As I'm fond of telling people, I'm a bit like the G1 Decepticon Ravage. If you don't hear from me much, that's okay, it means I'm up to no good. And that has certainly been the case lately.

Been hard at work to get my book finished, and my goal is to have a completed manuscript of FOLLOWING THE SUN: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO EGYPTIAN RELIGION by the end of the calendar year. Early next year I'll start shopping around for a publisher. I've actually had to give myself a break for a few days lately because I've been at it so non-stop.

Thinking back over the first ten months of this year, I've gotten so much done already: a comic book issue completed and printed, four more prints, got a movie poster design of mine printed up (it's really something to see your work blown up to poster-size), the final installment of the Roommate Manga, three different works registered to the Writers' Guild...I could go on. And there's still two months left to go this year!

One little thing that I just finished I'm quite proud of, for the technical victory it represents more than the finished art. I just uploaded my first three-second piece of Flash Animation to my Gallery, so check it out. The visuals are crude, though I'm proud of the Decepticon symbol itself because I drew it using Flash tools and a mouse, rather than my handy little Wacom.

Working on animation is also forcing me to look around on the Internet not only to find tutorials for Flash but also to see what other tools are out there. I'm finding that a lot of ideas I'd had about doing traditional-style animation and having people in far-flung places all being part of a studio are shared by other animators who are already doing it. This is encouraging because it means there's a whole lot out there that I can still learn and try on my own. And I'm sharing this with my DA watchers (my ' peeps', as I like to call you guys) because it means that you guys can try it too. I just got turned on to a really awesome site called toonboom.com that has some free learning trials of their software, which is professional-grade; put it this way, when I can incorporate Golden Age Productions hopefully early next year, this software will be on my company wish list! So go check out their free trial versions, use it to toy with your own stuff, and eventually we could all use the Pro version to do some other work. No harm in checking it out!

And I'm still going to promote our voice-actor friends for the upcoming INUYASHA stuff where possible. I stumbled across one last signed Sesshomaru print in my inventory, and that will be going up on eBay along with a blurb about contacting Viz to keep the same English voice cast. It may sound like I'm just promotion-crazy about these sorts of things, but without promotion a lot of things in that business just don't get done. To think of it another way, videos don't go viral unless everybody tells their friends about it and links it to them. That's "show biz" as well!

So tally ho!