[649] i will do it myself

console

< Piro >

"fall down, get back up"

Wednesday - December 15, 2004

Well, I made my deadline. Book 3 is done and out of my hair. yay.

(falls over)

Things didn't quite go according to plan, of course. My goals were to finish the artwork by Sunday night and to put all eight pages of the Endgames short together on monday. Of course, I forgot the fact that while an average comic page takes 5 hours to draw, it takes an additional hour to scan in and clean up the images for that page, and around an hour to put the rest of it together in illustrator (this includes the inevitable script tweaks and rewrites on the fly). that's about two hours of work per page, which means that as of monday morning I had about 16 hours of work ahead of me. I think I understood that but didn't take it seriously enough ^^;;

As of yesterday morning I was still going through and tweaking the script. I decided that I had to redo two drawings to finish things up properly. I was actually quite satisfied with the finished product. There are 62 drawings in total, most of them are on the high end of what I usually do for Megatokyo comics, many have backgrounds, etc. All in all, it's actually up to the quality level of extra material for the books that I've always wanted to do.

I think that being able to journal about what i'm doing on a regular basis over on the fredart site has actually been helpful. I so often feel that people are in the dark about what i do on a day to day basis (case in point, a recent email that asked me pointedly "just what do you DO all day??" as part of a "now that you do this full time, why cant you..." email). It's nice that now, if you really need to know, you can follow my whining and grumbling as i go.

You'd think that finishing this damn thing would give me a sense of accomplishment or something, but it doesn't really. All that really happens when you finish a huge project is you suddenly start thinking about all the other things you pushed aside in order to finish it, so there is a panic of sorts that creeps right in and overwhelms you. An unfortunate chunk of yesterday was spent dealing with some things, and most of this morning was dealing with MegaGear related stuff. I feel as if i'm looking up a mountain that is ready to start pelting avalanches at me.

But now it's time to turn back to Megatokyo and chapter 6. :)

(gets up off the floor)

I had hoped to be done monday so I would have Tuesday to work on getting back into chapter six, but that didn't happen. Ah well, I can say im not a machine and stuff, but jeeze, even a machine would be behind given the raw time it takes to do this stuff :P Aw hell, it's been just like a Finals week, and most of you seem pretty cool with how things have been going. I thank you very much for your patience, and the feedback on the Endgames extra has so far been pretty good, so I hope you all enjoy it. Like I said before, if you don't want to buy the book, that's ok - just drop into a bookstore and read it there, it's only 8 pages :)

Speaking of the book, we do plan on offering pre-orders on book three when we switch over to the new store software at the end of the month. This is in NO WAY like the preorder fiascos that went on with my previous publisher -- these will be actual pre-orders, where we do not charge you at all for the book until we ship it. More info on that when the time comes. ^_^

Ok, time to get back to work. Knowing me, I won't have it up by 1am like I always say I will, but I'll try :P

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< Dom >

"Holiday plague"

Tuesday - December 21, 2004

[Dom] - 23:30:00 - [link here]

While my holiday spirit remains undampened, my health appears to have been. My lungs spent the greater part of the day trying to migrate south for the winter, and their escape plan involved a mad dash up my esophagus to safety. It's nothing horrible, but this cough just isn't going away. And that's irksome.

But while I was taking care of some business at home today, something hit me. This is going to be the least crowded Christmas ever for me.

Let me explain. When I was young, our family was extremely close-knit, something I'm pretty sure happens frequently in refugee/immigrant families. But we were all pretty much within 30 miles of Grandma and Grandpa's house here in Redwood City, and even the cousins down in Anaheim came up for the holidays, and so Grandma and Grandpa's always was packed to the gills with family. Not counting the San Jose segment of the family, which was large enough that it had its own Christmas separate from Grandma, there were 11 cousins, me, my sister, and the older generation who all gathered for dinner (and mass, but as we got older and more agnostic/atheist, we sort of stopped that part of the tradition) each holiday. And, as we grow up, get married, and have in-laws to drag the kids to, Christmas has been getting a little smaller every year. And this year, we have representatives of the family in Philadelphia, New York, Vancouver, and other parts unknown for their in-laws, and it looks like we've gone from around 24 to 12 for Christmas Eve dinner.

But I guess the core of it is that this will be my first Christmas without Grandma and Grandpa. Well--I don't know if that's entirely true, they hadn't been a true presence at Christmas dinner for years, due to their bedridden states. But I guess it's a sign that time has taken its toll on us.

Hmm. I'm starting to feel old. That wasn't the point of this rant, I was going to talk about something random. Oh well, that's what happens when you write while medicated and listening to the Katamari Damacy soundtrack.

Anyway, since the next scheduled rant date is Christmas, it'll probably be a bit late. On the other hand, I'll also be chock full of energy from playing with my nieces--well, maybe I'll be a bit sore. Loannie still prefers being carried to walking, and at age 3 that's starting to get a bit rough on the arms.

Well, enough of my musings on the continental drift of my family's holiday dinner. I still have presents to wrap!

Hmm. Maybe I should just give them the presents in the box... or make duct tape giftwrap.

Wait, the duct tape seems like a bad idea. I wonder what other lazy ways there are to do this.