profmariachi

I was sorting through my old journals from high school when I happened upon this entry, and thought, well, I just had to share this.
Call it a notice of my own imperfection. Or that I was an arrogant little cuss in high school.

I had submitted a piece for review to an editor I had worked with in contests, and was soo secure in the knowledge it would be published, gain bestseller status, and push me to author superstardom. I would be a sensation, a media darling by the age of fifteen. Imagine that! Oh, nievety, how bitter a pill you are!

In retrospection it was total crap. All crap. Not crap like manure, which has useful properties, but rather completely unredeemable textual diarrhea.

I read through the novel again (novella really, if I could offer but two words of sound advice to my teenage self: publisher’s guidelines). I cringed so often, that an onlooker might rationally assume I had developed either tourrettes or epilepsy. And in truth, writing of this magnitude could probably cause flare-ups of genetically predisposed illnesses.

The style was rushed and terse. As if written by an author on speed, the voice leapt around like a hyperactive preschooler. Sometimes the cool, consistent Dr. Jeckle’s, but more often Mr. Hyde’s. It was clearly written to completion, not perfection.

The plot holes were paper galaxies large enough for entire solar systems to co-exist within them. The concept was interesting, but lacked believability and needed substantial revision. And the characters, oh my witty and brilliant characters… They were cardboard cutouts of a pubescent fan girl’s subconscious fantasies.

Perhaps worst of all, my concept of “revision” at the time involved Word’s spellcheck and a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style. And lord help me, I thought it was hot stuff.

My editor friend set me straight, and the hormonally carbonated fifteen year old who received these words of wisdom did not take them well.

“Caroline,” he said.
“I see that you have a lot of talent. You’re a musician, an actor, an artist, and a writer. You are incredibly creative, and I know that you know you have a great deal of raw, unadulterated potential. It is for this reason that I must refuse to read the remainder of your manuscript. I am very sorry to say I cannot stand ‘naturals’ and will probably never work with you.”

“Talent is a curious thing. Jewelers, taxi drivers, and plumbers have it, and yes, even a few writers have it. The truth is most people have talent. Most people who become accustomed to having talent never do anything worthwhile.

You’ve been published throughout your childhood. You’ve won awards and competitions with your poetry and prose, and surely, a lot of people have called you talented. I am very sorry for it. You seem to have stagnated, placing complete reliance on the idea that you are talented. Talent alone is less than useless. Talent is nothing without cultivation.

As you know, I grew up on the family farm in Saskatchewan. If in a season my father failed to seed and cultivate the crops, we would have a terrible harvest, even in fantastic soil. But with proper cultivation, even ‘bad’ soil could produce a crop.
Talent is like the soil, the base from which life grows.

Talent, like soil, is by itself, nothing. A failure to cultivate it, make continuous effort, and follow the pre-determined rules will result in a bad harvest for your work. You have squandered the good soil by letting weeds grow, and not painstakingly cultivating seeds.

I hope this message finds you well,
The Best,

X_____.

Harsh words, but true. Now I don’t think my friend the editor was generally decrying talented people, but his words are true enough. I’ve gained more from experience than anything, and that was my first lesson.

That year was a year of bittersweet lessons: a year of rejection. The year I first experienced inadequacy in the writing of my own hand.

I remember the first contest I didn’t win. It was THE x_____ annual poetry and short story competition. I submitted my work with smug satisfaction. It might be a couple of years old, but it was good enough then, the so it should be good enough now. Surely it would merit at least fourth prize.

It wasn’t published. But two girls in my grade, from my high school? Theirs were. Of the thousands of entries, two snooty girls I knew made the top four. How was such a thing possible? Didn’t they know how involved I was, my written track record? This couldn’t happen to me! I had planned to be a prodigy. They were ruining my life.

I fell into a period of self-debilitating bullshit. Sorry, but that’s really the only way to put it. Woe was me, and if only I had ____ I would have the tools to succeed. I believed the entire course of my existence was doomed to failure. Dramatic? Perhaps. But keep in mind the books I read: Shakespeare, Bronte, Austen, Dickens, Tolkien… My life was dictated by tragedy and Victorian novels.
High school breeds dramatic notions.

I didn’t write again ‘competitively’ until first year of university, and my faculty hopping and rejection is another story altogether. I wish I could have helped my teenage self. I would have reached out tender arms, and served her with a slap upside the head. I lost several, valuable years due to my own stupidity.
But hindsight is 20/20, and I didn’t know then what I know now.
See, now I know I was an arrogant little cuss.

Afk this week. Offset by brief periods of sporadic internets. Otherwise I’m literally in a cabin in the woods. I even caught a fishy. :O
Will upload comics when I have internet and my computer isn’t about to die.
Care

Hey all,
haven’t been posting because, I’ll come out and admit it, I suck at schedule. I have several months worth of comics drawn and waiting on my hard drive, like a two dimensional cmyk traffic jam chugging slowly through my system memory. But this isn’t about that. No no no. This isn’t just another post apologizing for being beyond late with comics and promising like a junkie that I’m good for the money, man, and I just need a little more time. *Although I swear there’ ll be a comic up this week, maybe two – I’ll pay you back with interest – just please dear god don’t break my legs with that baseball bat!*

No, this is about admitting someone else has a problem. A very serious problem. And that elusive third party is my schedule.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in an abusive relationship with my schedule. Or, to put it more vividly, my recent schedule has backhanded me thrice with a shovel, and proceeded to viciously brutalize my human form until reducing me to a mere puddle of viscous human goo which bled across the sidewalk. I know, it’s a darling image that thousands of grandmothers across the country will one day immortalize in crosstitch, for the massive tapestry of my life, but whatever. In the immortal words of my favourite teacher my schedule “so sucks the other guy”.

I actually counted up and I have fifty-eight and a half projects on the go. five-eight. That’s a lot, even for me. All are, of course, time sensitive (there’s never any other kind) and several of which I have other people breathing down my neck about. Some of them are really important, and all the others are, well, really important too. At first this confounded me. This seemingly unsolvable equation was addressed by numerous consultants, who’s official reports suggested I “drop something”, or “organize my life and work in order of importance”. Phshaw, I say! Phshaw! I was still confused and concerned about what I should do about my abusive schedule, short of hauling his ass onto a daytime talk show, which admittedly sounded appealing. To me, daytime talk shows are like showdowns at the O.K. coral, only instead of bullets, you get words and public dafamation to wound each other with. Depending on the show’s target audience, sometimes you get to use inanimate objects such as chairs, food, and audience members as projectile ammunition. For some reason normal assault laws don’t apply on tv… but I digress.

Short of having it out with my schedule on network television, I had no other solutions. The local police force refused to take me seriously about the restraining order, and as I was married to another living, breathing person, divorce was not the answer (although the schedule had become like Dupree in our relationship). Then, one night well after four and my eleventeenth cup of earl grey, when I was looking at my hand, and I mean dude, REALLY looking at it, a little green man came out of my macbook and blew pixie dust onto me. No s***. This really happened.
Like an alien Peter Pan, the little Marvin the Marsian bobblehead flew through the air, taking me with him, soaring up and beyond the clouds. He never said a word, but pointed down to a place where the woods walked, mountains spoke, and a second earth, (named creatively, second earth) was being constructed as a summer home by billionaires for launch into space. But best of all, I had an android for a personal assistant. True story. We descended into the teched out reconstruction of my family’s ruined Scottish castle, and there I was, K4R0719, time managed and organized by a pleasant robot named J-9, who’s voice reminded me of her ghostbusters namesake. My army of robots worked tirelessly, while I oversaw and made key decisions by pressing buttons on a massive touchscreen video wall.
Marvin blew his magic dust at me and my future dissolved, like a screen dying one pixel at a time.

When I woke up, my faceplant on the keyboard had prompted an email that went something like fgfdhgfhfhgggggggggffffffffffffff about a hundred times over, like some bizarre string of unutterable gregorian chants for a religious cult. Seriously, if any of you out there are accepting submissions for musical numbers, I’ve got a number one hit for you in my gmail sent folder.
But waking up (if indeed I was asleep, and not transported to a parallel universe by a beloved character violating copyright law) I realised one thing with steely resolution. Clearly, this dream was a message, and I read it loud and clear. I’m highly intuitive like that, and only occasionally delusional. The message was simple. I need to build myself an android as a personal assistant. That would solve all of my problems.
So no, I have not learned anything, except that I probably shouldn’t have caffeine and sugar after midnight.
Care

Here is something I put together for one of my history classes.
I just finished it yesterday.
Identity Animated
Some people think its funny, so I hope you enjoy it.
Am colouring the new comic now, and will have it up soon.
Happy Wednesday,
Care

I promised we’d be back for May, and so we shall be.
Professor Mariachi returns to twice weekly on Wednesday.
See you there!
Care