Buffer = 26
Tuesday May 16, 2006 • Howard Tayler
I keep a "buffer tracking" thread alive at all times over on the Nightstar forum. It's a way for me to let readers know whether or not I'm doing the job I'm supposed to be doing. For the last 18 months it's been rough. The buffer has spent entire months never rising above 14 (that's 14 days of comics pencilled and inked -- the colored-and-uploaded buffer is even lower, sometimes dropping as low as "zero.") I'm not sure why this is, really. Scott Kurtz recently blogged about how cool it was to share his studio with a couple of other cartoonists for a week. Reading that, I realized why I've been so much more productive since deciding to do almost 100% of my pencilling and inking at Dragon's Keep -- I'm a better cartoonist when I spend more time around other people. Anyway, today I got the pencilled-and-inked buffer up to 26. That's the highest it has been since September of 2004, when it was sliding down from 29 while I was on the road for Novell. I was on my last-ever Novell trip. I look back at that, and I look at my work today, and I see what needs to be done. I need to keep going. For the record, the highest the buffer has ever been is 43, on Februrary 6th of 2004. Beating that would be nice, but I may not get much over 26 for a while. As of June, I'll be working on the comic Monday through Wednesday, and then doing work for the next Schlock Mercenary book, Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between, on Thursdays through Saturdays. If you want to check on my progress, head over to the Nightstar Schlock Mercenary forum and look at the uppermost thread. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Books may arrive. Coloring needs to be done. I'm out of finished scripts to draw on. There's work to be done.
