Waffle

On Tuesday, the day after I posted All in all, fortune smiles, I spent the day outside at the lake, then rode my bike home to fetch a couple of Hello You!s to show to my workshop students, rode to the school, lost my sense of where I was and where I was going, spent the actual workshop sweating buckets and generally crashed and burned. Heat stroke exhaustion, I guess. Since then, I've been struggling to write the first-in-series Gang of 4 episodes, and those two things together, which may or may not be causally related to one another, have taken me off my high of the week before that. Things that didn't bother me last Monday, such as the pain in my foot and the realisation that decisions I made when I thought I was going to draw that book contribution in a hurry would come back to haunt me now that the deadline had been extended, are now pushing me into a state of depression and worry. Objectively, I'm not worse off than I was before. I'm a little behind schedule with the Gang of 4 scripting, but I have written 3 viable scripts whose main flaw is that they aren't the first one. I have identified a flaw in the series concept that is making the writing more difficult (the ensemble cast is making it hard for me to develop characters properly) and have contacted my editors about last-minute tweaks to the series concept and title. Yes, my foot hurts but I've had worse injuries. Yes, correcting errors is a drag, but hey, I've got time? Yes, I need to hand in tax stuff or ask for another extention. I can do one or the other, surely?

Five days ago none of this would have bothered me. Now it does. I'm going on a trip tomorrow and a nagging voice is telling me that I mustn't, that I must stay put and slog until the backlog is cleared. I know that won't work. I know that time away from the studio will make me feel better and fresher come Monday. But depression has a way of perpetuating itself.

God, I miss running. That was the one thing I could always rely on to break the cycle. Maybe I should just bite the bullet on Monday and train inspite of the injury, even if it's only with the beginners.

The Animation Archive has some lovely samples of a Famous Artists cartooning coursebook showing how sports cartoonist Willard Mullin drew animals. It's lovely lovely stuff, inspiring and educational. I like it extra because it will help me settle a long-standing argument with studio-mate E. in my favour: Mullin names the joints of an animal according to their structural correspondence with human joints, not their functional ones (otherwise what Mullin calls the wrist would be called a knee). That'll teach E. to look at me funny when I try to describe animal parts.

The correct chronological running order for the Chronicles of the Witch Queen stories is as follows:

1. The Double
2. Christmas at Blocksberg
3. The Eye of the Underworld
4. Thousandstab
5. Staff Cutbacks
6. Alcydia / Guðrún
7. Courtly Manners
8. Courtly Manners 2: The Unicorn Race

Webcomicsnation doesn't offer any means of changing the order in which stories are shown on the front page - they're shown in the order their database entries were added to the site. This may change in the future, I hope. I like being able to move blocks around like I can do in WillowCMS.

My reviews of the new Doctor Who episodes have been pretty brief lately. My problem with the series isn't that it's suddenly become bad - it's worse than that. Season 2 of the new series has shaped up to be a very ordinary sort of series. Every week, we get a perfectly entertaining, competently-made action adventure that could just as easily have been any other series.

But not everyone feels that way, and it's nice to know that some traditions are being maintained:

(37) "Oh. Dear. God." says Adam slowly and distinctly. "Exactly. The. Opposite," says Dad. Harry abandons his cushion and races behind the sofa, closely followed by Amy. For the next few minutes, they're like meercats, popping up and down depending on whether the Beast is on screen or not.

(From The Fear Forecast which is always fun to read. The kids rated "The Satan Pit" 5 out of 5, or "terrifying", by the way.)

Bad: The tendon on the outside of my right ankle hurts, and has done so for two weeks. My doctor has told me to take it easy with the running until it's better, and replace my running shoes. Luckily, the pool is really quite inviting with the recent weather.

Good: I have written a four-pager for an anthology of cartoonists from Groningen, and partly drawn it. It initially looked like I wasn't going to get it ready in time for the deadline, but it now turns out that that deadline, despite what it said in the call for submissions, wasn't entirely set in stone, so I might still get it done in time. The comic itself has a nice me-in-1998 vibe to it, which I like. I drew a lot of great short comics that year, things that I can still look at now and think "yeah, that was all right". Writing on next season's Gang of 4 is also progressing well. I've got a loose first gag idea, and I've done the necessary ground work of refining the characters to make them more distinct from one another. It looks like this year, sparks will fly between Amber and Ruben in particular. I like that and am very interested to see where that goes. That took about an hour and a half, so at that rate I'll have a lot of the season scripted by the end of next week. I'll try to have at least several episodes and a good overview of the story arc. I have also storyboarded the first draft of a crossover between Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and The Bare-Pit, in a way that sets a minor ROCR character up for her own comic series, should I choose to do that. I'll send the script to Bare-Pit creator Stephen so he can check if I've written the characters right. I have money in the bank, somehow. A week ago, I was €100 in the red and worrying about when that was going to be made up. Now, at least two of my workshop clients appear to have paid me, keeping me in the black for a few more weeks. I have been invited for a job interview at a local software localisation firm! I'd more or less given up on that, but presumably their initial batch of candidates didn't turn out so well in interviews.

On balance: Hear me roar.

...turned out all right. I'm in no mood to write a full review, but for the record, I liked it. Next week's trailer looks interesting as well. Won't see that one until the Monday after, at the earliest, though.

There's a new page of the remastered Guðrún up, and with this one, the story begins in earnest. A hapless traveler trudges through the snow... what danger lurks in the frozen forest?

Page 2 of Alcydia is up.

Just to remind you that there's an update for the remastered Guðrún today. Page two of the series introduction.

Sometimes I feel like I should just use my RSS scraper to stick a copy of Andrew Rilstone's blog in mine (to do so without his permission, though, would arguably be a form of plagiarism). He doesn't write much but he's always a great read. Today, he reads the Daily Express so you don't have to. Or rather, he read it for a week last month, but has now recovered enough to post an analysis. Drop what you're doing and read it. The blog post, I mean, not the Daily Express.