I had a whole long post about the phrase “never complain, never explain,” but I ended up shelving it because I realized I was explaining and complaining. So instead, I will leave you with this quote, which honestly was the best thing about the whole post anyway:

I think the Internet (and the world) would be a much better place if we talked about what we liked more and what we disliked less.

@jakebe on Twitter

Keep on bein’ awesome, world.

-The Gneech

I’ve mentioned before, mostly in connection with Arclight Adventures, that I’m trying to “break out” of my established art style. My recent apparent obsession with drawing My Little Pony is the most visible part of this process, but I’ve been doing a lot of simply studying other styles and trying to break down in my mind how they work.

This morning, as I was waiting for a reboot from yet another Adobe update, I started doing some sketches of John Dunn’s redesign, and I’m trying to utilize some of the new stuff I’ve learned. I’ve never been real comfortable drawing human faces (one of the reasons I gravitated towards furry art), and honestly with a few exceptions I just don’t like them very much. But one of the things I’ve been studying is how to get past trying to realistically depict an exact human form and create a stylized form that “reads” human.

I haven’t quite gotten it yet, but I’m improving. In the case of John Dunn, tho, I’m still coming to grips with what he should look like both “realistically” and “stylistically,” which is making it a little harder. I might end up just finding pics of an actor online and using them as a springboard (but not a direct model), like I did with Verity. Character-wise he’s been revamped to something like Beast from the X-Men with just a dash of Isiah Mustafah’s “Old Spice Guy” thrown in (as opposed to the Woobie Frankenstein he was originally), so I need to find a model who’s physically imposing in a way that Isiah Mustafah isn’t, but still has a hint of wry humor about him. Maybe Michael Jai White? I’d love to hear any nominations folks might have.

Ah well, back to work for now. But come lunchtime, that sketchbook better LOOK OUT!

-The Gneech

PS: Oh yeah, I meant to mention! Arclight Adventures has a launch date now! January 9, 2012. A bit later than I anticipated, true, but given how rough my early 2011 was, I hope you’ll forgive it.

So this morning my various social media feeds are buzzing with the story of the gal who dated a geek, discovered he was a geek and went “OMG Yuck!” and then proceeded to post a ranty blog about it, only to have the rest of the internet rightly tell her what a nasty thing she’d done.

Okay. I would submit that anybody who posts to any blog anywhere has no business blasting someone for being a geek, but that just serves to underscore the ridiculousness of her tirade. But that’s not the point.

See, almost immediately after I read that, another story came up about women bloggers being systematically targeted with death threats pretty much for being women with opinions about things. That leads me to look at some of the more vicious reactions to the gal’s rant with a bit of a wince.

Having recently been blasted for stating what I thought was a perfectly reasonable opinion and having the reaction be that Diana’s pack of hounds chased me down and tore me to shreds, I find myself in the curious position of being sympathetic to Alyssa Bereznak, not for her piece (which was awful) but for waking up one morning to discover that the internet hates you.

It’s not fun.

So please internet, I ask you, exercise some restraint. Yes, her blasting of Jon Finkel was not cool, but she’s a human being too. Don’t forget that.

-The Gneech

PS: Spreading the word about this idea would be appreciated. Thanks!

So I’m downtown at [agency redacted] going through the second step of getting an official Government Identity Card from the Department of Big Brother Is Watching You Homeland Security, when the building starts going rumba-rumba-rumba-rumba and we all start giving each other quizzical looks. One guy says, “It’s the train, it runs right behind the building.”

Looking at the windows buckling in the building across the street, I say, “That’s a hell of a train!”

Fingerprint and Registration Lady says, “That’s no train, that’s an earthquake!” just as it comes to a stop. She adds, “If it had kept on going, I would have evacuated.” (The “floor warden” vest and helmet hanging in her cubicle added weight to the statement.) With perfect sitcom timing, a security guy steps in the door and says, “We’re evacuating the building. Everybody out!”

Turns out, it’s the largest earthquake ever recorded in Virginia — which is not that impressive on the global scale of earthquakes, but given that our usual amount of earthquakes is nil plus heavy traffic, it’s quite discombobulating. (Imagine southern California reacting to three feet of snow — the sheer “what do we DO with this”-ness of it makes it comparable.) Fortunately, there doesn’t appear to have been a lot of damage and I’ve heard no reports of injuries so far — the biggest problem has been dealing with people’s reactions to it.

Basically, every building over six stories or so appears to have been evacuated and everybody was either sent home or stood around the sidewalks of D.C., chuckling nervously and making jokes about whether or not the earthquake damaged the debt ceiling, har har. All of the phone services were blocked to “non-emergency” use, making Twitter the only means of communication for a while, and even that was slow, but I was grateful to have anything at that stage.

The Metrorail was closed for about twenty minutes while they checked there was no damage to the tracks, and then the trains all operated at 15 MPH (presumably to minimize the chances of a major accident due to aftershocks). This made for a long and stressful ride home for me — I cannot seem to ride the Metro without there being an annoying 6-year-old boy next to me the whole time. You’ll be happy to know that 6-year-old boys still sing “Plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is,” still think it’s hilarious, and still think that nobody else has ever heard it before and therefore want to hear it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But I digress.

The point is, we’re all home and fine now, and very grateful for the concerned texts and e-mails. This was not my first earthquake, but it was the first strong and extended one, so I can at least add that to my list of life experiences.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have the gov’t ID, so it’s back to [agency redacted] again on Thursday to try again. Watch that be the day Klaatu comes back.

-The Gneech

This week I punted on a story that just wasn’t going anywhere; I hate doing that, and I especially hate doing it when the editor for whom I was doing the story seemed so keen to have it, but it was frankly not my best work and I suspect he would have had to reject in the end anyway. Better in the long run at this stage to let it go so both he and I can devote the mental resources to something else.

This, combined with the gear-grinding on Arclight Adventures, has led me to reflect on just what it is I want to accomplish with my creative endeavors, why it is that I do them — and why I seem to have been having difficulty with them lately. And I think I’ve discovered at least one psychological factor that’s been holding me back, i.e., “fear of commitment.”

Y’see, Suburban Jungle and NeverNever consumed so much of my life for so long, that there is a part of me that’s frankly afraid to get that wrapped up in something again. I loved doing my comics, don’t get me wrong, but there were plenty of times when it could also be a draining, demoralizing, downright painful experience, and part of me is shying away from that.

Another issue has been my own underlying motivation for doing the work, and here I have not been pleased with what I saw in the mental mirror. Y’see, for both NN and SJ, my motivation was that I loved the work — I was making those comics because I wanted them to exist, I thought they were good and worthy things that would make the world a better place by being in it. This has been less true of my more recent projects. In fact, at the end of the day, what has been motivating me lately has been ego.

I don’t want the entirety of my creative output to be “ten years of webcomics and done.” I don’t want the history of pop culture to say of The Gneech: “Known, by those few who do, as the guy who did The Suburban Jungle.” I want to leave a bigger footprint.

A natural feeling, perhaps, but a terrible reason to be doing any major undertaking. Somebody recently described me in my LiveJournal as “dedicated to my own epicness” — said as a joke, yeah, but it still had the sting of truth to it. I should be thinking about the work itself, and the readers out there who will hopefully get something out it, not about what it will do for my prestige and/or fragile egg of a sense of self-worth.

So … what to do about it? Well, for starters, I’m blowing away all of my current “projects” (which have been more placeholders than actual work anyway), except for the Short Story Geeks Podcast, because I have made a commitment to my fellow podcasters on that one and I intend to honor that. But for everything else, as of this blog entry, I’m no longer “working on X” for a half-dozen half-formed ideas.

Second, I’m going to look at each of the things I have been working on with a critical eye and determine which, if any, are actually worth doing on their own merits, rather than because I think it’d be “good for my career,” so to speak. If a project can actually justify its own existence, then I will add it to my to-do list, even if the due date is “sometime after 2015,” but if not, it’s going into the proverbial sock drawer indefinitely.

I do know of at least one project which will move up in the priority list, a YA collaboration with Mrs. Gneech, actually, which we’ve been talking about on-and-off for several years now. We recently sat down and hashed out a lot of things about it, to the point where I think we have a pretty good vision for what it should be like. It’s not something that really builds on anything I’ve done before (except in the vague sense of having some fantasy elements), nor really is likely to have immediate appeal to my established audience, but it is something about which I can confidently say its existence would be a +1 for the world.

As for what other projects will be added back in, I couldn’t tell you at this stage. If you have one you’d like to advocate for, I’d love to hear it!

-The Gneech

So last year I talked quite a bit about this idea that was eating my brain for a new comic, a steampunk adventure thing that I was very excited about, and I even put together some pages and development art for it.

And then I sorta stopped talking about it.

And then the projected launch date wandered on by and shrugged when nothing happened.

I have had a few questions about it since then, so I figure I should go ahead and explain what happened for those who are interested. Long story short: it got mired in development heck. “Writer’s block” isn’t exactly an accurate description, but it does sorta apply.

Essentially, no matter how hard I tried, all of the ideas I came up with were turning the idea into something I didn’t want it to be. I have this problem occasionally: whenever I try to write songs, for instance, they always come out as country/western, and I hate country/western music. So the net result is I never write songs. In the case of Arclight Adventures, what I had intended to be a fun and over-the-top adventure comic kept turning into a grim and violent drama about the moreaus (who were supposed to only have the occasional subplot, not steal the show). Instead of Mission: Impossible [1] in Victorian garb, I was getting a treatise on man’s inhumanity to man.

I wasn’t happy with how the characters were developing, either. Fagin (the fox moreau) came out nicely, but I never was comfortable with John Dunn, and as things were developing, the character of Charlie was becoming less and less a character of her own but instead being defined by who her father was. In short, I was falling into the same old racefail/genderfail traps, but every time I tried to steer away from them, they just kept popping back up.

Eventually, I just got frustrated and stopped working on it, hoping that some time away would let me come back to it with a fresh perspective. So far, well, it hasn’t happened yet — but I’m hoping that the upcoming Dragon*Con will help. I fear that the only way to fix it will require a major tossing-and-redeveloping of the main cast, which is a painful process. At the end of the day, I may be better off to just do a different project all together, instead.

-The Gneech

[1] The cool and awesome original Mission: Impossible, not those crappy Tom Cruise movies.