Wednesday Night's Alright for Fighting

Once again I have been updating the Underfire Website in an attempt to make it something useful and relevent. This time that means porting over to the wordpress software and getting an easy to read archive online. It's not at its prettiest just yet, and I still need to write up some more of the supporting pages, but it works and enables a constant stream of interesting things from our archives, web-only short stories and excitement building previews to be spammed rss-ed to any that are interested. At the moment the first 5 issues of Rapid fire are online, and there should be more soon.

Woo!

web: http://www.underfire-comics.co.uk/online
rss: http://www.underfire-comics.co.uk/online/feed/
livejournal sydication: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/underfirecomics/

/self promotion

I realise that I spend an awful lot of the meagre amount of time that I do spend posting on Livejournal basically laying into books that have annoyed me and writers that I think come up short. I am also aware that it is easy to be a critic when you have never made anything yourself, and possibly even easier to be a critic when you are a frustrated artist in your own right. I don't think that either of those two positions invalidate criticism inherently, by the way - yes, bitter people say bitter things but that doesn't mean that they are automatically invalid and they can still be important and insightful observations.

I also do not subscribe to the view that art or even artistic endeavour, validates itself. Just because you have something to say doesn't meant that you need to be heard. This is important because good art is important to the world, and in my view more important than the artists who make it. Bad art does not deserve recognition or reward merely because the artist expended a lot of effort in its creation, or indeed has no other means of subsistence. Art is bigger and harder than that.

I understand very well how harsh that statement above is - I know and care for people whose income depends on the quality of the work they produce and I would hate to see them lose their income because of a slip in standard. On a personal level that would be horrible, a real tragedy. In fact, my own security is based on the continued artistic achievements of the institution I work for and too many duff operas would send me back into the job market for sure. But that still doesn't validate the bad work in itself. Every job is precarious in one way or another, every life open to tragedy and we cannot escape it.

Having said all of that, I thought that it would be best for me to lay open my own cards - not in a 'look at me' way, but merely in a 'here I am' way. I write a lot about things that annoy me, about writing that doesn't work, and I also write about the writing that I am doing myself. I don't necessarily think that the writing that I do is great - certainly not always good enough to charge for - although I am working towards the point when I think that it might be. I am bitter about a lot of things, but this isn't one of them. I do what I do partly as a compulsion and partly as a hobby, but it's all fine. Anyway, my point is: if I'm going to be a critic, I may as well lay myself open to criticism as well, so here I am - and I'll link to this from my sidebar too - all my major work that is complete (save some serious editing that is probably required, as well as a proofread because no matter how many times I go through things I can never spot every mistake). It's free to read, to copy and to distribute as long as you don't change it and keep my name on it. If you have an opinion - please tell me about it. ( links behind the cut )

Why did I not reallise that Sound mind was a sequel to Double Vision. I would have got round to reading it much earlier...

I recently read the Orcs trilogy by Stan Nicholls - I ended up buying it at the airport before we went to Japan because for some reason I was getting worried that I didn't have enough to read, or that what I did have was too hardcore for holiday reading when I might want to relax. Of course, the opposite is ever true and because I actually was relaxed I had more headspace to read the *clever* books that I'd shoved in my bag from our bookshelf (Kurt Vonnegut, Toni Morrison and some Kant that I wanted to try re-reading).

Although, the thing is, I was expecting perhaps naively that Orcs might actually be a somewhat cleverer book than most fantasy. I've seen the omnibus of it about a fair bit, and it has that sort of minimalist design and some decent pull-quotes on the back. But more than anything it talks about how the book is a total re-imagining of the relationship between orcs and the other fantasy races, a gritty look at a culture born for war and the possibility of that warlust being the final arbiter of peace. Big themes no? I should know by now never to trust the hype. ( cut for length and for spoilers )

Rules
1. Reply to this post, and I will pick six of your icons.
2. Make a post (including the meme info) and talk about the icons I chose.
3. Other people can then comment to you and make their own posts.
4. This will create a never-ending cycle of icon glee.

I got myself tagged by fera_festiva( why not )

Man, I was all like - 'hey, the DFC is for losers' when it started up, but now that it's actually having the money pulled from under it I feel really sad. I think basically, even if I didn't like it much, at least it was a real attempt by a big pblisher to do comics in the UK. Now we're back to square one (or 2000AD as it is officially known).

Ok, so this is not as well written or as full and wide ranging as I might like to make it, but I'm out of time and off on holiday soon and wanted to do it while it was freshly stirred up in my mind. It's kind of tangential to the whole racefail thing, but is also stuff that I've been thinking about for quite a long time (one of my sort-of-projects is working out a way of writing fantasy that isn't reactionary, and its harder than you'd think - regardless of my shitty prose). Basically, it's about the inherent divisiveness that you get in genre fiction, and as such is not really about specific instances of characterisation and how they may or may not be percieved, but about the artistic basics of SFF. Ah well... ( blogging is all about shouting into the void anyway. )

Autobeat operative Refridgeron is fully charged and back in action. Allallies rejoice, operations are go once again.

The car is working again

• Moving house (again) in 3 days time.


• The car won't start.


• Story conference regarding next underfire project tomorrow. Haven't prepared.


• Work annoying and busy

On the plus side, although it still makes me want to cry for various long and involved reasons, my big sister who is getting married this year, want's me to walk her down the aisle. This is one of the nicest things ever, but also sad. But brilliant!

or possibly meta-blogging?

There appear to be a lot of reasons why I never keep up to date with blogs, much the same reasons that I never finish diaries, really.

One of the most practical is that, although I can type quite fast, I can't type as fast as I would like, which makes it a labourious process to get anything worthwhile down. Also, and probably more importantly, I can't type anywhere near as fast as I think, and so typing is a continuous effort of marshalling, slowing and returning to my thoughts which I have probably already left behind in favour of something more interesting. At the risk of sounding like an incredible t00b, it actually constitutes an effort for me to splurge a stream of consciousness, to blog about nothing other than the endless succession of days that I am a party to... so if I want to pull something interesting out of that morass then that is an even harder prospect.

Strangely enough, this problem doesn't hold so true when I'm writing with pen and paper - or at least writing some form of fiction; it's more of a communion when I do so, a generative state of mind where the mass of thought are laid out and given form. The pen-paper transition is a point of contact between the mental and the physical that contains within itself its own rules. Ink as avatar.

When it works.

But, even this is beside the point, as I'm not really writing now about fiction, but about journals, and I can't even write those by hand.

As I said before, my thought processes are faster than I can keep up with physically, and while i have the training and capabilities to systematise when I need to, and to construct arguments and logical through-flows should I need to - should I have something I feel is worth making the effort for. And this is my second big problem.

Partly its due to the fact that I don't find much that happens in my physical life to be of interest - in a sort of mundane way because a lot of it is so much the same as the things that everyone else does, but there is a more fundamental element to it too. Because, in fact, even when I do incredibly interesting and out of the ordinary things, I genuinly don't find them to be interesting in a general sense. Which is to say, I don't find them to be interesting in and of themselves. (Although, I do find it interesting when other people that I know talk about those things, so I understand on some level why other people might be interested in me talking about those things.)

Fundamentally, however, it is I think something to do with my very relationship with reality and experience. I don't necessarily judge experience, as in the things that have actually happened, as being superior to what didn't happen in the way that some would. The value of what hppened is diminished by telling only what actually happened - it doesn't tell you anything about possibility, only about actuality. It is interesting on a personal level, of course - when you know the people involved - and there is a definite use in historical-level data (funnily enough because it can be closer to stories in terms of the distance you get and the scope it encompasses), but biography is, to me, a generally dead area.

Fiction, on the other hand, is far more useful, because it tells you about the way in which people react (or impose reactions upon) hypothetical situations. Even if fiction is about the past, or about a fantastic quasi-past, it is still about futures - the futures of the charachters, which are undefined except through the act of reading/learning about them. Don't let the standard use of the perfect tense decieve you, stories are about what people would do in a given situation, not what they did do. The very fact that a story is not real also means that you can disagree with it in a way that you can't disagree with biography/reportage. Which means that it makes you think much more than biography/reportage. Which makes me much more interested in writing it... When I can get my self around to it (which is in itself a whole other topic).

Finally, there is the fact that the other stuff that I might blog about, I find myself not wanting to, because I am aware that it will probably make me comeacross as a complete bastard. Which is to say, IU have very high standards for things - not in a way that makes me look down on those things that I don't think match my standards - but in a way that means that just because I like something/someone doesn't mean I won't pull it up if its contradicting itself, making silly points or generally not being intellectually rigorous. This I get from my teenage years sparring with a couple of right intellectual bastards, but I don't apologise for it nor do I think that it is wrong. I just realise that, especially in type and on the internet, it is a recipe for wank and drama. (Its a recipe for drama in real life too, but I know how to cope with that because there are reasons why one of those people will always be my friend no matter how much we argue while the other one is someone I'm probably never going to see again now anyway.)

And, that's it. This has taken me some three days to write. It will probably sit at the top of my LJ for another three months before I get round to writing anything else to follow it up, which will no doubt in its turn be just as melodramatic. However, tonight I'm going to have a go at a 24 hour comic (although I'll probably have to do it in a few x hour stints), which should be fun.

Isn't life wonderful.

Cocking America.

This is a blanket statement, I realise. I shall qualify. I got really excited for a minute, because I thought that the new Quantum Gravity book was out. Then I got annoyed, because it looked like it had been out for a while and I thought I'd missed it, despite having been in a bookshop only last week or something. And then I discovered that it was out, but only in America. This is why I started swearing. It's bad enough getting spoiled on things like Heroes, but at least you expect to be on the lookout for it, cos it's an American series. I'm so mad, I think I'm going to have to start reading this Mercedes Lackey novel that's sitting by my desk.

err...

So, I've just realised that the last time I actually wrote a livejournal post was when I'd just finished failing my driving test and started on the getting drunk. The world has changed a lot since those heady days, but I do appear to have remained drunk for most of that time. Which is to say, that I still haven't passed my test (the next one's booked for the 18th of August) but I have had a birthday and been for a week in Plymouth with fera_festiva's parents, who have a well stocked fridge.

Also; retirement parties, comics meetings, other people's (fera's) birthdays... god, that was actually a really long time ago, wasn't it? I blame the alcohol on the not posting. That and the fact that I'm supposedly doing the first re-write of the novel I am apparently writing. Re-writing is rubbish, because it ties me to my computer - which is both headache inducing and conducive to pointless internet browsing which often ends up at /b/ anyway, sinkhole of the internet that it is. Which just makes me depressed.
However, over the weekend I had two things that have helped me in this respect, putting a new bulb in my desk lamp and the gradual shedding of my computer's internet capabilities. For reasons far beyond my ken pages like facebook and others have just stopped loading. Although only sometimes.

Regardless, there was excitement over this weekend, woohoo!, as Underfire had a signing/selling/drawing session at Borders. No-one, except for our friends and loved ones, really came to the table that we had had set up next to the kids section. At one point a woman did talk to us about how her 13 year old wanted to do comics, he himself didn't seem too convinced about it, but after looking at Rock Night for a little bit she very quietly put the book down and led her children away.
To pass the time we decided to do a live comic on the easel and paper that had been set up by the Borders staff. It was great, and we even got the three pages finished by three thirty, when we were due to leave and so duly headed don to the pub. The story was an epic tale of struggle across the ages, featuring the battles of Tri-Jaw and Combat Teddy, and I may post it somewhere if I can ever work out a way of getting it scanned. Definitely it will be a back up strip in the next anthology that we do.
So, some of it was fun. We sold one or two comics, and Bob did a drawing of a dragon for an attractive young lady. Borders have said that we can come back anytime we like, because we put in so much effort. And the beer afterwards was a great idea. A success, then, to a certain extent.

So I failed my driving test today. There is only one thing for it, to get systematically and rigourously drunk. The only reason I haven't started yet is because I was baking for most of the afternoon, that bit of it that I wasn't watching Diagnosis Murder.

After I found out I rang up work and told them that I wanted to take the rest of the day off as holiday, because I couldn't be fucked to go all the way up to Lewes, and as I mentioned, I would have spent the entire afternoon staring at my computer brooding anyway.

As it was, I went into town and got some comics put into the Borders in town. The guy there is realy cool and has been talking about getting us to do an evening or a day in store, either selling or giving a little talk or something, which would be amazing. More news on that when/if it happens.

Now, to the drink.

Excitement.

Got a review through for my comic. It's a little bit ambivalent, but errs towards the side of positive, and I can't complain about the 'out of ten' it gives. I should be able to extract a quote for the back cover for the reprint too.

I was a lttle bit weirded out last night, reading the review, but only because I was very tired and this is the first time anything I've done has had this. I also took a bit of comfort in the fact that my employer got through their first review for the first production of the season this morning - a production which I have watched the many thousands of pounds it has cost build up from my vantage point in the finance office - and that got a much worse review with a lower equivalent on the star rating.

This is probably not the best way to think about these things.

Underfire Comics went to the 2008 Bristol International Comics Expo last weekend and a fun time was had by all. No-one had an actual camera so we didn't really get any pictures of the event, except for a few that I took on my phone - but fortunately I did get one picture which I feel summed up the entire event for us, far more so than would one of Stormtroopers from the UK Garrison parading cosplayers about, or that one Goth woman who's worn the same clothes for years on end and yet whose stand remains resolutely uninteresting. Behold, Jon at the layby where we stopped for a fag break on the way home:



( 'I don't want to make new friends, they're invariably a disappointment' )

This feels a little bit weird, not least because it's not a very good interview. It was conducted by email, and what with me doing it while very tired I forgot to actually answer one of the questions, and generally its a little bit stupid. But, more importantly, it is an interview with me about comics that I did. Woo!

Oh fuck. The Internet is Here

Our new comic has been printed. YAY!

It looks really nice too. Hopefully either this evening or tomorrow I will get a proper page for it up on the Underfire website.

Right, so, after my angry blip last week I think I'm feeling a bit better about the whole promotional thing. I'm still deeply unsuited to that sort of thing, my default position remaining one of reticence rather than boastfulness but I'm learning to live with it all.

In fact, I'm much better at this sort of thing when I have concrete project to follow with a clear, realisable goal. Hence, I have now finished the coding on the new online shop. After a false start last night where I used the wrong buttons from paypal and this morning spent replacing them when I should have been at work. Yay.

This is one of the things that I really like about the internet. I totally fucked up last night and uploaded something that was wrong at midnight, just before I had to crash out and I didn't have a chance to put any of the files onto my pen drive either then or this morning. But, I could come in to work, download the files, do all the changes in wordpad and then ftp them up again from a free browser-based ftp program (not one I'd want to use for big projects, mind, but the fact that I could do it at all is key).

It was brilliant, because I actually felt a bit like I was living in a cyberpunk novel. I mean, I know that technically its pretty mundane, but what I liked about it was the fact that just sitting at my desk, and not using anything that I don't have normally on my computer (and I don't work in IT or anything like that) I was able to jury rig my technology into doing something cool.

Now where's my damn jet bike?

I had meant to do a post about all of this earlier in the week, but didn't get around to it. Anyway, exciting news, my life is now my own again. The comic has gone to the printers, and in fact I'm expecting to get the proofs in either today or tomorrow. This means that, all being well, the book should probably be ready by the end of next week. A full two weeks before Bristol.

I think that that's got to be some kind of Underfire record.

Of course, the next thing is publicity. Which sucks and is soul destroying. Partly this is due to the way that I have found, even if people say they would love to do this and that to help you promote your book, they don't, but it is also a general observation.

Self promotion is a bastard of an art form and a horribly tricky thing to get right, especially in the small presses and so on where there is no real core audience already out there, but rather a group of your peers (basically other fans) who may or may not be interested in taking a look at what it is that you're doing. Which is why the convention circuit is so important, because its a place where people are looking for something new, and - on the creators side - it doesn't take up all of your time.

Because time is the worst thing. As a fan of any media one generally enjoys discussing it with other fans, but doing so - i.e. maintaining a presence on various message boards and forums - requires a whole lot of time and energy, time and energy which as a writer/artist you have to put into your work. If you aren't then you aren't really a writer/artist etc, but one of those (many) people who would like to be the above, but never will be because they are too busy talking about how great they will be when they finally start finish work on this great idea that they have.

Well, that's a little prescriptive, it is possible to be both active creatively and in fandom, but to do so while also maintaining a full time job, relationship and maybe even a social life is not the easiest of balancing acts.

Anyway, what end up happening is that, as you are out of the loop and not a regular poster anywhere and so on, you (me) find a big problem when it comes to trying to inform people of the project that you have just finished (especially as, if you're like me, you like to keep quiet about things until they reach the critical mass point where they have to happen, in some form at least, - because there's nothing worse than having someone ask you 'what happened to that project you were mouthing off about last year,' when the answer is 'I never finished it'). No-one knows who you are and so if you start going on to coms and message boards with your great big unwieldy press release everyone ignores you like the spammer you are.

God damn, I'm such a whiny bastard I should get myself a livejournal and be done with it.

Oh.

I have discovered the secret of the '?': Bitter recrimination, angry infighting and procrastination followed by dangerous deadline chasing.

Actually, I do us a disservice, but still. I just got an invoice through at work and saw how much someone got paid to edit a programme, and I compared that with my reward for editing this comic - which is a headache - and felt that I had somehow come up short.

Oh well, just found out that I should have three more pages in today. I should just learn to love fear...