Well I feel bad about things not coming together yesterday for the update, so I decided to talk a little about this book I mentioned the other day. People seemed interested. Or, at least, they did a great job pretending to be.

I have been penning a novel (ooo, it sounds so formal!) for the past five years. I did not realize it had been five years until I updated the “Copyright JKR” dates from 2002-2005 to 2002-2007. Which might show you WHY it has been in the works for five years. I wrote the opening (which I now find abysmal) in 2002, and then didn’t pick it back up until 2004. That year I wrote another few chapters. Finally, in late 2005, I grew tired of having the story unfinished so I spent 2 hours every single day writing the rest. After months, it was complete. I then shelved it until 2006, when I re-read the whole thing. My goodness it was terrible. Well, not all of it. Just the stuff written before 2005.

Whether the book ever sees the light of publishing day, I do not know. I’d love to keep polishing it up until it was worthy of people reading it. I really love the story, and am actually pretty proud of most of the book. If it is ever published or not depends a lot on me. On if I can manage to edit it. You see, my entire writing career (and when I say career, I mean throughout school) has been one of me waiting until the day before something is due and then writing as fast as I can. By doing this, I can create quite a work of fiction (even if the paper was supposed to be factual, ahem…). It is average, by my standards, but in school it became exceptional. More or less because I have some talent to writing that comes naturally, and put up against a bunch of other average works, it looks very well done. Put up against GOOD works, though, it sinks like a rock. At any rate, I never had time to DO editing. So I never learned how.
I’ve never been good at editing, and obviously never had much time to practice the art. I can see why the first four chapters are terrible, but I have no insight as to how to fix them. The information inside MUST be said, or later events can’t happen. But it is, frankly, boring until you reach chapter 5. What to do? I just don’t know.

The book, though I won’t go into much detail, is the story of a young boy who lives on a small island. Things really get moving, though, when his sister is kidnapped and he sets off to save her. It is a fantasy, taking place in a far off land, and deals quite a bit with the sailing of huge tall-sail ships. That is such a loose description that I feel I can get away with it. I would hate to tell a summary of the story and deprive people of using their own minds and imaginations to find out what happens.

If the book is ever published, you’ll all be the first to know.

Well apart from a torn Pectoral muscle that I now have to deal with (ruining my 2007 tennis season, for certain, darn you fence building!), it looks like any updates that were coming today will be postponed until Monday. After completing quite a bit, my computer seems to have wanted me to start over, as it keeps giving me error messages when I try to open things. Hooray for technology!

The good news is that I have all my hand drawn underdrawings (the computer can’t get to those!) so after I scan them back in, I’ll be able to redo them from there. Sorry about that. Believe me, I wish it was all done today as planned instead.

What a week. Oh well, now’s my chance to change it to something positive. I can spend the rest of the afternoon working without the rush of a deadline looming, I suppose.

Here’s a little rough I did for people to enjoy. One my ol’ computer didn’t eat.

Well, I learned that you shouldn’t use a high-blocking moisture-resistant paint in the basement unless you want to spend the next three days in a torturous gas chamber and have constant headaches. Apparently, the fumes go straight up into the house and prevent any sort of living from being done there. My house is practically a hazardous waste zone now. And I can’t breathe.

So I’m stuck not knowing what to do, because in this state I can’t very well spend 8 hours a day in my office or I will suffocate, and yet deadline day is tomorrow. I tried to work at the library, but ironically it was too noisy. I remember the days when libraries were quiet. Now they have cafes and magazines and even a DDR machine. Yes, in the library. Oh well, so much for that.

I also wanted to print the first draft of my book I’m writing (which has just turned 5 years old this past week, much to my dismay). But coming in well over 100 pages, it would be $10 to print. I don’t think I could bring myself to spend $10 on a bunch of sheets of paper that I’m going to throw away after marking the crap out of, since this draft really is pretty terrible and needs rewritten. At least the first four chapters, which are miserably boring now that I finished the entire first draft. Miserably boring. They have to be slightly boring, so readers can see how dull the main character’s life is, but still… Gotta jazz it up!

Yes, it was up yesterday afternoon, but for those who missed it there’s a new KB comic waiting for you here.

What else is there to say? Perhaps only that the next one will be a while, since I haven’t even started it yet, and there are more pressing comics to be done. What comics you ask? Guess you’ll see soon enough…

Well my illness has begun to fade, it seems. Which I’m quite happy about, because it was pretty miserable. I’ve still got some distracting aches, but all in all I’m feeling pretty much back to normal.

I have a new Kingdom Blue comic ready to be put up, so I just need to actually upload it and everyone can check it out. Then I suppose it will be time to get started on the next, which I haven’t begun yet. Or perhaps I should do an update for that other website I used to maintain… what was it called? Fred something? I think there were monkeys…

I decided to upload a warm-up drawing I did last week and share it. So here is a random doodle of a character I call Bell. He won’t be in anything (probably) but I just came up with him before drawing last week’s Cubetoons. Sometimes when I’m not in a super-hurry (ha ha, like that ever happens) I’ll do a warm up drawing to loosen up my inner artist. For all you aspiring artists out there, I highly recommend it!

Whenever I write in the blog about being sick again, I think “AGAIN?!” even though it really has been a while since I was last sick. I’m not certain what has decided to attack me THIS time, but my stomach is in continuous pain, and I think that cramping has made its way upwards into my chest and shoulders. Of course, it doesn’t help that the humidity is so high I could reach out and touch it. And my sinuses are apparently bored, so they’ve decided to open a mucus factory. How nice.

So I’m in bed.

But before going back to sleep for the 10th or 11th hour today, I updated Cubetoons.com with all the latest comics up to Level 67. So if you haven’t seen them, there you go. Now I’m going to turn off the computer and see if I can force my body to rest enough to rid itself of this miserable agony.

Let it be known the lesson of the day: It is much more stupid to not ask a question than it is to just ask it.

I finally called Nintendo yesterday, after the Wii Shop Channel still hadn’t been working properly. A friendly guy named Brian answered. He was nice. He knew that I had no idea what I was doing when it came to router settings and whatnot. Thankfully, he walked me through the entire thing (which was actually extremely easy once I did it) and in about 10 minutes completely fixed the problem. I mean COMPLETELY.

The Wii Shop Channel now loads in about 5 seconds. TMNT took me 20 SECONDS to download completely. Wow. This is coming from Super Mario Brothers taking about 15 minutes total a few months ago. The original Super Mario Brothers. I hardly blinked and TMNT was on my system. Now all my other channels run about 900 times faster too.
So, again, the lesson, everyone, is that you should ask if you have a problem or question. Ask ask ask. You’ll be much more happy if you do. (And for goodness sake, if you’re having Wii/DS/Nintendo system issues JUST CALL THEM! Best customer support ever… I should have remembered that myself and saved 7 months of grief.)

My Wii claims to be connected to the internet. As a matter of fact, it is connected, because I can vote in the Everybody Votes Channel, surf the net, and browse the latest news until my heart is content. But when I try to BUY something via the Wii, that’s when things go sour. And not the good kind of sour, like the kind found in delicious blue raspberry flavored candy, but the kind of sour commonly associated with the phrase “that’s when things went sour”.

Sometimes it just stares back at me from the screen that simply says “Wii” on it. Sometimes it makes it all the way to the “Connecting. Please wait…” screen (which I happen to be staring at right now). But only twice in our time together has the Wii Shop Channel opened its virtual doors to me and invited me in for some downloading fun. The first time I bought points and Super Mario Brothers, Kid Icarus, and Zelda: Link to the Past. The second time I put more points on my account and was about to snatch up TMNT and Ninja Gaiden when it booted me out and refused to say another word.

I know I should just call Nintendo and they’ll make everything all better, but I just don’t feel like figuring out all the things they’re going to ask me. “What router do you have?” they will say. “I don’t know” I will reply. “What is your ESPN number?” they will say. “I don’t know” I will reply. “Why are you not using commas after your responses of ‘I don’t know’ on your blog?” they will say. At this point I will feel bad and probably start to cry.

I finally, yesterday, finished reading the last volume of a manga called Death Note. It started out a bit disturbing, but interesting. Then it grew more and more disturbing, and less interesting. Finally it reached a point where I just wanted to know what was going to happen, and I didn’t even care anymore. Now it is finished, once and for all.

The story itself was not a bad one, yet for a “graphic novel” it certainly had more text than pictures. Every other page was a character in an internal monologue about what another character might be thinking. It was beginning to drive me insane. The ending (I won’t give it all away) could have been great, but instead it seemed like the author included something to piss off everyone. People who wanted the bad guy to win would be disappointed. People who wanted the good guy to win would be disappointed. And, surprisingly, people like me who didn’t even CARE were still disappointed. Included in the end was a bit of depressing crap that totally made the entire series pointless to me. It really should have ended several volumes ago.

But no matter, it is done. Now I can go back to reading Inu-yasha and Hunter X Hunter and enjoying myself. Farewell, Death Note, I’m sorry I wasted my time on you.

I am thrilled that in just one more month the final chapter in the Harry Potter saga will be here. You see, I have a sort of love-hate thing with Mr. Potter, or more specifically J.K. Rowling. Despite sharing initials, we don’t agree on some things.

I began reading the HP series shortly after it came out, who knows how many years ago. (10 is it? Has it really been a decade? Sigh, I’m old…) I fell in love with the writing style, even more than the story and characters, and was amazed with every page how eloquently the words flowed through the novels. Book one was amazing. Book two was beyond amazing. Book three was perhaps the greatest work I’ve ever read in my life. Then came book four, which was nearly as amazing as book one.

Then came book five.

Book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, was, in my humble opinion, the worst piece of trash I’d read in a long, long time. It made approximately NO sense. NONE. The events that took place were so illogical, that in the end when certain events transpired (the dying of a certain character) I was so taken aback by the complete LACK of flow that I almost stopped reading the series forever. Here’s a recap of how things went down in that book, being vague for anyone who didn’t read it:

-Harry becomes angry
-Everyone ignores Harry
-Things are set up strictly for the purpose of killing a single character, even though 1 MILLION simple things could have prevented it and ignoring those things makes no sense
-A character dies for no reason in the stupidest way I have ever, EVER heard of a character dying
-Harry becomes EXTREMELY angry (for it is obvious that the previous events made no sense to him as well)

Then we move on to book 6, in which everything is back to normal, Harry is as he was in Book 4, and it seems as if any character development in book 5 never even happened. And because book 6 needs to be longer than book 5, random chapters that are useless are thrown in. Honestly, Chapter One should have stayed in the drawer where J.K. left it when she wrote it several books back. Still, Book 6 certainly did not suck as Book 5 did. So I was hopeful.

The end of book 6 was obvious and stupid, yet after the travesty of book 5 I found myself not caring. And so now I await the final book, number 7. It will be over, and I can move on. I can find a close to this part of my life. My hopes are not high, but they’d like to be. I feel like Mrs. Rowling had such magic with words at the start of this story, and I only plead that some of that is brought back for the finale.

Either way, it couldn’t be as bad at Book 5, so I know I’ll be content with the conclusion. Oh, Book 5… What the biscuit.