Friday 20 June 2014

Weekly Update #36 Supplement: The Firewall

DAVE SIM:
See, I have SUCH a firewall between CEREBUS and SDOAR (how much of a firewall do you have between CEREBUS and SDOAR?) I have SUCH A FIREWALL between CEREBUS and SDOAR that I actually forgot to talk about SDOAR in my post.

Basically Dave Fisher and I will be going one step at a time on my new assumption that now that I am really, really slow and getting slower on SDOAR and I can't rely on what IDW is paying me to cover my bills.  CEREBUS I hope is covered with the CEREBUS ARCHIVE Kickstarters, but what I'm planning to do is to raise money selling glamourpuss artwork.  But it's going to take a WHILE for Dave to get the artwork inventoried because it's already been split into Alex Raymond pages and glamourpuss parody pages.  And then further divided into pages that I think will sell for a lot of money and pages that I think won't.  That was at the time when I pictured that I would have time to inventory the artwork myself and do as much promotion as I can through (and hopefully with) Heritage Auctions.

12 hours a day six days a week and a chunk of that time taken up with CEREBUS ARCHIVE right now, and presumably every three months to keep the scanning and restoration going.  I still think of myself as being fast and even doing something basic like the inked Cerebus heads. I can do four a day so that's six days right there.  And I haven't even started signing the stuff.  I'm going to have to limit what I do to doing a "glamourpuss goes to Heritage Auctions" piece that will hopefully cover all the auctions. And I have to start (as I'm doing) months before the actual auctions.

And that's the problem with the firewall and the necessity of the firewall.  I can't raise money to restore CEREBUS and then spend it writing and drawing SDOAR.

So, that was when I pitched Dave Fisher on reading all of glamourpuss so he knew what pages were what.  And he's in the middle of doing that. But he's got a lot of his own stuff to do.  So that was when I thought, Okay get him to do the tracing paper first so that will pay him some money while he's doing the inventory and writing Heritage style descriptions.  So that's how it will start with him talking about the tracing paper here at AMOC and doing weekly auctions.  Or bi-weekly auctions. How many is too many?  We don't know.

Somewhere up ahead I want to do a mini-catalogue through Heritage, because the glamourpuss stuff isn't KNOWN.  It isn't CEREBUS.  It has to be "I don't know how long it's going to take me to do THE STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND" and I can't keep stopping every three months and going "Okay, NOW how am I going to make money?"

That's the advance game that I used to give the mainstream guys grief about. You're getting paid to do THIS stuff and you only make enough to get through that and then you have to make money committing to doing something else.  And it takes all your time to do THAT thing. That's nuts!  You're never going to be able to do the thing you know you SHOULD be doing.

And now here I am basically in a variation on that.  Which serves me right, I think.

IDEALLY, if -- having gotten CEREBUS (I hope) covered -- I can work to get SDOAR (I hope) covered so all I have to do is sit down and write and draw the book, well, GREAT!  But it's not going to happen on its own and it's going to take a while to set up even theoretically.  There might be, you know, five glamourpuss fans and once they each have a tracing paper drawing, that will be it.  And then I have to stop again and go "Okay, NOW what?"

I'm not really complaining although I know it sounds as if I am.

I'm determined to preserve the house and the Cerebus Archive so that means leaving my life insurance policy alone.  That's where the preservation will come in after I'm gone.  Which means only using cash on hand which means having to make cash on hand in sufficient quantity to convert 6000 pages to digital AND pay me to do a third of a page a day -- at best -- for however long it takes which is now going to take a lot longer because of how much time it will take to keep CEREBUS "covered".  How much longer I have no idea -- I didn't know before, but I don't have even as much of an idea now.

But, I do want to assure everyone: the Kickstarter money you pledged to get CEREBUS restored will go for that. I KNOW CEREBUS is more important to most people than STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND.  I only have the chance to do STRANGE DEATH OF ALEX RAYMOND because of CEREBUS.  I really do think I can get through this.  I'm perfectly happy working 12 hours a day six days a week.  I really don't fit in society so there's really not much to do besides work and I prefer working and, I think, always have.

There's a lot needs to be done.  Dave Fisher called yesterday at 4 pm and left a message saying "Do you have those items for A Moment of Cerebus? I'm coming by at 5 pm."  Okay, well how long does it take to do three posts?  I got them done in time.  Good to know. I can do those in an hour.

I'm back here in the coffee shop because I have some SDOAR stuff I have to look up online.  So, I thought I would post this at the same time and do another AMOC item, because as everyone tells me. you have to promote yourself.

Well, okay.

So far, so good.

Stay tuned (please.)

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