boundcreature

Queue up: Frustration

I get frustrated easy. My mind moves faster than my body can keep up with. I purposefully cultivate willpower, just so I can one day take complete control of my body and subjugate it to the whims of my mind. In my head, I know I can do the three illustrations that I need to do. But, my body is telling me that it is unfamiliar with the movements and techniques that need to be employed, its telling me that its tired from working six days at the sign shop. I don't have time for my body.

My body slept for twelve hours last night. I will assume this is because I only let it sleep for between three and six hours each night this week. Too much to do, too little time.

Engage: Commiseration

Hey buddy, take it easy...

Remember last night? You were thinking of how hard it is to be a serious illustrator... and you were thinking "maybe I should just stick to this business stuff, its easy as hell and it comes naturally to me."

Well, one year ago, that business stuff scared the hell out of you. It made you unsure, kept you on your toes. But you decided that not only would you NOT quit, but you'd work your ass off to overcome it. You read almost forty books in 2004, some of them more than once. That's some serious stuff buddy. You got good at business because you don't quit.

Now, you have reached a point in your life where it is time to focus on aesthetics. You KNEW it was gonna be hard, I know you did. You wrote about this subject a few entries ago.

So, put your head down and hammer through it. Quitting is for pussies. You know this. You have never quit anything (well, you quit basketball and wrestling in junior high, but highschool sports are totally fucking lame and don't count EVER, besides, you took up the martial arts anyway and became a blackbelt so fuck those prats)!

This is the reason you took the promotion at work, so you could drop enough bullshit that life could be fun again.

Detail: The Plan of Attack

The sign shop is the priority right now. If I have to put in extra hours, read a book after hours, learn how to use software on a Sunday, whatever, I'm gonna do it. For the first time in my life I have a professional mentor (my only other mentor was in the martial arts). There is way too much to be learned from my boss (and he is way to willing to teach me) for me to fuck around at this job from now on.

The scooter store is on the backburner, I told the owner I was out and he offered me a position as a consultant and I demanded a silly amount of money to do it. If he takes it, fine, if he doesn't take it and I quit, fine.

Otherwise, I'm just going to explore my abilities this year. Put my time in at the sign shop, then in a no-pressure situation, blast out the best work that I can.

Come March, I think, I will be looking into Muay Thai again. Dancing sucked last night because I haven't worked-out in three weeks or so and I have just been eating ice cream.

So, I learn business inside-out at the day job, I learn the intricacies of managing a group of people in the completion of a series of difficult and complex tasks, which gives me the knowledge I need to successfully run a studio and a publishing operation...

which leads me to:

Launch: We Must Become Our Heroes, the prototype

My thinking now is that I will have the time available to work on WMBOH. Of course, the only way I could do it right would be to quit my job and launch it full time, but, I don't have the money and, like I said, I REALLY like my job. So...

I'm just gonna work on developing a prototype for the finished product over the next six months and then I'll self-publish about 2000 issues and sell them on my own. Even when I put the first issue out a few years ago I was able to get distributed and NOW I am ten times as good at selling and marketing, so it should be a cakewalk (a time-consuming cake-walk).

The prototype will be the kind of showcase for my work and ideas that I can use to get financial backing. So, at this time next year, I might be running WMBOH full-time and working on my horror graphic novel... we'll see. Maybe putting out another issue of WMBOH will get the bug out of my system and I'll just focus on comics? Who knows, the important thing is that now, these ideas aren't far away dreams, they have been integrated into my plan of attack.

***

I leave you with what I've been doing at work for the last few weeks. My boss is opening a second location, twice as big (12,000 square feet on two floors) and I was put in charge of recreating a scale replica of the various workspaces in our current buliding so the architect could see how the new buliding should be arranged according to our workflow. My boss is deadset on the idea of redefining the ideal sign shop, which is something that makes me giddy!

This is my diagram of the painting room:



And, this is my diagram of the ventilated area that will hold the large-format, Solvent-Jet Printers we are purchasing:



I think they look neat. They weren't made to be visually pleasing, but I love looking at them anyway. I like order. I like taking control of chaos and creating productivity and functionality of it.