Ninth Anniversary

Lately I've been thinking a lot about life: where I'm at, where I'm going, what the master plan is, and so on and so forth, but mostly I'm trying to make sure that I take the time to understand and appreciate how great a blessing it is to be right here, right now.

The picture needs a little explanation. CeCe, my wonderful wife of nine years, and I have kind of a quirky tradition. On our honeymoon, a rubber duck was in the bathtub of our hotel room. We kept it, and wrote the date on it. A year later, we got another one on our first anniversary. And that's our tradition. Each anniversary, we go on a hunt for our new rubber duck. Generally, we look for one that speaks to us, one that summarizes our past year and captures our hopes for the following. This year, we made a move from California to Missouri, my book was released, and CeCe is finishing up a pretty awesome freelancing opportunity. We've kind of felt like stars this year, and during the next year we've resolved to take aggressive steps to kill our debt, so it will be a year of reaching for the stars as well.

We went camping last night, and we got to experience the other thing that the duck represents: that of being able to sleep under a beautiful starry sky, unhindered by smog and clouding by city lights. There were also cows, lots of cows, but that's another story.

One click in the quiet of the night.

...and just like that, Forsaken Realm: The Light Within is out in the world. Capable of being bought, read, loved, hated, and experienced, whether good or bad. I'm very excited to have "my baby" out there for the world to see and experience, but there's also an unexpected vulnerability to the whole thing, a feeling of being very exposed. It's all good and well to say (as I do) that I'm excited to have it out there, because it's too big to live only in the mind of myself or in the minds of a few, and I believe that, but it's scary at the same time.

There was no hoopla, no bells, no whistles, just a few keystrokes late at night after years of work to get it to that point. But that seems appropriate, after all, that kind of quiet intimacy is how books are experienced, and it seems only right that my final moment with the book that had been mine came to an end with an unheard goodbye kiss in the middle of the night before dancing across the minds of others for the first time, quietly, intimately. Forsaken Realm is no longer mine. Not even Mine and Akeem's. It now belongs to everyone who reads it. Everyone who pictures the characters a certain way, and hears their voices with different inflections, sees them strike different poses than I envisioned. I guess that is the beauty of a story--each reader has a singularly unique experience, my static words transformed into a myriad of different realities.

Whoa.

Stand Back-this is gonna make me invincible!

Lately I've noticed a tendency among those that I work with to respond to a question a certain way. The question is "How's it going?"--or something similar. The answers vary a little, from "Just another day in paradise", to "Just living the dream, not sure whose dream it is though," and it bums me out a little. So I've decided not to buy into this. I want my response to the question to be, "I've got another day and another chance to make things right." That's right, cheerful optimism comin' right at ya.

It's a little thing, but I feel better already. Every day is a wonderful opportunity to make things a little better, for those around you, and yourself.

Done and done...almost...

After a ridiculous four-day, pull-out-all-the-stops, do or die, get-it-all-done-or so help me, no holds barred creative session, which Akeem was gracious enough to come all the way out to Kansas City for, Forsaken Realm: The Light Within is complete.

For real.

I'm still looking it over, double-checking for formatting errors and the like, but it appears to be done. Good thing, too, because it will be available for purchase in just a couple of weeks from now. We have learned a LOT from this experience, which is going to benefit the next four books in the series, but let me tell you what I've learned.

Akeem Brown is awesome. I don't say something like that lightly. As the co-creator of the property, he's always ben very invested in making it work. Our huge distance from each other is a testament to that. But this visit was more than that. When I called him over a month ago and said "Dude, I'm really going to need you to come out. I don't see how we can make the deadline." He didn't ask questions, other than when, and he immediately put in to get the time off of work. Like me, Akeem has a job that is crucial to the support of his family. Time off of work is not something either of us takes lightly. So a few weeks later, he showed up for four days of non-stop production. It was amazing. By skipping sleep and intravenously taking his mountain dew, Akeem produced in four days what would normally take four months. It's good stuff. But you'll see, soon enough.

Daily, CeCe is doing work on the trailer for the book, which uses unique pieces of Akeem's art designed for the trailer, and that's coming along beautifully. I will be so excited when you all get to see it.

Changes, self-imposed and otherwise

What we've adopted lately:

Instead of consuming upwards of 40 ounces of soda per day, I now have Soda Saturdays. Instead of soda, I drink water the 6 other days of the week. As a side-effect, the soda is significantly more delicious.

In a cost-cutting measure, we discontinued our Netflix. Not forever, mind you, but we've agreed that we can resubscribe (or buy other movies) once we have watched every single movie and tv series in our collection. We grossly underestimated how many movies and stuff we actually have. This is going to take a while.

Instead of frequently eating out, we may now go out to eat once a month. Like the soda saturdays, this has resulted in us savoring and enjoying the experience much, much more. As an added bonus, I also get to consume a soda during this outing. It's awesome.

Most of this is the liberal application of something called 'creative deprivation' to our lives. The idea is that the more you do something, the more you take it for granted. On the other hand, when you look forward to something, plan around it, and have to wait for it, it's that much better.

Website updated!

After my computer died a few weeks ago, I found myself in the undesirable position of having to rebuild my websites from the pieces that I could salvage. Although it was pretty frustrating, my new web designing interface is much better for doing updates than what I had before, meaning I'll have a much easier time doing news updates and such within the website.

Here's the new site:

www.forsakenrealmseries.com

It looks pretty much like the old one, but is actually a piecemeal reconstruction of he previous.

Outside of Forsaken Realm, I also updated the Painted Monkey Studios website, because it was in the same situation, and it gave me an opportunity to add a whole lot of CeCe's more recent works, including her Squary Monster series, which she painted in collaboration with

Xavier!

CeCe is also now listed with About faces Entertainers, a national gig company. She's worked hard on getting her samples together lately, and I'm so proud of her! You can look at that one here. (Sorry about all the links, guess it's kind of a linky day!)

Stress...

I found this note the other day saved in a folder from long ago, sent by my regional manager in 2007. (Incidentally, that year, I failed to follow its advice, but I've done much better since then.)

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water & asked, “How heavy is this glass of water?” Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it.”

“If I hold it for a minute, that’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you’ll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it’s the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

He continued, “And that’s the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all of the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won’t be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we’re refreshed, we can carry on with the burden.”

Some ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

• Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.
• Keep your words soft & sweet, in case you have to eat them.
• If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
• When everything’s coming your way, you are in the wrong lane.
• Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.

April plans for Forsaken Realm!

So, Akeem and I are in talks to come back to York and have a little release party at the Sylvia Theatre on Thursday Night, April 28th. We haven't announced it officially just yet, and gauging the level of interest in this is pretty difficult, but we think it would be a lot of fun, and pretty neat.

Since the book comes will be available for purchase at the beginning of April, we are hoping that attendees of the event (it would be free) will have had an opportunity to have gotten their copy and have read it by that day.

Akeem's so excited that he's already created a poster for advertising the event, pictured on the left.

And then life...slowed...down...

Today, I realized that continuously checking my email was unnecessary. I had been in the habit of receiving about 20-30 emails per day, nearly half of which needed to be responded to right away. To this end, I got a data plan for my phone not incredibly long ago to cut down on the difficulty inherent in being able to address issues in a timely manner.

Today, I received two emails. Two. The smart phone that I got to keep me from going crazy juggling my responsibilities at work a little while ago is now a completely unnecessary Facebook conduit. Do I like it? Well, it's a funny thing when you get what you want. I think it will take some getting used to.

On the plus side, in our larger space here, I've been able to unpack action figures that were stored for years, as well as bust out my old comic books, including my favorites. In the 90s, during the height of the comic book market explosion, a book called Excalibur was written and drawn by a guy named Alan Davis. It featured three former X-men who went to England and teamed up with a couple of superheroes there. You know how people get upset when they adapt a British sitcom for American audiences? This was the opposite. Imagine 3 main characters from a very popular American action show thrust into a British storyline, frequently with humorous overtones. It was quirky and amazing. During a time when comics kept getting darker and darker, this strange spin-off stressed adventure over action, magic over mutants, and I loved it.

Anyway, if you're going to simplify and streamline, and slow your life down, it'll probably be okay if you find some long-lost comics to remind you of who you used to be. And if you find some old Alan Davis Excaliburs, check them out.

Megaman X

A few days ago, Xavier read his first word. The reason that I know this is because CeCe squealed with delight in a manner that was certain to be heard not only by our current state, but indeed, any other states in which we have resided. I was proud, to be sure, he quickly followed his success in sounding out then reading CAT by reading CAN, but my level of excitement paled in comparison to CeCe's. I thought it was perhaps because I am a far worse parent (I am, by the way, I can admit it), but then today, I squealed over something that CeCe barely cares about. That's right, that is a picture of Xavier playing Megaman (part 9, which is an 8-bit game). Today he learned to walk, jump, and shoot, and die over and over again. I'm soooo proud!

He lives here? Cool!

So in a nod from the gods of creativity and inspiration, today I found out that Bill Amend, the guy that does Foxtrot, lives in Kansas City. When the paper came out, I looked for two strips: Calvin and Hobbes and Foxtrot. When Calvin and Hobbes rode off into the non-commercialized sunset, it meant I still had an amazing strip to look forward to. This is a relief, because there has been a tiny part of me that has been afraid that my creativity may be curtailed in an area where every waiter isn't waiting on their 'big break', but if this is where Foxtrot comes from, that excuse goes straight out the window. Although I haven't put together a stalker strategy just yet, it's on my list of things to do. Pictured is one of my favorite strips with Akeem and I (I mean, Marcus and Jason-I'm Jason because I, uh, wear glasses all the time, and Akeem is Marcus because he once dressed as Green Lantern for Halloween, yeah, that's it) as various superheroes.

Fire through the smoke

"Writing lets others see the smoke from the forest fires of our minds. Editing lets them see the fire through the smoke," a friend of mine said a few weeks ago, right before the cross-country move. It's true, and indispensable, but I never imagined that the joy that I found in writing and planning and crafting would make up less than 5% of the process. It's tedious and very time-consuming, but ultimately worth it. So, aside from a brief break to hop on here and reflect on this, I've been spending today focused on the (fingers crossed) final edit of the book, readying it for the April release. The picture here is what the actual pages that I'm working from look like. The biggest challenge is to not make errors as I enter the corrections (typos and so forth), which is a paranoid and daunting undertaking. On the plus side, it feels good to have such a lean, mean manuscript, especially when I look back at the previous drafts. I really want everyone's introduction to Forsaken Realm to be the smoothest reading process possible, so what else matters?

Mister Five-Dolla!

It's been a while since I've actually worked on a caricature seriously, but I recently was asked to contribute a gallery to my company's caricature manual in progress, and the only requirement (in addition to a handful of caricature samples) was to do a caricature of good ol' honest Abe. So this is mine. It's pretty tame, bordering on what I call a "portricature", but it was a good exercise nonetheless. This week has had me jumping from art, to excel, to email, to reviewing stuff for the book, and figuring out a loose schedule for the premiere of the book in April. It's an exciting time, especially as we settle into our new home in Kansas City, Missouri.

A new adventure!

A couple of weeks ago, my family and I moved to Kansas City Missouri. It is a drastic change from Southern California, but an exciting one. I decided to start this blog to have a repository for all of the stuff that I do, from my novel, to my caricatures, illustrations and other artwork, as well as nifty work stuff that I want to share with the world.
Thank you, California, and my friends there, for giving me three unforgettable years that will always stay with me and shape who I am.