things could be worse

Reposted from my dA journal because well I pretty much said it in there. Sorry for incoherency, but I'm feeling pretty incoherent at the moment.

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH

That, my friends, is the sound of idea block. Which I may or may not be in the process of getting over.

Let me describe idea block:
Okay, so you have been working on a couple of stories for a while, and they're solid. But it gets pretty tiresome to always be on those subjects, right? So you want to come up with a new idea to work with. But not just any old schlock. Something new, something you haven't done anything like before. You have some idea about the territory you want to work with, but not much else.

The problem with this is that trying to find such an idea without any real-life impetus other than your own mental bent is horrific. If you have even the slightest concrete notion of a story element, then you at least have something to work with and build on. But just having a very vague idea of what flavor of story you want to come up with and not any concrete object or character in there--doesn't make for a very good brainstorming session.

I spent most of the past hour staring at the wall. I think it's almost passed though.

In other news, I have no 'writer's block', and by that I mean that established stories are developing nicely and I started writing a script for one of the long-comics. I've settled on doing one semi-long comic to practice comicking and doing something more realistic-styled (artistically) for a change that will probably end up being about 100 pages long (hopefully less if I can re-compress the story a bit). I want to write it all out and then just churn through the drawing bit. The style is going to purposely sloppy-ish so that I can get into the comic without wanting to cut off the hand that offends (haha lookit that a biblical allusion). This is mostly to give me time to develop another comic idea while still feeling productive. The second comic idea involves a lot of historical BS and I'm not a history major so it will involve a lot of consulting of library resources and so on and so forth. That will be a lot longer but I will definitely be coming into it with a set series of events and beginning and end. And... well that comic should probably be "Erin screwing around with history because she felt like it" but it's mostly a comedy. Blargh.

Okay. I think I'm going to set a due date for myself. The first script will be due by the end of February. Eek.

SHIT:

1) FIRST ITEM: Finished NaNoWriMo like seven days early by doing another cram weekend thing. I hope to never have to look at that piece du merde again. It did give me some ideas as to how I should write my next projects though. I need to write some short stories to get all this muck out of my head. Most favorable option: dump all long ideas that are not comics for the moment and start from the ground-up with writing.

2) SECOND ITEM IS REDUNDANT: I will be mostly absent from the world probably for a little while as I write and study for finals stuff. Even if I'm not working on this stuff I'll be getting other shit in line. Ugh. Everything is a mess. But I have one paper to finish, another one to write completely, two finals to study for and a third midterm (?) to study for. BUT I DON'T HAVE TO DO ANY MORE READING FOR ENGLISH CLASSES YAY and I can say goodbye to the professor from hell after this semester.

3) THIS IS THE THIRD THING: I have to apply for one scholarship whose deadline is less than two weeks away and I doubt I'll get it but by God it'll be one of the best things that's ever happened to me if I win it. I'll be set for the rest of college and have something awesome to put on my resume for grad school.

4) FOURTH ITEM: I have some web design stuff lined up that will hopefully pay for Christmas. I've been waiting to do some of this since the beginning of the semester and my client just got back to me. In the middle of NaNo. So yeah.

5) FIFTH ITEM: I'm not big on Christmas, but I'm getting a DSLR finally! It's my combo birthday/Christmas thingy and woooooo am I excited. I'm getting it just in time for my field station semester next fall and for the summer before.

6) SIXTH ITEM: I dunno what I'm gonna do for a job. I don't think I really have time for anything big while I'm at school next semester but I may be able to get an environmental science job this summer. I dunno yet. I'm hoping web design stuff picks up to a consistent pace.

7) ITEM LE SEVENTH: Dear Julie: This winter break will be devoted to doing work on Arthur stuff because the things you sent me were AWESOME and I want to start on them. Yesssss. (Ragnelle story love)

WOOOOOOOO

So tonight I played two songs at a little coffeehouse thing and it went off surprisingly well considering that all the musicians had honestly two days of notice. I got to sing "I Google You" and "What's the Use of Wond'rin'?" from Amanda Palmer. Delicioussss.

But the happiness is mostly for the fact that I've decided to dump the bad teacher for next semester because she'll be replaced by the time I come around to take the class again. I don't need chemistry as a prereq and even if I did I could probably just tell the teacher why I didn't take the second semester and they'd understand. I wasn't keen on this at first because I thought I'd only be able to replace the class with another English class and I didn't think I had enough time my senior year for another 4-hour class... but my Conservation Biology teacher's going to let me do research for credit instead! Which means I'll be helping build and develop a biodiesel reactor for the school. Coooooool stuff. I'm excited, we're meeting to talk about it on Friday and probably half of it will go over my head.

And that's basically all. Toodles

So I'm procrastinating. Hurrrr

Mostly because my brain is still broken, but mostly because I wrote 18,000 words this weekend for NaNoWriMo over two days this weekend (about 60-70 pages double spaced) and now I'm already getting behind again. I didn't write the necessary 2,000 words yesterday and I might not tonight (I will, eventually). My body shut down last night after 1 and my body decided not to wake me up until its pre-programmed time of 10 minutes before class. Which means I got 8 hours of sleep for once, but for some reason I was still tired all day today. Aaaaand I'm going to get very little sleep again tonight probably. I am also a little behind on animating the scene I have for jisuk's thesis because I think I only have about 1/4 of it inked and I did that over 2 days.

But there are breaks on the horizon. Literally. I'm mostly home free after this weekend. I have 100 more pages to read before either Friday or Monday for one class and 60 pages for another and I'm done with my English reading for the semester. So good. My reading has been pretty ridiculous this semester considering I only have two classes to read for. I'm caught up on my homework for my science classes, and I only have one test left in each of my science classes and a final in each that will require little studying for the most part. I have two papers to write for my English classes. And that's pretty much the rest of the work for the semester. But even more immediately I have Thanksgiving break/Birthday/see a family member for the first time in three months coming next Tuesday-Sunday. (19 is such a weird birthday. I'm only excited because it's a prime number again and I won't have another one of those for four more years. And it's my last teen year. HOLY CRAP I JUST REALIZED THAT) /Anyways.

I want to punch all my musical obligations in the face because they're being stupid. Choir people want me to go to Brazil but my dad thinks I'll get mugged if I go. Which is actually not a totally paranoid observation. I'm not sure I want to go to Brazil with the choir, mostly the choir people like to think they're weird but then can't deal with people that really are weird. Or musically competent. (The alto section leader doesn't know note names.)

On the bright side I got tapped by one of my professors to apply for some fellowships for my last 2 undergrad years. The applications are intimidating but they are awesome so I'm applying anyways.

All my teachers hate me. The student services lady sides with fired teachers. I'm still mostly in a situation where I know everything I need to know and am still getting B's. If I can't get my grades up to A's in the next two years I'm probably going to go nuts.

Um there's more than that but it's mostly depressing stuff so I won't go into it. I'm having serious motivation/procrastination issues and I'm forcing myself to finish NaNoWriMo when I really just want to write weird short stories. I actually have a really solid idea for a short story to submit to Fantasy & Science Fiction. Herm maybe I'll work on it over the break.

And I've been trying to read Watership Down all semester and no one will give me the time.

So behind on everything... but I live in a world wherein if such isn't the case, then it soon will be.

Out of a healthy concern for my education, I'm putting NaNoWriMo at the back of my priorities for the moment.  Don't worry, I'll probably win this year.  I've gotten over the 'this is horrible' phase in my novel and am just writing shit in hope of finding something salvageable.  I'm more worried about other things right now.

I'm really tired of being treated badly by faculty at the moment.  Right now a teacher that has already been dismissed and will be gone after this year apparently has more respect from student services than a concerned student.  Long story short: I keep on having to correct my chemistry teacher, and she is getting mad at me being 'aggressive' in class.  I have never had a teacher that is so bad.  Talked to student services with them and the student services lady says I shouldn't worry so much about other students.  Well sue me for caring about the education of forty students caught in the trap of an incompetent and impotent professor.

Anywho, my other classes are going as swimmingly as they can be given my hectic schedule.  For whatever reason my work ethic hasn't kicked up yet like it should, and it would usually compel me to try harder.  I think it's temporarily broken because of the catch-22 I'm stuck in with a teacher that is hardly worth my time.  Hm, I think I'll call her Prof. Catch-22 from now on.  But starting tomorrow I think I'm going to try once more to set myself in high gear and see if I can't fix myself in that state for the next month or so.  I'm frustrated by knowing my material and being unable to articulate it in a way that translates to grades.  Mostly because of due dates.  I feel bad because I'm being rude to some of my professors because I keep on handing in things late.  But my teachers are also being unusually non-understanding, especially considering I'm pretty up-front about being busy.  But I know from experience that people that don't know me very well tend to think I'm terribly lazy and never busy.  Maybe I need to act like the old concertmaster of our orchestra and look frazzled all the time. 

I'm also looking into a job in an small publisher; they currently have postings for a creative production team, but they mentioned an editing position before that I think I would rather be in.  I keep on getting flashes of A Hazard of New Fortunes every time I look at them now that I've read that.  

I think I'm also going to look more seriously into a comicing-type job.  My drawing teacher keeps on telling me I should pursue something artistic.  Hererermrmmmmmaybe.  Anyways, time to get back to the old grind.  Which is summarizing articles discussing The Age of Innocence.  Articles = interesting, summarizing = tedious.

Sigh.  I'm sick this weekend, which is unfortunate because it's a four day weekend at my school and most everyone has gone home except the theatre kids and the international kids.  I was intending to do a lot of work this weekend but my general misery has kept me from accomplishing a lot.  Every time I get a little active my temperature spikes.  I was feeling a lot better this morning but I went to go rehearse cello stuff with two recorder players and a harpsicordist (? my life gets stranger) and my temperature spiked over a hundred again.  I think it's slowly coming back down now that I'm in bed and have taken some ibuprofen.  Anyways, you get the idea, general misery and whatnot. 

The most unfortunate part of this for me is that it makes it difficult for me to get caught back up on SSTAML like I promised I would.  I'm about to attempt to do one but I don't know how that will turn out.  I also have two new projects I'm working on: I'm doing the art/animation as part of a cooperative project between a friend and I, which has a crapload of characters to design, and starting in a few weeks I'll be doing animation assistant stuff for jisuk 's thesis.  But to give an idea of all the things I'm trying to keep track of right now:

1) School, of course
2) Research for my own comic project
3) Outlining my NaNoWriMo novel, then writing it during November
4) SSTAML and ICWO (once weekly)
5) Animating/art for cooperative project
6) Animation for jisuk's thesis

So I'm going to stop procrastinating and get back to trying to draw an SSTAML.  Toodles all

Hello my fellow yeomen!  ...I mean.... I've been reading too much Brit Lit....

Anywho, school has been mostly dominating my life lately and the absurd amount of reading I'm having to do right now is stopping me from doing much research. I have a little time on hand, but I get so tired of reading that it hinders the research I have to do for my new comic project.  But the coloring style is almost settled on... seen here in the hair, not so much the rest of the face:



I have about seven pages of this written and an outline going on into the second chapter, but I had to stop myself because there's a bunch of Greek mythology research I have to do in order to write the story properly.  

I also decided to do NaNoWriMo again this year.  I wasn't going to (I don't think) before, because I wanted to not kill myself mentally, but I've been in such a writing slump the past year that I feel that I have to use NaNoWriMo to force myself out of it.  But this time, especially since I've got a pretty good fix on the gist of the story this early, and I've attempted the story in a previous NaNo (my 11th grade one, I believe).  I'm going to try to plot it out as much as I can beforehand, which I failed once more to do last year.  The story is a lot simpler in this one (as far as breadth goes), though, so it shouldn't be quite as hard to get a fix on.  I'll do that while I'm trying to push past all this reading crap that I have to do.  Thankfully I haven't gotten behind in any of my classes so I've got a little wiggle room in my schedule.

Oh, and there's a slight possibility of my being able to work on SSTAML a little over the next few weeks.  I've found out it's a good thing to work on when my neighbors' loudness prevents me from concentrating on reading. 

Starting a new comic project.  I only have a few pages written and I still need to do a full outline, but right now I'm more worried about the art style...




I dunno.  I'm thinking I should try a less anime-esque style so that I can do more with the coloring.  Any tips?

I don't have a job.  They majorly cut their hours, though I predict (not hope, predict) that I will get a call from them later.  I got paid for my time there but I put it in savings so I wouldn't spend it.  Instead!  I'm not spending any of my own money and I'm spending my time playing video games and cleaning and drawing.  I'm trying to do more of the last but I'm completely reorganizing all my shit so I'm trying to do that first.  As for video games.... well... Prince of Persia was awesome and I'm working on ICO.  And of course after that I'll rent Shadow of the Colossus.  On my parents' money.  My sister says I am being stingy... but I have about sixty dollars in my checking account and not much more elsewhere.  I don't think stinginess counts at that level of destitution. 

I'm gonna focus on productive stuff, though I've been drastically unproductive recently.  But it's nice to devote a summer to your own stuff, even if that stuff ends up being video games and tee vee.  But I don't really have the patience for tee vee and I don't have the money for any more video games so hopefully I'll be doing a lot of other stuff.

Ah well.  I liked that job, dammit.  But I'm over it.  On to other crap!

Finally finished Final Fantasy XII today and am quite disappointed.  I'm a big-time story person and that was kind of... blugh.  Anywho, I think I'll have to take a break from video games.  I don't even play that many video games, and final fantasy has temporarily sucked it out of me!  It almost makes me want to go and play... the better FF games.  Oh cruel world, why do you so underrate Final Fantasy IX?

Enough of that then.  That's all I've been doing.  Job again on Tuesday.  I have no money left.  I need to force Laura to write comic so I can thumbnail.  And I need to actually finish the character designs and do a test page or something to get the style down.  Other than that... studying languages... Spanish is so much less fun than Gaelic and Irish and Japanese, but I guess it's useful.  Or something.  

And it seems that fortune gives hard workers what they want, and rewards the deluded with the means to further their delusions... I guess it all works out.

...I HAVE A JOB AND IT IS AWESOME.  I am working in... hold it... hooooold it... a comic and games shop.  Yeeeees.  Nerdy, but awesome.  This job is probably a tie with Barnes and Noble and Borders for part time awesomeness.  Or better, since it's not part of a huge corporation and therefore I can have less of a crushing sense of foreboding around it. 

So I got back from my first time working there today, and it was pretty hectic.  I've never worked in sales before (closest I've come is bagging groceries at Kroger for a few months), so that was interesting.  It's fun.  It was just sort of scatterbrained today, especially since with only two people working there at a time (generally), everyone has to do everything.  My hours are going to be something like 30/week, rather a lot for part time, but spread out enough over the week to work out.  And it's also good because I'm getting minimum wage so the extra time helps.  And ironically enough having a job helps me not spend so much money.  So maybe my bank account will be built up by college-time.  And I can get half of that in my savings... anyhow... enough money...

Working there is pretty sweet, but I don't know anything (ANYTHING) about card and tabletop gaming.  So I'm learning all this crap at the same time.  And stuff.  My brain is fried.  My feet are dead because I didn't take much in the way of a break over 5 hours and then I went straight to Kung Fu and died.  So I don't want to walk anymore.  But I'm working eight hours tomorrow.  Uhhhhhhhhhh

Yeah I'll talk about it when I've done it more and when I'm not watching Family Guy.

...Not very actively, at least, though I may go to two places tomorrow to apply.  I think for my age my application looks pretty good, it's just a question of finding places with summer positions.  And hopefully some web design stuff will trickle down to me over the course of the summer.

But the news as of right now is that I sat down with my good buddy (i.e. best friend of ten years) Laura after not seeing her for the semester and we decided to collaborate on either an animation or a comic.  Quickly pared down to comic since that's what we have experience in.  And I dug up a way-old but pretty awesome idea and we fleshed it out and SHAZAM!  Like that we have our comic idea.  And... it's going to be a lot longer project than I anticipated.  But if I get Laura to hurry up and write a first chapter then I can have it done pretty quickly.  And I'm going to force her to help me on the art more than she thinks since she has wa-hay more experience with that than I do whether she acknowledges it or not.  BUT  I've got the main character designs almost finished.

As for plans of getting it out there, the original intention was to write a fairly short comic (40 pages or so) and sell it small-scale (because sometimes it's nice to acknowledge the practical aspects of making comics).  But this is a story that's definitely well over 100 pages in its shortest form.  So I think the plan is going to be to make it the way we intended but first publish it as a webcomic (hopefully with enough of a backup to publish it M-W-F throughout the year).  The important thing is that we have a definite beginning and end and we know where we're going.  I'm going to force Laura to write out synopses of each chapter before we do anything else.  Because... bad experiences with non-planning...

But it's gonna be awesome.  It's been a loooooong time since I've been in love with a story I'm working on so this will be sweeeeet.

So I'm looking for a job right now because the web design company I've been working for since June 2007 has been really unresponsive and hasn't asked me to come back this summer.  Which is strange, because they were getting pretty cheap work out of me for the crap I was doing when I left.  It's probably for the best long-term.  I was getting paid a pretty good wage for my age and experience, but I really was doing work that usually gets paid a lot better.  I was only seeing about 10% of what we charge per hour for that type of work... so... yeah.  Instead I intend to continue all my web design work through my freelance company; I prefer to work independently for this sort of thing anywho.

Anyhow, I have a volunteer internship with a land preserve this summer, but it's just that--volunteering.  So I've been looking for odd jobs everywhere--I applied for part time jobs at Borders and Barnes & Noble (yeah, yeah), a contract web design job at the Galleria, an editing job based out of Dallas... so I'm looking for jobs everywhere but trying to avoid things I would not be interested in at all (I've learned from my three month stint at Kroger... it's not an issue of the customers, it's the disrespect of the coworkers).  So wish me luck in my summer-job-search.  Who knows, my job may actually be relevant to my studies! 

So I'm procrastinating lots right now.  I have to write 13 more pages tonight, and revise a paper, and read at least another 81 pages tonight (which will leave me with 161 pages to read tomorrow.  So I won't sleep tonight.  And I have a 6 page paper to write tomorrow, um, what else?  Preferably make a summary list of the short stories for my test on Tuesday... oh I have to revise my short story too, it needs some work.  Anyways, I don't want to talk or think about that right now. 

So this summer I'm going to do a short comic (as in, not a sprawling epic).  It'll probably be about 40 pages.  But I don't know what format I'm going to do it in.  Originally I started it as a quick n' shoddy pencil-then-ink-in-a-sketchbook type thing, but doing this recent short comic I think that if I'm going to put the time in I might as well make it look nice.  In color and stuff.  Oh, and sometime between now and then I have to learn how to color better in photoshop.  Yeeeeah.  I'm trying to take advantage of not having anything to really do this summer by doing artsy fartsy and music stuff.  And writing.  But I'm putting this project at the fore so I can finish something for once. 

Okay.  I need to go back to studying now.  Small digression.  Yup.

Anywho, all I wanted to say is that I got my comic scanned and everything.  It looks a lot better scanned since you can't tell the difference between sharpie crap and micron crap in b&w mode.  So... LINKITY LINK LINK LINK

I've procrastinated on everything... except this.




My man-hand there for scale.  I think I really like working on giant bristol board.

EET EEZ COMPLETE!  Now to find a working scanner.

http://jisuk.deviantart.com/art/The-Portrait-120831790

Go watch it now.

Did the cleanup/inking/whatever for 5 character animations in it.  A surprising amount of work.

Uh huh... huh... huh... I keep on forgetting that livejournal has journals on it.

So this summer is destined to be the summer of getting my shit together. My grades were kind of crappy this year (by my standards) and such and I put other people's crap ahead of doing homework (because I procrastinate). But I got to do cool things this year! Actually... I did a lot.

-Rewrote my first complete novel
-Wrote half of a crappy fantasy novel
-Painted six paintings over the summer and did a joint art show with Laura
-Started my own web design business
-Did ten comic strips for the college newspaper (the first of which can be found here)
-Did some more SSTAML strips (I did 13-18 since the last time I posted... almost a year)
-Lost 15 pounds

And more recently (i.e. this past week or so):
-inked some scenes for jisuk 's flash thingy
-Did a bunch of recording to help a friend (although I intended to do--and had prepared--more songs, but the people working on it took wah-hay too long setting up to get everything completed)
-Read like a bajillion comics (an achievement indeed)

And stuff still in progress:
-I have a rough draft of a short story that I have to pretty up
-Currently working on my first professional-traditional-whatever-drawn comic, a two-page assignment for one of my classes:



Note:  I have man-hands

Making comics this way is actually pretty awesome.  I swear to god until recently I have never written down scripts for comics.  I started writing out crappy scripts for my newspaper comic so that I could do them more in advance, and I do that for SSTAML now too... but for this comic assignment I had to completely write out the script (about a page and a half, I think), thumbnail it, pencil it, and now I'm in the final stages, inking. I mean... I knew you had to do all this crap before, but I didn't realize how much easier it makes finishing things.

On that note... I've started writing out a script for a comic I plan on writing this summer. I should have time, as my employment status is in flux at the moment (I've got my own business, but I haven't really advertised so I don't really have clients.  Just the one).  I'm trying to just get an easy job at Barnes and Noble or something so I can get discounts on the two things I buy (read: coffee and books).  And I've got a for-no-pay internship near my house (in the burning Texas sun, hopefully). 

So that's my updates for now.  I totally forgot that I could use this journal.  I should probably stop ranting on deviantART now.

So we started driving today on our way to Pennsylvania.  Unfortunately I'm running out of battery and too lazy to plug in my computer right now, so I'm gonna have to make this fairly short.

1) The land was completely featureless for the first ten hours of driving.  Seriously, the biggest hills were around SHSU and that's just sad. 
2) I saw a crop duster for the first time ever, which was cool because I got to see it dodge power lines and trees and such. 
3) Uh
4) I haven't gotten like anything done for the past week or so because I've been too excited about going off to college
5) I'll be in my dorm on Friday
6) Um ah
7) Stuff?
8) Yeah there's really not too much to talk about.  Traveling is typically more exciting, but since the long distance is coercing us into skipping the scenic routes there's not much to talk about. 

But I have three days spent mostly in a hotel room, and on the road, so I should get more stuff done.  And by stuff I mean stuff.  Stuff? Stuff. Stuff stuff.

Blah.

So it's turning out to be an average week in the Texan summer, the second to last of mine for another couple of months.  Average week in Texas means temperatures near or at the triple digits every day, which I wouldn't mind so much if we hadn't just switch offices to a new building.  Now, I was all giddy about being in a new building where the floors don't creak threateningly with each step--and let me tell you, the floors here are solid--but someone had the mind not to turn on the A/C till this morning, which doesn't work well with the heat escalating towards midday and trying to fill the whole four-story building with A/C.  Also, the air is filled with a distinct plaster smell and the elevator's breaker isn't working.  I started to discard semblences of formality in the workplace a while ago, and since the project manager put a box fan in the hallway I have taken off my shoes, rolled up my pants and sleeves, and moved my laptop on top of a cabinet in the hallway.  Situation has improved, and I think the A/C's starting to take a better hold.  I think my lunch melted, though. 

I'm ridonkulously excited about leaving for college.  I met my roommate at orientation and I'm 99% sure we'll get along.  She might be a bit more social than I am.  Or a lot.  Meanwhile I am working out what to bring, which comes down to clothes and books pretty much since I'll be buying my furnishings and other such shit there.  I think it'll take me all of a few hours to put everything together, so I'm not really sweating it as of yet.  I don't intend to take many things, and my room is filled with useless shit I don't need.  Seriously, all summer I've used just my laptop, TV, some books and a few sketchbooks.  I'm taking my paintings too so I can use them to buy access to the school's art supplies and classrooms.  I think the things which will be taking up the most room at the moment are my cello, guitars (can't decide which one to bring, or if I should bring both) and such.  Yay music.

Till then, I'm not expecting a lot of excitement.  I'll just be writing and drawing as usual, hopefully with greater regularity... more news when my trip comes around.