Blog 9-27-17 – Breaking Down

It is now deep in September after a wonderfully productive July and August. Over those previous two months I was able to keep up a good posting record of almost every day, with basically four art supply reviews a month. Now in September I’ve missed more than half the days and most of the posts have been comics and not written posts (not that the comics are bad: I love doing them), and I feel like I should explain myself.

The long and short of it is that I started school again, and I’m now grateful that I didn’t attempt to bring back an actual posting schedule in the last few months. My goal is still to post something every day, but lately I’ve been sort of creatively zapped. I am recovering, though, (I know it doesn’t look like it, but I am) and I should be picking up the pace soon (“should”). I hadn’t anticipated that this would be much of a problem, but I haven’t been back to school in several years, and it appears I just didn’t remember.

And on a bit of a tangent, as part of my “recovering” I am beginning to work on project for the Alpine Artwalk 2017, so be on the lookout for updates and new things becoming available.

-Austin

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Blog 6-30-17 – About Face

Well here I am, back a little more than a month after the last update to give another one, as is custom for this type of thing, and I’ve made a decision that has been a personally difficult one to make. When starting, and during, my hiatus I was very adamant about not only it being a temporary thing, but something that would eventually “disappear” as I would work to make up all the content I had missed postin when I was on it. It’s more than a year later now, and while I have been working to catch back up, I haven’t been seeing the returns I’ve hoped for. My original intent was to just power through this section, creating both my backlog material and moving forward into new stuff. But, as many people who try to finish large project know, something like this creates a mental block. The sheer amount of things you are telling your brain it “has” to do dissuades your brain from doing those things, and as it puts them off, they only get bigger.

While I have been making some headway in this “power through” area it hasn’t been as much as I had hoped, and my “re-warm-up” phase has been much slower than expected, All the while things I was “supposed” to do kept piling up, and it got to the point where my mental resistance to moving things forward was preventing me from getting back up to speed. Looking at things now, it could potentially take me years to catch back up on a reasonable schedule (especially for a person with a house, job, and schoolwork). If I wanted to catch up by the end of 2017, I would have to do more than triple-time on my work, and that just isn’t coming from a person who wasn’t able to keep “regular time” for the last year. And extending that deadline only increased the mental block. Devoting that much time to catching up makes the brain think it’s failing, and that just isn’t good for work.

So the decision I’ve made is to “give up” on the idea of catching up. And that has been a possibility from the start, but it was shunned by my more optimistic side. Now the idea’s still there, and maybe sometime in the far-off future when I’m being super productive I’ll be able to go back and catch up on everything or something close to it, but right now I’m going to focus on what I can do next. Nothing is going to stop getting made at this point. In fact, I intend to increase my output, but I won’t be re-instating the schedule and might even make up a new schedule sometime in the future. My current new goal is to get myself back to putting up at least one thing a day, but none of this will be trying to make up for lost time, and there will likely be many new projects introduced.

And even though this has been a difficult decision for me personally (doing this essentially makes my last year a creative failure), I know that both my few dedicated followers and those many on the internet just passing by really just want more things they can read/view to enjoy, and that me making nothing for months at a time isn’t what they came to see, nor is it satisfying “artistically” for me. This will hopefully end up with a better arrangement for all of us, and allow for my various sites to improve.

I always want to thank everyone who has viewed (liked, and commented on) my content, and I appreciate the patience of those of you who have stuck with me. I’ve got a lot of cool ideas and new projects in the works that soon we can hopefully enjoy together.

-Austin

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Blog 5-19-17 – Catching Back Up (and dates)

I can’t believe it’s already May! Normally I am not in agreement with people when they say “time flies” or “man, this year is going by quick”. But this last year has been an exception. I’m still trying to catch up, but that’s always a harder proposition than it seems. Hopefully, you’ve been able to see some of the fruits of tquichis labor this month, though. Of course, I’ll try to continue to keep up some semblance of this output and if all goes well, I’ll prevail.

In any case, I’ve begun work on comics again (my favorite and least viewed part of the website) after some time of debating with myself how to do it. I have been keeping track of how many I’ve missed during my hiatus (as I have with my written projects) and I intend to catch up. But I will be posting them on an “as-made” schedule and it will still be some time before I get back to the old schedule. But there won’t be any backdating and pretending in the future I didn’t go on hiatus (even if that would make it look nicer).

I use the term “hopefully” a lot in these update blogs, and things do never turn out as well as I would “hope”. But things are moving forward, falling into place, and getting better. There’s more of the old stuff and lots of cool new stuff in the works around here and it may take me a while to get to it but it’s coming. And I hope that some people out there can get the chance to enjoy them as much as I do.

-Austin

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Blog 1-1-17 – New Years Updates

(Post is late because the power went out at my house {everyone’s favorite New Year’s tradition})

Well, it’s the New Year. Time to settle in with my traditional Welch’s sparkling grape juice (I may have already). I hope your year was enjoyable and that your next will be better. Putting all world events out of the picture, I had a fine year, through it was far from what I had wanted. Those following my Blog and updates will know already about my moving house, along with social, work, and familial obligations that have really eaten into my capacity to finish projects for my various online endeavors (I’m even out of the house as I write this).

The daily posting schedule is still suspended. Even with the personal goals I set for myself, I am not any particular distance closer to getting it back on track. I have done better, though. Before leaving on my current trip I wrote a post a day (which are coming out a bit more sporadically as they need to be edited) and have continued to write into my “vacation”. So I won’t be launching anything new this year or changing anything up: my goal will simply be to take steps to returning to my former schedule (with comics likely coming back soon). I seem to be getting closer to that goal, but all projects need to be taken one step at a time. I will be posting regular updates along the way, and if all goes well things should be back to “normal” around this time next year.

Hopefully, this new year will bring as many opportunities and interesting events as the previous, and I’ve already got some plans for new releases to come once I’ve gotten back to a semblance of normalcy. I am excited about working on new projects as I try and catch up (I guess that the analogy would be that I have multiple legs taking multiple steps). I appreciate everyone who has enjoyed, supported, critiqued, found interesting, or left feedback on my work this past year. It should be getting better all the time, and with any luck more expansive in the coming year.

Happy New Year!

-Austin

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Blog 10-30-16 – October Update

All right, I said I would be doing another blog before November, and here we are… with less to report than I had hoped, but nevertheless it is an exciting time.

First things first I will be participating in a few events: the second Big Bend Comic Con will be in Alpine Texas on November 5th, and I’ll have a table in the Artist’s Alley. And the 2016 Artwalk festival will also be in Alpine November 18th-19th where I will have a stand on the walk selling my books.

And speaking of books I have a couple new ones I’ve been working on that will be debuted at the Comic Con and then go on to be featured at Artwalk. These will be available soon from the Amazon store link as well. Here’s a photo of the proofs.

photo-216

There’s a new Walking the Roosters, Stamped, and a printed version of the Beta of RPG LTE.

On the more personal side of events, I have finally finished my move (which if you count that as the time from when I moved out of my last solo place to where I am now, took more than a year). I still have to finish unpacking (which I’m sure will be a wonderful experience) but I will be moving to a more stable schedule that means I will be able to produce more online content.

And I know I said that I would get more posted in September and October, and I do have many more things finished than I haven’t posted, but I run things by an editor before posting them and she has been very busy lately as well, making it hard to get new things through. But now that I am in a more stable place (and have finished the new books) I will be able to sit down and concentrate much more on what needs to be done on the site. I have my own personal goals for catching up on everything, but I won’t post them here because they will inevitably change. I do really enjoy doing the things I have been online and I hope to get back to it soon, and it shouldn’t be too long before I put up another post with more information about how things are going.

-Austin

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