A nice cup of rabies

Obviously, the thing to do is to find an expert in this field and ask. But that's the problem. I'm so clueless about financial stuff (what with being an otherworldly artist type, and broke for most of my life to boot) that I don't even know what kind of title such an expert would have.

So: What kind of expert do I want to find here? Where would I go to find one? (And if one of y'all i the Boston area knows a specific person who does this kind of thing you'd like to point me to, that'd be even more awesome.)

I dunno how well it works under Crossover or suchlike; I just played it on Rik's machine since he was out. [edit: Seems to work fine, huzzah.]

Is it just me or is the voodoo lady hot in this one?

Looking at the lyrics widget on the laptop's screen after I brought it back up from deep sleep under the bed* and seeing the lyrics to a song off of 77 by the Talking Heads made me realize: it feels strange to have music in active rotation that was written by someone who's now so much younger when he wrote it than I am now. I don't think the cure is to stop listening to music by people younger than I am or anything like that; I'm thoroughly detached from who's being marketed to the Youth Of Today now but I still enjoy hearing new things.

I thought I was going somewhere with this but then I got distracted by looking through the watchlist of my sekrit alt on Furaffinity. She watches everyone back...

Anyway. No plans for anything today, looks like it's going to be a lovely day - maybe I'll just take a sketchbook and go out of the house for a while. Reflex suggests "work on Absinthe" but I feel like I should give myself a little vacation.

* a practice I try to avoid, as it's real easy to just take it out and spend hours lying in bed aimlessly browsing the web; I was reading some PDFs in bed last night.

I have done some interesting things around my birthday but "tried going onto a completely different sleep cycle" feels like one of the craziest.

Oh yeah, birthday: I'll be thirty-eight tomorrow.

And then, of course, there will be much Illustrator action. I had pages 1-20 all queued up when I started the first chapter going. So far I've gotten a total of one page in the space between 21 and the end completely finished. I've got several others in varying states, of course, from 'raw scans set up in AI' to 'just needs some clutter added to one background'. I think I'm glad I ended up not going to Anthrocon, though. I'll need all the time I can get to stay ahead of the queue until the chapter ends. The endless fiddly detail of Wormwood cityscapes is replaced by the endless crazy detail of a wild party.

And if you're going to AC... have fun, and be sure to read our contribution to the program book! It actually ends in that version!

(The ear seems to be getting better; the antibiotic/anti-inflammatory eardrops are helping a lot. Still no real news on my intent to try polyphasic sleep; I'm waiting until I have energy to spare for a few days of utter sleep-dep until my schedule breaks and phase-changes.)

Absinthe hits its tenth page today, which is coincidentally where that crazy double-page spread of the city falls. If you've been thinking of linking to it, now would be a lovely time! We even have a cute little animgif banner hanging out on the links page, if you like using those. (And a big thanks to that little wave of people who linked to it a couple weeks back - it definitely showed up in the stats!)

I'm still working on training my body to expect a twenty-minute nap every four hours. It has been an intermittent productivity boost, despite the drain and hassle of the ear stuff - it's easy to say "I just woke up, let me go get something done!" or "Naptime soon, better get something done!" instead of staring at the internet for inconclusive hours. It's also been a bit of a hassle; last night, for instance, we had to interrupt lying around MST3King a series of Doctor Who* so I could nap between the last two episodes. Today will be the first time I deal with bending the dayjob around it; hopefully the ear will clear up soon and I can try dropping the nighttime "core sleep". Good thing I ain't doing AC.

* Full Circle, wherein Romana's wish to not have to leave the Doctor is granted, Adric and his Star of Excellence In Stealing Things are introduced, and an entire spaceship full of people is saved from the cabbage men from the marsh in a climactic rock-n-roll battle between Mistfall and The Deciders!

An inquiry into whether or not Nick was cooking something led to him chasing me around the house, putting on a comedy French accent, and threatening to put me in rubber pants and stuff tofu down them. This needed to be memorialized with a crude 20-second doodle in Illustrator.

Also, I went to see a doctor about my ear today. He agreed that it looked infected, what with all the white goop he saw in there, so he wrote me a perscription for ear drops. Except he fucked up and put down the abbreviation for the right eye instead of the right ear. Which I only realized after carefully scouring over the packaging and directions. And he is the only person who can remedy this, and he is gone for the day. Feh. Oh well, tomorrow I can get it faxed.

Seriously, it looks like he leaned over my shoulder and drew this expression or something.

Having disparate influences is pretty fun once you get to the point where a very (insert influence here) piece of a drawing just falls out of the pencil. And then the next one looks like someone different. It might lose the Fogliosity when I pass it through AI; I dunno. We'll see if I try to retain it or just let whatever happens happen.

Oddly enough, I am quite chipper despite this - as long as the sun is out. When the clouds that have been plaguing Boston for most of this month cover the sky, my mood drops, but when the sun's out I'm really upbeat; despite the ear pain I've gotten a couple more pages of Absinthe pencilled (4 more until the first chapter's all pencilled!) and some work done in fits and starts on the Illustrator side too. I'm perky to the point that I'm noticing it; there was a time when something like this would've sunk me into doom and gloom and fear, but now, well, I'm gonna go see about it Monday one way or another if it hasn't cleared up, it's annoying but it's not making me miserable. My personality has changed somewhere over the past few years to a much sunnier base state.

To make things even stranger, the back of my head has decided that now is the time for me to experiment with polyphasic sleep. I'm not getting much in the way of lengthy sleep right now anyway, the reasoning seems to be; why not try taking advantage of this disruption to make a phase-change? Right now I'm just napping on schedule regularly, to get my brain used to the idea; once I'm done with this ear infection I'll probably try pushing into the full "uberman" schedule of 20-minute naps every six hours. Not having an all-week-long day job will make this a lot easier than it could be otherwise.

I dunno, the back of my head just tells me to do things sometimes, and every time I've listened it's turned out to be a pretty good idea.

I figure that, well, the Movellans are sexy robots, at some point the Daleks would try (badly) to emulate that to gain the sympathy of other races in their endless war against half the Doctor Who universe.

For Exdrawminate!.

It keeps on making me think of The Little Prince, too. Despite a complete lack of baobabs.

I am now trying to only have one program visible at a time. I don't know why I'm doing this; I just am. I'll say this: it's nice to only ever see the new mail count on the icon when I feel like switching programs, instead of having it change in the corner of the screen when it checks mail once an hour. One less distraction from that precious, easily-interruptable state of creative focus.

I dunno if it's helped. But it's different, and it's making whatever part of my brain wanted it this way happier.

Meanwhile I've almost got the most panel-packed page of the first chapter of Absinthe done. Nine panels is a lot of work - 1889 paths versus the 1603 of the super-detailed city spread that takes up pages 10/11, and I still have the last panel to do. This comic is a hell of a lot of work but it's not as if I could let someone else handle the Illustrator part of things. [edit: finished it, 2173 paths. Wow.]

And explosions. What kind of story opens with a heist and doesn't have explosions?

I hope everyone's been enjoying it so far! In another five pages it'll be at the point where I've decided it'll make sense to actually try to promote it a little; the premise will have been firmly established, there'll be some jaw-dropping cityscapes on display... and hopefully around then I'll have most of the first chapter in the can.

I want to work on the pages leading up to the sex scene now, but I gotta go to the dayjob today. Drat. Maybe I'll have enough energy if I blow off work a little early tonight... [edit: Or, hell, I'll work on it before taking off - I managed to get a page from 'lettered and halfway blocked in' to 'halfway done with the pencilling'.]

Also at some point in these last few pages of pencilling I really ought to take some progress shots for a "how we make this thing" page. I started to do that for the page I worked on this morning but it's one of about four pages whose thumbnails are seriously cut up, and I'd rather show an example of the typical workflow than one of the exceptions!

Unrelated: AAAWWWW.

Photos tomorrow or monday; I may just wait to post it in lj until I stick it in the "shop" page on the comic's site and make a blog post there directing people to the first piece of Absinthe merch!

And there's more to come. I nailed down the wind-up boy's design in something I might put on a shirt; more importantly I have a decent drawing of him to refer to while pencilling the last five pages of chapter 1! Also I probably need to make a shirt with Hester, given that she had fan-art before the comic even launched.

Otherwise, I mostly just spent the day making a couple Tarot decks - one for an order that's taken entirely too long to happen, the other on spec. I will probably make a few over the next few months so I have a stash to sell while at Rainfurrest and Foolscap.