Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Saturday, June 8, 2019

Biorhythms...

I went into one of my crash and burn modes, yesterday, and am just now pulling out of it. I forced myself to finish roughing out the last of the frames for A65...and I do mean forced...but today had to put everything aside to give me time to regain my equilibrium. When I work while in a mood like this, I hate what comes out and wind up trashing it, so better to just step back, give myself time to settle, and focus on nothingness, for a while. And remind myself all I did was rough the sketches out, not fill them in; they can be adjusted, if need be.

I hate it when I get into moods like this...where I question every aspect of my life and kick myself for every mistake I've made...but I did manage to diminish it by re-reading the ending of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. Jake dealing with his mother in a phone call he dreaded making, and the aftermath of it...those few pages reminded me I do know how to write and can create something powerful, when I work at it.

They didn't kick away how lost I am when it comes to dealing with trying to sell my work. Get it known. Everything I've tried in the way of promotion has brought back minimal success. I'm still in the red on every one of my books except How To Rape A Straight Guy. Deep in the red on a couple of them.

I tell myself making money wasn't the point, and it isn't; I set the percentage paid to me very low to keep the price of the books from being too high, so breaking even was always going to be difficult. And normally I don't care about the income from them...except when I get into a black mood like this and want to chuck it all.

At least I'm past that and now stand a bit above apathy. It helped that I watched more episodes of Vera while doing nothing else...though I will say, I'm not buying second hand DVDs again. I bought this 7-season set through ebay and of the 12 disks I've seen, so far, 3 needed cleaning and 4 had dings on the surface that caused major glitches. I can usually get past them but it's irritating, doubly so right now.

Oh well...I've got 32 frames filled in and another 27 to complete. Funny how working on the visuals kept changing the angles and flow of the piece...but once I've backed away from being hyper-critical, I think it'll be ready to go, soon.

Then comes the fun part -- the slide-show for video.

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