Man, who's idea was it to do one of these every day. Obviously by now I'm flagging with about a week to go to my first agreed rest point. I know it's bad form to do one of these self-referential doohickeys, but there is a point I want to address here.
What's more important at this stage? Keeping to a daily deadline or making sure you have something worthwhile to say?
I've been reading the blog of comics writer and editor Jim Shooter lately. He's done tons of stuff but my own interest in him comes from his work on one of my faves, The Legion of Super Heroes (the black and white Showcase reprints of the 60s LSH tales, many written by Shooter, are my Fourth Comic Book Recommendation). He was also an editor, later Editor in Chief, at Marvel in the late 70s and 80s. This was a time when superhero comics were still found in newstands instead of just specialist shops and so if a title was advertised as monthly it was vital that it shipped monthly. Nowadays, with creators often aiming toward collected editions of their work as their final goal, a 'writer' or artist might fall behind schedule and individual issues appear months apart (interestingly enough, DC's younger-skewed September relaunch of all their titles has made a big deal out of reversing that trend - stories paced for a regularly-shipping (physically and digitally) periodical seems to be their goal). But back then, Shooter often refers to substandard art and scripts being accepted because they had a schedule to keep.
You can see where I'm going with this. Last night's blog was a bit poor and all that was gained from posting it was a headache from lack of sleep after an extra-long day.
Hmm, I feel a graph coming on. If we plotted how late it got against the effects on my poor head it would look something like this:
So how useful is it for me to keep churning out any old tat? Well, mostly it's to observe how I write and see if I can exploit any patterns I see to help me form a working methodolgy. Unfortunately, this so far seems to be based around staying up until nearly 2 o'clock every night. What is it about that time that I accept it as a deadline in a way I won't for an earlier, more sensible time?
That's the interesting thing. If it turns out that that's the best time for me to write i can start looking at ways to make sure I can fit that into the rest of my day. At this stage I'm afraid the content is coming second to the process.
Which of course is another roundabout way of me apologising for another lo-fi blog entry ;-) Stick with it though folks, I'm certain that there's better ones on the way. But for now it's enough for me, for now, to keep regular. Which I guess is another way of saying:
More soonliest!
