Category: Uncategorized

Hey, let’s start blogging again.

Volunteering at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival was a great experience — really friendly and relaxed, with lots of support and appreciation from the event’s organizers, exhibitors, and guests.

I was a bit worried about doing something new that I knew nothing about, but discovered that being a generally confident grown-up goes a long way. I felt totally at ease — although some of the details and duties were left to us to figure out on the fly, as in:

“Where’s Room [Mysterious Letter-Number Combination]?”

“Do you know where [Comic Artist I’ve Never Heard Of But is Probably Way Famous] is doing their signing?”

“I have no idea. Let me look it up in the guide [which you also have in your hand and could look up as easily as I can].”

All it took was being one step ahead of the guests — delivering a bit of patter all the while, of course.

And I discovered endless reserves of banter: until the after-party last night, where suddenly I found myself in a dark wooden-floored room with flashing lights and loud music, and spun back to those horrible grade-school dance afternoons or my nights as a single person. Everyone was chatting with their group, and I suddenly felt totally out of place. So I went home.

Over the weekend, though, I did get to speak with a few artists I’ve long admired, who inspired me to get back into cartooning (like Boulet, Dustin Harbin, and Dan Berry). It felt great to credit them, to their faces, with giving me the chance to make a living doing this thing I’ve always loved.

I also tried to make contact with other cartoonists for this project I’m building — Comix.Work — a network for referring paid work to other artists and production people.

(Our clients at work are always asking me if I do freelance work. I don’t, so then they ask if I know anyone else who does what I do. I didn’t, but am trying to change that!)

I went to TCAF two years ago, but ran through and didn’t speak to any of the exhibitors ’cause I felt too shy. By contrast, this year I felt totally at home in the library, wearing my orange volunteer T-shirt, and was much more outgoing because of it. I felt like part of a community I care about, full of people whose skills and intentions I really admire.

So it was a fun weekend, I picked up lots of books I’m going to enjoy, and hopefully I made some new friends I can enjoy creative solidarity with, and perhaps help out, too.

I’m still trying to figure out the best way to post content to the web.

Details follow. Warning: Technobabble ahead!

I publish on this blog, Twitter, Facebook — all that social stuff. And I’ve read some very good arguments for POSSE: Publish On [your own] Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

(In short, the idea is “Don’t drop different content all over social media like Easter eggs; instead, invest that material in your own site, then lead people there with social media links.”)

I know this bugs some folks who don’t like to see the same message appearing in multiple locations. I’m a bit like that: If there’s too much repetition, I’ll unsubscribe from all sources save one.

If you’re one of those people, I’m fine if you do that with me.

Thing is, this site is my archive, and the content here belongs to me. And if I POSSE, then hame.land isn’t some tumbleweed town, but the central showcase of my efforts.

The challenge is that I created my site in Serif’s WebPlus. Yes, it has a truly horrific interface — a dog’s breakfast, and that dog is named “Windows ME”. Seriously, look:

But — big ‘but’ — it lets me lay out my pages exactly as I want them to look. Except the blog solution in WebPlus is: let’s say “wanting”, so I put a WordPress blog on my server and basically cut a hole in the site so that WordPress blog would show through.

It’s not ideal, but it works.

Again, except: when WordPress POSSEs links across my various social media accounts, it links to the WordPress blog. So you’re not seeing the website frame around the blog, just the raw blog.

So I’ve got to figure out some way to keep it automated, but make sure that links go to my real site, not the stripped-down WordPress shell. If This Then That, maybe?

I got a too-short haircut after work tonight. I think my lady was upset with me for interrupting her television program. Oh well — you still can’t beat eight bucks!

Craig’s out at: something tonight. (Can’t quite remember what tonight was.) It’s very snowstormy. Poor wee lamb!

I deliberately left my computer at work tonight ’cause I’m just feeling altogether too entertained lately, too mediated.

I’m trying instead to just sit with my experience, to stare into the void, to talk to myself and listen. Anything I could really want to understand is there.

Or maybe meditatively make an apple crisp:

I’ve been wanting to try this for a while — to see just how small I can get my tin of watercolours.

Mom sent me a clip of Dame Maggie Smith on the Graham Norton show, and I couldn’t resist doodling this during it:

Screw fancy mechanicals: I’m switching to cheap pencils.

Okay, confession: It’s because this is too cool an idea to pass by:

I’m cheap about some things, but the sky’s the limit when it comes to tools that will let me make endless amounts of creative products, or do my thing anywhere.

It’s like this weekend: I was rolling a big log of vegan sausages, then cutting them up, and I wanted to laugh like a comic book villain. “I can do it MYSELF — mwa-ha-ha!”

The latest book for Strategic Coach is out the door — on time! And, in addition to our team learning how to work even better together, I had a breakthrough in the process about sticking to a limited colour palette to distinguish each chapter. (Exciting! What, no?)

Since finishing that project, I’ve been using my extra energy to blast through side projects, both at work and in my spare time.

One big “Wahey!” is finishing the first interactive story for my website. It’s called: wait for it: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation“. (I’m still chasing the bugs out of it, so if you play it and get stuck, let me know where it happened. And sorry in advance!)

My goal with these is to create little “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type stories that the user can play through in five minutes or less. It’s a much more fun way to show my work, I figure, than posting a bunch of out-of-context illustrations. (And I can’t really show a lot of my work for Strategic Coach, ’cause it’s full of their ideas and intellectual property.)

I also wanted to lower the bar to entry by illustrating this first one with simple, raw pencil drawings — ’cause “done” is much more valuable to me here than “finessed forever and never seen”. It’s one thing to have whole work-days to pencil, scan, lay out, ink, letter, and colour my cartoons for the books; it’s quite another to do that in the evening or at the weekend, when I’m also trying to be a husband, friend, and, y’know, general person.

Along that theme: Yesterday I got stuck full of needles. The Children’s Aid Society basically requires its adoption applicants to get all their vaccinations again. I know some people go bugnuts about these shots, but a) I had them once, and was fine (and didn’t get any preventable, horrible diseases, which I see as a plus), and b) I appreciate that CAS doesn’t want to place vulnerable children with anyone who could harm them in any way.

So now I’ve got a sore arm and a bit of tuberculosis living under my skin. Yick!

~

Tomorrow at lunch I’m teaching a bookbinding workshop to two of my colleagues. They’re good friends, and excited about learning this skill, so that’s going to be fun. And I haven’t taught in a long time. It’ll be good to get back to that.

I also submitted an application to volunteer at TCAF this year, and pitched the idea of teaching a class on using the comics software package Clip Studio Paint  — which I use just about every day. Howevermuch they decide to use me, it’s exciting to think about being involved in this event.

In my absence, Toronto has become one of the brightest spots in the comics universe. The one year I happened to be here when TCAF was on, I ran up and down the aisles, saw a bunch of my heroes, and sheepishly left again without speaking to anyone. Not this year! I need to develop relationships with other comics professionals.

Amazing as it was to live in the Highlands, it didn’t turn out to be the haven for creativity that I expected. All that time and space — surely I’d write and produce all kinds of books. But no, I didn’t feel like it, and life there was about other things.

Now that I’m here in Toronto, though, something has awakened inside me: a burning need to play and to tell stories.

I’m reading a book called Playful Parenting — an approach I can get my head around! — and it strikes me that play is an essential, vital part of life, yet one we neglect, thinking it’s a pointless luxury. Play, says the author of this book, is how children practice experiences, and thus learn about the world.

The things I’m dealing with in life right now are kind of Big and Important (potentially becoming a father, illustrating a long series of books, adjusting to an international move, &c.), so I love the idea of having a parallel play-world of my own in which to try things out, dabble with outcomes, and just pretend!

I’m wondering if, ultimately, we really need to take anything seriously. I mean, this life is all made up, and we don’t survive it, so why not make light of it and have fun? As Kurt Vonnegut said, “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”

I loved writing novels, because it was such a great chance to exercise my imagination like that — to create worlds and figure out what I think.

So I’ve started a few projects that give me a chance to do these things — and, of course, use my skills to create literal products of my imagination. As I said about my project-management materials, I’m drawn to use things that I created.

One of the projects I’ve been working on is a role-playing game. Over the holidays, I did a ton of reading and research, and there’s a ton of great material out there about creating games to play on your own (like Solo Roleplayer and DriveThru RPG).

From all this, I derived a very simple gameplay system that works for me, and my first campaign (story setup).

It’s just like writing a novel — setting up a premise, characters, and potential conflicts, then following the storyline along — except here it’s just for fun! No worries about being original or interesting.

(This story is about a cartoonist who’s just landed a job in a satirical magazine while a dangerously inflammatory politician rises to power. Think Charlie Hebdo meets The Dead Zone.)

So I look at the situation, decide what action my character wants to take, then roll a die. The result can be:

• “No, and:” It didn’t work, plus something worse happened.
• “No.” Simply no.
• “No, but:” It didn’t turn out like he wanted, but there’s a bright side.
• “Yes, but:” It kind of worked, but there’s a catch.
• “Yes.” Success!
• “Yes, and:” Not only did it work, something even better happened!

If I need to fill in some random twist in the story, there are Rory’s Story Cubes (wonderfully unexplained picture dice) and Deal-A-Plot (an ingenious free printable deck of random story-generating cards from the 1930s).

So it’s kind of a Rorschach Test for imagining and playing, along with “generative storytelling”. I’m writing down the story that emerges, and, of course, tempted to share it. But then I’d start second-guessing and trying to make it good for other people. That’s not the point.

What is the point? ‘Cause this is kind of a dumb, pointless exercise, no?

The point is play, and actively using my imagination —  which is an invaluable resource for the kind of things I want to do.

~

Speaking of which, my other project is a “visual novel”. That’s a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style story that you click through on the web.

This is made possible through an insanely cheap piece of software called TyranoBuilder (seriously: it’s like fourteen bucks), which features simple, visual programming for creating branched stories and spits out HTML5 code. So when that’s finished, I’ll feature it here on my website.

This is something I’d like to do lots more of — produce simple, interactive stories featuring my drawings: Something fun, as opposed to just “look at my work”.

I figured I’d start with a quick autobio story called — wait for it — “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”. It’s tough to find time for this, especially while illustrating a book (as I should be right now), but I’m making slow and steady progress.

I’ve outlined the branches of the story, gathered together reference material, and this morning I did the character designs:

So that’s what I’ve been working on while not writing here over the past little while.