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22 December 2023
It's Tuesday, January 28, 2003. We send the paper to the printer in two days. And my comic still isn't done. Debbie's gonna be pissed.
It's not like this is the first time this has happened. Plus, since my workload usually spans three sections of the paper, I have two editors and one editor-in-chief who will be up late tomorrow due to my procrastination. (Debbie, despite being the most vocally opposed to my tardiness, only needs about four minutes to lay out a page in the comic section. I've seen him do it.)
So, to Neogeo (master of Pen & Think), Vinnie (Entertainmental's fearless leader), and Wayne, the man in charge of the whole goddamn paper (and whose hair is thinning, at least in part, due to Hugh-induced stress), to you all I owe a very sincere apology for my work habits.
Okay, I'm sorry to Debbie, too. If it weren't for me, he would have been done last Friday.
I'm not making excuses for my actions; there are none. It's just that at the beginning of every month, it seems like I have all the time in the world until my deadline. So I go out with my friends. I play Twisted Metal for those extra couple of hours. I spend an afternoon snowboarding (or as I call it, “falling down a hill”). I go to bed early, telling myself that I'll get started on everything tomorrow. And then before long, it's January 28, and we send the paper to the printer in two days.
I'll say one thing for myself, though: I don't think I've ever pounded out some sub-par crap simply to have it done. Sure, I've done plenty of illustrations or comics that I wonder how much better they could have been if I had started a week sooner. But there have been plenty of months where the reason I haven't turned in my work until the last possible second is because I felt that there were still changes to be made.
Take this month's Pen & Think submission, for example. I wrote a rather lengthy (for my standards, anyway; I'm still no Mercedes Helnwein) submission which I became rather emotionally invested in, only to discover that space was limited this month. Rather than edit the hell out of my story in order to make it fit, I decided to hold it for a future issue.
And so I find myself writing a replacement for it on January 28, two days before the paper is sent to the printer. Had I simply asked Neogeo about my available space before writing my 966-word opus, I could have saved myself a huge chunk of time. Instead, I'm just an idiot with a comic to draw who's way past his deadline.
It's not like this is the first time this has happened. Plus, since my workload usually spans three sections of the paper, I have two editors and one editor-in-chief who will be up late tomorrow due to my procrastination. (Debbie, despite being the most vocally opposed to my tardiness, only needs about four minutes to lay out a page in the comic section. I've seen him do it.)
So, to Neogeo (master of Pen & Think), Vinnie (Entertainmental's fearless leader), and Wayne, the man in charge of the whole goddamn paper (and whose hair is thinning, at least in part, due to Hugh-induced stress), to you all I owe a very sincere apology for my work habits.
Okay, I'm sorry to Debbie, too. If it weren't for me, he would have been done last Friday.
I'm not making excuses for my actions; there are none. It's just that at the beginning of every month, it seems like I have all the time in the world until my deadline. So I go out with my friends. I play Twisted Metal for those extra couple of hours. I spend an afternoon snowboarding (or as I call it, “falling down a hill”). I go to bed early, telling myself that I'll get started on everything tomorrow. And then before long, it's January 28, and we send the paper to the printer in two days.
I'll say one thing for myself, though: I don't think I've ever pounded out some sub-par crap simply to have it done. Sure, I've done plenty of illustrations or comics that I wonder how much better they could have been if I had started a week sooner. But there have been plenty of months where the reason I haven't turned in my work until the last possible second is because I felt that there were still changes to be made.
Take this month's Pen & Think submission, for example. I wrote a rather lengthy (for my standards, anyway; I'm still no Mercedes Helnwein) submission which I became rather emotionally invested in, only to discover that space was limited this month. Rather than edit the hell out of my story in order to make it fit, I decided to hold it for a future issue.
And so I find myself writing a replacement for it on January 28, two days before the paper is sent to the printer. Had I simply asked Neogeo about my available space before writing my 966-word opus, I could have saved myself a huge chunk of time. Instead, I'm just an idiot with a comic to draw who's way past his deadline.
artid
1141
Old Image
5_6_steve.jpg
issue
vol 5 - issue 06 (feb 2003)
section
pen_think