[651] so sweet

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 >

"Yule Log Joke Here"

Sunday - December 26, 2004

[Dom] - 23:59:59 - [link here]

So it's Christmas Eve, and I am confronted with the purest image for the comedy that is my life. I'd say it's a tragedy, but really, it's not--comedies are tragedies with distance, and to most other people, it's a comedy.

Anyway, there I am on Christmas Eve. A girl is riding me for all she's worth, grabbing my hair and ears and guiding me on with increasing urgency. There're just a few catches:

1) She's fully clothed
2) She's related to me
3) She's five years old

Honestly, I don't mind those three facts too much, since I have Nieces of Cuteness plus 4, and there are few things that make you feel all warm and fuzzy the way piggyback rides do--my shoulders are still reminding me how out of shape I am, though. Also, there are few things that remind me that these children are of the same blood like when she says "Uncle Ga, go up behind Uncle Crazy so I can hit him in the head!"

Ah, youth...

Other than the avuncular rush that was Christmas Eve, my holiday's been blessedly quiet. I've spent the last couple days reading my Christmas gift from my sister, Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". She figures that a spermologer like me (that's collector of trivia, my dear, dirty little readers) would absorb and adore a book of collected miscellania about the sciences and the rich European men who loved them, and she's right. With one exception. The chapter on quantum physics.

I. Hate. Quantum Physics.

It all started a few years ago, when I realized that after the word "quantum", my eyes started watering and I heard this strange oozing noise. It found out later that the strange oozing noise was my brain melting and leaking out of my ears, at which point I gave up trying to learn anything about physics past the atomic level--even Professor Muller's excellent Physics for Future Presidents class couldn't do much to prevent me from curling into a fetal ball at even the merest discussion of quantum anything.

Which makes it amusing that I'm heading up to Lake Tahoe in a couple weeks, not just for the annual family ski trip/gambling vacation, but to meet up with an old friend of mine who's visiting family for the holidays.

He's currently doing his post-grad work in quantum physics somewhere in Maryland.

See? I told you my life was a comedy.