Snow’s rapidly falling outside and I’m struck by the fact that winter is most definitely here again. It always looks so much better through a window or when you have no where in particular to go. Trudging through the weather for work will be annoying, as always.

I came down with a horrendous cold and missed three days of work while I fought it off. It was torture as it crept from my sinuses through to my lungs. Although it wasn’t as bad as when I nearly came down with pneumonia around Easter, it was still pretty ugly. The worst part was the cold sores that followed the cold. Probably the worst I’ve ever had them…really sore, swollen and painful. Not fun.

Once I got over that, I had a lot of catching up to do at work. Luckily, my new class is quite decent and stayed on task while I was battling sickness. Except for the stack of marking I have to catch up on, things are back up to speed.

The webcomic is going incredibly well, if you’ve been following along. I’m getting a lot more confidence with Photoshop and the newest crop of pages (which won’t be on the site for 3 weeks) are looking pretty nice. I want to keep pushing myself, try different approaches and coloring techniques as I go. I don’t want it to get stagnant for me. If you’ve been reading, I hope you’ve enjoyed what’s there so far. It’s even easier to tell people where it is, as I picked up the .com address this week. Tell them all

www.makeshiftmiracle.com

The readership is quite solid, and rising each week. I’ve already crossed 75,000 page views and the word is spreading further as I’ve gotten an e-mail from Australia and one from France about it.

I did a lot of reading about Windows XP with the release this week. There was the odd bad press, but a lot of overwhelmingly good press about its stability and control. Even the registration that everyone was complaining about seems less stringent than what was initially thought it would be. It intrigued me enough for me to pick it up and give it a try.

If you know anything about installing computer components, you know the hell of reinstalling your OS. Driver conflicts, installing each piece one at a time, reboot after reboot and praying for hours everything works properly. I will proudly say that installing XP was easily the simplest and most enjoyable process I’ve ever had on a computer. With all my components hooked up fully (video card, sound card, network card, router, scanner, digital camera, Wacom tablet, Cd-Burner and DVD-Rom drive…) XP recognized all of it without me having to put in any other CDs or disks or anything! I never even opened up me computer box once. I had the all my old software installed along with XP and everything up to speed within about an hour and a half.

Instant recognition and perfect compatibility, it was freakish. Things like the scanner would have taken me longer to open the drawer to my CD-Rom drive then the time it took for it to recognize it and have it running flawlessly. I have been unable to crash it (even though I’ve tried) and it runs my machine faster than ever before. Unbelievable. Microsoft making a kick ass product like this seems like I’m in the Twilight Zone. No complaints.

This weekend’s been good. Working away on pages for Makeshift Miracle and relaxing. I received a call from Cary Nord this week and we got together today, which was very cool. Cary’s a comic book artist that I met last year and he’s a really nice guy. We’d always met with groups of people, but he’d recently moved and called me up out the blue to hang out. He came over today and he brought a bunch of his Marvel and DC comics pages. It’s strange seeing the published artwork right in front of you like that. It was a good way of seeing how much further I could go on my drawings if I spent 8-10 hours on a page instead of the 45 minutes to an hour I currently use in my spare time to draw out the Makeshift Miracle stuff. I scanned in one of his sketches of the Incredible Hulk and colored it up in Photoshop, which was quite fun and a good challenge for me. Considering it only took me about an hour to color, I’m pretty proud of it.

Anyways, that’s the report for this time. Next time I’ll have digital photos and more news on the happenings of late October and early November.

(Here’s the e-mail I originally wrote yesterday to send today. Obviously the tone is much happier than the Newsletter I sent out about the US attack. The important part is the announcement within.)

I’ve got some kick ass news for everyone! It’s an announcement and then a series of requests and strategies…listen closely now 🙂

Back in August I told you guys about the webcomic I’ve been working on. Well, it’s here!

I received web space last night and just finished uploading everything for the page. It’s exciting and intimidating all at the same time. Now that I’ve set up this update schedule (new pages on Mon, Wed, Fri and sometimes tutorials or sketches on other days), I really have to stick with it. I’ve got a lot of material done up ahead of time, but I have to do at least 3 pages a week in order to stay ahead. And dammit, I will do it! It’s a great challenge for me and something I can really sink my teeth into. Regular artwork from Jimbo telling a slowly building story. Yippee!

Here’s the address:

miracle.keenspace.com

(Notice the lack of www in that address, it’s important that it does not have it.)

“But Jim,” you say “is there anything I can do to help you promote this website to the masses?”

Hell, yes!

I’m asking, requesting, practically begging you to check it out. If you like what you see, spread the word. It’s that viral marketing thing. Tell at least three friends and maybe they’ll tell three friends and so on and so on. Tell more if you’d like 🙂

I want to slowly but surely create an audience, starting of course with people that know me and give a crap about what I’m doing.

Check out the site on update days for new story pages (Mon, Wed, Fri) (That means there will be one up tomorrow!). Hell, check on other days just for some extra hits on the site. The real key though is getting different people to check it out. Each time a new person sees it on their computer, that’s registered on the Keenspace server as a unique IP and person. As much as I’d love to tell you to just go to my page and hit Refresh 40 times a day, that won’t get actually show a strong audience to them. Unique computers checking the site each day will.

If I can build a firm audience, the chances of my site getting promoted to the full Keenspot site increases dramatically. If that happens, it would show my work to a much wider audience and who knows what else…

Tell people about it and visit it regularly! It would mean so much to me!

While you’re there, scroll to the bottom and click on the Keenspace Top 99 button. It registers votes that you like what I’m doing. It’s a great way for other people to see and get exposure to my site.

I’ll be blitzing the web in other ways to get people to try it out, but I’m hoping that you guys can help me out in that way. This pet project of mine is a big step and I can’t wait to see what it brings. Whether or not it becomes a hit, I want to create something and put it out there. I hope you like it.

Thanks in advance.