Barbarians at the Gates
redux
I realize now that when creating a webcomic, or any ongoing creative project, that routine and consistency are important. When I stopped doing the webcomic, for what I thought would be a month, maybe two, I lost momentum and all the energy that I had built up on an ongoing basis just dispersed and to try to get that wheel moving again has proved to be nigh on impossible. I compare it to when Austin Powers lost his mojo and almost ended up where all groovy secret agents go to die. Or for a more appropriate analogy to this comic and it’s themes, Robert E. Howard often talked about his writing and he almost felt like the character he was writing about was standing over his shoulder telling tales of their adventures and all Bob Howard had to do was just copy down the stories as they were told to him. When he ran out of stories for a particular character, he felt that the person had stepped away and Bob would never be able to write convincingly of them again. That’s kind of the way I feel with Sonya. She’s stepped away, not just physically from my shoulder, but receding in time till she’s travelled so far back that I can’t feel her presence anymore. She’s shouting and all I can hear is the wind!
This will take time, folks. I need to search through the winds of time and pull her back from the dark abyss that is called negligence. One of my patrons told me that he hopes it stays fun for me, so we can keep going. The world hasn’t been a fun place for quite awhile now, but I think we finally see the light at the end of the long, dark tunnel and it’s time to be fun again.
It’s time for Sonya to reign again!
Yes, it’s a “get back in the saddle” thing. I end up facing it now and then (though it helps that I _have_ to get going again when print deadlines are coming up). And not just the current strip; some characters I’ve had started to feel… lifeless when I’d stepped away from them for some time, like cardboard figures that I could move around but didn’t really have a relationship with anymore. They still came alive and breathing again when I began interacting with them anew, but yes, it can take a bit of time.
I guess it’s largely a matter of knowing your characters and where you want their story to be going. Agnes and Trudy are plenty fleshed out and rounded (pun intended) so I think you have every chance of getting back on speaking terms with them.
Hey Khelatar! Thank you, I hope so. I guess I thought it would be easy to get back on track when I initially decided to take a break. I had been posting fairly consistently for years between Barwench Tales and Oddly Aroused and things flowed pretty smoothly, so I figured it would be no biggie to just start right back up where I left off. Boy was I wrong! The comic is a potpourri of everything that I love about comics and fantasy stories and i just have to reconnect to that and let the fun show. Giving myself time and not feeling any undue pressure from deadlines, etc. should make the process and the final product better, I think. Thanks again and I hope all is well with you! Talk to you soon.
Jim
Also I’ve installed a bunch of behind the scenes technical stuff that I didn’t have installed before, like Secured site SSL, Google Analytics, etc. Interesting to note that my own country, Canada isn’t even in my top 3 viewing countries. The highest and in declining order are; USA, China, UAE, Canada, Sweden, UK and so on. I’m not a techie guy and it was a helluva an effort to get it all installed and figured out but it does fascinate me so 🙂