Manga Studio Study — New Comic Panel by ~the-gneech on deviantART

My first ever completely-digital-from-start-to-finish comic panel, done in Manga Studio. On top, all the working layers I used, including perspective lines, blueline roughs, sketch, and ink; underneath, just the inks. I haven’t decided if I want to try adding tones for shadows in Manga Studio, or just leave that to the coloring process.

This single panel took me several hours, but a lot of that time was spent learning the tools, in particular the focus line ruler and parallel line rulers.

There’s a lot to like about Manga Studio– being able to ink while zoomed way the heck in is huge– but there’s no denying that it has a steep, steep learning curve. Intuitive, it is not.

But powerful? Oh yes. It is powerful. This may just be one small 10″x3″ (ish) panel, but what it represents is huge, to me!

-The Gneech

The downside of self-publishing, of course, is that when things go all pear-shaped, you’re the one who has to scramble to fix it.

In this particular case, I’m referring to Volumes I and II of No Predation Allowed, which are currently floundering in the Hell of Printers Who Don’t Q.A. Ironically, Volume III, which is the one they received last, had no problems whatsoever and will be on my doorstep tomorrow, ready to take to AnthroCon on Thursday.

The sticking point in both cases is the text on the spine, which for some unspecified reason, keeps being mucked with by their tech department. First, Volume I came in with the text at the right size, but reading “No     Predation Allowed.” What the heck? So I poked ’em and they said, “Oops, we’ll send you a fixed one.”

Then, Volume II came in with the spine all disproportionately crunched, so the letters were all wide and short. Why people who are presumably trained in at least the basics of typography would not see this as an unacceptable gaffe, I can’t imagine, but again, I poked ’em and they said, “Oops, well send you a fixed one.”

On Friday, the “fixed” Volume I arrived (a day after it was supposed to): the giant empty space between “No” and “Predation” was gone — but the text was now scrunched like the initial Volume II proof.

Dude. Seriously?

So I called and beat ’em up in my nice and non-antagonistic way; they said “Uh … it doesn’t look squooshed to us.” So I took a photo of the squooshed Vol I next to the correct Vol III and sent it to them, and they replied, “Oooh, you mean squooshed! We see that now. We’ll show the tech team. They are working on Saturday, you might hear then.”

Oh, and no sign of the corrected proof for Volume II yet.

So I call this morning, to be told, “The tech team doesn’t work on Saturday, they’ll get back to you as soon as they can.”

…

…

Okay. Time for Plan B.

So now my plan is, with the gracious help of Mammallamadevil, to get some “emergency copies” printed posthaste (and probably at very high cost, le sigh) so that I can have at least some on hand for AC, hand-carried by Bill Holbrook and John Lotshaw. If my current printer manages to get their heads out of whatever orifices they’re stuck in quick enough, I might be able to get them to ship copies to the hotel, but I would be very surprised at this stage to see that happen in time.

The part that drives me craziest is that these are the books they had first! So it’s not like they haven’t had time to get it right — they got Volume I fourteen days ago. They got Volume III last Sunday. Nuts.

The part that drives me next-craziest is that the people there can’t seem to see what’s wrong with these books they’re shipping out. How hard is it to figure out that “No     Predation Allowed” is wrong? What are you doing in the print business if you can’t see it when proportions are scrunched? Argh.

-The Gneech, now in scramble mode ’cause somebody else screwed up

So somebody posted to me in a comment, “Are you on Twitter?” I was somewhat surprised by the question, given how much I talk about my various internet connections. I am the sinister spider at the center of a malignant web! Er, I’ve made an effort to reach out across a variety of platforms, because some readers prefer one over another and I’m trying to make my work available to everyone who might be interested. I am that needy an attention-hound.

So! For all those who are interested, here’s a rundown of the various ways you can find me online:

• gneech.com — Your one-stop Gneech shop. :) Includes all of the following links, as well as stories, reviews, periodic fits of madness, and bad poetry.
• RSS — An RSS feed of my gneech.com posts.
• LiveJournal — Still my “social medium” of choice, LJ also includes my more personal ramblings.
• Facebook — I don’t care for FB myself, but some of my readers use it exclusively.
• @the_gneech on Twitter
• Goodreads.com — My Goodreads.com author page. I could use some more friends there!
• Amazon — My Amazon author page, such as it is. Not the easiest thing in the world to maintain.
• DeviantArt — A smattering of my art.
• Artspots — A gallery of my furry art.
• FurAffinity — Another gallery of art. Warning: Not always the most family-friendly of sites.

…I think that covers ’em all, or at least all the major ones. So! Pick your favorite and hang on for dear life! ;) If anyone has suggestions for places I should be but I’m not, I’d love to hear them.

-The Gneech

Spending most of my day yesterday and today at CFUnited, which is one of the major get-togethers for ColdFusion developers. This is my third, but alas also my last, because it’s everyone’s last. They’ve opted not to do any more after this one, which is a major bummer. As much as I gripe about my specific job, I really like ColdFusion in general, and always learn interesting and exciting things at CFUnited.

If nothing else, my take-away from CFUnited this year is that I’ve got to get more involved in the CF community, particularly locally. There used to be a monthly CFUG (ColdFusion User Group) at the Center for Innovative Technology at Dulles (a.k.a., the Darth Vader Building), but sometime back it moved downtown to the Figleaf facility at DuPont Circle, which is considerably harder to get to. So one of my co-workers and I discussed yesterday the possibility of setting up an alternate CFUG out here again, which is something I’m going to be looking into in the upcoming weeks.

Of course, CF users are net-savvy folks and so most of the CF community is actually net-based (via blogs or Twitter); I don’t have the programming chops to do a technical blog — but if there’s one thing I’m good at it’s talkin’ about stuff! So I’m going to start looking at ways I can combine my communication skills with my interest in CF, whether or not the alt-CFUG idea comes to fruition. My recent experience creating and teaching an HTML course suggests a direction that’s worth investigating. Teaching low-level CF concepts could allow me to get into the CF community, as well as helping me develop more advanced skills of my own.

-The Gneech