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Remaining baked beans from Thursday night for lunch today. And a hot dog.

Productive afternoon. Wrote in regular paper journal about January's MLK Day festival, travel between California and Florida, and last Thursday night's movie viewing. That journal finally up to date. Hasn't been since June 9, 2007. Have been remiss in this discipline. No more. Will try harder to write more often. Also, began catching up on prompted reflection journal. Should not have allowed new interest in Watchmen to get in way. Now two days behind.

Spent part of afternoon conferring with other writers over Twitter. Interesting. Will do it again when opportunity arises.

Attempted to start transition planning process this evening. Failed. Suffering from lack of self-discipline on this front, too.

Daylight Saving Time started today. Darkness waited longer to appear. Strange and disorienting.

So last night, my friends and I went out to a street of apartments near my college to people-watch and hand out cookies and candy. The street was in the midst of our annual Halloween party, which means it was absolutely packed with people in costumes.

I stood on a curb and people-watched for about two hours. As we were walking away from the party, back to my friend's apartment, all I was thinking was:

"Hmmm... did I see more Marvel or DC costumes tonight?"

Now that's nerdy. :-D I never did come to a conclusion as to which company's costumes I saw more of, by the way. Probably DC, because I saw quite a few Superman suits out there.

I'm currently writing and drawing installment 4.5 of my comic series, Digital Marchers. I started this series in my junior year of high school, and #4.5 is the end of the first story arc. I'm finishing it now because I really don't like leaving things unfinished.

I'm really enjoying drawing this comic. To my surprise, I'm finding that drawing it is teaching me something about writing. I've always avoided writing action scenes, because I'm not very good at writing exciting action. This issue of my comic is mostly action, and I've discovered two techniques that are helping a lot.

1) Make a storyboard. If you know in advance what happens in your action scene and in what order, you'll have a much easier and more fun time writing it out. (My storyboard is a stack of small pieces of scratch paper with one or two important events on each piece.)
2) Action scenes are better if you rely on visual images to show what's happening. As I look at my comic, I see a marked contrast between it and my written work. My written work is usually 95% dialogue, but drawing a comic is forcing me to get out of that habit, because in comics you have to use the visual element as your primary means of telling your story. I'm discovering that I am capable of conveying action effectively, without tons of dialogue and thoughts slowing it down. Pictures of things that are happening are so much more engaging for the reader than characters talking or thinking about what's happening. This knowledge will really come in handy when I write this year's NaNovel, whose plot calls for a number of action scenes.

ETA: I am planning on participating in 24 Hour Comic Day on October 7th. My plan is to draw as much of Digital Marchers #11 as I can on that day.