Another Friday. Thirty-eight weeks into the year of our lord Two Thousand Twenty-One. Thank you again for opening this email. Thank you even more if you read it.

These Days …

I’ve been summoned for jury duty! When I got the notice I was momentarily excited. The post office pays your regular salary for time spent on jury duty. I checked the dates and was disappointed to find that the date falls on my next scheduled vacation. This will be the fourth (maybe the fifth) time I’ve been summoned since moving to Seattle. The first couple of times I was working for a company as the office manager. If I’d actually been chosen for a jury the company would have been without anyone to answer phones, schedule appointments, bill clients and other such important activities so my bosses got me excused. The last time I was summoned I did the previous day call in thing and was told I didn’t need to show up. That was pre-covid. According to the summons jury selection will be done remotely. If I’m not contacted by a bailiff by October 6th I’m no longer in the running for a jury.

I’m interested in serving on a jury sometime. I suspect I wouldn’t make it through the selection process but I’d like to see what a trial looks like from the inside.

That’s the first week of October. I will have the whole week off. This week … bleah. The best way to handle a mess is to expect a mess. So I go into work each day with the expectation that I’ll be working at least ten hours, probably more. I got myself a good powerful headlamp so I’m ready for that evening when I’m stuck out after the sun has gone to visit another part of our planet.

This week has been an improvement over recent ones. I only carried my own route on Monday and Tuesday. I did overtime because of the volume of parcels (on Monday) and Red Plums (on Tuesday) but I was done before six pm. Wednesday was my scheduled day off. I took Thursday off because Sarah had doctor’s appointments.

We’ll see what today brings.

Transmissions / Power Dynamics

… will return next week.

Practice, Practice, Practice

I’ve gotten four commissions in the last couple of weeks. One was for a pair of spot illustrations for a Call of Cthulhu book. The second was for a portrait of a family as their favorite superheroes. The third is a re-coloring job updating some art from the 1940s. The fourth is an illustration inspired by the current kerfuffle happening in Sebastopol (the small town where I spent most of my childhood) over the merger of the two rival high schools. I’ll post some of that when it’s appropriate.

I’ve also been trying put in time sketching. Now that my online stores are up and have a good variety of images I’m wanting to create some comics. I have ideas. Kaiju Weather. The Witch Engines. Both are long graphic novels that I’m not ready to tackle yet. So I’m sketching to see what comes up in the meantime.

Some of these sketches are NSFW. Fair warning.

I’ve also discovered that Google Sheets is a handy way to outline a plot. I set up a spreadsheet for the number of pages I want for, say, a chapter of a stpry. Each box of the spreadsheet represents a page of the comic. In each box I write a few sentences describing the action of the page. That allows me to figure out the basic plot and action. From there I can work up a script (for the dialogue and captions) and thumbnails (for the layout of the illustrations).

One of the advantages of Sheets is that I’ve been able to set it up on my phone and make notes during breaks at USPS.

With Sheets I’ve outlined a long graphic novel twice. The first time the story came to 600 pages – that is, 600 boxes in a spreadsheet. Fifty 12 page chapters. I lthought the first version was a good start but it needed another pass. The second time the story came to 660 pages – Fifty-five 12 page chapters.

I doubt that either outline will be expanded further. They were good practice. I imagined the final pages to be manga-ish – smaller than American comics, three to five panels per page. I had originally thought the story might be about a hundred pages but, as I outlined, the characters started escaping the original plot. They refused to do what I wanted them to do. They chose to do things that were better, worse, different. Still, 600 plus pages is too ambitious at the moment. Those characters were fun to work with so perhaps they will find their way into another  story. Versions of some of those characters are depicted in these sketches.

As I said, Google Sheets was really useful. Having the plot laid out in a grid allowed me to see where to schedule page breaks, plot reveals and gage how many pages to dedicate to a series of actions. I did most of the writing early in the morning. I’d take a half an hour and jot notes. The first draft took a couple of weeks. The second draft a little less. I didn’t use my phone access much but it was handy to have available.

That’s it for this week. Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.

Remember that there’s a Might Nizz calendar available for 2022.

See you next week!