Hey everyone. Greg here.
This is a special edition of The Ramble, where I want to talk briefly about what I did during May while I was on a posting hiatus. It was a fabulous month, and I'm glad I took a little bit of time to take care of some important priorities. I hope you'll see why.
The most important thing that happened during May was my 40th wedding anniversary. Clearly, I have a very tolerant wife, and I wanted to take time out to really honour that relationship.
We had a great time up in Whistler. It was a place we spent a little bit of time during our honeymoon, so it's a special place for us. There wasn't a lot going on because it's in between seasons, but we did manage to fit in a guided tour. It was technically a bear-viewing safari, but it was a bit early in the season for that. So it was actually more of a behind-the-scenes tour of a lot of the Olympic facilities, which was really cool.
Also, around our anniversary, we went to Stars on Ice to see Kurt Browningβs final performance. If you're into figure skating at all, you'll know his importance to Canadian skating. We are old enough that we've been following his career since he was a teenager, so it was very cool to be there for that moment.
The other main reason I took May off from posting was to free up time to finally launch my Shopify store. I can't say enough about the E-comm Clubhouse course from wholesale Ted. It's a recorded course, and there are a lot of details in there that helped me get through a lot of the complexities of setting up a Shopify store. I finally have that in place. I've been meaning to do that for a very long time, and it was just time to get it done.
One of the cool things I was able to do is to create a section that kind of mimics the back of the comic ads, like the treasure chest of wonder, where things like seam monkeys showed up. So I've taken a number of products, and I got one of my friends and colleagues,
, to do some images to emulate that sort of feel.I love how it turned out. The significance of the store itself will become more apparent when I get into my project Cannon Builder. More on that in the days ahead.
Last but not least, in terms of events, I want to give a shout-out to VANCAF, our local Comic Con that is really targeted towards actual comics as opposed to just geek culture. It's a fabulous event.
One of the guests this year was Jeff Lemire, who, as a Canadian, is one of my comic industry heroes, so it was really great to finally meet him in person and hear his session.
Just before my anniversary, I finished the first draft of my script for Lump Dog. The next installment of the Lump Sum Saga.
I sent a note for some peer review from some friends, and then I took a leap and actually sent it in for a pro review. I won't tell you who did the review, but let's just say they didn't get my vision for the comic. The really aggravating part about that was that I actually got where this reviewer was coming from.
When I first got the review back, I started doing edits based on what the Pro had said, but then I got to a line where he said something that resonated as, βSo they landed a spaceship. Big deal.β And that line in his critique actually stuck with me. It showed me that what I was writing was not for him. (GT In fairness, what he actually said was, βWe get it, there's a spaceship, so therefore there's a Mission Control, that's intuitive. You're overexplaining a bit.β Itβs funny how I didnβt remember it that way! I need to work on that.)
I'm one of those people that tears up when there's a successful space launch, or a new achievement is accomplished in space exploration. So that line really stuck with me as βWait a minute, this person just doesn't get what I'm trying to do.β But the exasperating part of it is as I know that he's right, and so I have to either be comfortable with the fact that what I'm writing is not really commercially viable if I do it my way, or I have to actually change it to reflect what he was saying.
Ultimately, because I'm an old geezer, I've decided to go with what I felt was right, but in doing that, I have to acknowledge that it is just not going to be something that sells well to a regular comic book audience.
Where am I with the script now? I did take a number of the suggestions that were provided by my critique partners and this professional and have been working on those. I have also been adding a few more pages to make it a little more obvious what I'm trying to do with my story. We'll see what happens.
It is great to be back. Weβll start season two in earnest next week.