Scraps (n. ,fem., singular)

For some reason, Spectrum and I decided this weekend would be a good one for scary, spooky, etc. movies. Granted, neither of us are into blood and gore, so we ended up renting Skeleton Key (which Spectrum hadn’t seen, and what started this little odyssey), 1408 (”and the word is… innnnnteresting”), and House on Haunted Hill (the recent remake, which we both remembered liking and being a bit spooked by).

Um, yeah.

I don’t know if I’m just jaded and whatnot or if it was because we didn’t watch them all at night with the lights off or what, but none of them were at all scary and even though Skeleton Key was the most enjoyable one (filed in Drama which was odd but I guess it really is more suspenseful than scary) the other two were incredibly… well, not all that.

But it was a good weekend regardless of the questionable viewing choices and I got a lot done, including all of this week’s comics. Now if I could just get at least 2 articles done and next week’s comics started I won’t have to worry about dropping the ball due to el-surgerio in just a couple days. Pre-Op appointment is tomorrow, more will be revealed, I’m sure.

Tags: movies, Skeleton Key, 1408, House on Haunted Hill, comics, writing, work, pre-op

And thank heavens for that. It seemed like it took forever to get started drawing tonight. In fact, the first panel of Wednesday’s strip took a full hour. But I’m really proud of some of the poses I managed to draw in the 2nd and 5th panels so it all balances out. Still working on Friday’s pencils but there’s several panels still virtually blank so they may spill over into tomorrow.

Now for something completely different. I’ve been sporadically exposing Spectrum to various movies he’s never watched before. This weekend is was Oscar! with Sylvester Stallone. I’m not really a Sly fan, but this movie makes me giggle whenever i see it. Last weekend it was Lemony Snickett’s a Series of Unfortunate Events, before that Coyote Ugly and before that Sugar and Spice. So far he’s found them all enjoyable and some (SnS, primarily) laugh-out-loud funny Granted, there are some movies I’d never ask him to watch (Clueless comes immediately to mind) but there are plenty of others I can mine for entertainment value.

Tags: movies, drawing

And last night I didn’t have it.

Well, I did, but it was all occupied by pencilling for over 6 hours straight. So that tells me that it takes just over 2 hours per page just to pencil. Tonight was all about the inking and I’m pretty much at 1.5 hours per page for that. So 3.5 hours per page (update) not including scripting (and let’s not get into the strange ordeal that turns into–you’d think it would be simple because, you know, I lived it and all, but not necessarily). Which isn’t all that bad, not really, and it tells me how much I’d need to carve out of my week if I wanted to start building that buffer again (though, as I told Spectrum, I don’t see that really happening anytime soon without a week’s vacation from the day job).

Anyway, have I done anything else other than the comic? Um, no… That’s why I’ll be drafting two articles tomorrow night to catch up with that and, then, probably spend Thursday before and after the meeting working on the WT script. Sure, that works… sorta.

Still no word from the doctor. They have through tomorrow before I have to get a little pushy. I realize that I’m not their only patient. I realize that at the time I was having my studies done, at least one if not two others were also having them done, and then however many repeats during the day. And I realize that there’s probably one, maybe two, doctors that review the studies (which is another peeve: the person going over the films is not the person I’ve talked to, knows nothing other than whatever my form says (which I didn’t get to write) so cares not one iota about my concerns… but anyway!) so it takes exponentially more time to get results. But just because there are other patients does not make my health, my issues, less important than anyone else, and 5-7 days is just rather ridiculous when you consider the ongoing issues it’s supposed to spot. Sigh… Whatever, I’ll eventually get the results and may actually have something to actually work on then. But the waiting sucks, okay?

Tags: comic, art, drawing, time management, waiting, doctors

But I don’t really feel up to blogging about any of it. Maybe tomorrow I can muddle through it a bit more. In the mean time, I’ll just ruminate in silence while inking this week’s comics.

I teetered a bit on that whole no-shopping thing this weekend but it wasn’t much. And it was in the name of research and good will as while he was ringing up my purchases I sweetly asked if i could conduct a brief interview. So, yeah, total expense account. I can only claim laziness and cravings for the meals out Friday and Saturday but it still wasn’t at all extravagant. So I didn’t make it an entire month, but I got close! And I’m going to stick with it until Friday, anyway.

Work-wise I’m in the midst of wrapping up my last 4 articles for the month. It always feels good to get another month in the can which leads directly to another check in the mail. Always a good thing. And since it gives me most of a week before I need to start writing the next set of articles that gives me time to not only work on this week’s comics but scripting all of next month as well. Back to the photo editing for the articles, though.

No, I didn’t go shopping!

Well, okay, that might not be completely accurate. I’ve been getting quotes from various printers for the Random Acts… year 1 book (title TBA) and made a dummy so I can get some physical planning done. Now, I’d organized my strips from the first year and had them all in lists and sized and so forth, even to the point of jotting down some notes on additional content to make the book that much better a buy. The dummy, though, it helping me wrap my mind around how many pages (of the 80 I’ve set it at) will be taken up by business-type stuff and where the additional content will fit.

So it’s progress. And that’s a good thing. My goal to have the book done by the end of August probably will need a bit of adjustment, but not much. It’ll still be out in the Fall, it might just be more middle than early

Work was… work. Not horrible, but it certainly didn’t fly by, either. Got a fair amount done, so all’s well. Of course, I was a leetle brain-dead at first when I spent however long trying to figure out what was missing on a bank rec, rechecking all the deposits and checks only to finally realize I hadn’t reset the beginning values on the form. Dur.

Once home, all I had to do was pencil this week’s strips. Distracted much? Yes, thank you. I think I should pay more attention to how much detail I’m expecting from each of the week’s strips to avoid what happened tonight: 3 days, 6 panels each, almost all fairly detailed. Oops! And it’s not that it’s incredibly difficult (a few were tedious from a perspective point of view–ba dum bump!) it’s just I was not totally on-task. Still, at this writing I’ve got two of the three days penciled and the third decently begun. Won’t have any trouble getting Wednesday’s ready for a timely update but it remains to be seen whether they all get inked tomorrow night or if they spill over into Wednesday. I hope not since I’ve got articles to finish up, but it will all get done, it always does.

Going to throw another 30 minutes at it before bed and see how far I can get.

oh! My girl didn’t win on Legally Blonde the Musical: Search for the Next Elle Woods. I was really pulling for the other girl, but, oh well. I’ve no doubt someone else will snap her up for something now that the show has finished.

“anyone comprised with an immune system”

As it was a warning for the young and the elderly to avoid Serrano, etc. peppers as they could still contain some salmonella (tomatoes having been given the all-clear, not that it does me any good) I’m fairly sure that should have been “anyone with a comprOMised immune system” but that’s just a theory

Decent day at work, no real tummy troubles (yes!) and an SCA meeting tonight. Got a load of towels and sheets laundered, tested out a new printable for Random Acts… (functionally sound, just needs color and accessories) and tidied up a bit. Also came up with a new layout idea for the RA website. Now just to figure out how to get the ComicPress theme to do what I want it to I don’t expect it to be impossible, just challenging. Challenging I can do

Some days you win, some days you lose. Today was sorta in the middle.

Work was okay ’til lunch. When said lunch decided it didn’t want to play nice. Granted, I didn’t feel too well after supper last night (which was the same thing: Garden Salad with Salmon, simple, healthy, tasty) but I thought it was a fluke. Er, no. So, okay, feeling very ill for a couple hours while I trudge through some receivables reports. Enter confused client. Confused client is sorta disputing an alterations charge because the salesman (big surprise) neglected to inform, yadda yadda yadda, Boss walks in as I’m getting off of that call, explain to him what he overheard, have to dress-down salesman who tries to tell me he told the client all about it (which I doubt since there’s nothing in writing and it’s a credit card order and he knows we have to have price changes in writing).

And my body said no. My face and chest splotched bright red and stayed that way, burning, full-on flushing, for the rest of the day. Which, you know, might not sound like much but it’s actually really draining. Thing is, this isn’t the first time this reaction had happened, recently, I’ve been having more symptoms in the last month or so compared to the last 6 months prior combined (or longer). It kinda bums me out that this stuff is back again, that I might not be able to breeze through that next round of dr’s appointments and labwork in September. It’s not what it was 3 years ago, before I knew what it was and what I could do to help the situation, but it’s ramping up a bit. Trying not to spaz about it, and all, but it’s annoying.

On the up side, though, I totoally managed to get all the inking for this week’s comics taken care of tonight, scanned, uploaded and blogged. Whew! That’s what took today from majorly sucking to being moderately okay. Had a very safe supper, ditched the rest of the salad leftovers, and am looking forward to a much better day tomorrow. I think it might be a good time to work on the next article and play with the Print Gocco kit, finally: two birds, one stone.

Man, this ISBN or not to ISBN is totally giving me a headache so I’m tabling the issue for a little while longer. After all, I still have the extra strips to do for the book and all the layout, I really only need to know before I design the cover (holy cow, the cover, not a clue there yet).

I mean, getting the ISBN is really just a matter of a form and a check. The thing is, I’d be the publisher of record so I suppose I should really do it right by setting up a fictitious name (another form, another check) and get a PO Box for it just to be all official and everything. And I’ve been thinking a PO Box wouldn’t be a bad idea, anyway, just to use for business-type things. It just feels like a much huger step than a couple of forms and a couple of checks, ya know?

Of course, it’s not like Book 1 is meant to be a bestseller. Honestly, part of it is for tax reasons, showing a good faith effort in actually, eventually turning some sort of small profit so that art supplies, etc. are acceptable write-offs. I have no need, at this stage of the game, to go anywhere near Inc or LLC status, so at least that’s not hurting my head, but the rest is official enough for right now.

Since this is me, of course I’ll probably just go ahead and deal with the forms and pay the fees and have 10 ISBNs to use over the next however long (for instance, did you know electronic “books” require their own, separate, ISBN? They do… go figure! and, of course, each individual edition needs its own and while I don’t plan to do revisions on the Year 1 book, there are other projects in the works). I know I will. It just started to seem a tad overwhelming for a bit.

It was a choice between the meeting, tonight, or productivity. Let’s face it: on meeting nights my time gets chopped up and I can’t find a rhythm. By the time I get home (and this would have likely been another long one) I’m usually wiped and/or flighty. So, knowing that I’m still constantly exhausted, had a headache, and still had work on two articles for the 15th, I opted for productivity, slow as it was.

Now I have two articles drafted, a third begun, a closet of clean towels and a tidied living and dining rooms. Not bad for having to bribe myself with several games of WordTwist in between the more ornery parts. Last night I started on an idea for some paper doll scenery and I think it’s going well. Got the basic shape and construction issues on paper, now for a few more details, ink, color, and the accessories which will go on a separate sheet. This is so much fun, I’m going to have to be careful not to get carried away with it

What? I’m all out of the funny.

Comics are done for the week, leaving me plenty of time to write after dinner tomorrow night. Things are still on track, so far, both at work and home. [Passed] Time for bed.

Last week just took twice as long to do everything as planned. But everything got done, so I suppose that’s all that matters. Trying to get back on my usual schedule this week and so far, so good. I have most of this week’s penciling done, one article drafted and two more pretty well-formed in my head. As long as I can keep up with things I should be in good shape. Hopefully I can get some of the additional content done for the Year 1 book worked on as well, this Fall is coming rather quickly, you know?

Not totally, of course, there was the scanning and the PhotoShop cleaning of the print pages which did get done. And all those grays I was erasing stray marks to be able to pick them up better? They totally dropped out anyway. Apparently 20% cool gray is ass for scanning. Oh well, just tweaked the levels and left them out. I was kinda worried how they’d print anyway so it’s probably just as well. If it’d been only a little uneven I just would have gone back over it with the airbrush to fix it. Oh, well, live and learn.

Other than that, nothing had really happened tonight. I had totally planned to start on this week’s strips tonight, at least getting pencils down but, well, no. Didn’t happen. And I’m not going to beat myself up over it, either. I can definitely get Wednesday’s up tomorrow night so there’s no crisis and after pushing myself so much these past couple of weeks I think a night off is not uncalled for.

Now about July… July is going to be a “chill” month for me. Of course I still have the comic and my eHow articles to do but here are some things I’m not going to be doing:
*taking on new projects
*scripting Act 2 of Wedding Tarot (it’ll wait til August)
*committing to new projects for future months
*throwing a party (it was a possibility, but no, I need the break)
etc.

I also plan to curb the superfluous spending for the month of July, kinda like a lifestyle detox. Of course, that just meant that I ordered the print gocco machine tonight rather than waiting on later this month, but I’ve been planning to order it for 2+ months now and it will actually be used for an article, at that. But enough excuses. Aside from things like gas and groceries and necessary art supplies it’s gonna be nix on the other frivolities. We’ll see how that goes

I think I sprained my toes. This is what comes of rushing from one room to another while simultaneously scanning comics and moving furniture to make way for the carpet cleaners that are coming tomorrow. I’d have been fine if that folding stool hadn’t been moved. But it was. And then were my toes. It’s not horrible, it’s just one of those things. And I think I’ll definitely be wearing flats tomorrow just in case.

Managed to get this week’s comics finished this evening in totality which is good because I really should spend some quality time on the print submission this week to get back on track for the July 1 due date plus draft the next article tomorrow night. Thursday is Mom’s birthday so that’ll be another SCA meeting missed in favor of the birthday dinner. (Note to self: call and order her birthday cake tomorrow!)

So I engaged in a bit of retail therapy last week and I was really surprised that my ring from ice.com came in so soon. Isn’t it pretty? It’s almost too pretty, but not quite, lol.

Anyway, aside from admiring the new pretty I managed to get two of this week’s comics completed and the third about half-way there. Which is good because I need to pick up non essential items from the living room and dining room tomorrow night because the carpet cleaners are coming Wednesday! Lovely two day warning, huh? But, hey, it’s a freebie due to renewing my lease, so who am I to really argue. I figure I’ll stash the dining room table (thank goodness its lightweight) and chairs on the bed and roll up the rug so they can cover the most area. The Abyss is still off limits and I’ll probably just close both bedroom doors just to avoid the headache. It’s the high-traffic areas that need it anyway.

So, today’s headache? RSS feeds.

I absolutely adore Google Reader, it saves me so much time every day and I know many people feel the same way about their chose feed readers. I also adore Google Analytics for tracking Random Acts… stats. The one thing it doesn’t track? RSS subscriptions. I could have more readers than I thought, so I decided to look into ways to track RSS subscriptions.

Enter FeedBurner. Now, I actually have misgivings about using this service but many people do, even some webcomics I know of, and it really would be nice to have those numbers, so I install it and set up the feed. Oh, look, it allows you to alias your domain for the reader url instead of there’s, that’s nice, I even managed to create a DNS entry all on my own. Of course, it didn’t quite work. So I backtracked, deactivated that option and set the various urls to point to each other. Baby steps.

Well, that took care of the out and out error message I was getting, but now the RSS subscriber in the url field looks for feeds.randomactscomics.com (which doesn’t exist). I’ve been able to use validators to see that randomactscomics.com/feed/ and the feedburner url are both valid but I don’t see anywhere to tell Wordpress where to look. Sigh… I think it might have something to do with the Comic Press plug-in but I can’t be sure, nonetheless I’ve thrown myself on the mercy and wisdom of the plugin’s forum to see if there’s a known solution or trick I’m just not aware of.

Worst case scenario is I deactivate the lot and just let those go untracked until I find a better solution. But I hate taking steps backward!

Now I’ve got Carol Burnett from Annie running through my head. I spent the evening editing a couple of articles and finishing some clay doll parts for one of them. Between all the typing and mousing and drawing and now the clay stuff my right hand is really smarting. Time to dig out that elastic brace and some ibuprofen!

I can hardly wait to check out my pageviews for Random Acts from today. I threw $5 at a Project Wonderful ad (lasted for about 7 hours on a high-traffic site) just to test and I know I got 15 clicks (12 uniques) from the ad but I wonder if more people went to the site directly instead of clicking through. It’ll be interesting to see how many archive crawls I can detect and, more importantly, how many come back later in the week. Basically I earned the paypal money from the eHow WCP and if it’s in my PayPal account its ‘play money’ in my mind, so if it doesn’t pan out, it’s no great loss. If it does, well, then I’ll try a few different sites/days/hour combinations as long as there is funds in the paypal. Thinking about buying a newsletter ad for next week, too, again just to experiment. Baby steps.

For a brief fraction of a moment. On the comics at least. Managed to get this week’s strips done tonight and at a reasonable hour, too. It has a lot to do with some streamlined backgrounds this week compared to the host of details involved with the last week’s mini-arc. If I can keep them minimal but complete, I will be happy and done sooner. Buffer is a long way off, though, as I’ve sorta used up my wiggle-room on the RA… print submission. I have til the end of the month before I break my self-stated deadline to the publisher and I don’t intend to break it. Work work work

But the rest of the week can be split between the print special and my eHow articles, which should get me back on track and in line with all of my deadlines. Maybe I’ll even have a chance to get more script written on Wedding Tarot!

So. This weekend was my first Con and overall it was a very pleasant experience. As usual, the trip over there was half the fun in itself, but that’s a road trip with Palmie and I.

We finally got to Panama City and had dinner in a Pirate Ship (that the 70s forgot) before heading to the hotel. Palmie’s all like ‘I see nerds, we must be in the right place’ and right until we saw the land speeder and I braked to stare at it, we seemed fairly normal. SO much for that! I also ended up with the first guest sighting (Brian from Ghost Hunters) as we entered our building.

The Con Registration Desk had closed by the time we wandered over there (right around 8:00). And, well, this is the one main issue that I had this weekend: a lack of organization. Now, no registration hours were posted on the website prior to the Con BUT since there were film screenings going on into the wee hours and a poolside mixer that evening until around 10 or so, it seemed logical that reg would be open later in the evening. Uh, no. We were told to come back in the morning, 8am to be specific. (Found out later that the volunteer that told us that was supposed to have gone to get one of the head people to check-in “stragglers” but was too lazy. Regardless, it was an issue.)

Saturday morning we make sure we’re up and dressed and headed over to the Con area right around 8am. Yeah. No one there. Finally a staffer walks up and we ask about picking up our badges and she rummages around a bit and tells us that Reg won’t be open until 10am. Uh… the first panel starts when? Oh, right, NINE. See the problem? Turned out to be some sort of mega-miscommunication and it was 2 minutes to 9 before they finally got the box of badges and list of pre-regged sheets (because yes, we were prepaid, all we needed were our badges and bags). It wasn’t just us, of course, there were some vendors who couldn’t get into the dealer room yet, either.

Thankfully this was the only real hiccup. They could have used a tighter ship when it came to scheduling and making sure the panels ended when they were supposed to, but they were pretty good about posting revised schedules as the day progressed. Palmie and I have different opinions on this matter. She says that all cons run this way (though that’s not entirely true as Spectrum had a different experience at GenCon, but whatever) but I look at it from a basic, event planning 101 stand-point: you set a schedule and you do your damnedest to stick to it. You have people available to get your attendees what they need to enjoy the day they paid for. I don’t care if some actor is running a workshop that people paid $20 a pop to attend. They paid for an hour, clear the room after that so the next group can get in. Also, having planned wiggle-room to change over areas is a really good idea–think back to high school when you had so many minutes to change classes. It is, literally, textbook.

Okay, now that that’s done, let’s get to the fun stuff. The hotel was pretty nice, not too crowded despite the various things going on (if there were more than 200 people at Wrath of Con I’d be utterly shocked), and the restaurants never had a wait (which was crazy… I don’t know exactly how folks managed that). The only panels I was planning to attend were the Ghost Hunters panels at 9 and 10 on Saturday. Everything after that were stars of shows I didn’t watch. The Ghost Hunters were fun though did start (and end) about 30 minutes late. Ended up going to the Jerry Doyle Q&A with Palmie and Spectrum and it was an absolute riot! Man! I sorta want to watch Babylon 5 now. Later that day I took in the rescheduled Art, Comics and Manga panel which was pretty cool and chatted with the moderator afterwards, being brave and self-promoting a little bit Not sure how many of my flyers got picked up, but a few did. Hey, they aren’t exactly my target audience, not really, so it was cool.

The dealer room was jam packed and kinda small BUT very fun to browse. I ended up buying a set of marabou-trimmed horns and had a watercolor caricature done on Saturday and then picked up some books on Sunday, signed by their respective authors. Not exactly sure when I’ll have a chance to read them, but I’ll add them to the stack. Also picked up a lot of cards and flyers of things to check out later and follow up on if they prove interesting.

Sunday morning I really didn’t have anything I wanted to do other than that last trip through the dealer room. That accomplished, I found a comfy chair to commandeer, took out my art supplies and penciled two pages of a Random Acts… side project (more info when there’s concrete data on that, I promise) while Spectrum and Palmie did their thing for the morning and early afternoon. Due to some interesting schedule issues and a missing Jerry Doyle (temporarily) we didn’t end up hitting the road until 4ish. Later than I’d wanted to leave, but I was getting so much work done and they were having a blast so it really didn’t hurt anything.

After stopping at IHOP for an early supper we rolled into Tallahassee a little after 7pm, exhausted but happy. Nice first Con. And I know, I know, Dragon*Con will be vastly different. I’m looking forward to it.