Friday, January 26, 2001

Cool! First I discovered the emotional power of MegaTokyo, then the comedic offerings of SinFest, and now there’s another new online comic, neobaka. It’s intended more for anime/manga fans, but the appeal is pretty generic. It also has the impressive ability to include Monty Python and other pop-culture references as part of the strip, instead of as blatant attempts to insert geeky humor.

I’ve decided to abandon my current novel attempt, which I just realized I’ve only mentioned in passing on this diary page. My idea was to write a serious, character-oriented drama set in a fantasy world, focusing on the royal cryptographer. The cryptographer in question has a lot of issues which I had planned to explore. Unfortunately, both the story and the characters have refused to gel into anything coherent, so even after writing about ten pages’ worth of miscellaneous scenes, I still don’t have a novel.

But that’s OK. That project sort of re-awakened my writing muse, so it served a purpose, and heck it was good practice. The main thing now is for me to find something else to write, and for the time being I think I’m going to focus on Wine To Those In Anguish, the animated series that I want to produce. I still need to write out a lot of the scripts.

What else is happening. Well, Brennen, Eric, and I are hashing out a design for a 4X space empire building game, for the BeOS. The emphasis is on a strong design rather than pretty graphics, which is good because none of us have any talent in those sorts of graphics. The working title for the game is “Second Empire.”