THE LAND OF PUSH AND PULL

 

Your perfect soundtrack for thist post. Just loop it.

I managed to trap myself yesterday, pretty bad. Not gonna bog you down with the personal details that you’re not really interested in, but last week was no damn good. This week not so much either. Let it all catch up to me, or I guess you could say I jumped into the cage myself. Whichever. Little of both because the truth of it is that it takes energy not to jump into the cage and pull the door shut behind you.

A lot of this, work-wise comes from the push and pull of trying to validate all this work by making it sell. Figuring out what’s going to work and second guessing yourself is bad enough. It can cripple as badly as being hit by a car. But when I (and maybe even you) start hamstringing myself with what’s got a chance of selling, much less working, and I dwell on that for any length of time? Yeah, that’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Truth of it is, knowing what will sell is a misnomer (at least on the onset — in theory one gets so well known that they can do pretty much anything and it’ll sell to an audience). Ain’t nobody knows, and anyone whose telling you different is lying, else we’d see nothing but best-sellers from every publisher, record company and movie studio forever and ever. That’s not how this works. Still, the work has to work.

And that’s where I’m killing myself. Thinking too many moves ahead. That’s just as useless as thinking about how the best work is all in the past, whether it be books, movies, music, cartoons, etc etc. Or that your best work is in the past because if it is, well then why are you bothering, right?

Of course, those aren’t the problems that I’ve been having. Mine has been more just connecting, which is a frustrating process when in the best of times, I’m only able to do about 30% time on work. Yes, I know. That’s not acceptable and if only you were devoted enough to do 100% work time you’d be successful. That’s also not a reasonable expectation in my situation.

So yeah, frustration boils over and you lose a day doing nothing, hating everything you do, feeling boxed in and that it’ll always be this way. That last one’s the killer, the real crippler.

I know. “Abloo! Abloo! Life’s so unfair!” Got it.

So, for real work update? Hah. It’s all pitch revision and in some cases, creation. Unfortunately, pitches and storylines are where all the work is front-loaded. It’s the hundred pages of stuff that nobody sees, and an editor might see five pages of. Think about that again. A hundred pages of work that nobody sees and the editor I’m pitching to sees a distillation of about 5 pages, maybe. That hundred pages still has to get written before a thing gets done. Character arcs, worldbuilding, aesthetics (this is comics after all), plot arcs (both initial plotting and have enough to continue from). At least the whole of a novel gets seen, right? Not development stuff. Which is done solo, in my case, I suppose others have a group to bounce things off of. I don’t. And I have a lot of other stuff to do, so building the mountain that has to get carved into Mt. Rushmore seems like a daunting task, particularly when the success rate of your earlier works is what mine is. But enough of that. Just know that a pitch isn’t something you dash off in an afternoon even when you have the smoking hot idea for it. The smoking hot idea, by the way, is the easiest part.

Working on further revision of RAGNAROK SUMMER, which is about 2/3 done. Probably one final pass on top of that. I realize it’s not going to reach perfection, but I’ve got no use for that. I do need to finish more.

STRANGEWAYS grinds along. I’m tempted to post a page from Luis’ Guragña’s story just to show you all how good he is now, but the one I want to show is a massive spoiler and that ain’t fair. Still have one story that needs an artist assigned (and it’s a challenge so, I don’t want to hand it out lightly) as well as a cover. Cover’s kinda important. Need it to be eye-catching, hint at the story, but keep in the tradition of a graphic style, so those make it a tall order to fill. I’m still optimistic for it to be finished this year and released next, but optimism is the opiate of the artist or something.

Still doing creative unwinding work over at Intrapanel. Taking macro photographs of comics beats alcohol as a way to ease down.

Also spent part of last weekend at the San Jose comics fest known as Big Wow! and I’ll have to write that up another time. Oh, and some thoughts on the Netflix DAREDEVIL series and the nature of serial entertainment structures with regards to television and movies and comics (mostly not movies, but a little bit.) Again, those will have to be separate entries. Gotta wrap this one up.