itesser ink: progress, uncensored

No art today.

I made a couple bad choices in an otherwise good day. Most of them involved dinner.

Don't get me wrong, it tasted good, but the whole production cut a couple hours into my "drawing time".

I'll tell you this much: Schedules suck. I never want to stop what I'm doing to move on to the other things I want to do. Yes, I complained about this yesterday, but, really, 24-hour days cramp my style.

But I'm very happy with the writing I'm doing and very happy with the reading I'm doing, and joyfully angry at the yoga work-out I got this morning (it was difficult, but felt good).

The writing project is scripting for the for-fun comic I'll be starting to thumbnail in about four days, starting to draw-ink(-color(?)) in 35 days, and slowly release onto the internet in approximately three months.

The writing won't be done by then. I'm working at a pace of about five longhand pages a day, which is ten to twenty pages of drawing (wow), and accounts for three or four scenes. Those latter figures are approximations. In the stack of paper I have "completed", I've worked through less than a third of the story I want to tell. If I was reading any book other than Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that might be a problem for me.

Instead, I am reading that book, immersing myself in the many details and events of these characters lives. In reading Atlas Shrugged, it is important to me that I am 600 pages into a book with almost 1100 pages and there is still the possibility in my mind that the blurb on the back cover about it being "a mystery story... about the murder--and rebirth--of a man's spirit" could refer to at least two different characters.

The story I'm writing isn't a fantasy novel, or pop-fiction, or a screenplay, or anything that will end up with three clear acts with comfortably predictable pacing. I'm glad that it's not possible to see the end from the beginning, to hold the story in hand and say "okay, I can judge how many pages are left for me to get through"

Yes, if this is ever published in a print format those things will be untrue, but I'm not thinking about eventualities like that now. I'm thinking of the journey of exploration I want to take readers on. Something that they will like enough to trust me and follow me into the jungle of the main character's life It won't be a rollercoaster, but a safari through one man's experiences, detailing the new reality of his life when that man uses a Magic 8 Ball to make his decisions.

I've had fun getting to know this character. I meet his friends and his enemies, his family and his crushes. I've watched him quit his job and get a dog. I've watched him try new things without hesitation, and resist the status quo. Today this new man in my life flew home to a family member's sickbed, and tomorrow he will make a confessor out of an old friend.

And that old friend? Let me tell you-- bad jokes.

There was no art today, but there was accomplishment.

I still believe that this M08B is something I will be proud of, and I can't wait till I have more to share.