Anyway … nervous. :\ I want to live in a place more accessible to my work, and really, I just love Sunset Park. It’s mostly Latino and … it feels like home to me. My dad and I were talking about how much more comfortable we feel in a Latino community than a heavily white one (which is how it is where I live now, in Brooklyn). Maybe it’s because I grew up in Texas, or maybe it’s because people meet your eyes there and don’t look away guiltily, but rather smile or nod or at least acknowledge your presence, just as curious as myself. It’s where I was for the census, and I fell in love with it.

Other things I’ve been up to? Well, working a 45 hour week at a real-estate company lately. Oddly, for having longer hours, I’ve actually had MORE energy to draw outside of work than I did working at HarperCollins. People here are energetic and friendly and there’s a nice sort of family feeling to the place. HarperCollins was well … it’s a lot of creatives and a lot of use sort of keep to ourselves or develop little cliques that make it difficult for outsiders to intrude. I do miss all the books however … I have a stack of books now against my wall, that if stacked on top of each other, they’d reach my ceiling. My 12-foot high ceiling.

So every day now, at lunch, I go to the break room overlooking Grand Central Station, swing my legs from a stool perched along the wall of windows, and draw my little heart out. It’s never a lot … but it’s enough. Enough to know that I’m still going. Enough to know I’m setting pencil on paper every day and slowly .. but surely … making progress.

In the meantime, proof that I’m actually working and not just saying it. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to post art:

PS. I can’t believe I get up every day at 6:30 for work and go to bed at 1 after drawing for several hours when I get home, and yet I still feel happy and rested the next day. I must be getting old to be able to survive on only 5.5 hours of sleep every night … I’m turning into an old lady! Oh noes!!!! ;D

PPS. I love my job. My boss yells a lot (not at me) and it’s amazing.

PPSS. But I also miss my friends. I think once Matt & I move, life will be a bit less crazy and hectic, and I look forward to seeing my friends again! Maybe we’ll even have a little party once we get settled in a bit. <3 <3 <3 If we get the apartment we want, we’ll have roof access with a view of ALL of downtown Manhattan PLUS the Statue of Liberty PLUS the island next to it (Staton Island?) AND the park behind us. I WANT THIS APARTMENT. ;_; But I will accept if it’s not meant to be. ;_;

And yet, in the midst of all the craziness, I’ve been drawing and working on “Jeannie Carnini” again. I’ve been redrawing and simplifying the first pages and made the format slightly wider. The plan is to release several formats: a high-end letterpress version in “simo” (as they say at HarperCollins instead of “simultaneous”) with an ipad digital version. I want people to read it, but I also know there are those like me out there who love the hand-made and are willing to pay extra for it. I’ll probably price the letterpress version around $30 and the digital around $4.95.

I know. Steep price difference, huh? But I’m not a Scrooge. It infuriates me when publishers want to charge as much for a digital book as they do for a print book, or even more than $5 honestly. There is next to NO UPFRONT COST in making a digital book: other than the time that goes into making it. Which is still a significant amount of time, but it’s miniscule in comparison with the cost of printing, storing, shipping, and maintaining a print book.

That, and I like the idea of my work being accessible to anyone of any income.

Also, you never know. With the low price of a digital book, perhaps that’ll make the idea of a print book that much appealing; if you really like something, you want to keep it and cherish it forever.

Eventually, I would also like to pitch my children’s book to larger publishers, but I really want to just focus on self-publishing right now. I’ve also already fixed it in my mind that I won’t sign to any publisher without the right to continue self-publishing print runs of under 500, specific print requirements (no glossy interiors) and keeping my digital rights (which is a contest, because that’s what all the major houses are focusing on).

Oddly, my new job at HarperCollins is in their digital rights department, working on … of all things … ebooks. Funny how these things work. :D

In the meantime, off to visit my Census crew and collect the last of their paperwork. It’s been grande making money and saving up to move (either to Sunset Park or Park Slope) but LORDY AM I GLAD IT’S ALMOST OVER.

Toodles!

-Rivkah

Also, who here doesn’t even know what the heck letterpress IS? Other than the most awesome thing to happen to print since paper, and the most beautiful form of printing in the world? :)

Yet nothing spectacular has happened. I just feel … as though I’m at peace with the world. It’s been beating me down, hammering me down into the ground every day, without rest or peace. I’ve been ill, physically and mentally. Last week, I let out such a scream of rage, standing in the kitchen, crying, weeping, falling to the floor and shaking with anger. And yet, at that moment, I felt a certain odd peace. A bit of my soul broke through the wall I’d built in an attempt to maintain my sanity, and a little bit of crazy gave me peace.

My art is my life. My writing is my life. To have neither left me feeling hopeless, helpless, and humorless.

So what’s changed? I don’t know. I’ve had more stresses piled on top of me. The Census work demands every hour and minute of my day, and the only days I’ve had “off” have been riddled with IUDs, bladder infections, sinus infections, and colds … a marching parade of illness and stress. And finally, it just broke, and upon breaking, I feel strengthened …

I have no answer for why this is, only that I feel that somehow, even after breaking, I still survived, and an odd pride at being able to bear it without hurting the people around me (well … Matt’s suffered along with me, being the hand that’s cradled my back when I’ve curled up, shivering with stress … ). I haven’t lashed out. I’ve still treated everyone around me with love and respect. And I feel such a strange odd pride at that … just that small thing makes me feel like a better person, makes me believe that deep down inside, I’m a GOOD person because there have been times I’ve wondered.

I hope that’s true. And I hope that someday, when I’ve saved up enough, when I’ve found a clear space to think again, that I’ll be able to share that love and laughter and joy with the world again by producing more books.

In the meantime, I meet strangers’ eyes and smile and feel love in my heart. I practice sharing joy through small, barely perceptible actions instead of broad, grand sweeping ones. I’d forgotten how important it is to daily practice love, that pouring it all into my larger works isn’t enough, and that it needs to be often divided into smaller portions.

I want to be a better person. I want to only speak good to others. There will be no more negativity or despair in my life, only joy and hope and passion and the will to break through the seemingly insurmountable blocks in my life to find the gems hidden within.

I don’t think it would be practical for printing whole comics, but it would be SPECTACULAR for covers if the one I just bought proves to work the way I want it to. Not to mention cards, flyers, small prints, etc.

The joy of letterpress? My feet feel lighter just thinking about it. I’ve been dragging them through the mud the last few months because of the insanity of Census work (which IS paying me $20.25 an hour, so I’m not complaining here) and saving to move (either Sunset Park or Park Slope … I prefer Sunset Park because of the Latino community, which I feel extraordinarily more at home around <3 ), and just the IDEA of having my own little letterpress machine has my fingers itching to do art. My drafting table has been gathering dust. My tools rust.

But only for now. As Matt pointed out to me several nights ago, in the middle of something of a mental breakdown (I think I concerned my roommate with my bloody scream of high holy murder), moving to New York hit the “reset” button for me, and I can’t expect everything to pick up right where I left off in Austin.

So I’m being patient, and in the meantime, fueling my love of print by experimenting with printing presses. <3

Oh, btw. Would anybody be interested in a printing press like this? My idea is to buy them wholesale, repackage for optimum quality (better brayer!), and sell at a reasonable discount. I’m also looking into DIY printing plates since they make them now, though Box Car Press can make them at a decent price from a digital file as well.

So many ideas! I want to keep the joy of printing alive and not see it washed away in this digital era. Hopefully little things like this can inspire the do-it-yourselfer and the love and appreciation for such a tactile art.

And bite our tongues when we do not.  I have to admit, I’ve struggled most over the last few years with curbing my tongue when I have a critical thought. In my head, I see it as trying to making something (or someone) better (including myself!), and I always went out of my way to put it nicely, but it took me a long time to realize that sometimes it really is better to just bite the words in half and swallow them. Too often I see the negative before the positive, and it takes a lot of self-discipline to work out of that. It’s not about being a pessimist but of having a world view that anything can be better.

But, because I struggle to improve myself, that doesn’t mean I have to broadcast every criticism to others. Not unless its’ a request or I fear someone may come to physical or mental harm if I don’t speak up.

We used to talk a lot about this in Ruhi (my Austin Baha’i study group), and it seems too common to want to open our mouths “for someone’s own good” because we also teach truth and honesty, but what is one person’s ideal isn’t always another’s. The motivation to improve as a person must come from within, it cannot be forced. To force someone down a path is to shut it off from them entirely. Unasked for criticism breeds doubt, resentment, and a closed heart, even where it is not intended. But praise where it is earned, love and encouragement makes the heart blossom forth and bloom, nurturing a sweet scent for others to follow.

I started out trying to make comics for the web, and trying to make a vertical format work on a horizontal screen is iffy at best. The horizontal format works for strip-type comics, but it doesn’t work for dynamic, panoramic comics. Action comics in particular seem to suffer; the body is vertical, so trying to make an action scene where the body takes up the full page in a horizontal format doesn’t have the same impact.

Tablets like the iPad (of course, I’ll be buying something more like the Lenovo tablet eventually since the Apple OS is poison for this Windows geek) enable a vertical digital environment that wasn’t previously available. The same kind of environment that print has embraced for centuries. The vertical format is preferred for innumerable reasons, and the main two reasons the horizontal format has worked for digital for so long are because of the shape of the keypad and navigation. But get rid of the keypad because it’s a consumer device, not a productivity device, and move the navigation bar to the top, and you have, essentially, a return to the print format.

I look forward to having a tablet myself, one day, and being able to purchase color comics at, I HOPE, a fraction of the current price. I do love color … but if only it weren’t so expensive. And considering color is printed at a lower resolution than b/w anyway (sort of…),the loss in quality from print to screen isn’t as noticeable.

It’s hard putting up work that’s less than perfect, the flaws of which even I can see. But I believe it is absolutely ESSENTIAL as a source of encouragement to those fresh at pursuing their passion.

When I was younger, I used to get discouraged in art, in writing, in music, because all most people ever see of an artist’s (ALL kinds of artists/writers/photographers/etc) work is the end result. Rarely do we see the process, the progress, the 50,000 pages of pure CRAP that gets churned out before its made beautiful and whole.

While it should come as no surprise that because of my lack of fear at displaying the worst along with the best, I often get comments like this: http://lilrivkah.livejournal.com/303076.html?thread=3038948#t3038948

…it still hurts.

But I keep moving on, because I actually fucking BELIEVE in something.

I. WILL. NOT. LET. GO.

I. WILL. NOT. GIVE. UP.

And I won’t let somebody too afraid to state their name or show their face control how I feel about myself or how I face the world.

That is all!

Write your books through your character’s eyes and mind, not your own.

This, of course, came up because I just rewrote the opening paragraph for my next chapter. The following is unedited, but you should still get the gist of how the feeling for the scene changes simply by moving into my character’s head instead of outside of it.

–

Original:

It was a while before any of them could find the strength to speak. Mikey was the first, pointing at a little yellow bird that had alighted on the ground in front of them. They had been forging their way through the overgrown jungle, ducking beneath leaves the size of baby elephants, winding around brightly colored mushrooms that grew taller than their heads and vines and moss that grew like curtains across their path. So far, though, the jungle had been silent except for the wind, not a bird or a bee in sight, and the little yellow bird drew them up short, staring. It fluttered to a bush a few feet away and turned around and chirped at them.

“I think it wants us to follow it,” Mikey said.

–

And revised:

Jane didn’t at first notice the eerie stillness of the jungle that surrounded them. Her mind was filled with the dimming of the stars in the Red Stag’s blue eyes and the shine of his golden wings. She hung her head, ignoring the plants that slapped her face and the dew that shook down onto her back. A lonely wind soughed through the vines that hung like curtains from graceful, curving branches and shook leaves the size of baby elephants, arching above their chosen path.

“Do you think it wants us to follow it?” Mikey asked, and Jane looked around, for a moment shaken out her despair.

There was a little yellow bird perched upon a low bush in front of them, and it hopped to another bush, turned, and fluttered its wings at them.

–

Personally, I like the second one SO MUCH BETTER. It feels more character-driven and sets a deeper mood. But what about you guys? When do you think it’s appropriate to dive into the character’s head and other times to pull outside of it?

I wonder how this concept can be applied to comics as well?