I struck me earlier today as I was working on comics that the strips I have running right now eat ideas for breakfast. They literally suck them in, chew them into a meaty pulp and crap them out a little later, in a form that is no longer usable. It’s quite an ideas mill we have going here.

This presents a bit of a problem from my point of view. On the one hand, I have to get a new strip out every day, Monday to Friday. On the other hand, there are only so many jokes I can make with the characters I have available. What, then, is a person to do?

Well it’s simple really. Either I revisit old topics and try to put a new spin on them, or I bring in a new character to change up the dynamics. Alternatively, I can move the story to a new setting and bring in difference that way.

At no point should “just stop the comic, you’re done” be something that is considered. Rest the comic, perhaps, if you really feel you need time away from it, but don’t drop it altogether because I guarantee you’ll start thinking up new ideas for it; probably right away.

Over the last few weeks I’ve tried all three of my options to bring life back into the comics. The Life of Nob T. Mouse got a new character recently in the form of Speckleton Q Speckworth, the Journalistic Reporter of Newsworthy News. He has let me make fun of traditional print media and the way newspapers were a vital part of frontier life when towns were just being formed in the Old West.

Not that you’ll see that in what has happened with him so far, of course, since I now plan storylines out in full before they get released. I learned that the hard way after the last storyline, with the Abstract causing all kinds of trouble for Nob Mouse. That was supposed to be a three week long story but it went on for so long that I went house hunting, arranged a mortgage and actually moved house during the time it was running. Never again am I getting into that trap. Never again!

The other two techniques came up on All over the house. Firstly I have been revisiting old topics for a while over there because it’s part of life that some things repeat but play out differently, so going back to the ideas well makes for a more realistic strip. I repeated a topic within the first fortnight of the strip running, in fact, (episodes one and three are both about “interactive telephones”) and I’ve no problem doing it again.

Lately Emily moved jobs, getting her own government department to run. This introduced a whole new dynamic for the character and opened up far more joke and storyline potential. It is part of a long-running plan for Emily’s character development so it’s not like I did it on a whim because we ran out of ideas but it does serve to demonstrate how a bit of a change of scenery lets us do more with the character than we otherwise probably could.

Today is episode 335 of All over the house. The strip has now run to more episodes than Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation combined. If we add to that the 300 or so episodes of The Life of Nob T. Mouse, you can imagine that I might be thinking about the possibility of running out of ideas for these strips a lot and it’s true, I do worry about it.

Nevertheless, as long as Jenny and I can keep coming up with new jokes, we’ll keep running the comics. It’s just too much fun to be stopping now.

As the video I posted on my vlog today will attest, I lost a CD somewhere in my office just the other day. I still have no idea what happened to it but I thought I would take the opportunity to look through some boxes that sit in here all the time, never getting looked at.

What I found was a collection of 3.5 inch floppy disks, the contents of which were an absolute mystery to me. I decided to give them a look through and found some gems from my past. My earliest extant attempts at writing were on there, as was a parody script I wrote in sixth form for my school’s drama festival and an essay on neutrinos (always a favourite subject of mine) which I wrote while at university.

I have collected these gems of past endeavours here for your enjoyment (or otherwise). If you manage to get through these truly awful novellas from 1992, I salute you. All I can say in their defence was that I was young and stupid.

• Alliance and Empire: The Forming (1992)
  
• Alliance and Empire: Swords and Sorcery (1992)
• Star Trek? (Which was described by critics in the school newspaper as “A cruel parody of the Godfather of science-fiction”) (1998)
• Neutrinos From Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Ray Photon Propagation (2002)

So lately I’ve been mostly away from the Internet, enjoying the sights and splendours of north Wales. It has been great to get away for a while and recharge my batteries because the number of projects I’ve been working on of late has taken its toll on my energy reserves.

Inside the walls of Caernarfon castle

Jenny and I took a lot of photos while we were away, all of which are now available on Flickr if you’re so inclined. Conwy castle and Caernarfon castle are amazing sights that I would recommend to anyone.

We took a few videos on my Blackberry while exploring Conwy castle; with Jenny and I giving a running commentary on what we thought of the place, and what we thought the rooms we explored were actually used for. It would probably have helped if we were actually looking at the guide book we bought on the way in and had with us while filming but then that would have been too professional. We were just larking about really and if I’d wanted to be professional I’d have used a real video camera instead of my mobile phone. Still, once the videos are edited up, I’ll put the results on YouTube for you all to enjoy.

Now that I’m back, I’m expecting to be able to get a load of work done over the coming weeks. The web serial project will move onto the scriptwriting stage soon, so expect more news on that as it comes in. For those of you who are interested at this point, the series is based around the exploits of a small ground of Live Action Role Players and will be a comedy along the theme of affectionate parody. Because I’m unable to get in contact with a couple of the co-holders of the copyright on Dudes with swords, I can’t use those characters or that storyline as a basis for the series (which is a massive shame since the script I wrote with Paul O’Malley is brilliant even if I do say so myself) but this new group and new story will be built from the ground up with the purpose of working as a web serial, so maybe all this is for the best anyway.

Now I’d best get on with building up a buffer on the webcomics again. I had one for while we were away on holiday but that’s burned through now and I need to get to work. Webcomics are like hungry, hungry babies: you can feed them strips all day long but they’ll always hunger for more. Hmm. I think there’s a story in that…