What's The Point?

What's the point I ask myself? What is the point of me doing blogs and videos at the age of 60? Do I really think I'm important enough to make a rich persons income or even a difference? Do I really think I can compete with other writers such as Michael Crichton or J. K. Rowling? Not at all. At most, I only ever hoped for a small fan following and to make maybe $50K annually off my work. Do I do it to have fun? Most anyone will answer that it should be to have fun, make a difference, and so on. But most of them have an audience. Besides, I've always had fun doing my story telling anyway. Especially when I was an early teen! A decade and a half since leaving my work world job at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and trying to get an audience, I get nothing out of it beyond having fun. To say nothing of making a difference or making a decent income. You can only amuse yourself for so long. I've always studied other peoples work from time to time. Whether it has been magazine articles in days past or You Tube now, I study to see what makes other successful while I fail. I'll never know why I fail while others succeed. You Tube, Twitter, Facebook etc. are places where even average people can be published. One can see all sorts of people publishing their works. I could try to publish my works and get seen on Facebook, Twitter, etc. but I generally do vid work these days.

So much for 21st century style but in any case, the CGI graphic novel style I used for my stories allowed me to tell stories and illustrate them as well. I've been using this technique since I was the age of ten. This example comes from a pic done in or around 2006 when I was half a century in age. The smudgy star like spot in the sky is the "Mars Voyager" plasma propulsion system ignition which takes place in 2024 in this story. A site that may be viewable for earthbound observers if we ever actually send humans to mars.

 

From my beginnings in 1966 to 2008 to be exact, I thought I did pretty decent where graphics and writing are concerned. It even appeared I could do a lot outside of my familiar graphic novel realm as a result of helping a client. I helped with his video by blending 3D stills and animations I did into my clients videos, even doing the end credits. All for an indy movie he produced. I also began a PR campaign involving contacting monster and sci fi fan mag's which were the natural market for his work. To no avail. That resulted in a slump in my own work and then I picked back up slowly after another major setback occurring in 2009. I did non-publishable hobby work from 2012 to 2014 and was also active publishing my 3D works on the internet Renderosity gallery. Then I was hospitalized early in 2015 and discharged myself when the doctors thought I was going to die. I recovered at home but that took 6 months and during that time, I lost interest in my graphics activities in a way I never had before. Six or seven months of no activity resulted. I'd given up.

This before and after pic was one I did for a client in 2008 or so. The before pic being an original image of his actors. The "After pic" being my modifications. Not ILM quality, but my client thought it passable. The still image came from a  movie my client had finished in 2007. However, he had me do some additional website work for him. Like me, he has not found success and has since moved overseas.

 

Having nothing much to do, I resolved to pick back up and start fresh on New Years day of this year with short video projects instead of lengthy graphic novels  nobodies going to read or even know about for that matter. The GNs took anywhere from 3 months to a few years to finish. Five minute videos have so far taken only a few days to three weeks to complete. Since New Years, I've posted 4 with a 5th ready to post. My big problem has been how to get exposure. I see silly videos like "Gangnam Style" get thousands of posts within a few hours of being posted. Gangnam style is now at 2 billion plus views. It was professionally done but I see amateurish crap get numerous hits as well. And I know you have to have a hook to get people interested so I can only assume my hooks suck. I don't get any hits unless I spend hours debating target audiences, and then my videos will maybe get only two hits.

 

This scene from a sci fi story of mine about shrinking people. It may seem like the idea was a rip from "The Incredible Shrinking Man" or "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" but this story has it's own surprise ending which could be a beginning. However, I never finished it so the ending is still only in my mind.

 

In my youth, I kept my Westgate city works to myself. That concept more or less being ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances in my fictional town of Westgate. No superheroes or even batmen in Westgate, although I experimented with the batman like idea as an early teen. My shtick has always mainly been human spaceflight and over the top realism to the extent possible. An example being if there is a moon in the night sky, it should be where it's positioned and in the correct phase astronomy publications show it to be in. However, I've known since my early teens that realism isn't what sells. So I tempered it as best I could. An example being my Mars exploration stories focus on crew and situations between men and women as much as going to Mars itself. I won't go into any more details on the mechanics of my story telling here. Suffice it to say it seems I'm not an engaging story teller. So why do it I ask myself?

This image is an example of both my late 1970s ideas and drawings and later, the building of this aircraft idea in the computer (Inset). I even color picked the originals Crayola colors, the typed numbers of which can be seen just above the profile view of this gargantuan vehicle. When I drew this in 1977 or 78, I pegged the vehicle for operations in 1995. This because the future was always projected by movies, magazines etc. to be far more spectacular than it actually became. The original image was not intended for publication. I scanned it into my computer a few years back.

 

In the past few years, I do it because it has become the slightly morbid idea of just leaving something behind after I'm dead. I can't even call it a legacy. I'm not important enough to have a legacy. Much of my work in recent years has been related to future human spaceflight as it might occur were NASA to be doing it. That in part because many of my near future ideas are just variations on actual NASA or NASA contractor ideas. The difference is, I use my own spacecraft designs. But even those ideas closely conform to what is known to be realistic. No Star Wars, anti-gravity or perpetual motion designs. Anti-gravity of sorts is reserved for my space travel of the far future since nobody knows how that's going to work, including me. With actual NASA human spaceflight on hold beyond ISS, I don't do that sort of story anymore and I stopped doing GNs because of the time involved doing them with no return on my investment. I've also been doing my story telling using CGI since 1998. I don't have an audience for any of it because it's a niche market audience at best. The work I did prior to my CGI era was largely personal and unpublishable anyway.

 

What made me think I could even interest a small fan base? 

I still can't answer that given I was generally cautious about major goals most of my life. I never bought into the "Believe in yourself" idea alone because I would think of many thousands doing just that and standing in movie audition lines over and over only to be turned away, while one lucky person might make it. Making it involves more than just one person believing in themselves. Other people eventually get involved and help determine ones path to fame. I managed to work at KSC from 1984 till 2000. My best professional 16 years. I worked there as a technician and later QA inspector. Nothing I'll be remembered for. I never expected to be remembered for that anyway. And in a sense, it took 7 years of preps in the work world and the USAF to build my resume because I didn't have a college degree.

I was told I had some graphical and story telling ability as an early teen by my parents and a few others. Nobody in high school except a best friend and girl friend knew about that activity. A few in the AF and KSC saw my work as well. Non of them ever said anything more than that I should work for Disney. Decades later, I get to see people younger than me making a difference often in huge ways. Or seeing someone close to my age making a difference. An example being the late Michael Jackson and his dancing, song writing and singing. I can still recall seeing MJ when he was part of the Jackson 5 and wondering if I would reach his level of fame. But as my mid teens hit, I knew I wouldn't reach that lofty a level. So I focused on work world employment after HS graduation and decided to get into aerospace. Getting the KSC work lead to a 15 year sabbatical in my writing although I still maintained my drawing works. By writing, I should point out my graphic novel activity prior to my employment at KSC, consisted of comic book formatted style of story telling. Drawing during my KSC years meant drawing spacecraft designs I wanted to use in stories that never materialized during that period. Prior to my CGI era, I did type out a spaceflight and time travel story intended for publication but of course, was unsuccessful in my attempts to publish them.

Orion is a popular name for spacecraft concepts. I named my Mars Transit Vehicle (MTV) concept Orion in the early 1990s when I made this drawing (Among many) and typed in the text. I've since come up with my own name for MTVs which is "Mars Voyager". This image clearly illustrates my borrowing NASA ideas and reshaping them into something with my signature so to speak. USV was one of my rare collaborations. I collaborated with 4 other technicians, a supervisor and an engineer. But even USV was built upon early NASA  space tug ideas. The 1983-1998 period was one of low energy imagination for me.

When the internet came about, I saw the potential for average people like me to publish and tried to do so. I can of course, make a website or go to the tube and publish all day long. But if I can't get the traffic without spending large sums of money I don't have, what's the point? So now I just want to leave something behind. I can still hear the faint voices of people long gone saying I was meant to be a graphics person as though I'd hit it big. I'd say artist but that's too hoyty toyty for me so I don't go there, but that's what a few of the long gone voices called me. I mean, an artist is someone who is truly accomplished IMO. They generally have a large body of work and their works matter to many. I may have been meant to do graphics all my life, but only as a hobby not to be appreciated by more than a few others. I don't mean to seem like I'm disparaging those few others because they are all I have or had and I do appreciate them. But I did what I did in hopes of a reasonable fan base of some kind. Since that's apparently not meant to be...I'll just post what I consider most important to me and be done with it.