Author: Teel

Okay, as I stated in my last post, Iain and I are planning on each doing a full comic (24 comic-book-size pages OR 100 panels of an online comic, all completely finished (and online, for the online comic)) sometime this week. I don’t know exactly when I’ll have the four hours to do it, but heck, maybe tomorrow night, right? Hah!

Anyway, I’m going to be making it available online in two ways, which Iain can already guess, seeing as we discussed it:

First, you can watch the comic unfold as I draw it, for $0.49 via BitPass. You will be buying access to a special page where I will be uploading panels as they get done, so you will be able to see the comic get created LIVE. I am, thus, planning on getting 100 panels done in four hours. Your purchase will allow you access to this special page for 30 days and four hours, so feel free to buy now and come back as often as you like to enjoy and re-enjoy … whatever it is I end up drawing.

Remember, in order to keep up, I’ll need to draw a panel around every two minutes. Wait, is that right? [Teel opens his calculator app… yep] Yes. If I were to draw a panel every two minutes, I would get to 120 panels. In the event that I somehow get ahead, and it fits the “story”, I may just do that. Now that I think about it, I think Iain said he might do that. Fine. I’ll do 144 panels. I’ll get a panel done and online every 1minute and 40 seconds, HAH! Err. Well. If you buy the live subscription, you can see me try to do just that.

Here is the link to purchase 30 days of access to my forthcoming LIVE Four-Hour Comic:

Remember, you can use BitPass funds towards many other online purchases, including comics, music, and … some powerpoint presentations, I think… Yeah. And you can buy BitPass funds with any major credit card, or your Paypal account (remember, Paypal can take funds from your checking account, so you can use it even without a credit card!). So, yeah. Do that.

Second, for those of you who don’t have a credit card, checking account, and don’t know anyone with same, you can still read my Four-Hour Comic. I will post it, three or four panels at a time (or so) over the course of the month directly following its creation… Probably starting next Tuesday…. you know, in case for some reason I end up doing the comic from 5 to 9PM next Monday night, just under the deadline. I’ll surely want to pass out at that time.

So, there you have it, you can see it unfold live, read it all at once, and enjoy the magic of the Four-Hour Comic (Did I invent it by suggesting that it ought to be actually done, or did John Allison invent it with a simple typo? I give credit to John. This was all his idea.) or you can wait patiently and see it unfold over the course of a month.

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Two more, little things.

If you did decide to buy access, you probably noticed that it said “take 1” in the title. This is because I would like to try to do a Four-Hour Comic at least once a month. Not just so that I have new comics content on Modern Evil just about every day from now on, but so that I get some comicking done every month. As opposed to the last few months, where I’ve basically not done any comic-making. Wheee!

Also, if there’s interest, I might turn on my microphone and record a four-hour audio session as I draw the comic. I could encode it as a reasonably-sized file (or maybe many small files, with cutoffs at the end of panels or panel groups or whatever) and give it free to people who paid to watch the comic live (after the comic was done, of course) and offer it for some small BitPass charge along with the appropriate panels? That would be neat. Like, buy the audio corresponding with the three or four-panel segments of the comic as they go online daily for a penny or two. Hear me struggle with drawing, and perhaps more fun, hear me struggle with getting the panels online!

(That reminds me that I have to upload all the panels as I go along; perhaps I ought not to try for 144 panels… Sigh… Silly Iain with his fancy broadband…)

That’s all for now. I’ll try to give ample notice (say, at least a few hours?) before I get started, so you can try to watch it as it happens. Now, to sleep.

So, a couple of people made their epic attempts at the “24-hour comic” this weekend, and someone else was making note of it and said “You’re meant to do 24 pages in 4 hours…” which is a typo that he may or may not fix soon, but which matched an idea I’d already had, while talking to Iain about his comic as he did it.

See, really, the comic is meant to be 24 pages (or 100 panels, for online comics), all drawn, inked, lettered, colored, and done before the end of the 24 hours (also scanned and online, in the case of the 100-panel online comic in 24hours). Not four hours.

But … I think I can do a 100-panel online comic in four hours.

In fact, I’ve just been having a little bit of a chat with Iain, and despite his utter, miserable failure at completeing the 24-hour comic in 24 hours (at least you aren’t a quitter, Iain! ::wink::), he also believes he will be able to complete a 24-page (or 100-panel online) comic in under four hours. Before the end of the week. So, how about we say that before next Monday at 21:00MST, Iain and I will both have our 100-panel comics online, each done in under four hours?

Whaddya say?

Anyone else want to play along?

Hey, everybody! Listen to the exciting “Radio” advert (by which I mean, MP3 I recorded) for my soon-to-be-available novel, Lost and Not Found!

Click here to hear the ad!

This is me, reading the copy from the back cover of the book, as it currently reads.

Does it encourage you to buy the book? Sure does! Now enjoy 15% off pre-orders between now and … when the book is available for sale, probably in a week (or two?). Click here to see the links to pre-order!

So, I got everything moved over from the orignal copy of FYTH into this new one. You shouldn’t notice a difference, since I have the new copy working right over top of where the old one was before. Except, of course, that I should (hopefully) stopgetting database errors every time I try to post something, and y’all should have less difficulty posting comments. Moo.

Let me know if you experience ANY trouble, and if you experience LESS trouble, too.

Thanks.

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Okay, so that didn’t work. I got an error as soon as I hit ‘save’. I’ll be … I don’t know… I’ll move over to 1&1 ASAP and see about whether their servers have the same issue. The move could take a few days. I’ll try to keep you updated.

Today I typed up all the hand-written pages from this week and the typed pages I did in the store today (I’ve been getting sick of how slow a pen is compared to typing, and carried one of my best typewriters down to the store so I could work while I waited for people to come, look, and not spend any money in our store), and my word count so far for NaNoWriMo is a paltry 5838. That’s just over 11% of the way to the minimum word count.

Well, for this novel. I couldn’t decide (at first) which of two ideas I had to work on, and worked alternately on both for a while, but between the two (totally un-integratable) novels I’m still at less than 7500 words. If I were on pace, I’d be at 25,000 or more! If I were writing with the speed and focus that I put into Forlorn (now re-written as Lost and Not Found) last NaNoWriMo, I’d be done twice over by now. What’s going on here? I think there’s a lot of distractions… last year it was just me and my novel. This year I can hardly get a day alone to work on it. And when I do (a la Thursday), I find myself unable to concentrate or create … blocked and stressed and … I even got a pretty bad headache there for a while… that wasn’t fun.

Cafepress still seems to be saying November 17th for Perfect Bound books. I won’t be ready by that date, but I’m working on it. I have a basic idea for the cover design and I’ve written my own copy … so, yes, it is self-aggrandizing, thank you very much, but it’ll have to do, as no one else seems to have the time to read a book these days. I did finally get back the copy of the book with Angela’s notes in it, and I will be working dilligently on at the very least fixing all the typos she spotted. I will look into other possible changes as they come up. I will also begin recording the audio version … soon. I think that reading the entire thing aloud will be the best way to work out any totally messed-up sentences and mis-understandings and unnatural dialogue, so the print and PDF versions will likely not see the light of day until the audio version is ready, too. I am thinking of offering the ATOMS versions of the book only through Cafepress and the BITS versions of the book only through BitPass… despite the fact that they will be priced well above a penny… I think that since you can buy BitPass currency with PayPal or a credit card without facing a transaction fee and their gateway automatically secures access to the digital files I sell that it will be easier than trying to secure it myself or manually emailing the (huge, in the case of the audio) files to people who pay via PayPal… so, yeah. That’s what I’m thinking. Also, here are some links to Pre-Order the Novel in various formats via PayPal at an extra discount (these links will be de-activated when the novel is finally available):

links removed

In other news, Betty is done, priced ($195 in the store, $147 for internet orders), and hanging in the store. I will try to get a photo taken soon. Depending on weather, I will try to take photos tomorrow. I want to re-photograph all my art so I can crop it all properly and adjust the size and quality to reasonable amounts and put together an easier-to-use interface for the whole ‘Art’ section of Modern Evil … but it has to start with new, good pictures. Of everything. So, we’ll see how that goes, but yeah – Betty is ready, and I think it’s some of my best work yet. I look at it and I’m just struck. Wow. People are already doing double-takes and coming back into the store to have a second look at it. Hopefully someone will want to take Betty home with them sometime soon.

Oh yeah, and the ScreenPrinting business accidentally fell into the time machine. It was set simply for “Spring, 2004”, so hopefully it won’t land too hard on anyone’s foot when it suddenly appears… we won’t know exactly when to expect it, except sometime between now and next summer, I guess. Looking through the time vortex as it plummetted, I think I saw over two dozen new designs available… must have hit some turbulence in the vortex and expanded from two designs to so many. Keep your eyes peeled next year for an explosive appearance of Modern Evil T-Shirts.

Also visible through the shifting vortex (it was only open for about eight minutes or so, since the time machine was actually working only that long – never trust cheap parts from sources in the future for your only time machine; it’s impossible to get them to honor their warranty in the event of a problem, since they don’t exist yet (and your time machine is broken)), this from an unknown point in the future, was a now secret project I’ve recently started on coming to fruition. Suffice it to say I am now actually working on my first short film, and that from what I saw through the vortex, it comes out pretty good. Looking forward to that.

And now, to go work on another VERY abstract painting, the cover for LaNF, and the recording of LaNF… and then, on to Solving World Hunger!