First page

Not in the sense that I'm starting something, more along the lines of you have no idea what will be the first page someone sees.

Let me back up a little. I've been reading webcomics since... I have no idea, at least a decade. I had a go at my own webcomic in ... 2003? Maybe even before that, and I read a lot of them before I tried to make one myself.

One of the things an artist needs to be keenly aware of is the limitations of their art. And for an online comic, one of those limitations is that you have no idea which page will be the first one a reader sees.

So make every page count, dagnabit!

Aaaand … NaNo comes to a crashing halt

Well, I gave NaNoWriMo a half-hearted stab this year. I went to the first meet-up and managed to get 500 odd words done at the first write-in. And pretty much stopped after that.

I’m still trying to write, just shifted targets for a bit. I’m now starting (yet another) project - Fallen House. It’s going to be a bit of a crossover between a webcomic, a novel and a wikivella. It’ll be piggy-backing on the back of Orbital Cauldron for now, though I may give it its own domain at a later stage.

In anticipation of this, I’ve ordered a graphics tablet which will hopefully be arriving sometime next week. This will help with the “webcomic” part of it. I may use the Orbital Cauldron Wiki or the Loneverse wiki, but at the moment I am planning to keep it away from the Wiki model since that normally tends to make me dither.

So at this stage I am gearing up for this project, Loneverse still on the backburner and Orbital Cauldron still needs a bit of a tidy up to allow it to be promoted.

Now all I need to do is to get stuck into it and WRITE!!

On hold

Okay, so I have a number of projects that are sitting around, not going anywhere. These are:

• Way of the Lone Road - this is a communal story forum that I started a few years ago. The people who were involved with that one have mainly moved on. Status: Currently, I am using it as general forum for my various projects.
• TwaiP - this was my first webcomic. For a first, I think it went pretty well. It has a start, a middle and an end. Status: Finished.
• The Craze Factor This was a "stolen" webcomic. Basically, someone else wanted their account deleted. I asked them to send me the login details which they did and I deleted their old content, like they wanted. Then I moved in my own junk and squatted on the account. Status: Being used as a testing area. Can be deleted at any time.
• ictoanftc - I couldn't think of a name for this comic is on indefinite hiatus. The story wasn't going anywhere and I ran out of motivation.
• escobar.id.au - my main site, no updates in a long time. This one I really need to get to work on. Status: Limping along
• Loneverse - this is my "big" creative site. However, it too has not updated in a long time. I have the urge to overhaul it and start again, but that does not feel right. I may just leave it as is, get another domain and start a new story site with a different theme. Status: Unofficially on hiatus
• LTPD - this is the latest webcomic. It's a photocomic that uses Lego people (hence the recent splurging on Lego). Turns out that sticking word bubbles on photos is not as satisfying as drawing comics. Status: Aborted?

I'm pretty sure that I have another project or three that I am not listing. I have a lot of started/aborted projects.

So in order to focus, I think I will cut down on the number of projects that I have running. Since I will be running a private server at home, I think that what I will do is to set up a private wiki and see if I can maintain a series of updates on the local one and then see about getting a new domain. Loneverse I'll put on tentative hold, though I intend to keep writing that one and I'll need to get into gear and get some more updates on my main site.

Everything else is getting dropped.