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The No-Update Update

Long time, no updates. Apologies to the folks who regularly check in. I've been swamped with freelance work lately, which -- while it's fantastic to actually get paid to write stuff -- also tends to:

a) lengthen the cycles between finished articles (when people pay you to write things for them, it turns out they unreasonably demand you submit several drafts of it until it's, you know, good);

b) lead to opportunities that pay well but aren't terribly funny. Nowadays I'm as likely to be doing layout or design work for other people's articles as writing my own, or writing assignments that'd just look really out of place on JP.com.

The other thing that's slowing me down is an eventual move of this whole site to a new server over on Neron Network. They seemed to like both my sites and offered me free hosting space -- sounds good to me. The new space means I can finally add a lot of sections (a forum, art section, etc), and I swear the designing just swallows up the time. I'll be hunched over a template adjusting color schemes and table lengths and suddenly look up to find it's midnight.

Hopefully I should have some JP.com content up soon -- I should have that short story I put up a while ago finished soon. And I've received enough email urging me to write more Inspector Poon that I figured I'd give it another shot. And I'm having a ton of fun with the comics, which are also getting received well. I might try something ambitious with it one of these days. Lastly, I've been meaning to do another one of those trailer rewrites.

Other people have written me about the fate of The Trailer Trash. Why no updates? Well, the thing is this: I work all week. I write on weeknights when I can, but the bulk of anything I create is created on Sundays. This used to be my Trailer Trash update day, and more or less, a typical update took me anywhere from four to eight hours. After a year of it, a) I got a bit bored with it, b) I noticed my JP.com traffic far outweighed my TTT traffic, and c) I only had so much time in the week, and time I could have been spending writing sellable articles I was maintaining a website I wasn't incredibly interested in anymore.

To those of you who liked it, and write to me wondering when I'm updating it again: Trailer Trash isn't dead. It's just sleeping. When I wake up and want to write a review, I will. But I'm not going to force it, cause you wouldn't want to read it. (Trust me.)

So, new stuff on the horizon -- and hopefully with the addition of a modestly-sized forum, I'll be able to chat more with some of you, so it's not just the one-way ass-kissing of the comments section.

Before I go, I wanted to tell you to go read Ultimate Spider-Man by Brian Michael Bendis. It's a series relaunch that Marvel put into place a few years back to capitalize on the Spider-Man movie, and it's aimed at non-comic readers as a target audience. I just got back into it recently (it's up to issue #57 now), and I was floored by the quality of the story-telling and consistency of the characterization.

Forget that it's comics, forget that it's Spider-Man -- honestly, just try for one second and pick up the series (or, if you're feeling rebellious, downloading it through bit torrent, though I don't advocate that, cough cough). If you're willing to just let the story take you, I guarantee you'll have your socks charmed off your feet. It's got a level of heart and care for its characters that you don't see in most movies or TV, let alone comics where people dress in tights and beat up villains in aviaries.

Jay out.