I plowed through twenty-one rows today.

For the uninitiated, a “row” is one row of Schlock comics taken through one of the four stages of creation — scripting, pencilling, inking, or coloring.

I scripted 8 rows (seven days – one week), pencilled 8 rows, and inked 5 rows.

That’s more than double (well… BARELY more than double) my “ideal” daily output of 10 rows. It takes this week’s output to 39 rows, which is an average of 13 rows per day so far, and is the equivalent of a full week of buffer (9*4=36… a full week of comics completed is 36 rows of work). Sure I still need to color stuff, but I’m happy with my output.

Sadly, I cranked the engine so hard that I’m wide awake and it’s almost 1:30am. I finished the last of the pencilling just under two hours ago. *sigh*. This probably means that I’ll be lucky to get six rows tomorrow… but I’m going to push anyway. The buffer has languished for too long in the single digits.

–Howard

Michelle at Dragon’s Keep had her iPod in the “we all get to listen” slot, and something came on that I liked.

(not that I hated the rest of the stuff… it’s just that something came on that I really LIKED)

She told me it was “Plumb.” I went home and checked out some Plumb on iTunes and on the Plumb website.

Wow. I’m enjoying this as much as I enjoyed my discovery of Evanescence three years or so ago.

Thanks, Michelle!

I think there should be a rule for Live Journal writers: don’t write about how much everything sucks unless you WANT it to keep sucking.

I’m not saying that depression, angst, sadness, or grief are all in your head, mind you. I’m just saying that sometimes the decision to write about what a rotten day it is results in the rotten day getting WORSE.

I’ve been feeling lethargic all week. I’ve had a really, REALLY hard time getting any cartooning done. It’s been like pulling teeth. I considered writing a journal entry analyzing this, and just two sentences in I was feeling so depressed and lethargic I couldn’t go on. Everything seemed pointless. Oh the crushing despair… blah, blah, blah.

I decided instead to write about what I did when I got tired of doing what little actual work I did — a couple of hours of RPGing. After writing about that I felt rejuvenated, happy, and optimistic about tomorrow’s prospects.

There are some things, like accounting, where if nobody writes it down it’s as if it never happened. I postulate that journals (be they Live, or Dead-Tree) are similar — what you focus on when you write about your life determines, at least in part, how you will respond to what happens next.

Goth-teen-online-angst-poets everywhere are clawing at their faces as they read this. Relax, kids. You aren’t completely undone. All I’ve done is given you power to be even angstier.

In this evening’s GURPS session we beat the GM.

1) We confronted one of his regional baddies, and proceeded to slice said baddy’s werewolf minions to chutney.
2) the big “reveal” for this baddy was supposed to be that he’s actually a vampire. But instead of delivering it as a big reveal, poor Robby (our GM) accidentally announced the next set of actions by saying “the Vampire draws his… ooops.”
3) Timothy and I slew said vampire handily. Sure, this required a few critical successes and a few critical failures, but in the end we walked off with a vampire skull, all the vampire’s personal effects (evidence to be returned to our Fell Masters), and our trussed-but-still-alive compatriot who had been captured earlier.
4) three hours before the usual wind-down of the session Robby said “And… um… that’s going to have to be it for tonight.” We’d run clear to the edge of his contingency plans, and then past them. I guess we were supposed to follow the vampire to his lair rather than slaughtering him and his pets and then hiking off with a portion of his remains.

My character knows exactly jack-be-diddled about vampires, and the player (me) knows even less about how Robby is treating vampires in this game. Still, taking the skull seemed prudent.

–Howard