2014 Site Update – Stuff For the New year!

Yeah! It’s 2014! And that means… it’s 2014. Well for me, that means some changes. Some are good, and some are… well “I” think they’re all good, because they make things better for me, but some might cause some inconvenience for your viewing, for which I apologize.

But to start with the good, I’m going to be doing a new comic! Yes, that means there will be 13 a week for all tastes, and some extras here and there. The new strip will be called 万年筆(man’nen’hitu): The 10,000 year brush. It will be about fountain pens, which I admit is a niche market, but no other strip will be removed or paired down to accommodate it. This is a straight-up addition.  Also, I will be working on a comic in a large format that will be more serious, but less frequent. And don’t let the seriousness fool you, it’ll still be a lot of laughs hopefully, but no dates yet. (万年筆 Starts this friday)

Back in November I released five new books in the fifth wave of my collections. Most of them are available at the Antelope Lodge in Alpine, while a few are also available in other spots in the area. But for those of you who are not near me I also launched an online store, where you can buy my books and a few other goodies. I recommend checking it out, but of course I would.

Speaking of updates to the site, I had to move all of my video content over from Blip.tv to Youtube, I have a blog post explaining this, but it means I’m going to start placing ads on previously ads-free videos.  That shouldn’t be much of a big deal with the way most online videos work now. But I will make sure that the video is at least a certain length (6 minutes or more?) before placing any ads, so as not to waste too much time. Also, I am now going to be placing (relatively few) ads on the site. You can see one in the sidebar already, and I will be putting more out to see where they are the least intrusive over the coming months. I hope you understand that I do need to pay for this site eventually somehow, and right now I’m not cutting it.

Ads might also be going up on the next place I’m going to mention, The Dragon Funnies, which I upgraded to a full site this year, but right now I need to get them up andy working. As for my content on the site, the new comic won’t be added, and some of the other comics might be removed as well, but this does not mean the site is going away. For every comic I take off I will be looking into putting comics from other talented cartoonists up. I want the site to end up like the newspaper comic section I would make, and so I intend to find the best content possible for it. It is also possible to submit a comic for the site, though if I don’t have any personal contact with you at the moment the most I can offer is exposure, which isn’t the best thing to offer right now, so, yeah. I will be working on a better way to get new comics up on the site while properly compensating their creators.

Also, come this new year I will be attempting to use more social media, posting as much content as I can on Twitter and Facebook, so if you feel the subscribe system on the site is a bit clunky, then you can follow there and get the highlights.

Now for the only bad news. Due to the high volume of content I produce, I have already stopped posting on redundant sites like the individual blogs for each of my comics. And at the end of January I will be ceasing posts on the Dragon Company wordpress site and Art Supply Critic WordPress site. All of that content is already posted on my main site, so nothing is going away, I’m just making it less of a hassle for me to post the content, and like I said, links will be posted in social media if you don’t want to subscribe.

All in all, I hope 2014 will be a good year, and it looks like it will be, so I hope to see you all there, and I hope y’all have a great time.

 

Moving Mountains

It feels like I’ve been moving mountains. I know I haven’t been, but it feels like it, at least it does now. In a few years I’ll look back and say ‘man that was easy, why can’t now be like then’. Of course, that’s what I think now about school. That was way too easy.

Anyway, you might wonder what I’ve been doing. Well, aside from my current schedule of providing from two to four pieces of content a day, I’ve been: Registering two LLCs with the state, getting DBAs for those two companies, working on advertising, and finishing up and publishing two websites, et cetera. (I also had to deal with some banks that wouldn’t let me get an account, so that failed.)

This may sound easy to some people, especially parts of it. But to me right now that was almost overwhelming. Okay, that might not be the right word, but I’ll go with it.

I’m not exactly sure what to say about the experience. It wasn’t actually difficult, it just felt that way, and it was very time-consuming. I guess time-consuming things are more difficult just based on premise. There were several hiccups, though not as many as I expected, being a few years ‘too young’ to be doing this kind of thing.

Everything has gone along smoothly as far as resistance is concerned though, most of the hiccups were easily gone around, though that was the longer path. The main problem has been that my work has suffered from doing these things. Paper work takes time, especially by mail, so between filling out forms, mailing them, and waiting for them I’ve used up a large chunk of time that I was previously using to create more content. Though most of the content is still eventually being created, it is sometimes late, and is really crunching my schedule. Most of these things are done, but things like the site meta-data are still works in progress.

This is really more of a blog update than an article or something. I just thought it was sort of interesting considering it has been consuming my life for a little while now. I hope anyone who cares was interested and I hope I didn’t kill anyone else with boredom. This has been a long process, but it is still much more gratifying than anything I did in school. And I hope all reading this will get to enjoy the future things I create because of this process.

If You Can’t Write… Don’t.

Articles are hard, just sayin’ that. Depending on the definition of article being used they can be even harder. What exactly makes an article is really up to either the author or the publisher. The same thing applies to when a short story becomes a novella, a novella a novel, and so on. But other than that they’re just plain hard. Writing is hard, every writer is the first to admit that (every high school “artist” wouldn’t in a “million” years). And contrary to popular belief, writing is becoming harder. While anyone can now become a writer, attention spans are becoming shorter. People who “write” write very little. Bloggers even have to force themselves to come up with interesting content. At least the interesting ones do. How many times have you come across a dead Blog with a promising start, that just disappeared. Or, more realistically, just sucked and piddled out. Everyone has a Blog, everyone posts words, or videos or something on the internet. However most just wither and die. Most “writers” don’t have the attention span or the drive to continue writing. Even people who are attentive to their Blogs fail because they can’t push themselves to continue creating content. Eventually preconceived ideas drain and nothing new comes. It seems cliche now to say that every writer finds it hard to write and most have to force themselves to start, but it is true. The difference is that most people say that to encourage people to write. I am not trying to encourage you: writing is hard, really hard and time consuming. But I don’t mean to discourage you either, if you write well then write, if you can force yourself to. Just because writing on a computer is easy, doesn’t mean you have great ideas, just because you have great ideas, doesn’t mean you can force yourself to write them, or that when you do it will be good.

Most writers that continually create content write as either their job or as a major hobby, and it works like any other hobby. Just like how the movie buff spends most of his free time watching movies, or that model collector you know spends his putting together little plastic pieces and painting them, writers spend theirs writing. It takes time and dedication to do, and if that is not applied, it is crap. And as much as the writer in me wants to say it’s hard because you’re continually being attacked by dinosaurs, going to parties, flying pigs around Mount Everest, and communing with the soul of William S. Burroughs, that is simply not the case. Any writer able to continue creating deserves commendation, but those unable to should not be concerned. The ubiquity of the Blog is unnecessary. Not everyone needs to be a writer. There are other ways a voice can be heard, or maybe it won’t even be your voice but your actions. Writers may be able to write more and arguably better then you, but you can do better than them at something. And if you are a writer continue to be so, the amount of dead Blogs grows every day from forgotten passwords to lack of content, don’t let yours fall into the same hole. But my intent is mainly a caution: do what you do, and not what the internet does.