Organization is awesome!

Wish someone had told me that sooner.

In order to put together the book, I must first sort through my big bin of strips to find the comics I need to rescan. Best way to do that? Organize it all! Ye gods...

What you see on my drafting table (currently converted to a much lamer regular table) is not even one third of the strips I have to sort. Every pile represents a break in continuity in which the connection strips haven't been located yet. The most unnerving gaps are those of single missing strips. (Where are you, #593 and #386?) Chunks I know got shuffled away and should all be together, but the loners? Who knows?

So now... what do I do? I've run out of space to stack my strips! This tiny apartment doesn't have much in the way of surfaces. I guess I have to flip through the bin in hopes of finding the missing links... or start stacking on the floor. All I know is I need to get this done today. Which means back to work!

*sigh*

More mental sabotage!

This day was over before it started, thanks to my bored, meandering brain. Yes, I was derailed by a dream! LAME!

Yesterday I woke up refreshed and ready to kick life's ass! And I totally did. BAM! Today... I woke up after a dream of the perils of air travel. Not cool, brain!

Oh, this dream had everything: The waiting, the tension and the mishaps. I get through my lines, past security and board the plane. Once aboard, everything is uneasy and tense. The passengers are suspicious, nobody is friendly and the pilot is a jerk. Yeah, the pilot was hangin' with us. Dream logic! As we go on, the plane moves closer to the ground and starts swerving around. I am sick to my stomach and starting to freak out.

Eventually, the plane is right by the ground, going up and down hills. (Must have been San Francisco.) We went through an underpass and I wondered how we did that with the plane's wingspan. That's when it hit me. This was not the plane. This was a bus. I wasn't flying to my destination, I WAS STILL ON THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT!

Yes, the dream began again! This time, the tedium went up a notch. We had to stick with the bus. We had to follow the driver's instructions. And everything was still swerving wildly, making me pukey. So naturally we were forced to stop at McDonalds before making the flight!

This was an airport McDonalds, so it worked differently. We moved in one slow, somber line. Everything was blank faced and robotic. Instead of ordering off the menu, you pressed a button corresponding to various meals. This allowed the workers to instantly hand you the meal in one dull box. Payment was a swipe of the card and we were back on our way.

Of course, we were running late so tension was high. I looked up to the big airport board to see if I was going to make my flight. I was! And there was the schedule. Depart at (whatever time) and arrive at - wait, what? We were scheduled to CRASH. In TEXAS. Good of them to warn me. GET ME OUT!

And that is how I started my day. No momentum, lots of weariness. I'm only now starting to get motoring again. The night is young, and the ink is plentiful! The goal is to get some comics done to justify my existence. This boring dream post isn't helping keep the gods from hitting that delete button...

Returning to work

Well that was a fun diversion, but it's back to the grind! New Year's a-comin' and I've got to have strips ready! It's about time for for me to switch the date over on all my files - and finally move said files to an appropriate directory!

There's a lot to do for the new year, most of which will be the subject of procrastination. The transition will be the easy part. The "put it off until next year" will be hard. I need to update the archive page, redo the cast page and, of course, finally get a store for Precocious. That will take a lot of time, and I'm not yet sure where it'll come from. Ahh, but the new year is for PROGRESS, and progress I shall.

Evolution

With my acceptance to SpiderForest, work now begins on massively upgrading the Precocious website. This is going to be a SLOG people. Thanks to Briana of the awesome Rune Master (go check it out!), I have the base for new PHP supremacy! Once it's set up, updating Precocious will be easy and AUTOMATED! That's right, drunken rich kids in white mustangs who drive into the power lines at 11:50pm, you no longer can delay my updating! Everything will be much more streamlined and efficient on the code end - but the site will look exactly the same! Win! Of course, that's once it's set up, and setup means renumbering 250 strips, copy/pasting the titles and alt text of 250 strips into and making sure every link is no longer pointing to the emeybee domain. It's gonna take a while. I love you emeybee, and it's been fun, but it's about time for me to grow up and leave the nest.

Tackling the strips is going to lead some reorganizing. Potentially starting this Sunday (depends on how fast I work) the strips will be listed by their ACTUAL number, not their 2009 number - which is going to be +100 all around. To get such a nice round upgrade, I had to play with the wretched Bonus strips that throw off the numbering. Meet the kids will now be #99, placed after the intro arcs. The first Sunday will be moved up to become the first non-intro strip, at #100. The Gary Larson toon will be stricken from the record and moved to the extras section. The final Sunday is going to be re-run on the 12th, taking that number in the archive permanently.

Wby am I doing this? Because I have to save my sanity. By moving the strips as I have, I can just add 100 to all 2009 strips. Keeping the bonus Sundays in order would mean remembering where they were placed and not overlooking them as I renumbered everything - because if I get just one off, I have to do it all again. This is WAY easier, and all it costs is one Sunday of new material. And this is just STEP ONE! I don't even know how the archives will work...

The Tiffany image is unrelated to this post. I *was* going to draw Sydney trying to capture Bud in a pokeball and make an evolution gag that way, but I snapped my mechanical pencil in two. I figured that was a sign to get my blog on and go back to inking Sunday's strip.

Large and in charge

Guess who got a new large-format scanner? I can scan ALMOST TWO TINY PAINTINGS AT ONCE! More importantly, I can scan two strips at the same time. (Aww, yeah!)

If this bugger keeps working, then life will be excellent. It will cut soooo much time off of tedious scanning sessions. Yay!

Working to avoid working

Today was supposed to be the day I started scanning in June's completed strips, or at least inking some more June strips. Yeah, that's tedious, so screw that. LET'S BE CREATIVE!

The upside is that I got these two bite-sized paintings completed. The one on the left makes me happy. The one on the right leaves me merely content.

How to spend a lot of energy and look like you've done nothing

In an effort to increase the Precocious experience, I am in the process to adding hovertext to all the comics. It's like each strip gets a second, lamer, joke! Also, in and effort to increase the annoyance experience, I have added StumbleUpon buttons to all 2009 comics. THIS MEANS YOU PEOPLE SHOULD START STUMBLING!

Oh yeah, there's on problem. There's no way my internet connection is stable enough to upload everything! I may try later tonight, when epic failure won't be noticed by as many people. Or I might wait until I've titled and buttoned all the intro strips as well.

Look at all the stuff I do when I'm incapable of doing anything *actually* useful. My Precocious buffer is down to one week, so I gotta get working! Any smaller buffer and I go full crazy person panic!

The brain has experienced a problem and needs to shut down

You know, I can't even remember anymore WHAT I've been working on with web design, all I know is that this idea came to me at one point in the process. The thing about web design is that you shouldn't notice it. Good design feels natural. Problem is, every new feature added is another chance to make things clunky. Also, the more you do, the more improvements you see that need to be made. I'm doing the best I can, but it melts the brain.

As of now, I am not suicidally enraged by web design, but that may be due to repressed memories. The biggest annoyance I'm dealing with is that web design is TIME CONSUMING. I have drawing and coloring to do, dammit!

...and boy are my arms tired!

I just scanned four weeks of new strips tonight. Man, that's tedious... but productive! Now I have to decide what to do next. I want to do the parents strips, but I might also want another buffer week. Maybe I should venture outside first. Nah.

Ominous sign: On the second scanned strip, I was almost finished. I selected the remaining gray artifacts and hit the delete key. The monitor went black. So much like life!

Desperate times call for busywork

Just as cowardice caused me to work on the gruntwork that is coloring, a sad and stressful day caused me to make the swatches graphic I needed to make for coloring. Colorizing strips requires actual effort, but making swatches is mindless busywork. Oh well, this will help in the future. The colors will change, I'm sure, but that just means I update the swatches. As long as it was a swatch at the time, no color is ever incorrect!

The power of negative thinking!

Today I woke up with the plan to keep with the publicizing effort going. So far I've put the strip on a few lists... and hoped for divine intervention! I have to keep submitting the strip to portal sites, start socializing on message boards and - this is the scariest - write to web cartoonists I adore and see if I can get some advice/assistance. I feel like such a tool doing that, and I have no clue what to say. I'd likely send the email equivalent of "Duuuurrrrrrrrrr," and make a fool of myself.

Suddenly, playing around with color isn't so bad! That's just tedious. Tedious > Awkward!

After my bold declaration of not making Sunday strips, with the bold edit of not having a strip for THIS Sunday... I will have the strip ready for Sunday after all. Having lost complete control of myself, I went ahead an colorized Monday's strip as well. Color strips *do* look spiffy! Also, they mean strip creation takes twice as long. Also, if I colorize strips, I have to save each original in the hi-res form in case I'm ever cool enough to justify a published collection. Also, color strips make publishing costs go way up. Also, I am not getting paid for this. See, if that last issue is taken care of, all the others go away.

Let's do this!

Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this. Let's do this.

Scripting: Done.
Sketching: Done.
Lettering: Done.
Inking: Done.
Scanning/Photoshopping/Formatting/Website updating: Aww, dammit, there's MORE!?

This is an image from strip #36, the latest to be scanned. I have 27 to go (including a promo strip, so the final strip of the storyline isn't the first strip everyone sees) and it's nothing but a grind now.

My scanner is too small to get the whole strip at once, so I have to do it in two shifts. Thanks to the small lip on the scanning bed, the image is *slighly* off. This means I scan a strip twice, drag them into a template file, use layers and opacity to line them up, delete the extra, merge layers, use the contrast tool and use a select color range tool to eliminate the gray leftover that comes from Photoshop not filtering blue properly. THEN it's touch-up time! Some strips require lots of minor erasing, which adds up. MANY strips (due to me being a lazy inker and not having my color range calibrated properly) need some extra black painted in. Finally, I rotate the strip to make it straight, shrink it too size and drop it into the final template for saving. Sometimes I skip the erasing, blackening and rotating... oh well.

Ahh, but if I'm good I can make a decent dent into scanning the strips tonight, so tomorrow can be primarily spent doing tedious web design!

BUT IT WILL ALL BE WORTH IT WHEN IT'S DONE! W00T!

Link to the present

Here's a compilation of some banners I constructed to advertise Precocious, using all recycled material! That was the *fun* part. The next part is creating and uploading the linking page that will host these banners. Coding something that will have code for others to copy and paste on their website is not that fun. Sigh. Web design is my punishment for uninspired days. At least *something* gets done...

Edit: The linking page is up

Continuing to hammer out the website

How does one do something productive when one's brain is encased in concrete? After completely butchering the drawing and inking of strip 24, I gave up on the art side of productivity for the day. This meant it was back to coding!

I've switched the domain forwarding now, so going to precociouscomic.com will now take you to the actual comic. Considering the only visitor might be the one reader of this post, I'm not risking anything here. I suppose that's a benefit that comes with being so unpopular.

Aside from adding the wildly-disappointing strip 24, I've also added a cast page and changed the menus a bit. While I hope to eventually expand the cast section as more and more characters get introduced, I figured it couldn't hurt to put up summaries for the elite eight. I'm not thrilled with the page, but it's fine for a placeholder. I debated over including Roddy or not, as he doesn't show up during the pilot arc, but decided I wanted the balance of having eight cast members. Roddy will be introduced when I start whoring out my strip anyway.

On positive news: I have a buttload of new art supplies! Should my brain get in gear, I'll at least be prepared for it.

What are Friday nights for again?

Friday is a dead day. Friday TV is a barren wasteland. Friday on the internet is when site updates tail off. Even the message boards empty. On Friday, you have to make your own fun. You are EXPECTED to make your own fun. No matter how pathetic you are, you have to have some social thing to do on Friday. It's natural law!

And then there's me, sitting in my mother's basement, cursing Netflix for now moving instantly and leaving me without the comforting space opera - a genre synonymous with lonely Fridays. (TNT's ST:TNG marathons on Fridays were awesome for making me forget I was friendless until my junior year of high school.)

What else could I do? CARTOONING! I finished the Jacob ramble strip and went on to the Max ramble strip before my brain shut down. So. Much. Text. At this point I could have tried to move on and draw something to excite me, but instead I decided to harvest my misery and use it as the fuel to sustain me through MIND-NUMBING TEDIUM!

Yes, friends, I worked on the Precocious website! Coding tedium aside, I *also* had to scan, size and photoshop all the comics. It took a while to figure out the proper method, but I chose not to look back. Yeah, the first strip didn't come out well. Yeah, I never went back and fixed Suzette's yelling in strip #17. Fuck it! If I stopped to think I'd just collapse in a dull heap!

So now I have 23 strips on the site for the viewing pleasure of the person who reads this. Man, I hope they're good enough. I have my doubts.

My hope is that, as the creator, I am just too close to the work. All I can see now are the thousands of errors and failures in the strips. Too many strips fail on comic timing. Other strips lose their impact because I can't quite get facial expressions correct. The lettering is unprofessional. It's sloppy drawing all around. ACK! Should I be feeling *pride* instead?

Granted, a lot of these problems are due to the inevitable pilot problems. At this is the first look into Precocious, I have to forcefully present the premise and the characters in a way that establish an identity immediately. Instead of nuance, I have to introduce personalities in bullet point format. Thus, as each character appears they inevitably monologue. I *have* to get this stuff down and it's up to me to do my best in making it work. The clunkiness is the consequence of creating a pilot. The BEST creators make it look easy... but I won't get there until I have more experience. Even the most skilled creative types need some trial and error to figure out the best use of their immense talents.

Sadly enough, I chose the *worst* time to post what I had on the web. The introduction strips stop at... strip 24, which will likely be posted later today. Starting at 25, the STORY begins to move and the characters are freed to interact without the "THIS IS WHO I AM AND THIS IS WHAT I DO!" shackles restricting them.

Just remember: For many quality TV shows, a clunky pilot is often followed by a CLASSIC second episode. I sincerely hope that the upcoming strips will make the reader forget the choppy pace of the opener. I'm not saying I will magically become an expert cartoonist overnight - only experience can help me fine-tune the drawing and timing - but if I can end this "pilot" arc on a high note, then there will be hope for Precocious yet!