The cure for too much holiday party

Sooner or later on a holiday, you have to get out of the house.

Everybody, including the cats, is turkey up to HERE.

Merry Stinzmas!

Stinz putting out hay for the birds and the poor half-horses.

Process or DRAW.

So.... do I spend all my time trying to process my books, or do I use it to make new art and pages?

I'm not getting any younger, so it may be up to others to get a lot of the additional book-processing done. I can stick smaller page counts up on Indyplanet or collections up on Amazon, but taking time to re-process into Kindle - considering my hundreds of books - is just going to eat up all my remaining years.  Flogging at publishers before starting a project just eats up hours.

A quicky sketch from many years ago. Yes, you can pay me to do anything from a scribble to an epic.

I'm not trying to be all whiny or gloomy, but there's a reality here.  Art takes time. Writing takes time. It's that or process.  Process disappears.  You can work your butt off on the ebooks and pdfs and paper versions, but all somebody has to do is fail their site or decide to change it, and years of work can disappear overnight.

So I'm sorry if all the stuff isn't going to be available everywhere all at once.  You'll get the new stuff on the easiest sites, or the most long-running sites.  I'm not going to run my head off any more to try to keep it all covered.  When somebody else figures out how to pay themselves by harnessing my author engine, you'll get the full coverage.  It can't be THAT hard, can it?

I'll try to keep updates going on the Bookstore (see it in the links, this page).  I'll very much appreciate any reports to me of problems or broken links.

In the meantime, I'll keep inking, scanning, coloring.  And taking time for commissions, because those are REAL.

I'm going to be SO rich when I'm dead.  Those people in my will to take care of my cats are going to be so happy.

Beans and Eggs for Solstice 2011

Just wrapped spices, tobacco, stick of anise in a page from an art catalog, and added that bundle and the last egg we had - the last egg of the old year from our hens - and gifted it to the roaring fire in Betsy the Stove.  If that doesn't tell the sun it's welcome, I dunno what will.  Boiling beans for the new year. Now keep me well enough after all this crud for the yearly chips-n-chicken (or fish) and Mac-N-Jack dinner at the Clallam Bay Inn.

Fearless and the Solstice Tree (Any pressies for kitties?).

Holiday Card 2011

Hi!  Click this image, download it, print it out on 8.5" x 11" paper of your choice, fold it up -- ta da! For those of you would like a paper card.  Let's face it, paper and posting is an 18th-century technology; we might as well get ahead of the curve.  Have a Happy Merry and remember -- after Solstice, the sun starts coming back!  (The gold roses are from our yard).

She Told Me To - Another Interview with Donna Barr

Sarah Coultier sent me some nice interview questions, and I'm posting it here as she suggested.

Hi, Sarah -- I'm typing this with the 'flu, so you might want to proof it.

My answers are marked with "D" (Hers are marked "S").

Donna Barr

S: Hey - I'm a student at Pacific Northwest College of Art and I'm supposed to interview three artists in the field that I want to go into. I actually have some things that I really want to know about how all five of you work, so - I know you're quite busy, but if any of you have time for a few questions, could you please answer mine? Even one would be awesome. If you want to post the answers to your blogs, I follow most of you in one form or another. And several of you have already covered some of these, so don't feel obliged to answer what you've already talked about.

D: Thanks for contacting me. I'll do my best.

S: Work ethic: from things you've mentioned on the internet, I know that all of you have continued to draw and update through depression, migraines, other jobs, and dealing with family. How do you manage it?Does the story have such a strong hold on you? Do you have an unusually strong sense of duty? A particular routine, or a system for getting things done that I'm not seeing?

D: The short answer: we're women.

KIDDING.

The other short answer: YES, to all of the above. I know I'm imprisoned by my Muses, and I'm German (the "duty" thang). The rule is: when not doing anything else, draw and write! Or even better, try to get the other stuff done when not drawing or writing.

My other trick: DRAW AHEAD. Do masses of stuff, and post a month's worth. So you CAN be sick or wrapped up in emergencies if you need to. Bless the internet for chugging along while we're doing other stuff. It's the way I've set up everything: WWWID (Will work when I'm dead).

S: Publicizing: what works for you guys? Who do you talk to? Where? Online or physical? Ads? Twitter? As far as I can tell, success is a combination of luck and just really being interested in your material - but some people do seem to make a success of advertising... and of course an audience needs to know you exist. How much is too much, for you? What's your experience with getting someone else to advertise for you? When did you decide there was enough demand to try to get your stories printed - or, for those who started before the grand era of webcomics and gauging an audience by online fan response, at what point did you decide to print, and where did you try to distribute it? Where do you wish you'd tried to distribute it, now?

D: EVERYTHING. Facebook, Lulu, Twitter, Createspace, Project Wonderful, CCNow and Blogger. You got those, you just do your hour of marketing and contacts every day. It's the online comiccon! You, too, can look at PayPal once in a while (and then regularly) and go, "Oh! Where did that extra hundred dollars come from?"

You print when you have enough pages: Ka-Blam.com (or other comics site) for comics page numbers. Lulu and Amazon for collections. Lulu and Ka-Blam for wholesale to your customers (fan and store). Amazon for cheapest discount to you for shows. Lulu for automatic ebooks.

The paper days? It was Diamond and nothing else. You can still do that, or flog it at book publishers. That world is still in the 18th century, when it started, all the rules still hold. What worked for Dickens will work for you -- but these days it will be pixels, not paper.

And we don't write cuz we're trying to get an audience. We write because demons have us by the back of the neck and are pushing our faces into the paper/screen.

S: Publicizing 2: Did trying to put yourself and your work out there make you feel like a flimsy facade with something ill and rotten behind it at first? If so, how on earth did you get over it, and do you think it has anything to do with how women are socialized to b self-effacing, or more to do with being an introvert, or an artist, or scolded for boasting as a kid...

D: Eh? Does not compute.

My stuff is good, damnit. I write what I can't find out there. Then again, I had a great blessing: I was daddy's little princess, but mom told me I was "enough to gag a maggot on a gut wagon." This taught me that NOBODY'S JUDGEMENT MATTERED BUT MY OWN. Get over yourself. And throw your relatives out of your studio. And your in-laws.

Oh, and I hit myself in the head with an ax when I was seven and immediately became obsessive, fixated and self-absorbed. Artist material! :P

(Fun with creaties; ask them when THEY had their head-trauma!)

S: Collaborators: Who's your favorite editor/collaborator/friend to take somewhere and babble at? What do they do that's special?

D: These days it's my fans on my websites. We have lots of fun giggling like girls over the antics of my characters (I'm not in control of any of this; I'm just management).

S: Collaborators 2: Do you have lots of artist and comic friends? Do you find you work best with engineers and scientists, or writers, or editors, or some other group of interests and traits instead? Do you emember how you collected most of them?"

D: My Facebook page is loaded with artists and writers and other creaties from all over the world. Editors and agents, too. I remember NOTHING about anything; the ax scrambled my memory, too; I have a hard time telling reality from dreams from imagination from tv commercials.

I love engineers; one of them is my BESTEST patron. They are so funny, tongue-in-cheek and self-aware (and they know art is worth money). The Desert Peach is an engineer. It's why my favorite Error Status is "418 I'm a Teapot."

(GOOGLE IT).

Scientists think my 1st rule of writing is hilarious: "If it's funny, it's right."

The other 2 are: "If it's physically possible for its time and place, it happened." And "If it didn't happen, it should have."

Or the short form: "Some idiot has already tried this."

(My rules of writing also apply to historical research).

S: Thank you very much if you have time to answer any of these. Any time would be fine, and you can pick any one question to answer if you want. I think I was supposed to ask how you got where you are in your careers, but this is the stuff I'm actually interested in. I apologize for how awkward this is. If and when you're ever in Portland, I'd love to meet you and say hi, and I'm just as awkward in person.

D: Awkward? NO! So nice and polite and well-thought-out! You should extend your teacher(s) my compliments.

Donna Barr

(and include this: http://www.donnabarr.com )

Sarah Cloutier

http://scloutier.tumblr.com/
http://melukilan.deviantart.com/

The Clallam Bay Totem Returns

Embedded link - and more information HERE soon.

"How To Draw A Mini"

This Clallam Bay Comicon now has a minion and a musician.  Here's what the local folks have been asking for to get ready for the con: