[Note: Musical accompaniment for this installment is at the end, click play and read away! – Akshay]
Well, it’s been a good long while but I’m trying to get back on the saddle / behind the pen / over the pages / whatever…
Finally started and finished this new piece, got motivated by the desire to make a starter for my latest story endeavour and hopefully this will be the first of… well not many, but at least a few!
I don’t do near enough art to practice my craft so this is the first finished piece in AGES! (As can be seen from my massive portfolio here at deviantart!)
My attempt at “cover art” for a pulp-serial-style set of stories I’m working on, the first of which is finished and can be viewed by this link and if you like it – let me know. I’ll be working on several down the line.
The character is my protagonist/antagonist/central figure known only as “Janus” and he is an uber-shadowy figure that is the scourge of the underworld and all the other sub-worlds beneath the shiny veneer of the “normal”.
He is not clearly hero or villain but is nearly lethally feared the world over and has agents everywhere and seems to know almost everything.
(You can read the story that inspired this work of …lets call it “art”, right HERE amongst my collection of short fiction, all of which can be seen from the handy-dandy link on the above menu-bar!)
If I can keep it together long enough to get sufficient practice, I might actually learn to draw properly and start doing my own comic art!
When I think of all the money I could save doing that… but then I’d have to deal with writer-me… and I’d have to work under the moody-as-cattle artsy-fartsy-ness of artist-me… oh god this could be awkward. Moderator me will have to be paid overtime in the usual currency he charges : Rum. Lots and lots of Old Monk brand Rum.
It will also help, indubitably, with the recent loss of my friend with whom I’ve spent many a sponge-like evening, soaking up Monk-&-coke and brain-drizzled (and sometimes stormed) ideas for things we were working on or even just something random and/or philosophical in nature.
Stick around folks, lots more coming from me as I try and get more on track after a over-loaded wobbliness of things that’s been my life for a bit!
In the good news column, the recent Film And Comic Convention that was held in Mumbai was a roaring success (for me at the very least, yes I’m a selfish twat…). We were overworked as hell due to shortage of some hands at the last minute so the organisers and their team were running like crazy (respect!) and managed to hold it all together through the days. I even got pulled into duty by default because the booth with my own comic was understaffed due to the aforementioned problem – the plus side though was that while I was going nuts keeping up with the people coming by and effectively shilling pretty much everything in the stall alongside just one other (very hard-working) fellow (pictured here in the red), it was exceedingly gratifying.
I loved being able to talk to all those people, answer some questions (albiet many repeated questions over the course of the 2 days I was manning the stall) and hear what they had to say about the stuff on offer and seeing their reactions. Plus, being asked to sign my work to them felt great and I tried my best to personalise each one and not just sign, but between all that, barely any eating and complete loss of any sense of time (not to mention still-running jet-lag after travelling from Europe just the day before arriving here), I was starting to get blurry eyes on those last few books. So anyone who got a gibberish-y message from me or a signature that looks more demented than usual – “I’m sorry! Truly!”
In all seriousness though, it really was an experience like no other I’ve had and hopefully I’ll get to do it a lot more in the near future.
Oh, this is going to be interesting…
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