Friday, March 16, 2007

Flailing your arms around wildly won't pay the rent or earn you recognition

Though I do acknowledge there are exceptions to the rule...

Right now I've hammered my list of projects down to...
  1. ArchBrook Treatment/Script
  2. Well Chewed Gum revision (A short script which could be considered a creative offshoot of "Tonight..."), finding some decent folk to make it with.
  3. Webcomic development.

Everything else has to be shuffled into the "Whenever you need a break from the first three" bin. The webcomic, the most recent addition, may seem like a bit of an odd thing to throw into the mix when I am trying to focus, but here is the deal. Aside from a number of other reasons (I swear, I should just make pie charts to explain why I do everything, short of going to the bathroom or sleeping), it is the pressure to maintain regular updates that has pulled me back to the notion. I crave the structure and the deadlines for the steady rhythm and focus they would lend. Right now I am very pleased with myself in that I am writing on a daily basis but the reasons (personal enjoyment, fear of wasting my life) aren't good enough to sustain this level of output past a certain point. Without more visceral consequences, I know that one day (be it a month, a year or more from now) I will wake up and not have it in me to push out another story.

Because, let's face it, I could just lay down my writing etc any time at all and I'd still be able to feed myself, have friends, fall in love, travel the world blah blah blah blah. I actually would like consequences to my lulls in productive creativity. With a webcomic there would be the matter of maintaining readership and if things went really well, I could even wind up supporting myself off it in a modest fashion. Having to make rent etc. from the sweat off my brow may not sound appealing to most, but it is certainly more appealing to me than sleepwalking through my days at uninspiring jobs and then driving myself, half out of desperation, to maximise my every minute of spare time outside of that job.

So let's see what comes of this, then. As far as the progress on the concept and art, amongst the possabilities I've been sketching I seem to be getting pulled in towards something that resembles Max Fleischer cartoons - or at least the hazy vision of them which I've culled from memories of what I would get up at 6am to watch on television when I was quite little. Some drawings I've worked on yesterday and today are approaching palatability - if you cross your legs and wish real hard I may just post pictures of them later today.

Man! I gotta get a scanner!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Scanners happen when you have stuff to scan, well enough stuff that is!