Update: Woggy #8

Back in October, I had mentioned my Lil' Me (working title) cartoon was a woggy I had hinged much of my medium-term professional aspirations on. Well, especially since this is a woggy I truly have my heart set on actually completing someday, I have come to face certain facts over the ensuing months, and have thereby decided to drastically alter the path of this little tadpole's future.

In fabulous amphibian fashion, this Lil' Me cartoon project does hereby officially transform into the shape of ... a comic book! Yes, seeing all the technological and other hurdles before me, and the inevitable complications of the task that are impeding this project's progress, while all my fab concepts, characters and ideas continue to chomp at the bit telling me to just hurry up and get on with it already, I've decided the best way I can get on with this in a way that will allow it to fruit into reality as close as possible to my vision is to create a comic book series instead. (how's THAT for a long sentence!! Take that, Mr. Dickens!)

All of the essential elements will still be there. The characters and stories can stay the same, and it works fine with an episodic format. the only thing that will have to be missing will be my fabulous theme song, which was the seed that started this whole project in the first place, but I will probably figure out some way to make that work in a comic book. Or, maybe I'll just sing it to myself while I'm drawing.

Best of all, I can return to the format I prefer anyway, which is the drawing on paper. In an instant I have erased all technological hurdles in my way!! And, even better, With me getting all my episodes out in comic book form, it will still be possible for them to be one day picked up as an episodic cartoon, with someone else doing all the fancy-pants work and me just letting everyone know the general idea of how everything should turn out.

I first started to think about this as a possible solution to my problem when I saw the movie Persopolis (which by the way is really awesome and I really reccomend you go see it if you haven't), most especially when I saw the DVD extra where they went behind the scenes and talked about how the movie began as a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, who also co-directed the film.

I've mentioned elsewhere in this wog that I've always been drawn to graphic novels and comic books, but have always felt a bit like a fish out of water whenever I was around them. My recent purchase and reading of Best American Comics 2008, as well as Lynda Barry's highly inspiring and wildly creative What It Is (which I am still in the middle of), have helped me find some more courage in that area, helping me to see this art form as a medium that might be just right for me, especially in the case of my "Lil' Me" story.

Then a defining moment came one day when I heard my sister, who works as a professional graphic artist, mention how much she'd really like a drawing tablet, which she does not actually have, causing me to look over at my dusty and paper-buried graphic tablet on my work table, considering exactly how long had it been since I had last used that thing anyway? And would I ever in fact be really using it for anything more than a glorified mouse before it became obsolete? Surely it could be put to better use by a professional who actually would use it everyday (i.e., my sister). This was in fact the most defining fact of the many facts I had brought myself to consider over these past several months.

Then on a recent visit with family, I found myself saying to my Grandma, who had just asked me what projects I was working on, that I was making a comic book of the cartoon I had told her about before. So there it was, I realized. I guess that's really what I was going to be doing, after all!

The last hurdle that was standing in the way of this official transformation was the purchase by me of some actual blank notebooks. Being a writer I have many blank lined notebooks lying around the house, but up until today I had no blank blank notebooks anywhere. Whenever I draw or "doodle" as I like to refer to it, I usually use either blank computer paper, or my favorite, sheets of white "typing paper" (or as they call it now a "writing tablet") which are quite nice for drawing on, but come in a tear-off pad, which is not very useful when trying to create a cohesive work of many pages that follow each other. I'm happy to say that I purchased not one but two blank notebooks today, of the size and binding I like most in their cousinly lined-paper forms, and am now officially ready to embark on the next phase of this woggy adventure.

I hereby rewrite my woggy to-do list...

Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• Dig up my old plot and story notes, and my folder of character drawings
  
• Sketch out a plot for my introductory episode/book
• rough storyboard the book
• draw book #1
• admire fab new book!
• repeat process for several more books
• research publishing graphic novels/ comic books, including self-publish options
• begin sending out stuff/ doing whatever initial stuff i need to do to pursue publishing of first few books
• continue making more books
• consider creating a dedicated website for the books
• write more to-do steps
  

Woggy #17: Family Tree

At some particular point in the last year, my sister-in-law, who had been doing some extensive family tree research on my husband's side of the family, uploaded her research to a popular family tree website, and invited us all to have a look. This of course inspired me to create a tree of my own, filling out my half of our family tree.

For a week or two, I began working regularly and diligently to expand my tree, taking advantage of the free trial membership the site had. I decided to go ahead and sign up, paying a monthly fee, thinking I would see this thing through in a month or two, culminating sometime after the holiday season, when I would incorporate all the info I got talking to all my extended family and/or receiving their replies to my organized letters that I would include with the yearly card and newsletter.

I have of course forgotten about this woggy project entirely until about last month, when I was reviewing my finances, and again this past week when I was visiting my family and thinking about the various details I might want to know about my family tree. I have yet to even formulate the sorts of questions I'd like to ask extended family, let alone create any sort of letter, organized or no, that could help me gather additional information to add to my tree.

Meanwhile, I continue to pay monthly fees to this website, sure that I'll be finishing this project up any day now, and have no need to switch over to the yearly fee structure. (It's obviously this sort of wishful thinking that keeps these folks in business.)

Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• consider switching to the yearly fee structure..
• finish up doing as much research as possible given the info I currently have
• figure out what sort of info I need to try to get from whom to fill out the tree
• send out letters/emails/etc. to get info and photos from pertinent family members
• update new info as it comes in
• finish up doing as much research as possible given the info I get
• Do any needed external research
• Complete the tree as much as possible
• print a final copy, send to family members, etc.
  

Update: Woggy #13 Complete!

After many, many hours of enjoyable work, I'm happy to say that this miniaturely giant woggy has finally been finished! Whatever Lego fan actually posted somewhere that he completed this feat in a mere 10 hours either has a faulty sense of timing, superhuman building power, or must have employed a large army of miniature robots to complete his task.

My final hours of project completion were assisted greatly not only by my small Lego workmen supervisors (see three of them helping to the left), but also by my Velvet Underground-seeded Pandora station, which I feel helped especially pulling me through all the delicate, frustrating, and slightly nerve-wracking moments connecting all the large component parts to one another.

And baby it was allright
And it was alright
Hey it was allright

Unexpectedly, the worst moments came not from placing the large central dome, which unlike all my previous attempts at handling it, did not fall apart or lose any tiles in the process, but from the plugging in of all the exterior building pieces to one another. As soon as I would get two plugged into each other and attempted a third, I'd find the second and third pieces come together only at the expense of the first two pieces coming apart. After an of absurd series of together-together-apart, together-together-aparts, I did finally succeed at getting them all together into one comprehensive whole, and only a few minor and non-lethal break and repairs.

In the end, the final result was pretty impressive. Hugely impressive in fact, and now I am beginning to consider the question my husband first asked me when I brought the Taj Mahal set home, and that is "Where exactly are you going to put that thing in our place?" I had decided not to worry about that trivial detail until after it was finished. For now, this Ottoman looks like a good place, though obviously not a permanent one. Anyway it sure looks great, especially when I put a light inside and the fountain from my city set in front of it. Who needs airfare? In that perspective the cost of this project now seems downright economical!

Woggy #16: New Bed

Though it's probably a surprise to anyone actually viewing my wog, my original inspiration for this page began after considering my friend's blog The Cranky House, and wondering what sort of topic I might be able to write about myself. Thinking of the absurd number of unfinished home projects I had around here seemed like that might be a funny place to start. In classic woggy style, I have of course done everything but talk about household projects ever since. So, I figured today is as good a day as any to finally mention one of them.

My husband and I have had plans for ages to buy or create some sort of new bed. And by "new bed" what I am actually meaning is really just "a bed", at least in the classic, traditional sense of what most people consider to be a bed.

While I was a bit opposed to it aesthetically, we did, quite immediately after moving in together, go to a mattress warehouse store and purchase the standard and traditional American Queen mattress with matching box spring. This set did come with a FREE! super-basic "bed frame", which is to say a simple but sturdy metal framework with wheels that one could safely place one's mattress and box spring set on top of. Here is a picture of said "frame", collapsed in space-saving fashion in the corner.

For several years we were content to call this basic assortment a bed and a bed frame, and I even bought a nice stylish bed skirt to make it appear a bit less rustic industrial than it actually was. As time wore on and probably somewhere after our actual marriage ceremony, I began to realize that most established couples out there seemed to have one of these complete and inclusive furniture item things that most people mean when they hear the term "bed", and hey, why don't we get one of those too! those look pretty nice!

And so began this woggy project. Due to financial restraints, we originally began looking just for something that would help fill out our current operation into something that looked more like a real bed. A headboard, a less rustic-looking support frame... And we had made some progress in this direction when we were interrupted by an unexpected and life consuming construction project. Our condo building needed to replace all of its exterior wall surfaces, and was going to replace all of the building's windows at the same time. Since 2 walls of our bedroom are almost all windows, and construction required a three-foot clear-out zone for the construction crew, that left our usable bedroom nonexistent, which meant our bed got deconstructed and placed on its side against the wall, ala factory storage style, for the duration of the construction project.

In the month that stretched into months of construction, while we slept on the most rustic bed of all, the floor, we began to discuss and imagine what sort of real, actual bed we might like to sleep on when all this construction business was over. The definitive conclusion we came to was that, neither of us actually wanted a box spring, and we would both like some sort of nice modern and stylish complete bed frame for our mattress to go on. We devised our environmentally responsible plan for freecyling our box spring and metal frame, which we reasoned would probably be a serious score if you were say, just out of college or high school and looking for something to put your beginning-to-sag futon on. Or perhaps someone whose boxspring had met with an unfortunate accident, and was looking for a replacement. We looked at catalogs, talked about bed styles.

Things were really looking good for this woggy project by the time the construction was coming to a close. New windows, new walls, and soon.. a new bed!

Several years later, we are still sitting here with no bed frame, and have actually devolved in that, thinking we would be freecycling our box spring and frame, we only bothered to put the mattress back on the floor, assuming we'd get a frame under it any week now, and leaving the others against the wall would make it so much easier when the freecycler showed up. Months after these assumptions had proven untrue, we did finally put the box spring down and the mattress on that, just "temporarily", until we bought the new frame, of course, which is why we didn't actually put the frame itself back on the floor and the box spring and mattress on top of those. And as, you might have noted from the picture at the top, there it still is, not under our bed!

But, my hope springs eternal. why, just two days ago, we almost went to the store to look at a bed frame. We firmly decided we'd probably go to that store instead next weekend. Maybe! A girl can dream..



Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• go to the store to look at beds
  
• decide on a bed and buy it
  
• put our box spring and frame up on freecycle
  
• give away our stuff to freecyle person
• get our new bed delivered
• say, "Hey, doesn't our new bed look great?!"
  

Update: Woggy #13

Well, especially thanks to an experimental voluntary week without electricity, I have made some significant progress on the ole Taj Mahal. Here you can see I completed the dome, and have also created and assembled all of the main base of the mausoleum. The top of the dome is super-solid, obviously a rework of the classic & sturdy Lego sphere. But the sides are super fragile and have begun to be a major pain in my butt. Every time I even get near those sides they try and pop off, and when I try putting them back on they usually become disconnected from the base, which requires even more delicacy getting everything back in place again. But I admit, creating cylinders of any sort is definitely a hack with Legos, so I suppose the Lego engineer who created this design did the best they could. For now I've got my dome sitting up on this shelf, and I don't plan to touch it again until the final building assembly, where pieces are undoubtedly going to try and pop off yet again...

I can now check some items off my Woggy To-do list:

X complete the four tower spires (this one's from the last update)
X complete the center dome structure
X complete the main part of the central building

Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• complete the roof of the central building
• put all pieces together
  
• revel in my construction triumph!

Woggy #15: Getting Out of My Mind

As some of you may have noticed, I do on occasion have difficulty completing various significant tasks in my life, ones which some might say would help me achieve "success" in this corporeal world. While you may have wondered if this fact had escaped my personal notice, it of course has not. In fact it is often forefront in my mind, and various solutions to this issue have themselves been an ongoing woggy project.

One such solution that was offered up to me within the past year has been the book Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. Based on a school of psychological thought called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, the goal in general is to face your problems/ issues/ conflicts directly, accept their existence, and learn how to stop letting them run your life. A good deal of the book is spent explaining and performing mini "experiments" on your mind to show how our mind/brain, useful in most day-to-day problem solving, is extremely tricky and completely unsuited for assisting us in dealing with the tangled self-referential web of emotional and psychological issues inside us. This convolution is particularly pronounced for those of us who have more intense emotional things to deal with, and/or for those of us who have spent most of our lives trusting that our ample brains are certainly well-equipped to get us out of any old trouble we find ourselves in. Being doubly afflicted, I have found this book to be immensely helpful.

However, while almost everything in the book has been amazingly useful and interesting, it is and has been at the same time extremely intimidating, painful, and difficult as it requires you to face all of the various demons you have, with the assistance of your giant brain, found many elaborate ways to hide away from. Not to mention the fact that, as the main point of this book seems mostly to be telling you how to stop listening to your brain when choosing how to live your life, it for obvious reasons makes that same brain rather reluctant to pick up the book again and continue reading, as it means in no certain terms and end to the reign of Brain As Monarch of Life.

So between me, my brain, and my demons, I have been quite on-again, off-again with this book. I'll read a bit, handle all the exercises and readings that aren't too painful to deal with, and then find myself whack right up against a question like this:

"The memories and images I avoid include: ____________"

after which I promptly put the book down ("That's enough for today; we'll pick it up tomorrow, I promise!" my brain fools me). And so it goes slowly, but at the very least, it goes.

And as the awesome, awesome, awesome Lynda Barry says:

"No one had ever solved the riddle by thinking their way out of it."

Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• set aside time to read
  
• write down the answer to above-mentioned troublesome question
  
• continue reading
• begin actually doing the daily/weekly mindfulness exercises from the previous chapter
• keep moving through next stumbling block
• continue reading and doing excersizes until the end of the book is reached
  

Woggy #14: MOC Page

Ahh, hubris. Yes, I've finally decided to tackle another of my aging woggies today, while we were on the subject of Legos. If you look carefully at the photo above, you might notice that just under "Tina's LEGO web site" it says

" I am currently in the process of setting this page up, but feel free to have a look around!

I should probably have something more interesting to say here in a few days. "

That hopeful introduction has been adorning my page, oh, for at least a year now. I can't remember the date exactly, but it has been a sufficiently long amount of time that upon my return recently, I found the host site had actually changed their design almost completely. My message may be outdated, but the page itself looks immensely more lovely than it did when I last left it, all having nothing whatsoever to do with any amount of effort on my part. Now THAT is the sort of effortless aging I can get behind!

My initial setup of this page happened sometime after NW BrickCon 07, my very first convention ever that I have ever attended (even though, it is true, I attended as part of the open-to-the-public viewing part rather than the actual fan part. I have just not discovered that level of comfort with any of my assorted fandoms yet). In my enthusiasm and optimism that I would any moment now join my self up with my actual local fan community, I visited many websites and discovered all there was to know about playing with Legos as a respected member of society, known as being an AFOL. Having of course already had many photos of my Lego creations on my computer, and several Lego models sitting around waiting for more photos to be taken, I started setting up my MOC page here as soon as I discovered what the heck a MOC page (and in fact, what the heck a MOC) was.

After posting a few first photos, I put up my now hopelessly optimistic front page message and continued uploading over the next few days, categorizing and captioning until I had everything in my current and past creation history. All I needed to do was finish up a few last things like my profile pic and all would be done.

And so my page has sat since, leaving its optimistic message for any unsuspecting lego-fan passerby, who may to this very moment be waiting for my page message, Halloween skull head video, and real-life valentine photos to be updated any day soon now...

Things Left To Complete This Woggy Project:

• find that Lego mosaic pic I made of myself for my profile page
  
• upload my profile pic to my MOC page
  
• change my front page message to something a little more timeless
• find and figure out how to upload my Halloween skull video, or change my caption
• upload my real-life MOC pics of my Valentine MOC, and change surrounding text
  
• upload, folder and caption my more recent MOC pics
• start hanging out on MOC pages more regularly and actually try becoming a member of the community...