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Here’s a piece of fanart I drew for Celeste, a game that really took me by surprise last year. I drew it in Autodesk Sketchbook Pro on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S3.

I ran into an issue setting up Citadel email aliases. The normal way (adding aliases to your user’s vCard) didn’t work, and they got all jacked up anyway, resetting the primary email address however they wanted to. So I tried adding email aliases to the user’s configuration, and if you add too many, you’re unable to log in as that user using IMAP because reasons. So the solution if you want to have email aliases in the Citadel groupware server is:

• Don’t add aliases to the vCard. The vCard does nothing.
• Have no more tham three or four aliases in the user’s configuration.
  • Test to make sure you can receive email at all of these aliases.
  • Try removing aliases one at a time. I think there’s a field size limit if I had to guess? I didn’t test this.
• If you need more aliases, set up a second user with the additional aliases and set up a Sieve forwarding script, and modify/save it as many times as it takes for it to stick and for Citadel to start forwarding mail to your main account.

I decided to go computer-less during the talks at VueConf 2018, opting instead for a small Rhodia notebook and my TWSBI ECO-T fountain pen for taking notes about talks, vendors, people I met, and all the awesome things I found in New Orleans. I had been introduced to Bullet Journaling recently and liked the flexibility of the system, so I tried one part of it – the Index with page numbers – to wrangle my normally-unsearchable paper notes.

However, those little Rhodia books have a lot of pages, and half of those pages are more awkward to write on than others, specifically the pages at the “top” of the notebook when it’s open and cradled in my left hand. I did not want to number both the “top” and “bottom” pages sequentially, so I ended up only numbering the “bottom” pages. When I used a “top” page, I gave it the “bottom” page’s number with an up arrow. This worked out really well for being able to jump around in this small notebook and keep track of what was where.

I decided to not stop there. I did not want to number all of the pages of this little book, not knowing if I’d use it all, but I did want some things in the back. If I wanted to move an item to the back to the book, I started numbering from the bottom pages at the back of the book with the last page being 1, but marked with a down arrow. And if I wanted to write on the top page, the top page got both an up and down arrow:

This lets me use the whole book from both directions without having to number the whole book, and while letting me throw in whatever I want at any spot in the book and find it quickly.

(I hope that’s enough keywords to help others)

Ubuntu 17.04 comes with a version of the linuxwacom project’s input-wacom that, when you bring the pen to the screen, registers a click. This has the following really, really annoying behaviors:

• Deselcting the thing you’re working on in Inkscape
• Causing random palette changes or paint blobs in Krita
• Making web browsing near-impossible
• Making near-everything even more annoying

The solution is to manually install 0.37.1 or up of input-wacom. It only took me a few minutes, and my pen returned to the pre-17.04 behavior.

This year was the first year that I went into my personal creative projects with a real, solid plan.

What worked?

Sandstorm

I moved the majority of my cloud-based document services to a Sandstorm instance, inside of which I ran numerous text documents, spreadsheets, wikis, git repos, file shares, and even more. I did this for two reasons: to get my data off of cloud providers that I don’t trust to varying degrees, and to experiment with developing for this platformm, which I was doing earlier this year.

Checklists

There’ll be a lot of links to Cortex episodes, so be ready. Episode 4 starts the conversation about checklists for codifying repeatable tasks. I’ve shared a Remember The Milk account with my wife for years now, but didn’t start really digging in until after Cortex. I discovered that it’s possible to add subtasks to a task and then duplicate a task, preserving the subtasks, which gave me the power of repeatable templates I could develop over time.

Personally, I have a bunch of checklists for packing lists and weekly reviews. For the comic business, I have monthly and quarterly reviews mapped out, a packling list for cons, steps for posting something to Patreon that gets promoted elsewhere, and other smaller ones. Big win for remembering how to do stuff I don’t do too often, and for staying motivated when I don’t feel like doing everything in a review.

Regular Reviews

I now do reviews the following times:

• Friday after work for personal stuff for the past week
• Monthly for personal and work stuff for the past month
• Quarterly for personal and work stuff for the past quarter

These let me catch up on ongoing things, like financial tracking and such, and give me time to reflect and pivot in different directions. They’ve been super useful.

For the business reviews, I was, at the beginning of the year, very good about getting out of the house to a coffee shop for an hour and planning things out without distraction or diving into art or code or writing. I need to start doing this again, especially as 2018 gets started.

Super-Focused Work Periods

Another Cortex recommendation. I’m now using either All Day, Feed The Animals, or Night Ripper by Girl Talk if I have either 70, 55, or 45 minutes available to work without distraction. Noise-Cancelling Earbuds help too (affiliate link, I bought them, like them a lot, and recommend them to whoever I can).

By working this way, I can crank out several full panels of art super-fast and stay on target with the work, with way less context switching which just drains energy. It works great with my programming as well. A+++, would work this way again.

What didn’t?

Having something non-kid friendly with my particular art style

I wouldn’t say Baltimore Comic-Con fell flat for me this year, but I would say it would have gone a lot better if I had something on the table for ages 8 and up. I’m looking to fill that gap in 2018.

Not putting in enough buffer for life stuff

A lot of crazy things happened this year which set me back in my creative projects a lot. I don’t feel bad about not getting this stuff done – life happens, and it’s often more important than drawing comics – but I wish that, when I put my content plan together at the beginning of the year, I had lowered my expectations more than I had. I would have been more focused on the things I really wanted to get done, like Issue 3 of Wizard/Metalsmith.

Non-memetic social media promotion

I keep forgetting that longform comics like the ones I typically do just don’t get the likes on Facebook and Instagram like single-image, easily shared images. It works better on Tumblr, but you really have to find that niche community to get that going. Next year’s marketing plan…well, it’s still in flux.

What’s still up for debate?

Using Tumblr to cross-promote work

187 Football Heads has been great, but I need to figure out good ways to get folks from there to look at my other stuff when it’s done. Still mulling this one over.