Daunting Success

So I've lately been back on Codex after a long absence, and I notice several of the writers there are also putting out ebooks. And in one thread, they're posting their cover images.

Which gets me thinking about the Digger short story collection I want to publish soon. So yesterday, I start toying with a cover concept, and sometime late last night, I end up with something that looks actually sort of awesome. Which presents me with a problem.

What's the problem with an awesome cover?

Well, I'm currently struggling with revising some unpublished Digger stories to include in hte collection for extra value. I thought the stories were sort of pleasantly funny, but now I'm thinking, "Man, I really need to step up my game so people won't be disappointed that this story is in a collection with that cover."

Because I've been a victim of the cover bait'n'switch before, and it sucks.

So the editing and polishing may take longer than I thought.

Big Game Wednesday - Digger Returns, But Then...

After a couple months of diversions, what with Gary's attempt to run Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, followed by mine, Gary decided to resume Champions again. He told me up front that I could bring Digger back if I wanted. Digger was a fairly well-conceived character with some history behind him, and importantly not a min-maxed monstrosity. When I mentioned that Digger had, you know, died along with everyone else in D&D land, he waved it off with a "characters in comics return from the dead all the time."

So Digger ended up being the only one who returned from an alternate dimension brush with death, and a new team was formed. With Digger being the only experienced character in the group (and since there had also been churn within the gaming group due to older players graduating and newer students joining up), he became the de facto leader of the New Champions.

I also decided that his return from apparent death would be a good time for a costume change, a not-so-proud tradition for comics characters with a new creative team trying to find a new creative direction. What I ended up with was the horror you see above--striped military pants out of Star Blazers, combined with the shirt from the original X-Men uniform, with a weird (and non-functional) anime-armor piece thrown over the top. I also included the signature poncho I'd had him wear whenever he tried to go out incognito and switched the boots to have an insanely large flap hanging down.

Plus a short-cropped haircut and a beard.

All in all, it was an almost total change from the previous look. The only common factor was the presence of the Drillers, and I'd even decided to have him weld on little fins to make those look cooler.

Unfortunately for Digger, the new look didn't make things any easier for him. His unlucky streak still held, and Digger was simply unprepared for the demands of leadership. The new group was younger and more volatile than the old one, but Digger was slowly beginning to grow into the role of leader.

And then he accidentally awakened an ancient Aztec deity from his ages-old slumber in a subterranean chamber. Tlaloc, God of Storms, emerged to conquer the world. Digger and the New Champions tried to stop him, but he overpowered them and sent them into the future.

This happened for a couple of reasons. Number one, Gary and I both liked X-Men, and "Days of Future Past" was still fairly fresh in our minds, as it had only been published a couple of years before.

And number two, Hero Games had published a new rules variant called Autoduel Champions that adapted the futuristic road combat of Steve Jackson Games' Car Wars into Champions terms. Gary was eager to try it out, and this was his way of doing it.

The big problem for Digger: he had lost his main powers. In those days, the Drillers were still defined as foci (obvious, inaccessible)--defined as unique bio-metal power batteries that could be removed for maintenance purposes. Tlaloc, after defeating the New Champions, had removed the batteries from the Drillers, then sent Digger fifty years into the future without them.

Still, I decided to accept the challenge so I could maybe develop Digger's skills in other ways, make him a really multi-pronged threat. I even drew up a special new character portrait of an anime-influenced Digger, his beard shaved off and his hair grown long again, surrounded by flames, with his shirt torn and that silly chest-piece missing. Dramatic, don't you know? Digger at bay, trapped in a world he never made.

We learned that Tlaloc had managed to take over the entire country (perhaps the entire world), establishing a totalitarian order that demanded obedience and human sacrifice. But there was an underground resistance, and they determined to help us do something to try to defeat him. I don't remember what the specific MacGuffin was, but it involved a road trip.

So we convoyed in two separate vehicles, and on the way, were intercepted by a cop (a trooper working for Tlaloc's evil regime, that is). That's when everything turned to shit. The driver of the lead vehicle decided to panic stop or something and failed his control roll, at which point we learned that we were traveling really fast, like 100 mph. That car rolled, basically incapacitating everyone inside. Half the team was out of the fight instantly.

Meanwhile, one of the guys in the car with Digger said, "Don't worry. I've got a force field. I'll draw their fire." He flew out and did just that. The laser on the cop car was really powerful, though, and Gary rolled amazing on the stun multiplier, so there was another hero out of the fight.

At that point, it was like Digger and one other hero (a martial artist or something lame), plus a female NPC who was not so combat oriented. As the other two characters tried shooting it out with the cop car, Digger grabbed a shotgun and leapt on top of the cop car's turret, using his clinging to stay balanced while firing down through weak spots in the car's armor (using his Find Weakness skill).

After a few rounds, the other PC and the NPC were both down, and only Digger remained. The car stopped and the cop got out to shoot Digger off the top of his car. This was the moment Digger had been waiting for, his crowning moment of cool. He would single-handedly prevail against this guy who had wiped out the rest of his team (though to be fair, half the team had actually wiped themselves out).

Digger did not have his blasters, but he had the highest allowable human strength, and insane speed and dexterity. He jumped down and punched the crap out of the cop, putting him down for the count. Sweet Victory!

At which point, the partner which Digger did not suspect was still in the car rotated the turret and shot him with several d6 of laser-fueled Killing Attack. And since at the time, he still had his damage resistance as part of a multipower, meaning he had to state he was consciously resisting damage--this due to the ridiculously low point totals Gary had instituted at the beginning of the campaign--he took full damage from the attack.

Digger died. Again. Like before, this was in an alternate world scenario using a variant rules set, but still...

This time, it wasn't so easy to handwave away. He hadn't had his form magically changed to a legendary monster, nor had he been killed in a land which included magical resurrection spells (as far as I know, anyway). He had just been shot through the chest by a really powerful laser.

I was devastated. I had played Digger at that point, off and on, for well over a year, so having him die suddenly like that really hit me hard. I went out and drowned my sorrows at Fatburger. The big lesson I learned? Don't try to jazz up your campaign by changing the rules on people. Players get used to the way the world works, and it is really hard to adjust mentally to a sudden change in rules, especially something that affects combat and lethality.

As far as I know, that was the last game of that campaign. We were coming up on the end of another school year IIRC, so we left it on the cliffhanger, and I think everyone just decided to let it hang. It wasn't as if the other players were real gung-ho to keep going after the serial embarrassments of losing to Tlaloc and a Highway Patrolman, and without Digger, I didn't see the point. I was going through my own troubles at the time anyway, since I was flunking out of Cinema Production.

We continued to game, but I really don't remember much about it. I know that we had a new guy come in at one point claiming to be a very experienced Dungeon Master with an awesome set of house-rules designed to create very powerful characters. He ran probably the most boring session I had ever sat through up to that time. We didn't really do much other than meet some powerful NPC who was pretty evidently his pet character, an elven princess who wore a distinctive crown of leaves. He spent probably five to ten minutes just describing her, including a leaf-by-leaf and dewdrop-by-dewdrop description of her crown (apparently just the kewlest magical item in his campaign , and he wanted to make sure we knew it).

I think I rounded out my time in L.A. playing Bushido and Runequest with Brian running while I worked a couple of horrible part-time jobs over the summer, trying to make it in L.A. When my dad called a few months later to tell me I could come home and stay rent-free in his house in Oklahoma City, I said 'yes' in a heartbeat, thinking I would take some time to regroup, get my screenplay writing honed, then someday come back.

I never did. But Digger did.

Oh Yeah, Before I Forget

A final Halloween Extra has been posted on herogohome.com. It's a special audio presentation of the first Digger story I wrote (though it was the third published). You can find it here.

Big Game Wednesday - Champions, Season 2

Short update this week, recounting Digger's origins as a character in a Champions campaign. The Champions home city of San Francisco had been obliterated by a nuclear bomb in the final adventure before summer vacation. Returning the next fall, Digger and the other Champions experienced strange dreams and other signs that maybe not everything was as it seemed. They soon learned that the detonation and subsequent fallout had been, in fact, a mental illusion set up by their arch-enemies in Eurostar (I think) to break up the group and remove them as a threat to Eurostar's plans.

The next few adventures were nothing tremendously exciting. The revived campaign, since it felt like a big retcon designed to absolve us of the consequences of our massive failure, felt like we had all discovered Bobby Ewing in the shower, and not in a good way. Still, we persevered, because we liked the system, we liked the way Gary ran things (mostly) and I personally liked Digger.

Although...

I was mulling over the idea of a "radiation accident," an idea put forth in the Champions 2 supplement that proposed saving a big bunch of unspent experience and then having the GM run an adventure that would basically allow you to rewrite your character from scratch to match a new character conception. In comics terms, think of that period when DC decided to change Superman from a vanilla strongman to an electric-type hero. It didn't strictly have to be radiation, mind you. If I'd still had the spell book, for instance, I could have gone on some fantasy-type adventure which would have left Digger without the Drillers, but with a newfound magical aptitude, learning the spells in the book as his new powers.

In the case of Digger, I had set things up from the beginning to allow for this. I had put forth the idea that the metal used in what would later be called the Driller Beam Generators was a special type of "living" metal (hence their original name, "Bio-Blasters"). I think the exact pseudo-scientific phrasing I used was that the ionic structure of the metal matched the pattern of Digger's own DNA, which was what allowed the metal to bond with flesh without infection or rejection.

So my concept was that at some point, exposure to a massive amount of radiation or other energy would activate the metal somehow, causing it to grow, consuming Digger's flesh and replacing it. He would end up a metallic being, but not smooth and regal like the Silver Surfer. He would be more like a chrome Skeletor, with exposed musculature made of steel cables and a skull-like face.

His powers would not be tremendously different from before, except that he could reflect energy attacks back upon the attacker and also attack at range without the huge power costs he currently suffered. Although Digger's main attack was at zero range, meaning he had to punch someone to blast them, I defined the Drillers as being able to change the focal point of the beam, with associated energy costs. The optimal focus was tunnelling range, a couple of meters in front of him; he could dig tunnels with no endurance cost. Attacking at zero range (and therefore diffusing the beam to make it non-lethal) cost him a minimal amount of endurance (3 pts per attack), but shifting focus to blast someone at longer ranges required him to pump a lot of energy into the attack (15 pts of endurance per shot).

In the end, I didn't go through with it. Because Digger had been built so cheaply, there were just lots of weak areas he had to shore up to get him closer to my original conception before I worried about changing him in a fundamental way. And several weeks into the new school year, Gary announced he wanted to put Champions on hold anyway.

We had started the school year also playing a new Dungeons and Dragons campaign in the evenings. The Dungeon Master was my friend Chuck, another Air Force ROTC guy who ended up being a navigator on cargo planes. But it didn't last very long. There were personality conflicts among the characters, and my character in particular, an elven thief named Stim, turned paranoid and chaotic. Even though we had some fresh blood in the group (including a woman named Denise whom I would briefly date), the game dissolved within a few weeks, leaving us without a major D&D campaign for the first time since I had joined the club.

So Gary announced that he wanted to put Champions on hold and instead start up a D&D campaign. Moreover, in a stark change from all the previous campaigns I had played in so far, he wanted to play the game straight from the rulebooks, without extensive house rules, which would allow him to use TSR modules for the adventures.

So one week a short time later, the sorceress NPC who had previously summoned us to the Savage Lands reappeared in our headquarters, asking us to help with another problem. When we agreed to help, she told us there was one complication: we would have to travel to an alternate dimension where things worked differently, and we might not make the trip unaltered. We passed through the gate and turned into monsters.

Gary's basic idea was that this would be our last Champions adventure for a while, and that he would use it to transition into D&D. We passed through the dimensional gate as Champions superheroes in a world that ran on Champions rules and came out the other side in a world that ran by D&D rules, transformed into D&D monsters that approximated our major superpowers. Digger, for instance, emerged from the dimensional gate as an Ankheg, a gigantic burrowing insect.

Almost immediately, we encountered a group of human fighters who attacked us. We fought back, but it was a slaughter. Our minds were still in Champions mode, a system which was very rarely lethal. While this simulated comics well, it didn't encourage smart tactical play. We all ended up being killed, and that was the end of Champions.

At least for a while.

Big Game Wednesday - Unluck and Luck

Last week concluded with Digger going on his first adventure. That was a fun campaign, though it was hampered by the fact that Gary had us start out with such small power levels. The rules recommended a basic starting point level of 100 + 150 (100 starting points plus 150 pts. in disadvantages). But Gary limited us to 100 + 100. Even after the 15 pts experience I got from the Matrix event, Digger was still very limited.

Still, we had some fun adventures. We had formed a group called the Champions (whether that's appropriate or unimaginative, I can no longer judge) based out of San Francisco. A couple of guys played some recurring NPC's during the first few adventures, sort of test-driving to see if they liked the game enough to go through chargen and play for real. So for instance, Chuck played Wasp (not Janet Van Dyne--she was basically Shrinker from the basic rules, although she was pretty much a power-clone of the Marvel Comics Wasp, so deja vu all over again) a few times, though by the time we answered a distress call from a beautiful princess/sorceress asking us to come to the Savage Lands, he had made his own character named Crystar and Wasp faded out of our group.

The Savage Lands thing was fun. There was an evil sorcerer in a tower who was oppressing the people. We basically had to do a Super Seven Samurai-type deal, where we led an army of natives to battle the evil sorcerer's army using some mass combat rules Gary had kludged up. That was when I realized the utility of area-effect attacks. Crystar had several in his repertoire and owned that battlefield, while Digger was just plunking one enemy at a time here and there.

But after we defeated his army, we had to face the sorcerer in his tower, where Digger emerged as the hero of the day. We were well on the way to a TPK (although not really, since Champions combat is rarely actually lethal), with only Digger left standing. So Digger ran away, just tunnelled straight down about three floors. Then he used his Clinging to run back up the outside wall to the sorcerer's lair at the top of the tower and hit him by surprise. After a few rounds of these types of hit-and-run tactics, the bad guy went down and the day was saved.

For some reason, Digger decided to keep the wizard's spellbook with the vague idea that he might save up some experience to maybe try to develop magical powers or something, though he never really got around to it.

But on their return to San Francisco, some bad things started happening, including the return of Wasp as a vengeful villain, intent on taking revenge on Digger for spurning her love (which was news to him). Other things happened as well, targeted specifically on Digger, until it became apparent something was going on.

For a while, I had thought it was just Gary getting creative with my Unluck disadvantage. Unluck in Champions was basically a roll you would make at the GM's discretion if things seemed to be going your way. A bad result on the roll would result in a bad turn of events (which got worse the worse you rolled). I figured Gary was just using the Unluck disad as an excuse to pile extra complications on my character.

But instead, I eventually learned that Digger was in fact cursed by a demon inhabiting the wizard's spellbook. It was weeks, months, before this came out, but finally I had to bite the bullet and destroy the thing, at which point the curse was lifted and Gary gave me a cool opportunity: I could use XP to buy up to three dice of Luck and/or buy off my Unluck.

And yes, this meant that for a while I had both Unluck and Luck simultaneously. If things were going well, I rolled to make them worse, and if things were going disastrously, I could roll for a lucky break. And yes, I did actually end up making both kinds of rolls in a single combat encounter, a dust-up with Foxbat being the one I remember specifically.

As players, we really enjoyed the campaign. Gary did a bunch of things right. He had a good variety of adventures, where one week we would stop a bank robbery, the next week we would fight international nuclear terrorists, and then battle sorcerous monsters the week after that. And he would have character subplots revolving around Hunteds and things that played out over several weeks. We never got bored with that campaign.

By the time the end of the school year rolled around, Gary decided to have a big season-finale adventure, involving us in a race against time to stop a bad guy from detonating a nuke in San Francisco.

A race that we lost. Oops.

Big Game Wednesday - Digging Deep

When we left off, Gary had proposed killing off Matrix and letting me use her experience points to build a new character. So now I had to come up with a new concept.

I had been getting back into Spider-Man at this time and found the idea of his core suite of powers--agility, speed, clinging--very appealing. But I didn't want to make a straight Spider-Man clone, and I wanted a bit more offensive punch. And for some reason, my mind kept coming around to an obscure DC hero named the Human Bomb. He was an old Quality hero who had been ported over to DC and appeared in a Justice League crossover in the 70's. His hands had been coated in some sort of liquid explosive formula, so he would punch stuff and it would blow up.

Well, the liquid explosive thing was pretty silly, but just the visual image of a punch resulting in an explosion sounded really cool, and it was easy to model in Champions (Energy Blast, 0 Range). So, why would things blow up when he punched them? I got the idea of some kind of device attached to his hand that would release a blast of explosive force. But why would anyone ever have something like that?

I don't know if I got the inspiration from seeing Tunneling on the list of powers or not, but the idea of railroads using dynamite to "dig" through mountains came to mind. And as I toyed with the idea of my Spider-Bomb character a bit more, I tossed in pieces of Wonder Woman (using his incredible reflexes and the metallic blasters on his arms to deflect bullets) and Karnak from the Inhumans (sensing the weaknesses in a structure, an ability he would use infrequently to demolish buildings in one blow).

I named the character Digger and rounded him out with a few skills and some weaknesses based on his origin story, the standard stuff about being an innocent dude who learned too much and was used as the subject of horrible experiments by an evil corporation. That's his original costume on the left there, as part of a team concept I was playing with for a potential comic book (note on the picture--that's Matrix floating above Digger's head, and there on the left is a preview of a mysterious character soon to appear in Hero Go Home ). One thing I did to save points was to buy his blasters as a Focus.

Focus is a Champions term for a power that derives from a device, like Green Lantern's Power Ring. Now, the key element for determining whether you could get points for a Focus was whether the character could lose the item, and therefore lose the powers temporarily. If they could not (such as Thor's hammer, which always returned to his hand and was too heavy for anyone else to wield, with one exception which I don't even want to think about right now), then the item was a Special Effect and not a Focus.

Digger's blasters were permanently attached to his arms, which would normally eliminate them from consideration as a Focus. But I needed the points, so I came up with the idea that the blasters contained a special type of battery that would recharge from the electricity produced by Digger's nervous system. These batteries would need to be removable for frequent maintenance--cleaning the contacts and such. So Gary let me buy them as an Inaccessible Focus, removable after I'd been knocked out for a round or so. Oh hell, was that a bad idea.

All in all, though, with Digger, I had finally gotten the hang of building characters for Champions (and yes, I guess it does say something for the complexity of a system that takes you three tries to come up with a decent character build). He was not a haphazard collection of powers tied into a blank slate of a character (like Blaze) nor was he a blatant rip-off of a particular character or a particular comics publisher's universe (like Matrix). He was a character with strengths, weaknesses and a unique history who made use of the flexibility inherent in the Champions system.

So the next week, when the heroes returned from the mission which had resulted in Matrix's heroic sacrifice, they found a new hero waiting at their headquarters, drinking a beer and wishing to apply for membership. And he immediately proved his worth when Eurostar took over a nuclear missile base and set up hordes of agents to guard it from attack. Digger simply tunneled the team under the base and bypassed the agents, taking the heroes directly to their big fight with Eurostar. The day was saved, and a new hero was born.

Next Week: Luck and Unluck

It's Alive!

Finally!

The New Plan

No calls on any of the jobs I've applied for. Not one.

Not one call. Not one interview.

So I'm thinking it's time to go ahead and throw myself into a Hero Go Home redesign. I've paid for the domain for a few more months at least, so let's put it to work.

I'm looking at making all the published Digger stories so far available for download; don't know whether to try charging for them or go the "free, but please donate" route. Got to freshen up the graphics and page design. It's set up as a ComicPress page right now, but I may dump that for straight WordPress. I've got some other ideas for some entertaining content.

And then there's Hero Go Home, the novel. The first two drafts were good in places, but didn't hold together overall. I've seen other people do the serial novel concept, and I'm thinking I might give that a try. I'm putting all the game stuff on hold while I take one last plunge at plotting it out and seeing if I can make a run at it.

The reason I'm switching to this at such a late date is two-fold. Number one, I own the domain, so I better use it before I lose it. Number two, Digger is still my only real seller. There may be an audience for the Dieselpunk stuff I've been playing with lately, but I don't know that for sure. I know Digger can sell, at least some. And number three, of course, I need cash, at least enough to keep my utilities turned on. Desperation may spur the creative oomph that escaped me on the previous HGH drafts.

I'll still post here. This will never go completely away, I don't think. For instance, tomorrow I'll be posting up another examiner.com story, and then will come Big Game Wednesday. I'm into the Champions era now, and you may be able to tell that I look back fondly on my Champions days.

And in a couple of weeks, Big Game Wednesday is going to reach the origins of Digger in the game. Assuming I've got some stuff ready to roll out, that may coincide with the Hero Go Home relaunch. We'll see.

Pieces of a Larger Puzzle

So I wrote recently about the idea of publishing Death Wave myself, and I tied it into the idea of finally going out and making this writing stuff that I do actually earn me a living.

Two big problems with that:

Number one, it's scary.

And number two, I've not been very good at it so far.

I mean, the DIY ethos sounds great when you're discussing it around beers late at night, but it's not as if I haven't tried it before. Blue Falcon went nowhere. Hero Go Home, the webcomic, fizzled (partly because I was still learning about pacing, partly because I had other things taking up a lot of my time, but also largely because I enjoy writing much more than drawing, and the art was a shit-ton of work for very mediocre result). Even this blog, which was basically started as an attempt to let folks get to know me and maybe build a following, is basically read by my friends and no one else (not counting the dozens of folks who visit once while searching for pics of the Barbi Twins or Tig Ol' Bitties).

But here I am with time on my hands and a desire to do more, go farther, than I have before. So I'm working on a few projects. I haven't figured out which one I want to lead with yet, aside from one small announcement I'll be making very soon.

One is publishing Death Wave. It's more or less ready to go right now. It could use an editing pass, and needs some other work, but most of the heavy lifting has already been done.

Another is perhaps publishing an anthology of Digger Universe stories. I don't have a lot of those so far. There are basically four that have been published (three starring Digger and one starring Digger's former teammate AcroCop), plus another that was started but never finished, another that has been basically plotted but not written, and another unrelated story that also features supers and could easily fit into the universe with a couple of tweaks. So that's seven, which is not really enough for a proper anthology, but could serve as a chapbook or something that could be the seed for future development. But since all the writing hasn't really been done yet, it's not as "shovel-ready" as Death Wave is.

Another possibility is finally doing another draft of Hero Go Home. I still take out the idea and mess with it, trying to find a way to make it work. I really want to make it work, although two bad drafts has pretty much scared me away from it. But if there was interest in the Digger anthology, I could certainly see myself writing this up as a follow-up. If there was interest in that, I might even figure out a way to finish Digger's Big Con, the storyline I barely started in the webcomic.

Also still rattling around in my brain is the new book I want to write, the Twenties-era Johnny Dollar meets Cthulhuzilla story. And at the same time, I'm playing around with notes for a role-playing setting that I might have finished enough and be brave enough to present to friends by the time our current Atlantis game starts to wrap up in a year or so. I probably won't make any money from that, but there are a lot of indie publishers with PDF's for sale on DriveThru RPG. Somebody must be making some money. Maybe after I've run it a while, it will be something I feel confident enough to sell.

Will any of this pay my bills and make me a living? Seems doubtful. Nothing here looks like a Penny Arcade/Schlock Mercenary caliber idea. Then again, who knew that those would take off the way they did? I did have an idea once that struck me as a possible hit, but I had neither the money, nor really the desire, to pursue it to its conclusion.

The point is, no matter what's going on with my current job situation, I feel as if I need to start putting more stuff out there. I know some people will buy it. I know my work is worth paying for, because I've been paid for it by professional markets. Now I need to find the right way to connect with the right audience, and find the confidence and enthusiasm to start producing the kind of work I was producing five years ago. And hope enough people will pay for it to make it worth the effort.

Corinne Bohrer, give me strength.

It's Real

I have uploaded the first week's worth of strips to the site. They'll update automatically on the scheduled days (I can do the same thing here--I'm doing it now, in fact--but I should probably do it more, so I don't have to scramble on Wednesday nights to do a Big Audio update, or do a ton of scanning on Saturday mornings for the Vault).

So now I just sit back and wait until the strip launches itself (and by "sit back and wait," I mean "work frantically on week five's strips").

And no, I still don't know what I'm going to do for a day job. I've had two opportunities that looked good fall through, but I'm still employed through Friday. Freefall starts Saturday.

Impatient

I've been trying to put this thing together in a systematic way, applying the lessons of a lifetime studying film and comics and writing, and learning from the successes of people like Scott Kurtz and Howard Tayler. So I set a launch date far enough out to give me a five-week buffer of finished strips. That is, if I could maintain a schedule of at least a page a week. The long lead time was also meant to let me see if I could do that and put out an acceptable product.

So here I am, three pages into the project, and trying to double my output this week, because I decided to do a splash page (I'm approaching this with an eye toward a finished printed product, so even though I'm splitting the pages into strips, I'm laying them out a page at a time, which means that even though each strip will have a constant width, the the height of strips will vary depending on the layout I'm following for that page).

In addition to the increased workload, I opened a Project Wonderful account with an eye toward putting ads on the site (I've got holes in the site layout specifically for ads), but I can't put Project Wonderful ads on my webcomic blog until I've got 30 strips published, which means 10 weeks. And I'm determined not to solicit readers until I've got at least a month's worth of strips for them to read coming in.

So that means another week-and-a-half before I've got anything published at all, another month after that before I begin getting any kind of real traffic (if ever), another month or two after that before I can fill my ad holes, and who knows how many months after that before I can pay for a beer out of my income from the strip. And probably two years before I collect enough pages to do a printed collection. And I'm kind of anxious say, "To hell with the schedule and the buffer and being systematic. Let's just throw stuff out there right now."

In the meantime, I'm going to be unemployed in nine days.

So both my confidence and my motivation are taking a hit at the moment. But I am frantically inking pages 4 and 5 right now, and as a small preview, here's a look at a portion of page 4. I almost hate to ink over this, because I think it kinda looks cool with all the perspective lines.

And no, it's not upside down.

2 Weeks and Counting

So all in all, it was a productive weekend. Had a meeting concerning what may turn out to be my new day job. Did some Vaulting and listened to a lot of old radio. Found my next Big Audio Wednesday, featuring an early appearance by a very familiar personality.

Colored the third week's worth of strips and finally solved my inking/lettering problems. The third week's strips look as good as I can make them right now, which is to say, any flaws therein (and there are many) are entirely due to my own limitations as an artist and not artifacts of the production process.

I started to despair late Sunday afternoon, because although I'd seemed well ahead of schedule early in the week, the coloring had seemed to expand to fill the remaining space, so by Sunday evening, I was racing to get done. But when I actually finished it and saw that the final result was pretty good, I was filled with enthusiasm and penciled all of page four right then.

I had been awaiting page four with some trepidation, because I was planning it as a splash page, meaning I was going to have to do some more extensive background work than I had done up to that time. As it turned out, the pencils look pretty darned good. Now I'm afraid to start inking them.

Meanwhile, since page four is a splash page, I'll need to move on to page five this week to complete week four's strips. I'm determined to have five weeks' worth of strips ready to go by the time I launch two weeks from tonight.

Inking

One of the things I've had to decide about the webcomic has been how often and how much to post. No two comics seem to post the same. PVP updates a single strip 5 days a week. Schlock Mercenary updates like a newspaper strip, with single strips six days a week, and a larger one on Sundays. Girl Genius updates full pages three days a week. No Need for Bushido and Atland update once a week.

For Hero Go Home, I made the decision to update single strips three days a week, Mon-Wed-Fri. This comes out to approximately a page a week, which is a schedule I think I can handle. This week, I seem to be ahead of schedule. The last two weeks, I penciled Tues-Wed, inked Thu-Fri, and colored Sat-Sun. This week, I finished inking last night (Wed),and I'm ready to scan, letter and start coloring tonight.

Inking has been a challenge, but I'm hoping that I've about solved it. The first week, my inking was totally random and haphazard, which I justified internally by telling myself I wasn't really working on a real strip, just testing a concept. The second week, I was more careful, but still sloppy.

The common problem I had both weeks was that I tried to ink according to the traditional model of putting down the thickest lines possible. With normal production practices, oversize artwork is shrunk down to its printed proportions through a photostatic process. Lines that are drawn too fine will simply disappear.

However, the computer scanning process I've been using tends to thicken up the lines, so I need to work counter-intuitively and draw the lines as thin as I can. At least, I'm hoping that inking with thinner lines will give me a better result when I'm done with this week's strips.

I'm also debating about what tools to use. I'm currently using Faber-Castell PITT artist pens, which supposedly use an archival quality ink. I see other technical pens recommended by manga artists, but I don't know if switching would give me any better results. When I first tried inking, I used the traditional crow-quill pen with India ink, but that scritchy sound of the nib scratching across paper put my teeth on edge, as bad as fingernails on a chalkboard, plus it was really slow and prone to blotches if you pressed the nib down too hard. But now I'm looking at on-line inking tutorials like this one and wondering if I should give the crow quill another shot.

I've also experimented with inking digitally in Inkscape with the graphics tablet, which could potentially give me the cleanest result, but I'll need more practice before I can do that with any chance of staying on schedule.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to solve my lettering problem. The balloons and letters look great in Inkscape, but look awful when I output to .png and paste them into GIMP. But I learned that GIMP can also import the .svg files directly. Perfect, except that for some reason, GIMP uses a default font in the balloons and won't let me replace them. If I white out the letters and retype them in GIMP, they look a little better, but still not very good. Maybe if I made them bigger, but it's hard to tell what size to make them in Inkscape. Or if I typed in the text, then converted the letters into paths, but that seems like an awful lot of steps for what should be a straightforward process.

Three Weeks to Go

So three weeks to go until the big debut. And frankly, I'm getting worried. Everything is going more smoothly this week compared to last--the penciling was faster (if not much better), the inking showed promise in places, the lettering and coloring are going more smoothly.

But the end result is disappointing. Not in the sense of, "I'm not as good as my favorite artist, so I quit," but in the way they translate to the final web image. When I transfer the word balloons from Inkscape (where they look awesome--Blambot makes great fonts for comic lettering) to GIMP for coloring, they come out dithered and fuzzy and hard to read. When I transfer the inked, scanned artwork to a new transparent layer in GIMP for coloring, it comes out jagged and fuzzy (and yes, GIMP is the common factor here, but I've used GIMP for years with better results, so I'm kinda' stumped at what the problem is). So I'm still experimenting to find the best way to a decent final product.

And in the meantime, the first couple weeks' worth of strips are going to sort of suck.

And while I know that lots of good webcomics sort of sucked when they first started (look at the first strips of Schlock Mercenary or No Need for Bushido, for instance, and compare them to the present), the competitions tougher now. You've got to be better coming out of the gate.

My one salvation is that I've been working on my storytelling skills for years, so while I'm flailing artistically, I hope the story feels reasonably solid from the first frames.

So mark your calendars: on Feb. 2, the first strip will go live and Hero Go Home will officially debut.

Although, seriously, you might wait until March to actually start reading it. By then, I hope to have worked out much of the initial suckiness.

Webcomic Progress Report

So things are starting to take shape now. I got a suspiciously awesome deal on webhosting space, so I now have a domain to use for the comic (and if the comic doesn't work out, I'll at least put up all the Digger stories so far and maybe serialize a novel or something). I bought a graphics pad for input, although it's hard getting used to. I've figured out what my first storyline is going to be (Digger's Big Con, the prequel to Hero Go Home that I was working on for a while), and I've spent several hours working on the first page.

Two big problems so far. First, I made a lot of notes on Digger's Big Con, but I stored them on a mind-mapping software site called maps.kayuda.com, which is no longer active. So all that work is lost, though most of it is in my head still. Second, I have been working for days on this thing and have so far finished three panels. That's it--three. And they're not even great panels (the third one is pretty good, though).

So that's discouraging. But on the other hand, much of the time spent is in learning how to do a bunch of stuff I've never done before, so I can only get better. And I am determined to have something up on the site come Feb. 1. I may not be ready to start the strip then, but I'll have something.

And between now and then, I'll probably give you some updates and teasers.

Stay tuned. Things are going to get a lot more interesting in the next few weeks (I hope).

Happy New Year

Went to a party with friends last night. Small group, but lots of fun. Slept late today, did some Vaulting (more Foglio coming Saturday), cooked up some sausage and onions and listened to some old radio (the Fat Man--he weighed 247 whole pounds, about the same as an average NFL player in 2006 and around 70 pounds lighter than an average offensive lineman).

I'm still working on the webcomic idea. It seems relatively simple on the surface, but in order to do it right, there's a whole range of things that have to be taken into consideration: not just the plethora of things that concern any piece of writing--plot, character, pacing, structure, dialogue--but also artistic considerations--character design, graphic design, logo design, typography, inking, color--and determining what compromises have to made in each in order to establish an efficient workflow that allows you to meet deadlines. In addition, there's website hosting and design and how to monetize it--donation box, advertising, merchandising, subscriptions?

Part of me wants to take time to work all this out before deciding to quit. Another part wants to jump in, get some feedback, spend the money to set up the site and see if it works. If I make money, fine, If I don't, well, it's tuition paid toward learning how to make things better next time.

New T-Shirt Preview

So last week I mentioned that I was thinking about ideas for a new Digger website. One of the things I've been contemplating today, seeing as how I'm dipping a toe back into artwork again, is doing Digger as a webcomic. I come up with lots of ideas like this, and very few of them ever make it beyond the, "Wouldn't it be neat if...?" stage. But I'll probably play with it for awhile, knock out some test strips and see how I like them.

In the meantime, here's a look at the T-shirt design I mentioned earlier, based on "Double-Secret Weapon." It's still very much a work in progress, as I'm mainly not sure what to do with the background. What's there right now is a photo background of an actual food court. I spent about two hours tonight screwing around with it, trying different ways to make the background look cooler. Came up with something pretty decent-looking, although I still wasn't completely happy with it. And then Gimp crashed.

Hadn't saved, either.

So now I get a mulligan. But not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

Watchmen Pics

I'm slightly excited over this. The graphic novel was so uniquely superior that the movie is bound to disappoint, and yet the pics, at least, look good.

Speaking of "Watchmen," there was a review of "Double-Secret Weapon" in The Fix, which is apparently a short fiction review site. Short version: they weren't thrilled with it.

But it's interesting that he seems to dismiss it in the context of "'Watchmen' and 'The Incredibles' said it all already." Never mind the fact that both those examples are long-form stories with different purposes than my short story. Never mind the fact that both stories appeared in different media with different advantages and different limitations. Never mind the fact that "The Incredibles" was written by a staff of folks over the course of years, and that "Watchmen" was written by the ferociously talented Alan Moore. Never mind the fact that even by Alan Moore's standard's, "Watchmen" is an amazing achievement, but that didn't stop him from writing more stories in the genre. Never mind the fact that in many respects, "Watchmen" and "The Incredibles" are the same story, albeit with very different characters and themes.

Nope, the message is, "it's been done perfectly already, so don't even try."

Thanks, Mr. Cowboy, I'll take it under advisement. Meanwhile (big announcement), I hope you like my upcoming pale-shadow-of-"Watchmen"-and-"The-Incredibles" short story, "No Love For the Middleman," slated to appear on "Strange Horizons" sometime in June, I hope. This is the first story I've sold that wasn't a Digger story, although it happens in the same world and Digger does get a brief mention. So the Digger lucky streak continues.

Escape

So "Astromonkeys!" is now up and available on Escape Pod. I have kind of mixed feelings about it, since the guy who reads the story sounds nothing like the voice in my head when I read it. But you know, it's so cool to have it selected and posted that I'll give not another word of complaint as soon as the check clears.

I know I haven't posted in a l-o-o-o-o-o-n-n-n-n-n-g time, and there's a long story behind that which I won't tell here. Suffice it to say that I think I'm back. I'm writing stories again, contemplating draft 3 of Hero Go Home (I think this one might actually be worth submitting to someone if it works out on paper the way it's feeling in my head), looking at job options. A lot of things got put on hold in the last three months, and now they're starting to get moving again.

Funny thing is, even though I haven't posted here in over a month, traffic has remained virtually unchanged. Mainly that's because hardly anyone ever reads this blog anyway. The other reason is because most of the people who do visit, do it because they're Googling "Whack the monkey" and landing on this. So if you came here from Baen's Universe or Escape Pod, thanks for dropping by, and please check out the T-Shirts. The link is at the bottom of the left column. Cafe Press shirts are expensive, but you would have the only one in existence (other than the one I wear to cons). Meet me at Conestoga this year, I'll even sign it. Such a deal!

Still Alive

Yes, I'm still here. I've just been on a brief personal hiatus from a lot of things. But I have a bit of news.

My third Digger tale, "Double-Secret Weapon," is now live at Baen's Universe. This issue doesn't have quite the all-star lineup of issue one (but quite frankly, what could?), but still, Nancy Kress, Mike Resnick, Eric Flint, Norman Spinrad... not bad to share a TOC with.

Funny, though, how the last few jobs I've worked all used the acronym TOC with different meanings. In the Army, it was Tactical Operations Center. At TV Guide, it was the Transmission Operations Center. At Clear Channel, we're the Television Operations Center. When I'm writing, though, it's a Table of Contents. I wonder if there's a big publishing house somewhere that has a department just for producing tables of contents for all their different book divisions. They could call it a Table Of Contents Operations Center (TOCOC).

The illustrations for this story (by Luis Peres, example at left) are better than the ones for "Astromonkeys." A nice comedic flavor, although the guy apparently kind of skimmed the story. He gave Digger a helmet with dog ears apparently because someone mentions Dig-Dog at one point. And he gave Digger white hair, although the story quite specifically assigns that feature to Professor Pierce. But those are tiny nitpicks against what is a Really Cool Thing: having another story officially published.

I actually started to do an illustration for this myself a couple of months ago, but couldn't get it looking the way I wanted, so I gave up. I may give it another try.

The story went live late Friday, and then today, Monday, I got another cool piece of news. "Astromonkeys" has been accepted for Escape Pod, so double-sale for that one. Yay!

Now I just need to start writing again. Haven't written a lick for a couple of months. Time to get back on it.