Author: Teel

By the time you read this, I’ll at the least be on my way to Phoenix again. Going down this morning and staying until Wednesday afternoon, when they think they can get me to drive myself back. We’ll see. I’m sure I’ll have to practice with the car they want me to drive, a little. Who knows if they’ll allow for that.

The ride down the hill with my grandparents promises not to be fun. I don’t know if it’s something about the shocks on their vehicle or the sensitivity of the steering or just the way my grandfather drives, but I just about always manage to get nauseous when riding with them, even just the 20 minutes between Pine and Payson. I tell you, before this I probably felt nauseated fewer times than I could count on my fingers in my whole life (that I can remember). It’s pretty disconcerting. In addition, my left knee hates long car rides, and will probably lock up into severe pain before we reach our destination today. Hooray, severe pain!

Anyway, yeah. I’m taking my laptop with me this time, so theoretically I’ll be able to check my normal email account with it. The idea is that I’ve volunteered to help Joey Manley out, looking at some things he’s trying in the Safari browser, so I figure I should at least have a Mac and a copy of Safari with me. I don’t know how much time I’ll have available, seeing as my dad and I are supposed to be hanging sheetrock for the next three days. I hope to get in a movie or two though, while I’m down there. I hope they managed to get my harkins popcorn shirt into a load of laundry in the last couple of weeks.

So… yeah. Did I mention that I’ve got most of my artwork hanging gallery-like for sale in the shop I run up here? Yep. I did some research on pricing of art in the area, and set all my prices pretty accordingly. Which means for you that after May 03rd, after the SaveME Sale is over, all the prices on the website will be marked up 200%-400% to match the prices I’ve marked in the store. So buy now, people! While they’re still cheap! When I get back from Phoenix I should have a new doodle or two to put up, too. I plan on doing at least all the drawings for the next New Comic, if not the next couple, while I’m away. Of course, at this point much of the work is in Photoshop, and I am NOT taking my scanner (though it DOES fit in my backpack)… but I am taking couple of scetchbooks and at least three good drawing pencils.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget that the Modern Evil Virtual Book Club is supposed to meet online tonight about the Foundation Trilogy. Anyone who’s read it is welcome to join us. Actually, I think we’re allowing anyone who’s even just finished the first book, though I warn that it is likely that important details from the 2nd and 3rd books may be revealed during our discussion. I fear there may be two people in a one-line, dial-up-only house who both want to be in on the discussion tonight, but who knows? I haven’t been contacted by anyone new about how to get in. Remember, email me to find out how to join the fun in MSNIM.

I’m going down for breakfast now, and then on the road. See you later!

So, yeah. It seems like all of a sudden I’m getting more involved in comics that I’ve been in a year or more lately. Last year I didn’t even attend the International Comic Convention in San Diego, but this year I’m not only registering as a professional, I’ve volunteered to speak about publishing comics on the internet (we’ll see if they want me involved, I’m sure alot of other people did too, I’ve just been doing it since 1999). And I’ve been doing ‘New Comic’, what I consider my best effort in comics to date. AND I’m considering submitting New Comic to Modern Tales for consideration to fill Patent Pending’s spot, and I think I can run it on the same schedule he was (ie: every two weeks). AND I just emailed Joey Manley (head of Modern Tales) to volunteer my Web programming/PHP experience to try to fix their woes with the Safari browser I use and am so fond of.

What the heck?

I guess, of course, that I probably shouldn’t have let myself slack off last year, I should have been in on MT from the beginning, I should have been doing quick strips the whole time. Comics is something I’ve been doing since I was 4 or 5 years old, before I knew it was comics. Art is something I’ll always do. Of course, real life has got in the way time and again, but I think I’ve got myself in a pretty good place right now, where art, and thus comics, ARE my life. The in between, the getting from there to here, is why you had to wait two months for the third New Comic. As soon as I was up here, I was working on the next installment. I’ve already got some sketches for the fourth one, expect to see it before the April 15th deadline for me to submit a comic to Modern Tales. Plus I’m finally working out the intricate story details for a comic I’ve been wanting to do since summer 2000, but simply haven’t had the time. Depending on how much time New Comic takes up (ie: whether Joey will love it and I’ll be picked up for a regular schedule, or whether it will stay here on Modern Evil & I’ll doo it at my leisure), my new project may or may not see the light of day in the next six months. When it does appear, it will be the beginning of the prologue to the real story. You know, because I was roughing out the story and found that I needed approximately a year’s worth of daily comics to tell just the prologue. When I get THAT one going, I don’t think MT could pass it up. It’s a very rich and detailed story with interesting characters and a significant historical and aetherial background to draw from. Plus, it keeps going well after the battle at Armaggedon, so… You know, it has stayng power. Oh yeah, and it’s experimental, using non-standard connectivity of panels and a virtually infinite canvas to tell the story in… well, I shouldn’t say. Someone else will do it before I can get it published, if I say. But if they ask me to be in that panel, I’ll do my darndest to get it started and online before the Con, and I’ll talk about it there.

I’m going to go down for breakfast now. Have a good day, everybody.

So, err… sometimes I’m struck by the most mundane things and good ideas come to me.

For instance take a look at these two new products in my Cafepress store, available for a limited time only:

Product 1

Product 2

I hope you love them. I do.

I’m going to see about selling the idea to one of the places that sells products like that already. Anyone have any contacts?

Who’d have thought that sitting in front of my computer for the last 6+ hours, working on New Comic, would make me feel so sore all over. My neck is crying out and my back is sore and I keep noticing little aches and pains all over my body. Scratches and gouges and holes in me that just don’t make sense to have happened while working in Photoshop. An unexpected level of physical exhaustion that matches the level of mental exhaustion I had been expecting.

Oh, well, I guess it could have been the hard physical labor I was doing while the sun was up and my father was here.

Well, some of it’s from the work I’ve been doing all night, though. I didn’t realise it was so much time passing until I looked back at it. Oh, and realised I’d run two DVDs and all their special features in the corner of my computer screen while working… and look at the time. I should have been asleep ages ago.

Tomorrow I’m thinking of taking a peek at a few of the local galleries, see what’s up and what it’s priced … I’d really like to get my work shown, and depending on the rentals situation, I may just have to work something out someplace else. Whatever. It’ll be nice to get out and about.

Then tomorrow night I think I’ll be able to finish this new New Comic. I finished the final images and the layout of them tonight. Just before I started writing this, actually. I keep wanting to upload progress, to show what I’m doing. just now I almost uploaded an ultra-low-res version of the thing to show that the layout was together, but decided that it might give away what all this ridiculous anticipation has been leading up to. So, tomorrow night.

Right?

I’ve just spent hours working on a single panel of a comic, and have not yet finished it. A single panel. It was drawn when I started. Drawn and scanned. Ready to go. I’m not even at a point in the story that calls for me to make photo-realistic characters or backgrounds or composites thereof. Hours. This panel, another panel, re-drawing a final drawing from scratch (or Photoshopping something that looks like I drew it again from scratch) based on the scale and spacing of the final layout, plus all the text and text-layout, and I’m there. I’ll be done. Fuck. At this rate, it may be a gajillion years before I get this done.

I suppose it’s going faster than the other comic I was working on today. I’m carving that one out of wood. I’ve never carved anything out of wood before, and for some reason when the question was put to me as to what I’d like to do, I drew a comic. Fuck. What the fuck was I thinking? Well, after a couple hours work yesterday and another half hour or so today, I managed to roughly carve out the first, least-detailed panel. I’m going to have to paint this thing when I’m done so you can see what I meant it to be. Then I started on the second panel & started immediately to screw the whole thing up. I even managed to damage the first panel. Oh well. I suppose it’s all part of experience. My first attempt is not supposed to be perfect, is it? I’ve only managed to carve my fingers a little so far. We’ll see how long we can keep that up.

I hit that frustration with the carving and switched projects. No hurry on anything, really. Just do it until it gets done. I started working on cutting up wood for fire. Old, rotten 2x4s, dozens of them, and cutting them up with a skilsaw. Moving the boards around and hefting the saw and then stacking the cut wood got me pretty sore pretty quick, so I’ll probably do a couple of hours on that a day until it’s done and I’ll still be way ahead of the game. No need to try to force myself to do it all at once; the rotting wood has got a while to dry in the woodshed before it can be burned anyway.

My dad’s coming up tomorrow. He’s probably got a dozen projects he needs to do. Some of it is quick, but it all adds up, and he likely won’t get to a third or a half of it until the sun is gone. Sometime tomorrow someone is supposed to come by and look at one of our last rentals, and based on what I’ve heard will probably want to be in by the 1st. Which means a little work in there to get it ready for him, but also means a lot of carrying 1300 sq.ft. of old stuff and junk out of there as fast as possible so he can start moving his stuff in. I’d been thinking of getting my art set up in there this week/weekend, but having a renter in there is much better than what we have going now. Actually, just about everything is renting now. We had a guy looking at the smaller log cabin today who’ll probably move in post-haste, and Grampa found a renter for the last of the smaller spaces at dinner tonight. Which is probably because not 20 minutes beforehand I’d mentioned to him that I was thinking of putting my art in there if the big space rents out tomorrow. Oh well. Having income is important. Makes it easier to do things like pay the bills and eat.

I really want to ramp up my painting. I went through everything I have here and dated and serialized it and while I was very happy to see the way my art has been evolving over time, I was disappointed by the volume of work I’ve been creating. For instance, I’ve painted more new paintings so far in 2003 than in each of 2001 and 2002. And it’s still been slow-going. I need to do more. I need to keep working. I also need to pick up these new skills my grandfather can offer me while I’m here, like wood carving, stone carving, welding, et al. So carving this comic is a good thing. But painting is my passion.

And so is writing. I need to re-write Forlorn. Cafepress promises they’ll be doing Print On Demand soon for books, and I’d love to offer it for sale. Or at least to have a copy to hold in my own hands. I have another work, one I’ve showed (or tried to show) a couple of people recently that I also began work on in November which I’d like to finish, to rewrite, to offer for sale. I have a lot of other ideas I should be getting down. Like the other day I solved the problem of wormholes. Now, the smart thing to do is to research all the latest work done in the field by the most prominent physicists, carefully document my theory and back it up mathematically and with reference to their published papers, and send it out into the world, maybe try to get it published in a journal or something. Instead, I’m going to write a hard Sci-Fi short story or novella surrounding the technology and just put it out there. Maybe the right people will see it someday. Whatever. I didn’t really want to be able to instantly be transported anywhere in the solar system using no more power than it takes to light my room for a few minutes. Not within my lifetime, anyway.

Did I mention that the specs I came up with my sophomore year of high school for a 3D computer monitor are finally in late-stages of R&D by three major monitor manufacturers? I was too lazy to try to figure out how to go from my raw idea to a product, so I just told as many people as could understand it and hoped eventually some other smart people in the industry would figure it out on their own. Look for 3D monitors that cost the same to manufacture as modern LCD flat-panel displays to hit the market within 1-3 years. One of these days I’ll figure out how to get off my ass about ideas like this and maybe see them working faster than a decade.

Okay, enough of that.

The more random comments from people about how Dani has treated them that pop up on my entries about how I feel about her, the more paranoid I get. the more it occurs to me that maybe she really is just jerking me around. I mean, she’s known Zuri for quite a long while and I know enough about Zuri to trust her judgement about people … to an extent. But maybe Dani treats Zuri differently than myself and the other person or persons commenting around here lately. I don’t know. I don’t want to make any judgements without all the facts, but I do want to keep an open mind.

You know what would be fun? Another one of those conversations in poetry. Alison and Iain and I had fun with that one a while ago. Maybe we can get Dani to play, too. What do you think, guys?

I should be sleeping by now. My dad is probably already up, or will be up soon. He delivers newspapers in the middle of the night, so by the time he shows up here, he’ll have already put in a full day’s work. If I make it seem like he doesn’t work hard enough up here, I don’t mean it. He works as hard as he can. He can only do so much before his body gives out. Of course, then he expects me to work until my body gives out, too. Except I want to be able to get things done the next day, too, so I try to pace myself. Like with the firewood today, just doing some of it instead of pushing myself until I couldn’t have lifted a fork to my mouth at supper.

Did I mention I drove to supper tonight? With a manual transmission, even. It was only a couple of miles, and since both my home and the restaurant are on Highway 87, it was all highway driving, but I managed to switch gears. Which is more than I could do last time I tried to learn how to drive manual. (I got it started, and got it moving in 1st gear, but simply couldn’t get it to switch to 2nd. After several stalls and some backed up traffic (again, on the highway) I pulled over and let my grampa take over.) I kept missing 3rd and going into overdrive, but after doing that a couple of times I got into 3rd okay. It’s just so much to think about. I’ve done so little driving in my life that just doing that alone is still a lot to think about, and adding all these things I’m supposed to be doing with my feet and with my hand off the wheel… I’m sure I’ll get it if I keep trying, but it’s pretty hard right now. I’ve been riding a bicycle for so long that all my reflexes are way off. Steering this vehicle with sensitive powered steering is bizarre to my hands and arms which are used to having a 1 to 1 direct effect on how much my vehicle turns, and at low speeds. Of course, when I want to go from 0 to 10 miles an hour on a bike, my right foot pushes down on the pedal as hard as it can, and I tell you what, I can go from 0 to 10 from a red light before I cross the intersection. You try that on a bike. I loved passing three or four bikes from a stop before I got to the end of the intersection when I rode in Tempe. Anyway, the tiny amount of pressure I need to apply to a gas pedal to go from 0 to 10 (or from 0 to 25, or 35) just doesn’t make sense to my leg. “Okay, now give it a little gas and slowly let the clutch out.” VVVRRROOOOMMM!!! “That was too much. Just a little while you get it in gear.” Oh well. I’ll get it. It only took 10 or 15 minutes to calm down after getting out of the vehicle. Grampa drove us home.

Well, I’m still up too late, and my mind is still not ready to shut down, calm down, quiet down. I’m typing faster than I should be at this hour and I’m too active above my beard. I wish I could update my Virtual Webcam image with some of the ones I took to Phoenix this weekend, but I couldn’t get the CD to burn. So, you just get to keep looking at me looking depressed and frustrated and confused while I was talking to Dani the other day. Pthbbbt!

Maybe I should go write that short story I’ve been meaning to write about a Flea Circus. Maybe I should try to clean off my table so I have someplace to work. Maybe I should .. Yes. I think I’ll go put that final element of paint on the painting I’ve had sitting here, unfinished, for months. It was unfinished because until a few days ago I didn’t know what it needed, what I should do with it. With most of the things I work on I would never be satisfied with them, never call them done, if I had the time and energy and resources to keep on them. So I just choose a point where it’s close enough, or where … well, where my mind says it’s okay to move on to the next thing, and I put a signature on it and … well, then it’s easy. I’ve made a deal with myself not to keep working on signed paintings. Also not to sign paintings that I want to keep working on (well, that I have specific things in mind for). Does that make sense? Anyway, I’m going to change my top shirt and go do that and … well, if I’m still as awake as all this when I get done with that, I’ll find something else to occupy my mind. (Knowing where my mind’s been the last couple of weeks, yes, it will likely be Dani.)