Minor Update
Reply
Category Archives: Updates
Blog 6-30-17 – About Face
Well here I am, back a little more than a month after the last update to give another one, as is custom for this type of thing, and I’ve made a decision that has been a personally difficult one to make. When starting, and during, my hiatus I was very adamant about not only it being a temporary thing, but something that would eventually “disappear” as I would work to make up all the content I had missed postin when I was on it. It’s more than a year later now, and while I have been working to catch back up, I haven’t been seeing the returns I’ve hoped for. My original intent was to just power through this section, creating both my backlog material and moving forward into new stuff. But, as many people who try to finish large project know, something like this creates a mental block. The sheer amount of things you are telling your brain it “has” to do dissuades your brain from doing those things, and as it puts them off, they only get bigger.
While I have been making some headway in this “power through” area it hasn’t been as much as I had hoped, and my “re-warm-up” phase has been much slower than expected, All the while things I was “supposed” to do kept piling up, and it got to the point where my mental resistance to moving things forward was preventing me from getting back up to speed. Looking at things now, it could potentially take me years to catch back up on a reasonable schedule (especially for a person with a house, job, and schoolwork). If I wanted to catch up by the end of 2017, I would have to do more than triple-time on my work, and that just isn’t coming from a person who wasn’t able to keep “regular time” for the last year. And extending that deadline only increased the mental block. Devoting that much time to catching up makes the brain think it’s failing, and that just isn’t good for work.
So the decision I’ve made is to “give up” on the idea of catching up. And that has been a possibility from the start, but it was shunned by my more optimistic side. Now the idea’s still there, and maybe sometime in the far-off future when I’m being super productive I’ll be able to go back and catch up on everything or something close to it, but right now I’m going to focus on what I can do next. Nothing is going to stop getting made at this point. In fact, I intend to increase my output, but I won’t be re-instating the schedule and might even make up a new schedule sometime in the future. My current new goal is to get myself back to putting up at least one thing a day, but none of this will be trying to make up for lost time, and there will likely be many new projects introduced.
And even though this has been a difficult decision for me personally (doing this essentially makes my last year a creative failure), I know that both my few dedicated followers and those many on the internet just passing by really just want more things they can read/view to enjoy, and that me making nothing for months at a time isn’t what they came to see, nor is it satisfying “artistically” for me. This will hopefully end up with a better arrangement for all of us, and allow for my various sites to improve.
I always want to thank everyone who has viewed (liked, and commented on) my content, and I appreciate the patience of those of you who have stuck with me. I’ve got a lot of cool ideas and new projects in the works that soon we can hopefully enjoy together.
-Austin
Blog 5-19-17 – Catching Back Up (and dates)
I can’t believe it’s already May! Normally I am not in agreement with people when they say “time flies” or “man, this year is going by quick”. But this last year has been an exception. I’m still trying to catch up, but that’s always a harder proposition than it seems. Hopefully, you’ve been able to see some of the fruits of this labor this month, though. Of course, I’ll try to continue to keep up some semblance of this output and if all goes well, I’ll prevail.
In any case, I’ve begun work on comics again (my favorite and least viewed part of the website) after some time of debating with myself how to do it. I have been keeping track of how many I’ve missed during my hiatus (as I have with my written projects) and I intend to catch up. But I will be posting them on an “as-made” schedule and it will still be some time before I get back to the old schedule. But there won’t be any backdating and pretending in the future I didn’t go on hiatus (even if that would make it look nicer).
I use the term “hopefully” a lot in these update blogs, and things do never turn out as well as I would “hope”. But things are moving forward, falling into place, and getting better. There’s more of the old stuff and lots of cool new stuff in the works around here and it may take me a while to get to it but it’s coming. And I hope that some people out there can get the chance to enjoy them as much as I do.
-Austin
Blog 1-1-17 – New Years Updates
(Post is late because the power went out at my house {everyone’s favorite New Year’s tradition})
Well, it’s the New Year. Time to settle in with my traditional Welch’s sparkling grape juice (I may have already). I hope your year was enjoyable and that your next will be better. Putting all world events out of the picture, I had a fine year, through it was far from what I had wanted. Those following my Blog and updates will know already about my moving house, along with social, work, and familial obligations that have really eaten into my capacity to finish projects for my various online endeavors (I’m even out of the house as I write this).
The daily posting schedule is still suspended. Even with the personal goals I set for myself, I am not any particular distance closer to getting it back on track. I have done better, though. Before leaving on my current trip I wrote a post a day (which are coming out a bit more sporadically as they need to be edited) and have continued to write into my “vacation”. So I won’t be launching anything new this year or changing anything up: my goal will simply be to take steps to returning to my former schedule (with comics likely coming back soon). I seem to be getting closer to that goal, but all projects need to be taken one step at a time. I will be posting regular updates along the way, and if all goes well things should be back to “normal” around this time next year.
Hopefully, this new year will bring as many opportunities and interesting events as the previous, and I’ve already got some plans for new releases to come once I’ve gotten back to a semblance of normalcy. I am excited about working on new projects as I try and catch up (I guess that the analogy would be that I have multiple legs taking multiple steps). I appreciate everyone who has enjoyed, supported, critiqued, found interesting, or left feedback on my work this past year. It should be getting better all the time, and with any luck more expansive in the coming year.
Happy New Year!
-Austin
Blog 10-30-16 – October Update
All right, I said I would be doing another blog before November, and here we are… with less to report than I had hoped, but nevertheless it is an exciting time.
First things first I will be participating in a few events: the second Big Bend Comic Con will be in Alpine Texas on November 5th, and I’ll have a table in the Artist’s Alley. And the 2016 Artwalk festival will also be in Alpine November 18th-19th where I will have a stand on the walk selling my books.
And speaking of books I have a couple new ones I’ve been working on that will be debuted at the Comic Con and then go on to be featured at Artwalk. These will be available soon from the Amazon store link as well. Here’s a photo of the proofs.
There’s a new Walking the Roosters, Stamped, and a printed version of the Beta of RPG LTE.
On the more personal side of events, I have finally finished my move (which if you count that as the time from when I moved out of my last solo place to where I am now, took more than a year). I still have to finish unpacking (which I’m sure will be a wonderful experience) but I will be moving to a more stable schedule that means I will be able to produce more online content.
And I know I said that I would get more posted in September and October, and I do have many more things finished than I haven’t posted, but I run things by an editor before posting them and she has been very busy lately as well, making it hard to get new things through. But now that I am in a more stable place (and have finished the new books) I will be able to sit down and concentrate much more on what needs to be done on the site. I have my own personal goals for catching up on everything, but I won’t post them here because they will inevitably change. I do really enjoy doing the things I have been online and I hope to get back to it soon, and it shouldn’t be too long before I put up another post with more information about how things are going.
-Austin
Blog 9-7-16 – September Update
So it’s September, and I said I would update y’all by the first week of the month, and here I am, proving again that I am not dead, and not much has changed in the way of the posting schedule.
I had no idea that the process of my moving would take more than a year, but, as many more productive people will tell you, when you can’t devote your full attention and effort to a single project, it will get done less efficiently. I definitely wasn’t able to get done what I had set out to do in a reasonable amount of time and I am sorry that in doing that I have severely diminished the amount of content that has been featured on this site (hopefully temporarily).
But, things are getting back on track, as hopefully the last few (and next) days of posts will prove. I didn’t do as many exciting things these two months as before, but here are a few photos from another art show “Clarity in Chaos” that I did with the new West Texas Collective (Facebook Instagram Twitter) in Alpine Texas. It was a really fun show, and I hope to do more like it in the future.
I won’t be fully up and running for a while longer now, but I’m getting close to being back in a position where I can do so. It’s more than likely I’ll have something working by the end of the year. I’ll post another update by November, and be on the look out for that one, because there are a few other really cool things that I’ll also be doing in November. So stay tuned and thank you for reading/watching.
-Austin
Blog 7-10-16 – July Update
Hello everyone, Austin Smith here, and it is July 10th, also known as the absolute last day one could possibly consider in the first week of July. Though I must admit I believe I did fail when I said I was going to have an update up during the first week. I did spend some extra time making sure the two posts I put up as tokens of proof that I am still going to update this site were a little more polished. The update is: I have not reached the point yet where I am in a position to fully restart my posting schedule. But I have said all of the things before about how I’ve seen Internet projects disappear, and how not getting things done snowballs. So I won’t go over them again, instead I’ll tell you about some of the things I did that are holding up the content but were still great to do. I’ll post another update by the first week of September.
The first really exciting thing that I did was go out to California and administrate a wedding for a family member. Unfortunately for me right now the photos haven’t come in, and all of the others that have me in them aren’t great (but I wasn’t who people were there to see) so I don’t have a photo from the ceremony right now. So instead here is one of me in Texas in the same outfit that looks like the Lord is shining down upon me.
I’m also still moving, and here are ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos of what a literal ton of books (as in actually 2000 pounds) looks like boxed up and on the shelf.
Most recently I went to both of my local 4th of July festivities, in Alpine Texas. The first one, Fiesta del Barrio, I attended as a vendor selling some of my books. But I’m bad at taking pictures so I only got one of the parade, and one of a horned lizard. I also missed the second parade and only got one picture of it as well.
And here is a panorama someone took of me from the Reds show I was featured in in early April.
Anyway, hopefully those photos and my posts from yesterday sufficiently prove that I am alive and dedicated to these blogs. Thank you for your patience.
-Austin
Blog 5-2-16 – Reconstruction
Hey guys, Austin here again. I said I would post an update in May after my April suspension of my posting schedule, and I’m here to say the posting schedule is still suspended. Things in April didn’t work out as I had planned (at least as far as this Blog is concerned, my sanity might be slightly restored though). And thinking I could get it all sorted out by May may have been a bit too optimistic of me (see what I did there). I’m working on quite a few site- and content-related things behind the scenes, but they aren’t translating at the moment into much that is visible on the front end. Still, I do want to get things out there so it does look like I’m doing something, since I can say I am all I want but without any new posts it sure doesn’t look like I am.
Unfortunately I will still have to extend my schedule suspension until I’m caught up and can return to it. I don’t know how long it will take to do that exactly, but I will post an update about it by the first week of July. Once things do get back on track, though, be on the lookout for some announcements of cool new things, I’ve got a lot in the works.
-Austin
Blog 4-1-16 – The Good and the Bad
Hello again. I’m Austin Smith from the Dragon Funnies (dragonfunnies.com), Art Supply Critic (artsupplycritic.com), and Dragon Co. (dragoncompany.org) Blogs. And I have finally and unfortunately reached the point where work, social obligations, sickness, and just life in general have rendered me unable to keep up with maintaining my web endeavors. Over the past few weeks I have failed entirely to keep the deadlines I have set for myself on all three of these Blogs. And with more than 3 years of not missing more than a day that is a huge blow to me.
I will not give up on posting to these sites. And in fact I can see the crest of the mountain where I can go back to the normal maintenance of them. It is disheartening for me to still have this problem even after I have streamlined so much of my content. But it is still just a hobby for me, and it is a hobby I will have to “leave” on this side of the mountain and come back for once I have brought everything else to the top.
The real announcement here is, I will be suspending my posting schedule in April. That doesn’t mean things won’t be posted. It just means there will be no schedule. I will finish what I can when I can and then review my situation in May. If everything goes as planned (and things, contrary to how it seems, tend to go as planned, just not on schedule), I will catch up through all of these days by the time I am done. So the amount of content in the end will be the same, but will be posted in bursts rather than daily.
Until that is done there is quite a bit still on the site to enjoy, and I will still be showing my art and books in a gallery here in Alpine Texas from April 1st to 10th. There will be a lot of photos and maybe a few videos from that. And I will be working on a way to get some of the really cool new stuff I made for the show out and available on my site.
-Austin.
Blog 3-21-16 – Announcement and Update
Announcement Part:
Hello everyone. Austin Smith, writer of this Blog and other Internet things here, going to talk about something that I’ve been waiting to talk about since last September (sort of). I’m going to be part of a (art/gallery) show with several artists from my local area.
It’ll be my first show in an actual gallery with me on the flyer and stuff. I’m including links to the other artists (Tommy, Chris), and I know they will be doing some great stuff for the show that I won’t spoil here. But I can say that I’m very happy with what I’m going to have there: including a few new books that will soon also be available on my Amazon page, stickers, bookmarks, postcards, actual work that goes on the wall, and maybe some other really cool stuff.
If you can make it, I hope to see you there, but I know that it’s pretty far out of the way for most people, so I will be posting as much about it as I can, and trying to figure out how to get some of the cool things I made out to a wider audience.
Blog Part:
Wow, when I made that post about being late last week I had no intention of it taking a week or more to get back up to speed, but that looks like what has happened. For this I apologize. But migraines carry with them lasting negative effects, and I’ve really only had one good, functioning day this week, and quite a bit of my work time was consumed by preparations for the show that had to be created and ordered in time to make it. Still, I wish I had been able to get more done faster, and I thank you for being patient if you were waiting for new stuff. I will catch up on everything I missed, but it might take a few days to get back to normal.
-A
The Dragon Funnies 