Far Out There

And now, COLORS AND EXPLOSIONS! …because I’m hoping flashy spectacle will distract you all from how much the plot has been running in circles lately. *sigh* I’ve learned some really important writing tricks over the course of this arc:

1. Don’t do any more stories with three or four plots trying to happen all at once. A single main plot with a couple of sub-plots that are clearly subordinate to it? Sure, but that’s now what ended up happening here. We started off with what looked like a story for Trigger, then suddenly Layla’s story took over everything, and THEN Stilez showed up and put the brakes on everything, and all the while Ichabod and Avatar try desperately get an occasional line of dialog… I’m just saying it would have taken a lot more rewrites than I can ever give myself time for (I mean, look how many hours late this page is)

2. If you MUST insist on doing a story as complicated to write as this, DON’T INTRODUCE A WALKING ACTION SEQUENCE HALFWAY THROUGH. There’s a reason so much of Stilez’s antics have been off screen recently. I was already frazzled from trying (and failing) to keep all the perspective shifts and character entrances straight, but page after page of dynamic action sequences too? I run out of brain pretty quick trying to do all that at once, and the hardest one to draw tends to be the one that’s first to go. I mean, let’s face it, my artistic skills are naturally directed towards people talking and making faces at each other. Jumping around and punching things? I gotta clear my schedule of all distractions before getting into that.

Well, enough of my venting (yeesh, isn’t that what I have Twitter for?) Let’s have a New Voting Incentive that’s… actually, it’s almost as sad as Tuesday’s, if you stop and think about it for a second.

(Historical Notes: Something about Past Me’s rant here rubs Current Me the wrong way, and I’m not sure what it is.  I think it’s that Past Me is clearly trying to process my struggle to get things done properly in terms of “do things this way” formulas, when really the only winning formula is “draw what you feel like drawing.”  That’s the biggest challenge in these long, complicated arcs, right there.  Between the arc going on for a long time and needing to do pages to serve the needs of some larger plot mechanism, I kept getting stuck “having” to do a page instead of “wanting” to, which inevitably leads to a spiral of delays and missed deadlines and cut corners and general frustration.  Also, wow, there was a time when I actually used Twitter to SAY things.  No WONDER Past Me was so cranky.)