A Three-Year Engagement

November's just over a month away.  For normies, that means football, leaves changing colors (if you live in a place where they actually do that), and something about Native Americans hosting a dinner for a bunch of people who got kicked out of England for wearing buckles on their hats.  (Seriously, it's not like the buckles were holding anything up.  Stupid pretentious fashionista Pilgrims...)  For myself and thousands of other writers, it means the self-imposed stress of National Novel Writing Month.  If you're not familiar with NaNoWriMo, it's this writing challenge that takes place every November where you write a fifty-thousand page novel in thirty days and behave like some neurotic, OCD novelist while your friends and family shake their heads and call you names behind your back, provided they don't already do that, in which case, you probably won't notice.

There are no real stakes and no real enforcement of the rules, except maybe some decent discounts on writing software and similarly related products, so it's kind of hilarious how stressed out people can get over their NaNoWriMo project.  I imagine people new to the idea raising an eyebrow and asking "What's the point?  What do I get out of this thing?"

After a brisk backhand to the cheek, I imagine Yoda narrowing his eyes whilst stating "Only what you take with you," because I'm a gigantic nerd and should probably get out of my Mom's basement.  I'm joking again; I live in Southern California and nobody has a basement here.  But I digress...

This year will mark three years since my first successful Nano and holy shit, I promised to release the damn thing independently on Kindle, Nook, etc, then become rich and famous like that pervert who wrote 50 Shades of Gray.  I even used GIMP to paint a nifty cover before promptly going all lame and putting it on the back burner.

Yeah, so it's an adventure novel involving radioactive mushrooms and international espionage in an alternate diesel-punk timeline.  I've decided I'm finally going to put this thing out before November because three years is a long ass time to sit on a project that in purely technical terms is only long enough to be a "novella".  I decided that just now as I was writing.  As soon as I finish this blog entry.  Hah, I'm already procrastinating on the editing by not ending this blog because once I end this blog, it means I have to get started...  And I will.  Right.  Now.

That's impossible, even for a computer!

Back in the early days of the internet, when X-Files fan pages and the *blink* tag roamed the web, I would frequent a number of amateur film sites run by teenagers like myself who were trying to create movies with whatever we had available at the time.   By today's standards, this included technology just a step above the phenakistoscope but not as steampunkishly awesome.  Remember VHS-C?  You're better off if you don't, unless you produce training videos for the Dharma Initiative.  And by "film sites" I mean personal pages on GeoCities, Tripod, Angelfire, and the like that read more like wish lists of the movies we wanted to make someday.  I'm talking old school, basic HTML, on dial-up connections that would be taxed to their limits by a simple blog with a few pictures.  That didn't really matter though because it was 1996, what the hell is a blog, and did you hear about this movie coming out called Independence Day?  Looks awesome.  Bonus points and a meteoric rise in the pecking order would occur if anyone managed to actually go through the somewhat hellish process of capturing their film-videos and (gasp) putting them up for people in the larger world to see.

After around eight years of slogging through with Pentiums, Pentium II's, III's, AMD Athlons, Semprons and Decepticons and the like, I started to realize that when it came to both hardware and software, my old "If it didn't cost so much, I'd be making indie films every month" excuse was growing less and less credible.  I had a miniDV camcorder and my dual core Athlon desktop could edit standard definition video fast by MySpace era standards.  I was at the tail end of film school, soon to have a Bachelor of Fucking Sciences degree in Film and Media Production (BFS Degree.  Look it up fool.).  I was doing a webcomic called Section 3! (Now resurrected maybe, we'll see) using mainly Photoshop 7.  Youtube was about to become a thing.

Then I got a job.  Like an actual job that didn't involve shoveling popcorn or stripping the coating from copper telephone cables (not even joking, the temp-world is a strange place sometimes).  The ultimate excuse for a procrastinating creative type is "growing up".  It was perfect because with HD available to all, tablet computers and a billion ways to get your work in front of people, I felt like one of those college sport stars that turns into a draft bust but whatever, I was getting paid.

But I still want to make movies.  I still want to tell stories, be it through comics, animation, film, or monosyllabic grunts while explaining my latest cave painting.  I decided to get back into it with NaNoWriMo and more recently, a new webcomic called An Arrow in the Moon.  As I did, I suddenly realized that all the stuff I hoped for back in the old days had arrived.  The things that were always "on the horizon" in the early 2000's actually showed up, RIAA and MPAA attempts to disrupt the tech be damned.  Video editing is not expensive anymore and the need to "capture" from sources is essentially gone or a one-step process.  A basic laptop in the sub $700 dollar range can edit HD video without a problem.  You can put your work up on YouTube, Vimeo, or just throw it up as a torrent.

So what's the point of this, the longest blog post I've put up to date here?  It's for me to complain like an old man about how easy you whippersnappers have it these days.  We would have killed for the stuff that exists now back in the day, I'll tell you what.  And even if we did have it back then, we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to access it. And before that, we had to walk fifteen miles just to get to the snow.  Actually, this post is more of a letter to myself, reminding me that things are possible now.

So I need to get off my ass, you need to get off my lawn, and we need to start creating, because the technology is here, it's relatively cheap, and despite all this, I estimate 80% of the stuff coming out of mainstream media/entertainment is kind of garbage.

Below:  Amazon links to things I use, because they say I get money if I convince people to buy them.  Lacking items like Photoshop, higher-end Wacom stuff, and Some other Adobe products because they're all high-quality, but linking them here goes against my thesis of creativity on the cheap.

• Manga Studio 5: This program is the stuff if you're making comics.  I was kind of skeptical because the non-EX version is under a hundred dollars.  Amazon's got the best price I could find if you're not a current student.  If you are, I think you can go directly to Smith-Micro and get it for $50 bucks.
• Sony Movie Studio Platinum Suite 12: That's quite a mouthful.  Disclaimer:  I actually use an earlier version of this, but unless they completely dropped the ball, this program's got everything you need to edit HD video unless you're trying to get your stuff ready for 35mm theatrical release.  Sound tools are above average.
• SketchBook Pro 6 : Simple and cheap.  Missing some advanced features you'd find in Manga Studio or Photoshop, but great if you just want to draw without a bunch of nonsense everywhere or consider a lot of photo manipulation stuff to be "cheating".
• Monoprice 10X6.25 Inches Graphic Drawing Tablet: The only thing that is a little sketchy (ha! see what i did there?) about this thing is the pen.  It feels a little like it could break on you, but after a year of heavy use, it hasn't.  Also, the drivers are a little strange.  You can find updated ones at UC-Logic, but be warned.  The site is a little ESL.

Here I go again on my own...

So yeah, this is a thing for me again.  I say "again" as if there were any readers left after I abandoned my last blog at Ben vs. Reality.  But now I'm older and/or wiser.  Even nerdier.  Is that possible?  Yes.

This time's gonna be different, I tell ya.  Regular updates and everything.  I know I've said that before, but this time I mean it homie.