Slightly Off-Topic

Holy crapadoodledoo, is that actually a new comic on Slightly Off-Topic?!?  Did we just miss an entire week?

Uhm… yeah…

Writer’s block was KILLING me which is odd because…

1. This is the strip I was working on for last Sunday that I delayed so I could riff on the toxic candy and
2. I didn’t change a single freaking word from the original commercial!!!

Actually, that second part is why I like this strip so much.  An honest transcription of the commercial with just a minor tweak to the visuals… Jeff’s story will probably require a bit more of a departure from the dialogue…

So the writer’s block thing… if I didn’t have to “write” anything, why didn’t this show up until today?  The short answer is “I don’t know.”  This strip hasn’t changed a bit from the original conception, but I couldn’t force myself to work on it anymore until I had pushed through my blockage… which is kinda dumb, but there you have it.

In a not-entirely-unrelated occurrence, someone asked me the following on Formspring:

What do you do to keep focused on your work? The procrastination wall seems to be getting harder to break…

This is a perfectly good question (nag).  I have certainly been known to procrastinate with the best of them… well… it would have been with the best of them, but I was busy that day… well… not busy, but Psych was one, and I figured I could just procrastinate later… and then I realized that I’d never played Lord of the Rings Online… you know how it is…

Wait… where was I?  Ah yes… procrastination, well… I guess the first thing to do is decide if procrastination is really the problem.  If it is, there’s any easy fix.  Get off your butt.  If you can’t manage to come to that conclusion yourself, maybe family, friends (or readers) have been gently trying to point that out to you.  I know I often need a good kick in the pants when I’m determined to put off a large project.

Now in this case, I wasn’t procrastinating, but rather as I said, was completely (writer’s) blocked up.  The question is, why?!?  I’ve had block before, but the last month or so has been fairly epic, and I really didn’t think I was out of ideas.  In fact, for another comic project, I’ve had ideas popping up constantly… which can be annoying at times.

So, if we assume that I’m not out of ideas, one has to look elsewhere for the cause.  I started to ask myself what has changed in my life.  Well, I’ve not been dieting the last few weeks… but failure is usually grist for my personal mill, so that didn’t seem likely.  My life has been pretty much the same…

…well… with one change… Brittany has left the building… and as I’ve mentioned before, the house is very different.  I don’t think I’ve been handling it as well as I should.  Well… it’s more like I’ve been working so hard to show that it doesn’t bug me that I’ve not had time to work on anything else.

So yeah… I miss her… but as I said previously, I’m glad she’s off doing what she wants to do (at least I’m glad as long as she’s actually… you know… studying… if not, then I’m just pissed).  Once I came to that not-so-startling revelations, the floodgates just opened, the scripts came a-tumbling out!   Attitude adjusted… block removed…  nothing like some good mental angioplasty!

So, where does that leave us?  Well, we have the original strip I put off above, its follow-up on Thursday, and Sunday… well… Sunday is, I think, easily going to make it into my top-5 favorite Slightly Off-Topic strips (well, assuming that I can get the visuals to do justice to the images in my head).  I hope you folks will enjoy it at least half as much as I do.  After that I’ve got a few more weeks of strips scripted… which I just realized I will have to modify a bit because is it me or is the year three anniversary coming up next week?!?  How awesome is that!!!!

As per the original question about when I am procrastinating, the key is to get me in the chair in front of the computer (preferably one without a ‘Stumble’ button).  Once I start drawing, I’m there until the bitter end… I really do enjoy this cartooning thing!