Last Chance, Afterdead Blurb

Last chance for anybody who wants to do a blurb for Afterdead. You gotta be a working Creative, and you got to add your name and what YOU do. Here's the cover art.

Color Afterdead and Win Fame and Acclaim (?)

Download and color!

Talking about the coloring-books-for-adults trends over on Facebook. People said we should post pages for coloring. So I'm posting this one, from Afterdead. Download and/or print and color away! 

Then send me a bitty jpeg or link so we can admire. AND CHANGE THE FILE NAME IF YOU SEND IT TO ME. So I don't replace and erase mine by accident. 

Format the name as:

   "Afterdead Coloring book - Your Name.jpg 

I hearby give you permission to use or share your colored version any way you like, so long as you tell me, and add:

     Donna Barr © Actual Year.

The page is about the long-dead Peach, accompanying the extremely-wounded pilot/teaching aide he's care-taking, to visit the pilot's girlfriend, who is GeStaPo - and therefore, of course, a Vampire. Don't ask why the Reich made that a qualification. It's probably on a par with the State law that makes it a crime to keep an elephant in a basement - somebody did something stupid, or something seemed more convenient.

Explanations welcome. I sometimes think my characters talk to my readers more than to me. Are you buying them beer??

Coloring Afterdead

Now coloring the formerly black-and-white pages of Afterdead, on ComicFury. 

One of the gamer-favored moments of the old days when I was first starting out, illustrating Traveler, was a graphic depiction of removing bits of shrapnel from live intestines. 

This panel is the descendant of that illustration. Now in color.

I just realized, seeing it in the small form, that it looks like a map.

"Afterdead" needs to find a new home.

It looked as though Webcomicsnation, hosting Afterdead, might have finally bitten the dust. Its original creator, Joey Manley, who sold it years ago, and who recently passed away, might have came back and kicked the servers, because it's back up.

In the interim, I've started it up again at Comicfury!

Head over to the first page of the latest episode, "Catching Hell,"and let me know you've dropped in.

Since it's hard to post new stories, rather than episodes, on Webcomicsnation - it's hosted, but doesn't look like much else is done - anything new will have to be at Comicfury. 

Emerald City Comicon Poster

Look out for my poster at Emerald City Comicon (booth 610).  

The original art used to build the poster will be there for sale (unless you grab it first; $449.95 -- and there's only one).

The One True Refuge

For the second time in a row, Diamond refused to ship my orders. In fact, with the economy making it tougher for retailers, they raised their order level requirement from $1500 to $2500.

I'm thinking about not bothering with Diamond. Haven Distribution orders as needed as backstock, and since I use POD, EVERYTHING can be treated as backstock. If anybody insists on using a distributor.

Everyplace we look in books, publishers and distributors are scrambling. Websitecomics sites and the publishers working with them work authors to pieces, then collapse and take most of their money with them (you know who you are). When I found out who was working at Clickwheel, I gave them a sample booklet, but that's as far as I'm going to gamble with those guys.

I've had to send a rather -- cool -- letter to a newspaper about back payments. That paper is now very good about paying me. The person in charge of those payments has moved on to another newspaper -- which is now having trouble paying me. I may have to rework the letter.

The two income streams that are really working for me are Projectwonderful, and my Lulu page. Both of them are simple -- they sell ads or they print and sell books. PERIOD. Once I upload files, there are no loony program changes that force more useless work (Hello, Firefox!). The only upgrades I need to do are the ones I do myself, because I want to make a collection out of smaller books.

Lulu also automatically makes all book files into downloadable PDF's. And if you, my dear readers, ever feel you're making me more money by buying hard copies -- you're not. I clear as much out of a small download fee as I've set for the hard copies. If you WANT a hard copy (and -- for you collector crazies -- $6.00 books are now selling in India for around RS 1300 -- about $26.00), please order one. I love paper, myself, but it's not the ONLY way to do it. If you'd rather just grab a pdf, please do so. I still get paid about the same amount.

I'm keeping an eye on Kindle. Any comments from anybody who have tried to use the device for comics? Good links on real-world experience?

AFTERDEAD Novel

The ideas for prose are beginning to gell. An afterlife series based on the ideas in AFTERDEAD -- but in a more contemporary vein.

I've even figured out how my main character gets INTO the afterlife, and it's one that I've found irresistibly funny and relevant ever since it popped into my little pointed head.

But then, my family competes to tell horror stories about the deceased at a funeral. Sort of like: "Mom came closest to killing ME, so I WIN!"

And I did.

AFTERDEAD Page

Another AFTERDEAD sample at Deviantart.

One of the AfterLife rules is that the closer you were to someone or something in your lifetime, the less likely you are to know them in the afterlife.

Rommel WAS a techie while he was alive.

Afterdead 2 -- let it snow.

So let's get off the whole publishing thing for now and talk about the next books.

I was whining to someone (yes,you know who you are) that I couldn't get any work done because I've been doing nothing but plow through publishing.

Which is why I'm about to start page 19 of AFTERDEAD 1.4, which is the last section of AFTERDEAD 2.

Dan says this is like teaching me to parallel park. He said I learned it faster than anybody he'd seen but I was still cussing because I didn't get it right the first time. I tend to beat up on myself more than is warranted (Recovering Catholic).

(Some of my readers mistake me for the sweet, patient, fatherly Peach or Stinz. I am much more like a cross between Udo and Leutnant Winzig.)

I had started the story sorta in the late summer, the trees touched with orange, mostly green. Then, while talking to a colleague on the phone, I remembered what the sky outside out window looked like.

Vancouver Island was frosted with snow. I can see this from my front window across the Strait of Juan de Fuca (NOT pronounced like that). I said, "There's snow on Vancouver Island. Oh, hell, the story should be taking place in the snow."

Which is why I changed page the pages up to 19 -- ah, the unifying wonders of a bright orange marker -- and put in a new page. I'd accidentally miss-numbered the pages, and had an extra I could either ignore or add. So I used it to surprise everybody involved that their little production was going to have to take place in the white stuff.

The prose writers reading this are scratching their heads and going, "Why didn't she just cut and paste?"

You don't cut and paste comic book pages. That would be like cutting and pasting tapestries once you'd gotten halfway down the warp. It would be like repainting the car once you'd gotten past the front doors -- and I'm talking a dragon-and-flame airbrush, not a nice metal-flake blue.

Speaking of prose, I'm seriously champing at the bit to get done with the AFTERDEAD book and start something in prose. I don't care what.

I should give my poor agent something a little easier to flog than the ENTIRE DESERT PEACH COLLECTION. Just as a break.

Link Madness

I found this old photo of me. Dan wanted me to point the gun at him, but I don't do that because (1) it makes a boring photo and (2) I never point a gun at anything I don't mean to kill. Unlike stupid chimps who think these things are toys.

(Note: I am not this cute any more)



I just posted this photo at Webcomics Inc., and since this blog feeds into my blog at COMIXtalk, I am doing link madness:

"Hi! I found out about Webcomics Inc. on Deviantart.

I'm at Webcomicsnation which links back to more of my work at Moderntales.

I'm at Lulu.com which is where all my webcomics go when they go on paper."

Throw pennies at the artist

Remember the two mad musicians in the Pixel short, begging for pennies?

Now YOU can throw pennies at an artist! Head over to the AFTERDEAD page and buy a ProjectWonderful ad.

Advertise your own book. Share your pictures. Or your own blog. Or your LOLkatz. Or just tell everybody how much you love my stuff (you know you do).

All you need to do is build a cool little banner and buy some micro-payments ads.

Our grandmas know how to do that now!

The Peach and Stinz and Barr Girls on Webcomicsnation

The Webcomicsnation AFTERDEAD series has a RSS feed, and loads a new strip on Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. It's free! The advertisers on Project Wonderful pay for it.

Peach is still trying to help Stinz get out of breeding for the AfterReich,* even though Stinz is convinced that's the only way he can save his kids from becoming cannon fodder.

(German-speaking readers will get THAT pun).

Even the Barr Girls -- I had a lot of fans for those people -- get a cameo. Those are the leggy Girls in the black:



Finally catching up with the processing of older pages so I can get back to drawing new ones! Once I catch up, things can get rolling again.

Just finished scanning all the color stuff from AFTERDEAD 1.3 - until the big collections go out, or unless MagCloud or ComicXpress work for economical magazine sizes, Webcomicsnation may be the only place you can see full color, except for a few examples on DeviantArt and here.

True Fans.

It's been said, that to make it as a small creator, we need 1000 True Fans. I've never had a truly creator blog, mostly just opinions and editorials and stuff. So this is the first of the True Fans posts. As a treat, I'm going to include the AFTERDEAD story which will never be posted anywhere else.

There WILL be wolves in the next AFTERDEAD, just not this one. The "Feral Witness Protection Program" happened when I mis-heard an article on National Public Radio. Call it a fancy rough draft. You Barr Girls fans will recognize some old friends.

I plan to post Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Unless I get a wild hair or have some more stuff.

Visit The Little Store.