Never Playing it Cool

I watched an interview yesterday with Maynard James Keenan of Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer. Gen and I have been listening to the new Tool album Fear Inoculum all weekend (which is amazing by the way) and we stumbled across this interview on Youtube that had been recorded about a month previous, and it seemed like a perfect watch considering. A lot of what MJK was saying struck a chord with me as I had been having some serious thoughts about how I'm spending my spare time, and how much of it I waste on social media, mostly making myself miserable. MJK hit on the social media culture and how it is an addiction, and his message to "turn off your phones and go outside" resonated with me, as I was already self assessing my own addiction. Harking back to many moons ago when I set out to do a life reboot , which now some years down the line I have failed to follow through on, I am once again looking at trying to make a lifestyle change for the better. Whereas last ti...

It's been a long time since my last blog, feels somewhat overdue. I think it's time for a long aimless ramble about my latest foray into the world of sport. I'm making another push and conceited effort to make a lifestyle change. I've had a fun 2019 so far with a good six months of being poked and prodded whilst multiple specialists try to determine why my cholesterol is so high. Part of it could be down to the fact I spend eight hours a day sitting behind a desk in an office, to then come home to indulge in one of my many hobbies and past times, all of which are performed sitting down. Combined with my less than ideal diet (Vienetta's a vegatable right!?) I think we can almost put a finger on it. That being said, apparently even with my over fondness for cheese and red meat, my cholesterol is abnormaly high for my age, which the doctor's and cholseterol specialists I've now seen believe could be down to something genetic. So once again I had to subject m...

I turn 36 this year. Now depending who you are that's either old, young or right were you are yourself. As I get older there are things that are considered the norm that make less and less sense to me. I often refer to myself as "a man with too many hobbies." I'm a musician , gamer and, more recently, a writer and illustrator of my own graphic novel . All of which I don't get to commit myself to as much as I'd like due to every day life getting in the way. And that's my issue, why should "every day life" get in the way of the things that make me happy. Each week I'm conscious of the fact that I am getting older and the majority of my time is spent for the benefit of others. I work the ol' fashioned 9-5. So for every 24 hour day I'm in an office for 8 hours, but before that I'm travelling to work for approximately an hour, and then another hour after work travelling home. So that's 10 hours our of 24 lost to work. Then app...

When last I blogged I spoke of the anxiety and hesitance I was feeling around the concept of sharing the Graphic Novel "Flux" I'm currently working on. I've been serialising it a few pages at a time for the faceless strangers of the internet through the website/app Tapas , but have been holding off making anyone closer to home aware of it. I mentioned the plan to start a website where the graphic novel would be shared, as well as any other creative works I find myself working on. Tapas  is great for reaching an audience, but breaking the story up into 3-5 page snippets on a weekly basis isn't ideal and can be disruptive to the flow of the story. Finding the appropriate places to fit the break in is difficult and can feel like when the TV puts the ads in the middle a scene. So the plan is to use the website to share the graphic novel in a format closer to what was initially intended. Uploading full chapters (or issues you could say) on a less frequent basis; mon...

Those of you who have been reading my sporadic blog posts will likely be aware that I started work on my own Graphic Novel/Comic, whichever term you prefer. It's a story I've had in the back of my head that I've finally decided to get out on paper. Or screen more to the point! My last blog post about the comic consisted of me pondering what I ultimately wanted to do with it. One option being serialising it a few pages at a time on the webcomic site/app Tapas (formerly known as Taptastic.) Well I've done it, I actually started the serialisation back in November. "Why only tell us now?" I hear you ask (tumbleweed.) Well to be honest, I found I was perfectly happy sharing it with complete strangers who are faceless people on the Internet, but less comfortable letting people I actually know see it. I mean, do I want people to see this side of me, it being a science fiction story of Sex, Violence and Intrigue (eat your heart out Game of Thrones) it does have ...

Last night I finished the art for the last unfinished panel of chapter one of my as yet unnamed Sci-Fi comic. Although not the last panel of the chapter, the last panel to be completed.  I will now be moving on to the "editing" process as I'm calling it, which will involve working through the thirty-eight pages one at a time, touching up and in some cases re-doing any artwork that isn't up to the standard I'm personally looking for. I've said from the outset that I'm not looking for polished "professional" standards of comic artwork, I've only been working with digital art less than a year and this comic was intended to be my practice. This editing process will mostly be looking at consistency, as there is a discernible improvement from the first pages where I started to the most recently completed. Having said that, it is constantly in the back of my mind that I have decided to make the comic publicly available and I want the artwork ...