The long Road to nowhere

[Nanda]

Oh man... You don't know how happy I was to read that, Jason. I mean, I stuck with you, I did, because I had FAITH, faith in the story up until that point, faith in your ability to bring things around with a BANG, right at the point when I'd start to get aggrivated with characters and/or storyline in the past... But when I saw "Track Suit Ninja," I have to confess, I went into a brief period of mourning. I have so much more respect for you, owning up to it. I feel immensely relieved... And I know you'll get back on track. I have faith.

[Steverules]

I tried to put this in the shoutbox but I guess it's too big and didn't take.
Jason, welcome to life outside of comics. It's just going to get more hectic. Wait until you have children. It boils down to this, you only have so much time in the day to spend time with friends and family. No matter how much fun doing a strip is it still takes a lot of time and when you are looking at spending the weekend at the lake with your gal or spending it sitting inside drawing the choice is really easy. Relax, enjoy your life and work this when you get time. You can spend 5 or 6 hours on a strip that I'll spend 5 minutes looking at. I'll love it, I'll admire it but your out that time and you've got to rinse and repeat. The rest of us are out enjoying ourselves while you toil away for our entertainment. I don't think any of your fans (myself included) have any room to complain when you are doing this for free. Work it into your schedule. I'll be here if you update daily, weekly or monthly.

[Anywherebuthere]

I'm just posting this here for posterity's sake....




You ever make plans to do something...like say...run a marathon, or write a novel in a month, and halfway through it, you discover that life just went a whole lot of bonkers on you, and what you REALLY had, sitting there, stewing in your brain pan...this really GREAT idea, this incredablely awesome, kick ass, knock everyone flat down on their teeth story that you were going to wow people with...how it's there, and you're doing it, and everything's going great.

And suddenly, unexpectedly, the entire bloody plan changed.

It's like running a marathon, geting to the 20 mile mark, and SUDDENLY, you have a heart attack.

BOOM, colapse right there in the middle of the street, and get wheeled away while the medical team does palpatations on you.

That's what it feels like happened here.

And I don't mean the story rewrote itself mid streem. No, that's expected.

I mean, my entire plan of attack, from March on, just took one, huge, monumental U-turn on me.

And I just sat there and went "OH CRAP...now what." How to I try and adjust what I'm doing to even TRY and make this work now. How can I POSSIBLY work all this crap out? I mean, what I WANT to do, what's running through my brain, is THIS...but I cant POSSIBLY do that now...because there's just no bloody way I'll physically be able to do it.

Well, welcome to "The Long Road to Nowhere."

SERIOUSLY.

In March, when I was thinking there was only...ten to fifteen full pages left to this bloody thing, life went reaaaaly weird on me. Suddenly, I'm not looking at spending all my time drawing a strip. I'm looking at funerals, and engagements, and trying to figure out exactly HOW the hell I pay for a wedding in 8 months (5 months now...so donate you bastards, DONATE). Suddenly I'm looking at china patterns, and home's, and figuring out rates on 30 year morgages vs 15 year morgages, and weither or not I TRUELY know enough about remodeling to take on an investment property, gut it down to the studs, and completly renovate it. (I do, by the way...thank you dad for 12 years of on the job constuction and restoration training. I DID notice the bowing in of the foundation, but the roofline WAS good, no leaks...thank you very much...however you did get me on the Hemlock floors. I knew they would have to be replaced, but I wasn't certain WHAT we were looking at there. And how the hell did you MISS that the buffet wasn't square any more. I mean...COME ON MAN.)

Suddenly, inexplicably, my life changed in the blink of an eye. And as much as I WANTED to finsh up this MASSIVE, tale I had brewing in my head, life gave me the finger.

So I filled. I bullshitted.

There were NEVER suppost to be pirate ninjas. But I figured that would give me one extra week to work on what I wanted to work on. There were NEVER suppost to be three FRIGGING months in this god damn mother fucking tub.

NEVER.

PERIOD

HONESTLY, I sat there and went...WHAT THE HELL DO I DO?!?

So I filled, I split up the story I wanted to tell. I padded, I moved stuff around, I changed what would have been published over a week and a half into what wound up being published over three MONTHS.

And I HATED doing it. Honestly, I HATED it. The entire time I'm doing it, I'm looking at it going "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING MAN!?! Wrap this up...get this DONE with...screw the ending you had planned...SCREW it just go on."

Honestly, the entire time I'm filling, I'm thinking to myself "Goddamn it, you're going to have to pull a Lucas on this one and just 'Special Edition' this whole goddamn story arc."

You have ANY idea how much I hated that?

And I WILL wind up special editioning this if and when it winds up getting collected. Because it's ...UGH...it's some of the absolute worst writing I've EVER done. It's forced, it's contrived, it's absolutly HORRID.

It's NOT what I intended when I set all of this in motion in February, and I absolutly HATE that.

And don't try and make me feel better. YEAH, there's some decent stuff in there, but honestly people. HONESTLY...

I was bullshitting. You know it, I KNOW it, and I'm sorry.

-Jason

[Casualnotice]

I said it in the shoutbox, and I'll repeat it here, because I'm a cynical old middle-aged bastard.

Welcome to the writer's life, Jason. Most of what you do, you will know is bullshit. Sometimes you get paid for it. Sometimes you get paid to lay down someone else's bullshit. Sometimes the check bounces.

But bullshit is the most popular and widely used fertilizer in North America. Where it is not used directly, it is processed ad a major component in many synthetics. From bullshit, lillies rise, roses bloom, and a world is fed.

You're right, Jason. The bathtub sequence is bullshit. And it's blossoming.

[Anywherebuthere]

I've commented on this whole affair in my blog...feel free to check it out to get the full "behinds the music" sort of struggle that was going on.


http://abhcomic.blogspot.com/

[Drbean3000]

Jason... I don't want tell all these people how full of $6it you are.

[firmGlomi]

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