There are four basic steps to each Schlock Mercenary strip: Script, Pencil, Ink, and Color.

Oh, and “Repeat,” which is the process of getting down off the “I did it again!” pedestal and getting back to work.

Of these, I think inking is physically the hardest. Scripting and pencilling, though… those take THINKING. Yesterday at the Keep I tackled inking, and realized that I was physically exhausted going INTO the process… so I took a page from Chalain.

Chalain once told me that in the mornings there’s a smart guy who sits at his desk, looks at the pile of work, and attacks it. In the afternoons there’s a dumb guy who can’t do much beyond chopping wood and carrying water. So he arrived at a strategy in which Smart Guy does very little coding in the morning — he solves problems and leaves instructions on how to execute on those solutions in simple, easily reducible steps. Chop wood, carry water. The result is that by noon he has nothing to show for his work except pages of notes. By 5:00pm (or 10:00 pm, depending on how long Dumb Guy is required to stay at the office) he has piles upon piles of working code, most of which Dumb Guy can hardly believe he wrote.

For me the scripting and the pencilling is the smart guy work. Sometimes he’s home, sometimes he’s not. Ofttimes he gets distracted by blogging or Live Journaling (he will have to answer to Dumb Guy for spending cycles on THIS post, I’m sure). On Monday he handed Dumb Guy a big pile of scripts — some were blank, some had been pencilled. Dumb Guy looked at them and decided that trying HIS hand at pencilling would be disastrous, so he opted to ink instead.

Chop wood, carry water. It’s not thought-provoking, and it’s not EASY. Make no mistake — it’s WORK. But it’s work I can do when I’m having an off-day. Yesterday was an off-day, and I got a full week of comics inked. It’s nice when I can get piles of work done on an off-day. I feel like the king of the world.

My goal this week is to finish the Book I footnotes and Marginalia, and by Saturday have one more week pencilled and inked, two weeks colored and uploaded, and a fresh week or two of scripts. Inking and Coloring is chop-wood-carry-water. I figure with two on-days and two off-days I can make it… provided Smart Guy remembers to leave Dumb Guy some notes.

We borrowed Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith from a neighbor. The movie is no better the second time around, even after months of not seeing it.

I’m glad we don’t own it. There are better things to spend money on, and I’d rather not have to explain the nuances of the twisted Jedi/Sith morality play to my kids a zillion times. The only character in that movie worth emulating is Artoo, and that’s because George Lucas never wrote any dialog for him.

Still…. better than Bloodrayne.

My buddy Dennis called Friday to tell me that he’s in town this week, but I misunderstood him. It turns out he’s in this part of the country (Utah/Idaho area) this week, but only in Utah until Sunday.

So today he called and I realized that if we were going to get together, I needed to drive up to Murray (about 30 minutes away). So I dropped what I was doing, and drove to Murray.

(Note: this means that Monday’s strip hasn’t been colored yet. Nor has Tuesday’s. This is a problem I’ll solve tomorrow.)

We had a great time hanging out. We didn’t do anything spectacular — just wandered around a couple of stores and ate out at Famous Dave’s Barbecue — but we had a great time nonetheless. Dennis and I served together as missionaries back in 1989 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and he’s pretty much the ONLY person from the mission I kept in touch with. Mostly this is because we both have the same geek-oriented interests, coupled with the same twisted sense of humor.

Now that I think about it, Dennis would get along really well with Chalain. In fact, it would probably be unsafe for Dennis, Chalain, and I to get together. Unsafe for everyone within 200 meters, at least. Bad geek humor has a blast radius. We wouldn’t need anything more volatile than a good curry to clear the room, and I’m betting we could get by without that, even.

I cranked out 14 days of scripts today. The Voices In My Head have been yammering non-stop for a week now, but I’ve been busy with book-stuff. I’m STILL supposed to be busy with book-stuff (footnotes aren’t done yet), but the buffer dropped low enough that I sat down this morning knowing I needed a good scripting jag.

I had one. It wiped me out. 19 rows of scripting isn’t really a whole lot of words, but scripting has to be TIGHT in order to work in my strip. Voice, plot, punchline… some of it is formulaic, but doing two weeks’ worth of strips in one sitting is very draining.

It’s also fun. I didn’t know what exactly was going to happen, though I knew the where, the who, and the why. Now I know, and I can’t WAIT to see how it looks drawn.

But right now I’m hammered. I’ll be role-playing here at the Keep until midnight-ish, and probably trying to pencil a few of these scripts on the side. Hammered or not, I really want to see What Happens Next.

–Howard