I am working on another website as a side project, so that's where my graphical efforts will be going for a while. I'll probably be making text only entries during this time.

More this evening... Until!

Update: Had a discussion recently with my friend Charles Hardin. I was talking about studying an artificial language to more accurately portray a translation machine in Bune, and he said, "I worry that you are overthinking Bune." He's right; I am, and I need to stop.

I knew all along that I wanted to create a world that was as free as possible of various fictional absurdities that have always annoyed me in reading science fiction (the idea of a 'universal translator' is one of them). This has caused me to lose momentum, as I'm concerned about getting things perfect. I know that I can't, but it succeeds in stopping me from even trying, and permits me to slack off and chase down other projects.

So. At this point, I have two pending unfinished projects, the Something Positive fan art and the 'encounters with death' series. After that, I have two paths to follow to get back on course with Bune.

First, I can follow up on a plan I hinted at last year, which is to use the characters of Bune in a couple of non-Bune stories. This would have the advantage of giving me practice in drawing them, while keeping me from committing myself to any particular style; I also have some fragmentary stories which fit these characters but not Bune. Though there's some danger in forming unintended preconceptions about the characters, this seems to me to be a reasonable approach.

Second... I can just do it, whether it comes out good or bad. In his book Getting Published: The Writer in the Combat Zone, Leonard Bernstein mentioned a last ditch strategy for getting something accomplished when you're stuck or blocked: do it badly. Write tripe, draw crap, even if it's unfit for publication, just get moving. It restores momentum enough to get you back on track, and you might find that it gives you a fresh enough perspective to get around whatever was holding you up. Not to mention that creativity can often take root and flourish even in bad soil...

Thus, my broad strategy is to try the first option. If that isn't working, I'll do the second. But one way or the other, I'll get it done, even if I'm grinding grain inside the windmill instead of tilting at it.