Welcome to the next to the next to the last Skook Words newsletter of 2023. Apparently we’re only getting 51 Fridays this year instead of the desired 52. I feel ripped off. To whom do I complain?

These Days …

This is my long week at the Post Office, the one where I work 6 days in a row. Because of the high volumes of parcels the folks on the Overtime Desired List and those of us on the Own Assignment list (we’re willing to work more than 8 hours to finish our route when necessary) are coming in at six AM. We load up our trucks with as many parcels as are available, go deliver them and then come back, sort our route and then deliver everything that’s left.

I actually prefer this set up. Delivering parcels by themselves is easy. All I have to think about is getting the right parcels to the right address as efficiently as possible. Then, when I’m delivering the rest of the parcels and the mail, that goes faster because I don’t have to make extra stops and trips to deliver larger parcels that don’t fit in mailboxes to the customer’s doorsteps. I’d be fine doing this during the rest of year.

Talking to Myself

Scene –
The Cartoonist sits at his desk. He is drawing using his Wacom tablet. To his right, a fat orange cat sits on the desk between the monitor and the printer. The cat doesn’t care about this drawing thing. To his left is a room temperature mug of coffee. The Brand Manager enters. The coffee in his cup is hot and mixed with eggnog. He looks over the Cartoonist’s shoulder at the art on the monitor.

Brand Manager – “That doesn’t look like Sunk Cost Elegy.”

Cartoonist – “It’s not. It’s test art for my 2024 project.”

The Brand Manager groans.

Brand Manager – “You’re shifting gears again? How can I manage your brand if you can’t stay consistent?”

Cartoonist – “Number 1, not my problem. Number 2, it’s going to help get Sunk Cost Elegy, and everything else, done quicker. And less expensively.”

Brand Manager – “Do tell.”

Cartoonist – “You saw the notice from Adobe? That they’re raising the price of the rent for Photoshop?”

Brand Manager – “I remember that, this year, you were going to learn enough Clip Studio Paint that we could stop paying Adobe’s ransom.”

Cartoonist – “I got sidetracked. My fault. But I’ve learned that the best way for me to learn something is to make it a project. Remember 2019? When I did daily half hour sketches and posted them to Skookworks.com?”

Brand Manager – “I remember that some of those sketches took longer than a half hour to finish.”

Cartoonist – “And some of them took less. It evened out.”

Brand Manager – “If you say so.”

Cartoonist – “Yeah. Okay. Stay positive here. Even when I did a sketch in a half an hour I still had to scan it and post it. For my new 2024 project I’m going to do daily half hour sketches directly in CSP. No scanning necessary. I’ll learn the program, post a sketch every day and still have time to work on Sunk Cost Elegy. I did these test images to get a feel for how ambitious I could be in 30 minutes.”

Brand Manager – “Not bad. Did that large one take a half an hour?”

Cartoonist – “That’s my Sunday post. I’m thinking of this like doing a daily comic strip – 6 small images and one large one. I’m giving myself an hour to do the large ones. The small ones will post Monday thru Saturday and the big one will post on Sunday. Since 2024 starts on a Monday it works out perfectly.”

The Brand Manager sips his coffee. He thinks. He smiles.

Brand Manager – “I like it.”

The Cartoonist looks perplexed.

Cartoonist – “You like it? Really?”

Brand Manager – “Oh, yeah! It’s a perfect opportunity to spotlight the Brand!”

The Cartoonist facepalms.

Brand Manager – “Think about it. You’ve got an Instagram account that only gets used when the Mail Carrier decides to post a photo of a sunrise or puppy or something. You’ve got a Ko-Fi account that you’re not posting to. You’ve got a Substack account that has only three subscribers. We can hit all of them!”

The Cartoonist thinks a moment. He drinks some of his coffee.

Cartoonist – “What are you thinking?”

Brand Manager – “I post the same image to Substack and Skookworks every day. Substack has a different audience than Skookworks with different ways of creating subscribers. For Ko-Fi I’ll post a hi-rez version of each image that’s only available to your patrons. Instagram can be set to feed to Facebook. For Instagram … hmm, Instagram wants its images to be square so that means a little more work but I can set up a template that you can plug the images into. Like this – ”

Cartoonist – “Cool. And then what?”

Brand Manager – “You’ve heard me complain that it’s hard to get an audience on the internet because no one can just stumble on your work? This will be a way for people to stumble on your work.”

Cartoonist – “Right. But then what?”

Brand Manager – “We get famous and conquer the world!”

Cartoonist – “Fame and world conquering don’t automatically go together.”

Brand Manager – “Let me worry about that. Don’t you have a lot of drawing to do?”

Merry Merry!

That’s it for this week. I’m looking forward to being very busy until the end of the year. I expect that most of you will be too. I hope that, in your busy-ness, you find some joy and, once in a while, some rest.

Thank you for reading. See you in seven!