Berlin is awesome

Yeah it is, I came back from there on Friday and it was pretty amazing. They have underground AND overground trains. My mind was officially blown the moment I stepped off the plane.

Either that or it was my ears popping EVERY FIVE MINUTES

Anyways, before I went away to Berlin I got copies of this in the post - in a giant white sack from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Story-Us-Sarah-Harding-Roberts/dp/1490466266/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373918781&sr=8-1&keywords=the+story+of+us+sarah+harding+roberts

Its now available from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com (copying that link and changing the .co.uk to .com totally works) and will be with me in a limited capacity at the Cardiff Comic Con. Now all I need to do is get paid and I can buy everything else I need and my plan will nearly be complete...

I'm also working on short stories which may or may not become full stories depending on reception to them at the con. I really don't know whether or not I ought to make them free, or to make them available as a bundle - such as a bundle that is also called a book, but how I would print said book (I could do CreateSpace but the turn around on the copies I order from the US would take too long for me at this point) is beyond me, so I may end up running around like a headless chicken in Central Library on August 29th on my lunchbreak printing copies. I'd like for that to not happen though. I run more like a mentally ill penguin rather than a headless chicken and it's just sad to watch.

CreateSpace makes me spit blood from my eyes

I'm having a few issues shall we say with Create Space, Amazon's book creating website which users are able to upload their work to, then have copies printed on demand by Amazon in America/the UK. I created my book Scourge there and it took a while (also the realisation I never included page numbers), but it worked.

Comics however are a whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooole different thing all together. I didn't know what a DPI was so I Googled it - only to have the internet laugh snarkily at me as it said "DPI doesn't exist".

IF IT DOESN'T EXIST WHY IS CREATE SPACE SHOUTING AT ME ABOUT IT I HATE YOU INTERNET AND YOUR STUPID FACE

So after a while some less snarky websites told me something about PPI (at which point I broke out in a cold sweat, felt very dizzy and blacked out) which is apparently not the type of Payment Protection Insurance I may or may not have to deal with on a goddamn daily basis, but something to do with pixels per inch or some such balls.

Anyways, long story short the internet failed to help much at all, because whilst I managed to get some of my images for the comic to the correct (apparently non-existent) DPI number (which is 300 in case you weren't wondering), ten of the images still aren't DPI 300 enough for Create Space so its still shouting at me. I don't know what else I am supposed to do, short of screaming at people on the street and handing them crumpled copies of the ten comics Create Space doesn't appear to like.

What's not to like?

This one has a foot in it (sidenote: I HATE FEET)

Cardiff Comic Con

So Cardiff is finally getting a Comic Con after so many years of me saying 'Cardiff should have a comic con'. I was mostly saying this because I was too lazy/poor to visit London or elsewhere to go to the cons there. Now I have a good job, Cardiff get's one.

However I will be there. In the flesh and everything. Selling things maybe. With a booth type of table thing, which I'll be sharing with my good friend Kate Evans, artist extraordinaire. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to have with me there - I mean sure, there's going to be books and shit like that, but I used to do comics you know. Shit comics, so maybe we'll ignore that.

But I've been asking people, taking polls and threatening animals and the general consensus is that I could look into doing short stories of some description. My main issue is that my short stories end up being the opposite of that, but I have recently written and completed The Year which is classed as a short story, but I don't think that's what the people I threatened asked meant when they said 'short'. Maybe they were just make a general observation of my height, those pricks.

Someone else suggested bookmarks, but I think this is something more for artists. When I went to the Cardiff Comic Expo recently I saw there were other people selling books - but they had waaay more titles than me. I'm not crazy keen on using the Scourge copies I have, as they're missing page numbers at present. I'll have to look into a way of getting other versions created to fix this (this was because it was on Kindle originally and I'm a fool for forgetting) and Averan is coming along fairly all right, so I am not sure what I'm going to do with it - whether I go the same route as Scourge, or submit it somewhere. Who knows. Probably the latter.

Maybe I can write more short stories ... Time to think of the various ideas I've had in the past! GET TO WORK, BRAIN


Oh hey, I drew this in work today: