Waffle

Earn original art by fixing an HTML problem!

I seem to do nothing on this blog lately but ask readers for help, but that's how it is now. I've switched out some of the Project Wonderful ads for a new ad provider, and ever since, site display has been broken on some pages but not others. In pages like this one, the top ad breaks out of its box in the top right section next to the logo, overlapping the top row of site links and pushing down the rest of the content. The problem only occurs in Firefox 3 (edit) and Internet Explorer, though it is less obviously visible there as the ad just disappears and only on pages using a certain template. Safari and Opera render it correctly; indeed I was working in Safari while changing the templates and didn't notice anything was wrong until 1 AM last night.

What makes this one so annoying is that the HTML code for the top section in those templates is exactly the same as that in the pages that do render correctly, and they pull their positioning code from the same CSS file. Also, I did nothing but switch out one clearly marked block of javascript for another. I spent half an hour counting "Div" tags before passing the problem on to a friendly webdesigner who has more routine and experience fixing problems like this, but told me the next morning she was also stumped. Screenshot

So... if anyone with Firefox 3, a keen eye and a good knowledge of HTML/CSS can help me out with this, I'd be very grateful and send that person an original drawing or page from the archives of their choice..

If you have a Webcomicsnation account, could you do me a favour and review some of the comics on Chronicles of the Witch Queen? Anyone who has an account, even if you only use it for commenting on WCN comics, can post a review which will be posted on the WCN homepage and on the Talk About Comics blog, which has seen a flood of new reviews lately. What with the boost my readership has got from a writeup in a comparatively obscure e-zine, I think getting written up in a few other places that are read at the same level would make a lot of difference for the readership numbers.

Here are the details. Some of the comics on Chronicles of the Witch Queen are also published on Rocr.net, but not all of them are. They are also divided up differently, with each storyline getting its own homepage and URL. Below, you'll find a list of comics available on the site, and where to post reviews:

Reviews don't have to be positive but the intention of the feature is to spread the word about comics you like - so if you like Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and the related comics, and have a Webcomicsnation account, spread the word! I'll be grateful for any and all reviews, long or short.

Preview of what is in fact the eighteenth page of the epilogue of Invasion, shot with my cell phone camera as I'm currently scannerless

This has turned out my most productive weekend in months in terms of new line art. I'm so close to the end of Invasion, I can almost smell its lascivious, musky scent.

One thing I've been trying to do more and more during the time I've been working on Invasion is to break out of the tiny little panel boxes, doing more pages that are a single large panel. The results are the opening page, the plague of frogs, the signover of the kingdom, the banquet, the city in a ball and this page. I'm not sure about the results in each case... I think some of these pages could have turned out better. But doing them this way has been very very liberating and I will be reminding myself to do more larger compositions from time to time and give special moments within each future storyline some more breathing room. It makes the process a lot more interesting and gives me more options for determining pacing and emphasis.

Now to get that scanner problem fixed...

Line art for page 17 (really) of the epilogue for Invasion, shot using my cell phone camera

I'm not out of the woods yet. The desktop PC has a new hard drive, Ubuntu linux is working beautifully including the tablet and Photoshop over Wine, but the scanner is still bust. I got a SCSI card sent to me courtesy of Mithandir and Alien of Chasing the Sunset — Mithandir also set me up with the A3 scanner three and a half years ago — but there's a new problem. Before sending me the card, Mith asked me whether the scanner needed SCSI 1 or 2, and my reply basically amounted to "Moo?". Like most computers everywhere, I know buggerall about SCSI. It's an old, but fast hardware interface with large 68-pins connectors, right?

Wrong.

Once I noticed that the connector at the back of the card wasn't the same as that on the scanner's cable, I did some research. There's a wide range of different connectors. SCSI is still being made and developed, mostly for higher-end systems, but for cheaper systems like the one I bought last march in a rush to replace the studio computer (which has since become the home desktop - I've had a very rough year, computer-wise), getting support will be hard and will become harder in the future.

Why is this important? Because the A3 scanner, antiquated though it is, is still a very nifty device that would take me over fifteenhundred Euro to replace with a similar but newer, USB-based, one. This would effectively wipe out my hardware budget for the next year so that if any other machine breaks, it would have to be replaced in a hurry by another cheap and nasty box that will have more problems within the year like the one I'm typing this on now. Instead of finally moving over to a schedule of smooth, no-interruption replacements of my production hardware before it breaks, I'd have another year of having to react to incidents as they occur, which is exactly the thing that's been frustrating me so much about the computer troubles I've had all year, including the latest hard drive/SCSI card breakage.

It's not hopeless though. When I investigated the card I got in the mail more closely, I noticed there was a 68-pins connector on the side of the card. If the physical chassis allows me to, I might be able to plug that in if I leave the side panel off the system and take the whole shebang out of its niche in my (old and decrepit) computer desk. That's a long-shot though. It presupposes that a) the problem is with the SCSI card in the first place (I still haven't tested that fully, and can't do so without a second box to put the card in); b) the connectors are as compatible as they look; c) it is actually possible with the compact box configuration. We'll see. If the card doesn't work, I'll have to start looking again, and it's going to cost me in both time and money. There may be renewed comic delays.

Family portrait of Ragnarok, Hildegard, Harold and Jake looking their Sunday best, made a year ago in preparation for the epilogue to Invasion

Episodes for Invasion for the next three weeks have been uploaded. Next week, I may be able to finish the final ones that have been scanned so far - what happens after that depends on whether I've got the scanner working by that time. The episodes will appear on Mondays, December 15, 22 and 29.

The comics will also be placed in the crossover archives for Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. There's no specific home page for Invasion but last Monday's update was archived on http://www.rocr.net/index.php?p=20081208 - the number for each update represents the date of publication.

Previous family portrait

We'll finally have some new updates again, and they'll be on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen website. Starting Monday, December 8, the Invasion series will update again, once a week on Mondays, hopefully until the storyline is finished, which should take 8 updates in total.

Feral is still in limbo. The day job is still taking up too much of my mental energy to do meaningful work on it. I hope to have some script for it ready after my next vacation, so there won't be any updates until the new year.

There's something else coming up, and it may not be all that significant to long-term Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan readers, but it's still kind of significant to me: Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan Re-runs on Drunk Duck will reach its 500th update on December 12! That's 500 daily installments without missing a day - clearly the secret to reliable updating is to have a 17-year buffer. For what it is, the re-run project is quite succesful too - it gets three-digit pageviews a day, which is good considering I don't actively promote it and the contents have been available on other sites for years. It gets proportionally more response from the readers there than at the main site too, though this is largely because in the culture within the Drunk Duck community, commenting on a comic and awarding it five points out of five is the local way to say hi (it's still appreciated, by the way - thanks all who commented). Perhaps more importantly, the project has kept me involved with the comic through the past 15 months, because even when I wasn't drawing it, I still had to upload "new" installments, check if things updated properly and read the comments. It's been a beacon for me, a daily reminder that I have this comic and it's unfinished. It's a powerful thing.

First off: follow my NaNoWriMo effort on My DeviantArt site. It's a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story and actually fills in the big gap in the archives between The Stone of Contention and the stories that feature Jodoque as a character.

Second, here are my latest original scans for Invasion:

It's slow going... it's not so much a question of time as of motivation and priorities. For the weekends, my number one priority now is catching up on sleep. After that follow some time talking to Aggie online, grocery shopping, household and administrative chores, NaNoWrimo (during November only), and then working on ROCR if I still have time and energy. I find writing Feral particularly hard at that point so I work on Invasion first as that's already scripted. The reason Feral is hard to write is because the original outline has been superceded by the shape the story ended up taking in execution. This means that I can't end it on a cheap gag as originally planned and have to rethink in mid-story. This takes effort and concentration which I may not necessarily have in me. I do hope that the discipline of NaNoWriMo will help me improve in this area.

Because I sleep very little during the working week, I give my body as much time as it needs to catch up during the weekends. I turn off all external wake-up cues. So today I slept until half past one, PM! Admittedly, it had been a late night as I'd been up writing until past 2 AM, but that's still a long time to spend in bed.

So for ROCR outside of the NaNoWriMO novel-in-progress, this weekend is once again a bust; I know I've been racking up a lot of busts in the past six months, and I do want readers to know that despite appearances to the contrary, I am still engaged in my work on the series as a whole, just at my own pace and in the media that I can work with the most easily, which right now is the written word.

What does this mean in practice?
One way or another, the King Groy story will make it to the ROCR website, resulting in a complete archive by the time I finish off the series. What I think will happen is that the second draft of the novel will go on the blog. The final draft will then be posted to the website proper, with illustrations. Historically, putting prose based stories into a webcomic archive has not been a successful move for those who have tried it, because readers tend to get stuck on their expectations and can't get over the work not being a comic anymore. However, I'm willing to give it another shot, provided I am convinced that the finished product is really, really good. It's going to take a lot of work to get from what is on the DeviantArt site to the quality I'm looking for. So it won't be any time soon.

NaNoWriMo has turned out to be very very addictive. I wrote over 4000 words today, and wrote more than 2000 words on all days after the first day, when I decided late at night that I would give it a shot. At last I have something I can really focus on again!

It's affecting my day job too. At work, I crank out words for a living, and knowing that I can crank the mout much, much faster than I've done so far is very motivational.

It's not so good for my physical fitness as I'm skipping gym time to work on it. It's also costing me sleep.

I am learning a lot about my strengths and weakness as a writer. The tone and humour of my work in progress are derivative, and I need to work on description and characterization - one of which I never needed to learn for my comics as I could draw what I needed, and the other I didn't always have as much space for in the panels as I now have in prose writing.

Drivel-in-progress is posted daily on my DeviantArt site. It's bad - it's a first draft that I'm cranking out in my spare time, working from a comic script that I never finished. But I hope it's bad in interesting and illuminating ways, and that by the time I'm done, I'll know what I need to know in order to make the second draft work properly as a novel.

Progress on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is slow as ever. A few more pages from the Invasion storyline are inching their way towards completion. Invasion will almost certainly end before Feral does, even though Invasion is later than Feral in the overall continuity.

At this rate, it'll take me years to get around to doing the other storyline that I need to fill up the overall continuity. There's a long story originally from 1996/1997 missing from the archives. I hate how that one turned out but have been meaning for the past few years to fill the gap with a re-written, re-drawn version of that story. Well, it seems like drawing is out of the question, but Aggie actually handed me the solution to this problem the other day when she started talking about her project for National Novel Writing Month which is a sequel to the comic American Gothic Daily. For me to write the new version of King Groy as a 50,000-word novel would be good writing practice and a good way to fulfill a years-old commitment that has always been at the back of my mind.

My Nanowrimo profile is here here and I'll try to post word count updates daily. Updates of the first draft will appear on my DeviantArt account before they'll appear on the ROCR website... so I can polish them up if they suck.

Aggie's new novel is on her DeviantArt account. It's rough, as mine will be, but that's what you get when you just push out the words and post your first draft.