Back in Houston, slow and quiet, reeling from my time in New York which was marked by a great deal of socializing and subway rides. The latter allowed for ample reading, namely two books by Albert Camus I picked up from Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn (one of my favorite bookshops in existence), easily devoured over the course of my 10-day stay.

And somehow, in the cauldron of conversations, reading, observation, book-browsing, and general contemplation, an idea for a novel came to me.

This, of course, is a terrible thing. I'm still on the last chapter of THE SOLAR GRID, after which I should probably add a few short stories to TIMES NEW HUMAN. After which, and only after which, I should contemplate pursuing the prospect of writing a novel (or any other potentially draining project for that matter). One way of knowing whether or not you're passionate enough about a project anyway is putting it aside and revisiting your notes on it down the line, to see if you feel just as excited about it as when the idea first struck.

It is good to know though that I, sooner or later, will have a way to put my notes on writing a novel in one month to the test and see if they actually work.

#journal

New York photo dump time.

#travel #NY #journal

Second attempt to catch flight out of New York is fail. Can't help but feel the universe is insisting on extending my stay for some elusive higher purpose I can't quite put my finger on.

Newsletter drafted between airports and friends' crashpads. Scheduled to go out later tonight. It's a good one, I think.

#journal #travel #nyc

Sold out of both issues of THE CURSE OF I from my end. Last remaining copies can still be procured however from Basket Books in Houston and Desert Island in Brooklyn.

Rain came down long and hard last night and I am getting notifications from the airline that severe weather conditions may impact my flight out of New York. Inclined to push it back a couple days to avoid any potential airport inconveniences and general fuckery.

#work #comix #journal #travel

New York City has no chill.

That's it, that's the post.

#journal #travel #nyc

He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived.

Because I'm a hopeless workaholic, I brought my TSG notebooks with me on what was supposed to be my New York getaway to try and solve story-compression issues relating to the final chapter. Just so I can slide right into drawing the thing upon my return to the studio.

It is warm in New York but it ain't anywhere near as hot as Houston. 25C this evening, the white noise of rain outside intercut by the slightly higher pitched tip-tapping on fire-escape metal. Good writing weather. Sometimes all you need is a little change of scenery.

Passage at the very top is from Charles Stross' ACCELERANDO btw.

#journal #travel #nyc

Up for over 24 hours, but at least inboxes and rss are both at zero now.

Last few hours of solo month with the little one. How I will miss him.

“Daddy, why are there some animals in some toons but they have people faces?”

#journal #moony

Week's worth of Mythomatic orders fulfilled, quite a few international ones.

Inboxes at 152, RSS 147. 34C today, “feels like 43”.

#journal #STATUS

“Daddeee, what's that sound you made?”

Me? (Feeling exposed) Oh, haha, nothing, habibi, just talking to myself.

“That was a funny sound you made, daddy,” he says laughing, which makes me laugh too, deliriously.

“Are you really tired, daddy?”

Hahaha, yes I am, son, you could say that, yes.

---

It's not that bad. Surviving on 3-hours sleep each night for most of this past week has paid off; Latest TSG is up, newsletter drafted and sent (edition #209: Power of the Package), kickstarter updated, and roundtrip flight to New York booked. And today, I finally managed to step away from work and take the kid out to the coffee shop around the corner for a much-needed treat (for both of us!). We also got to lay on the floor and do some coloring together, and also put together a little chia-planting kit. All in all, a delightful day.

#journal #moony #work

A couple hours after the sense of release/relief following the completion of the TSG chapter that precedes the very last, I started to think about the work ahead: The next and final chapter in THE SOLAR GRID.

According to script and thumbs, the last chapter is a 50-page beast. Between pencils, inks, and letters, we're looking at an average of 3 days per page, and that's if I work fast and assuming no pages require color, but there are in fact quite a few that do. In fact in fact, some even require what might best be described as ill-advised mixed media madness that I'm not entirely sure I can adequately assess the time they would need to make before trying to work on one or two such pages first. Which means we can be sure that 3 pages a day is way too optimistic and things will probably not work out that way. But even if we were to make use of this ludicrously optimistic calculation, we would be looking at 150 days of work. Five months basically, and that's if I work weekends and take on no other projects whatsoever, however small.

This is a terribly depressing realization and wholly unrealistic. I can't not have this chapter finished before year's end, I just can't. I will kill myself. The only logical thing to do at this point would be to go back to script and thumbs, see if there's anything I can cut or at least compress. And perhaps do without any unpredictable visual experiments that could potentially multiply execution time, no matter how strong the creative itch is. I really shouldn't spend more than three months on the thing, so that means I need to see if I can bring the page-count down to 30. That's a lot of cutting and compressing.

Shit.

On a completely different note, I have done absolutely nothing towards this week's newsletter which typically goes out every other Friday at 11:59 pm. It is now 9:45 pm.

Fml.

#journal #comix #tsg