys! Do your job and strut out in front of those crosshairs, instead of being all, "I want to live another year"...
Jerks.
Anywho, I still had a good time. And now that I'm back and (relatively) refreshed, it's time to get back to the serious (ahem) business of comic books.
We just received the proof for Bone Boy 2.5, so after some additional tweaking, we should have it on the shelves by the end of this month. Die Katze #1 has just been sent off for proofing; look for it in early December. I'm going to see about having some kind of release event, but we'll see how that goes. Keep your ears open.
In the meantime, I got myself tangled up in yet another project: I'm doing National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, if you're nasty. The premise is, you try to write 50,000 (coherent) words of a novel in 30 days, and have it done by midnight on the 1st of December. Whether it's complete or not, or even readable, is dependent on your Instant Story Creation Index, or ISCI, which is an official measure of plot improvisation that I just made up two seconds ago.
I've been writing a lot lately, in addition to my comic book making; fiction (especially sci-fi) was sort of my second love, with drawing being my first. Comic books came along somewhat later, although they're by far my favorite medium. Story writing is a nice side-passion, though, because whereas comics require a lot of planning and coordination, writing spills out instantaneously, about as fast as you can type (I prefer using a word processor as opposed to writing longhand).
I chose to do NaNoWriMo because it keeps my racing mind occupied, in between planning, creating, and editing various comics (such a slacker, I know). The thing about writing is, it's less "quantum" than a comic; that is to say, it's a continuum rather than a set of discreet bits or stages. For instance: with a comic, when I begin the actual drawing of the comic, I start with the pencils, and then once the pencils are done I have to go back through and ink over the same things. The "illustration" is not done until both of these steps is accomplished, and then the post-production (digital cleanup and word balloons) entails going back over the same images, over and over again. So you're basically spending a huge amount of effort in a multistep process in order to produce one thing. With writing, on the other hand, there's a lot less re-treading; the only real "step" is, "keep writing"; you can leave out a bit and come back to it later, and it doesn't feel like you're constantly going over the same territory. Of course the editing/revising stage requires you to go back over the horrible, unreadable dreck you've foisted upon the public; but for the most part there's this constant flow, instead of these jerky, discreet steps.
What I almost managed to articulate in the thoroughly confusing last paragraph is that, in a weird way, writing allows me to relax from comics without having to stop creating. The creative flow is something I'm kind of addicted to. When my comics are really making me frustrated, I still need something to keep the flow going, without taxing my spatial reasoning too much. Writing fits the bill quite well.
Anyway, enough about that. I'm currently enjoying the surprise snow (yeah, I like the cold), and I hope it sticks around for a bit, at least until Christmas.
Rick Out.
Jerks.
Anywho, I still had a good time. And now that I'm back and (relatively) refreshed, it's time to get back to the serious (ahem) business of comic books.
We just received the proof for Bone Boy 2.5, so after some additional tweaking, we should have it on the shelves by the end of this month. Die Katze #1 has just been sent off for proofing; look for it in early December. I'm going to see about having some kind of release event, but we'll see how that goes. Keep your ears open.
In the meantime, I got myself tangled up in yet another project: I'm doing National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, if you're nasty. The premise is, you try to write 50,000 (coherent) words of a novel in 30 days, and have it done by midnight on the 1st of December. Whether it's complete or not, or even readable, is dependent on your Instant Story Creation Index, or ISCI, which is an official measure of plot improvisation that I just made up two seconds ago.
I've been writing a lot lately, in addition to my comic book making; fiction (especially sci-fi) was sort of my second love, with drawing being my first. Comic books came along somewhat later, although they're by far my favorite medium. Story writing is a nice side-passion, though, because whereas comics require a lot of planning and coordination, writing spills out instantaneously, about as fast as you can type (I prefer using a word processor as opposed to writing longhand).
I chose to do NaNoWriMo because it keeps my racing mind occupied, in between planning, creating, and editing various comics (such a slacker, I know). The thing about writing is, it's less "quantum" than a comic; that is to say, it's a continuum rather than a set of discreet bits or stages. For instance: with a comic, when I begin the actual drawing of the comic, I start with the pencils, and then once the pencils are done I have to go back through and ink over the same things. The "illustration" is not done until both of these steps is accomplished, and then the post-production (digital cleanup and word balloons) entails going back over the same images, over and over again. So you're basically spending a huge amount of effort in a multistep process in order to produce one thing. With writing, on the other hand, there's a lot less re-treading; the only real "step" is, "keep writing"; you can leave out a bit and come back to it later, and it doesn't feel like you're constantly going over the same territory. Of course the editing/revising stage requires you to go back over the horrible, unreadable dreck you've foisted upon the public; but for the most part there's this constant flow, instead of these jerky, discreet steps.
What I almost managed to articulate in the thoroughly confusing last paragraph is that, in a weird way, writing allows me to relax from comics without having to stop creating. The creative flow is something I'm kind of addicted to. When my comics are really making me frustrated, I still need something to keep the flow going, without taxing my spatial reasoning too much. Writing fits the bill quite well.
Anyway, enough about that. I'm currently enjoying the surprise snow (yeah, I like the cold), and I hope it sticks around for a bit, at least until Christmas.
Rick Out.
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