This post is just an update. I haven't drawn any new material or even posted any old stuff in a couple weeks now, but I wanted to let anyone who is actually checking in on my blog know that I'm not dead yet. The Green Tower City project is something I will be working on in one way or another until the day I die, which I'm not actually planning on doing for at least 20 more years. (I'm halfway between 40 and 50 years of age if you are curious.) I do however get kind of lazy once in awhile, and spend my free time sitting on the couch watching movies, or even worse, sitting at my computer playing game after game of solitaire, sometimes with alcoholic accompaniment. In fact that's pretty much what I did all weekend.
Now that's my idea of a good weekend!
That being said I have not been completely unproductive, because even if I don't feel like drawing there are there are many other aspects to this all consuming obsession that I work on, and the Green Tower City Timeline is a big part of it, and that at least is something I work on pretty much every day, even when I don't feel like drawing at all. Here's an image of the very beginning of it. The structure is the same all the way through, covering ten years of activity in my fictional world.
For me, it's never been enough to simply have images of attractive females fighting each other, as exciting as that is. Way more important to me is the idea of there being an elaborate back story that connects the stories, characters, and the world they inhabit, and in the past couple of years I have been constructing an ELABORATE back story to explain all that is going on in my illustrated stories.
So far this timeline, which is only maybe 5% "finished" consists of well over 300,000 words. (Longer than Moby Dick, which is the book I stole the first couple of lines from, and where I took my "pen name." Apologies to Herman Melville. I guess you could say finishing this timeline is sort of my own personal White Whale.)
Here is the official word count as of this morning.
If "completed" the timeline will cover the roughly ten years that our narrator spends in and around Green Tower City, from the years 2473-2483. Lately I have been concentrating primarily on the first year of this timeline, though I have stories scattered throughout the first 7 years (leading up to the still unfinished "Mat Tournament of 2480." Here's another section of the timeline to give you an idea of how it looks. It is formatted as a table, with each box being a day in the calendar year, and separate boxes to contain each "combat incident." I have even gone to the trouble of using the powers of the Internet to figure out which years in the 25th century will have leap years, and added the extra day in February where necessary.
That's not all. Each character who appears in my timeline has her own file folder on my computer, in which are stored her profile information (some of them are unfinished) Her personal logo, images related to her, a folder containing any of her fights that I have drawn out, and most importantly, her fight record. Here is what the inside of one of my character folders looks like. There are so far about 200 of these character files, though over time there will certainly be many more added.
The most important aspect is possibly the Fight Record, which coordinates directly with the timeline. SO each time I add a fight to the timeline, I also record it in each of the character's fight records who are taking part in that particular battle. (And they are not all one on one fights. There are tag team fights, Battle Royales, and team fights involving multiple combatants.
This is all very time consuming, but it is something I enjoy doing, and the fact that I spend 40 hours a week at an office job where nobody really bothers me and I get plenty of down time means I can plow ahead on this project while I am at work for 8 hours a day! (In fact that's where I do most of my work on the timeline project.) Sometimes the fight descriptions in the timeline are short blurbs such as, "Tiffany defeats Stacy" other times they are a little more descriptive, such as:
And many other times they are full length stories, many of which will eventually find their way to the blog even if I don't add illustrations. This gigantic timeline
is the source material for everything I do. All the illustrated stories fit in there somewhere.
Eventually, I expect this timeline to be longer than the entire Wheel of Time series. All that being said, I still have a TON of drawings that have not yet been posted to the blog, so they will be appearing over time. Thank you all for you patience, and if this timeline is something that actually interests you, I would love to hear about it. (I know plenty of people just want images, and that's totally cool too. I get it.)
Also those of you waiting for me yo get to your commission requests, this is the exact reason why I don't take money up front from people any more.
