4275: Crumblin' Down
Sorry I've been AWOL for a while--besides the major thunderstorm on Friday that left us without power for 26 hours, I've just been largely unmotivated to do extracurricular stuff beyond the daily grind.
I keep thinking of a quote I stumbled across in some of the papers I was scanning [I'm sure this doesn't go against the NDA since I'm re-acquiring the quote from teh Intarwebs]:Always aim for achievement and forget about success. - Helen Hayes
This is pretty much my strategy in a nutshell at the moment. I still don't have a clear organization of what I want to do with myself and how to get there, so I've constructed arbitrary-but-achievable goals around myself, much in the way of various achievements in games and with the same sense of satisfaction upon completion. Maybe that's a bit flighty, but I have a goal in mind for once I complete X achievements [it's not that big a secret--I want to put all the good sketches I've done into a compilation], so my failure to complete one comic page a month is sort of sidelined to the project with a more obvious termination point on the horizon [when I have enough done and a chance to put the thing together].
It's sort of negligible to me whether any of my projects "take off"--until I have a business degree and/or confidence as a salesperson that independent artists with no agent require to succeed on a full-time basis, I'm resigned to doing everything for myself and smiling if someone else happens to like it, too. [Although, I'd take an agent, but I don't believe I can currently afford even a bad one.] Even if I got enough content going to potentially be self-sustaining from it, I'm still so hesitant to throw myself into the "fame" arena, with or without an agent to hide behind.
Advice columnists [who are any good] recommend figuring out what you want and/or, if the what you want is something of questionable merit [e.g. to be married before 35--something that depends on circumstance and the cooperation of at least one other person], why you want it. For instance, I believe of myself that I only want kids because I've been told my whole life that I should want them, and because .00000001% of the time they're cute, and I totally wonder what a mini-Charles would be like, and boy, do I have some cool names for my spawn--but, ultimately, I don't believe I hate anyone enough to condemn them to a fate of having me for a mother. This specific example is condemned as "selfish" by closed-minded parents who can't imagine anyone *gasp!* having a different life from what they have and/or seeing anyone else's decisions as a judgement on their own [PROTIP: it's NOT], but... really. I'm selfish because I don't want someone to have a shitty mother who happens to be me.
Uh-huh.
[I confess I'm also deathly afraid of maternal mortality, and no one can convince me I'll "be FINE, so stop worrying" until that rate is absolute zero so "NO, YOU SHUT UP"]
[[ ¬_¬ ]]
Pushing that back a few steps, what about marriage? Well, this is another thing I've always been taught to want, even before I understood what it really was. For instance, when I was little, I wanted to be married so I could change my name. No, really =|
Here's a messed-up thing that happened: In day-care, one of the sitters told us that we were NEVER allowed to change our names--with the exception of when we got married, then the wife takes the husband's last name. So boys were stuck with whatever awful names they had, FOREVAR. I'm 100% serious, I believed this bullshit even after I heard about legal name changes and husbands taking wives' last names and witness protection and etc. clear indications that society is not so rigid that a mistake [or, in my case, preference against] can't be undone. At least I'm to where I concede that marriage is a thing I would like to have for the psychological benefits, but where we are in our lives makes a wedding sort of "This seems like a lot of hassle for imparticular gain" relative to our interests [though I wouldn't mind the drive-thru JOP, but C wants to have a "real" wedding if at all].
Why change my name? Well, besides being tired of always being called "Julia My-Yamada" and all the misspellings that go with that, I've long regretted ever doing all my art under my real name, for all the usual misogynistic reasons: fear of being stalked, raped, murdered, etc. that fanboys don't [or do??] realize they project onto female celebrities. There's also the specific vitriol that women in media get significantly more than men, and just generally not liking being in the public eye. I've felt for years that I'd be more comfortable, now that I've established my online presence as "Julie Miyamoto" [which I continue as a concession to "it makes my parents proud to see my name on a thing I've done"], if I established my professional presence as Julie [anything else here]--which feels like something I should do, if at all, before getting another permajob if only because prior jobs have demonstrated their reticence against name changes [no one gets to update their e-mail accounts to reflect name changes, with the exception of those who've left and come back because their prior accounts have been removed].
This is something my ex didn't understand, certainly. [Not naming names--those of you who need to know already do.] I became immensely frustrated with his male-privileged failure to grasp just what my fears were and why separation of artist-me and at-work-me is so important, why I would even entertain the notion of drawing under a fake name [I have and maybe you've seen it [though likely not]] when I might as well put everything under my real name. It was one of many discussions I ended up conceding as futile to have rather than trying to explain my position to where he understood. It was even more frustrating when I realized he thought it was completely okay when ANOTHER artist did exactly what I wanted to do [draw under a different name from his work name].
While I don't think I've done anything in particular to disqualify myself from my professional pursuits with a quick Google search, I still would prefer to keep my "what I do during the day to pay for what I do at night" self separate just in case. After all, no use closing the barn door once all the cows are out and that =p
[also, I feel like, with my luck, I'd end up with these assholes for co-workers, and I'd beat them to the punch]
I have yet to figure out a good way to publish a novel online as a webpage vs. PDF--putting a whole book on one page seems atrocious, while breaking it up like so is a navigational mess. I had thought I would try writing stories this week [not necessarily full stories, but enough bits to be interesting], but Tumblr isn't really archive-friendly, so if I wrote part of one chapter one day and continued the next, it's not immediately evident how to get back to the first part/read the parts in order unless I manually link to the prior one and trust people to understand.
Although, there was a point when I realized there will be a majority subset of people who will NOT read my stuff in the correct order [it takes some effort to discern what that is, particularly since I've been concurrently writing EVERYTHING], so I kinda gave up LOL SPOILARing everything, but I still want to try.
Anyway, here's a new story starter, if you wanna read. It's about four book pages, 1780 or so words [just over a recommended Nano entry count], and doesn't quite get to a stopping point, but I don't know what *specifically* should happen next. Mostly just getting bits out to test the waters--there will be a different one tomorrow.
Don't know if I should bother transcribing all the BGNs anymore--seems like most of them are uninteresting in recap. Saturday evening was off to PA for refuge from a sweltering house with no power, though most of it was spent (futilely) trying to get progress on comic and/or daily grind... the most I got was a photo of crap sketch of me [as minzoku] sighing over a notebook with no progress made on it =/ GPOY
Anyway, Thomas and I tied for first, C was one point behind. I feel like I should have won, but I didn't read the cards carefully enough to realize, oh, I wanted Apprentice, not Stables [though Stables is good and got me a Province when I thought I had only 6 moneys], and I had too many Noble Brigands [1, but it kept coming into hand with no additional actions], and really I had not a good a draw as I could have. Tying for first is still good, though, especially with a Familiar in play [C's].
NOW TO BED before more storms rock da house =p
[also I made more Charlotte Russe for the company picnic thing--note to self: greater surface area = SHIT ANGEL FOOD CAKE]
I keep thinking of a quote I stumbled across in some of the papers I was scanning [I'm sure this doesn't go against the NDA since I'm re-acquiring the quote from teh Intarwebs]:Always aim for achievement and forget about success. - Helen Hayes
This is pretty much my strategy in a nutshell at the moment. I still don't have a clear organization of what I want to do with myself and how to get there, so I've constructed arbitrary-but-achievable goals around myself, much in the way of various achievements in games and with the same sense of satisfaction upon completion. Maybe that's a bit flighty, but I have a goal in mind for once I complete X achievements [it's not that big a secret--I want to put all the good sketches I've done into a compilation], so my failure to complete one comic page a month is sort of sidelined to the project with a more obvious termination point on the horizon [when I have enough done and a chance to put the thing together].
It's sort of negligible to me whether any of my projects "take off"--until I have a business degree and/or confidence as a salesperson that independent artists with no agent require to succeed on a full-time basis, I'm resigned to doing everything for myself and smiling if someone else happens to like it, too. [Although, I'd take an agent, but I don't believe I can currently afford even a bad one.] Even if I got enough content going to potentially be self-sustaining from it, I'm still so hesitant to throw myself into the "fame" arena, with or without an agent to hide behind.
Advice columnists [who are any good] recommend figuring out what you want and/or, if the what you want is something of questionable merit [e.g. to be married before 35--something that depends on circumstance and the cooperation of at least one other person], why you want it. For instance, I believe of myself that I only want kids because I've been told my whole life that I should want them, and because .00000001% of the time they're cute, and I totally wonder what a mini-Charles would be like, and boy, do I have some cool names for my spawn--but, ultimately, I don't believe I hate anyone enough to condemn them to a fate of having me for a mother. This specific example is condemned as "selfish" by closed-minded parents who can't imagine anyone *gasp!* having a different life from what they have and/or seeing anyone else's decisions as a judgement on their own [PROTIP: it's NOT], but... really. I'm selfish because I don't want someone to have a shitty mother who happens to be me.
Uh-huh.
[I confess I'm also deathly afraid of maternal mortality, and no one can convince me I'll "be FINE, so stop worrying" until that rate is absolute zero so "NO, YOU SHUT UP"]
[[ ¬_¬ ]]
Pushing that back a few steps, what about marriage? Well, this is another thing I've always been taught to want, even before I understood what it really was. For instance, when I was little, I wanted to be married so I could change my name. No, really =|
Here's a messed-up thing that happened: In day-care, one of the sitters told us that we were NEVER allowed to change our names--with the exception of when we got married, then the wife takes the husband's last name. So boys were stuck with whatever awful names they had, FOREVAR. I'm 100% serious, I believed this bullshit even after I heard about legal name changes and husbands taking wives' last names and witness protection and etc. clear indications that society is not so rigid that a mistake [or, in my case, preference against] can't be undone. At least I'm to where I concede that marriage is a thing I would like to have for the psychological benefits, but where we are in our lives makes a wedding sort of "This seems like a lot of hassle for imparticular gain" relative to our interests [though I wouldn't mind the drive-thru JOP, but C wants to have a "real" wedding if at all].
Why change my name? Well, besides being tired of always being called "Julia My-Yamada" and all the misspellings that go with that, I've long regretted ever doing all my art under my real name, for all the usual misogynistic reasons: fear of being stalked, raped, murdered, etc. that fanboys don't [or do??] realize they project onto female celebrities. There's also the specific vitriol that women in media get significantly more than men, and just generally not liking being in the public eye. I've felt for years that I'd be more comfortable, now that I've established my online presence as "Julie Miyamoto" [which I continue as a concession to "it makes my parents proud to see my name on a thing I've done"], if I established my professional presence as Julie [anything else here]--which feels like something I should do, if at all, before getting another permajob if only because prior jobs have demonstrated their reticence against name changes [no one gets to update their e-mail accounts to reflect name changes, with the exception of those who've left and come back because their prior accounts have been removed].
This is something my ex didn't understand, certainly. [Not naming names--those of you who need to know already do.] I became immensely frustrated with his male-privileged failure to grasp just what my fears were and why separation of artist-me and at-work-me is so important, why I would even entertain the notion of drawing under a fake name [I have and maybe you've seen it [though likely not]] when I might as well put everything under my real name. It was one of many discussions I ended up conceding as futile to have rather than trying to explain my position to where he understood. It was even more frustrating when I realized he thought it was completely okay when ANOTHER artist did exactly what I wanted to do [draw under a different name from his work name].
While I don't think I've done anything in particular to disqualify myself from my professional pursuits with a quick Google search, I still would prefer to keep my "what I do during the day to pay for what I do at night" self separate just in case. After all, no use closing the barn door once all the cows are out and that =p
[also, I feel like, with my luck, I'd end up with these assholes for co-workers, and I'd beat them to the punch]
I have yet to figure out a good way to publish a novel online as a webpage vs. PDF--putting a whole book on one page seems atrocious, while breaking it up like so is a navigational mess. I had thought I would try writing stories this week [not necessarily full stories, but enough bits to be interesting], but Tumblr isn't really archive-friendly, so if I wrote part of one chapter one day and continued the next, it's not immediately evident how to get back to the first part/read the parts in order unless I manually link to the prior one and trust people to understand.
Although, there was a point when I realized there will be a majority subset of people who will NOT read my stuff in the correct order [it takes some effort to discern what that is, particularly since I've been concurrently writing EVERYTHING], so I kinda gave up LOL SPOILARing everything, but I still want to try.
Anyway, here's a new story starter, if you wanna read. It's about four book pages, 1780 or so words [just over a recommended Nano entry count], and doesn't quite get to a stopping point, but I don't know what *specifically* should happen next. Mostly just getting bits out to test the waters--there will be a different one tomorrow.
Don't know if I should bother transcribing all the BGNs anymore--seems like most of them are uninteresting in recap. Saturday evening was off to PA for refuge from a sweltering house with no power, though most of it was spent (futilely) trying to get progress on comic and/or daily grind... the most I got was a photo of crap sketch of me [as minzoku] sighing over a notebook with no progress made on it =/ GPOY
Anyway, Thomas and I tied for first, C was one point behind. I feel like I should have won, but I didn't read the cards carefully enough to realize, oh, I wanted Apprentice, not Stables [though Stables is good and got me a Province when I thought I had only 6 moneys], and I had too many Noble Brigands [1, but it kept coming into hand with no additional actions], and really I had not a good a draw as I could have. Tying for first is still good, though, especially with a Familiar in play [C's].
NOW TO BED before more storms rock da house =p
[also I made more Charlotte Russe for the company picnic thing--note to self: greater surface area = SHIT ANGEL FOOD CAKE]