I worked on thirty pages today.  This marks the third time through the book on this pencils stage.  I should be done before Thanksgiving with the third time through.  I figured that I would blaze through this part, and I was right.  I hope to be done with the pencils by next weekend.  Then I will start to ink the text, and then the final inks.

In the next month-and-a-half or so I will go see a friend in Galveston.  I haven't been to Galveston since the '80's.  I plan on staying there for a weekend.  She really likes the Richy Vegas records.  Particularly the "Blind Assassin" songs.  I have four more "Blind Assassin" songs for the new record, "Self Portrait of Me."  I plan on bringing the guitar and playing some of them for her.

I managed to practice twelve days so far this month, so I've exceeded the total from last month.  I hope to do at least seven more days this month.

I came down with a raging cold the other day.  I've missed exactly one day of work because of it.  I picked it back up tonight.  i forced myself to work on about nine or ten pages.  If I do that kind of production a good deal of the time for 17 or 18 days this month, I should come in right on schedule.  I hope to be done with the pencils by the middle of next month.

At this stage I go through the stack and pick random pages to work on.  I figure that I've done about nineteen pages this way so far this month.  After another week, week and a half of this process, I will go through the stack and look for pages that I have not worked on that much.  I will then work on those pages.   I might do this one more time-going through the stack and working on underworked pages.  Then, I will start at the beginning and go through the pages from front to back.  I might do one last check to see if a lot of underworked pages still stand out.

If I can work about an hour to an hour-and-a-half on the pages per work day at this point, I'm doing pretty good.   I really hate pencil work for reasons I've gone into before,  Mainly that involves lots of decision making with the preliminary pencils not looking good at all.

I found it that much harder to work on my music than on the plates.  I did only one song.  I'm trying to increase the number of days per month that I work on my music.  Last month I worked on my music on eleven days.  I set a goal of eight days this month.  The idea is to set a goal that I know I can achieve.  That way I will more readily commit to working, get to my goal, and in the remaining days of the month I can work to exceed last months' total number of days.  I hope to work up to a number of days  that are comparable to what I put in on my comic books.  I got the idea for setting modest goals that fall short of what I've done from Dr. David Burns' self-help book, "Feeling Good."  It was from reading that book that I came up with a self-diagnosis of Love Addiction as the cause of my depressive episodes, and thus the cause of my psychotic episodes, so I recommend it.

My webmaster pointed out that I had 109 hits on my site last week.  Lord only knows what that's about.  For a few months now I've speculated that some employees of a certain business I patronize might be reading this blog.  I speculated that a young woman that I mixed it up with around this time last year got the idea when she saw my "Richy Vegas" t-shirt.  I'd written some about her and the unfolding situation in this blog.  I never resorted to name calling  or anything really dark in what I wrote about her.  She just turned out to be another elusive/unavailable young woman that I felt compelled to cut loose.

I guessed correctly that my intelligent decision regarding this young woman would lead to a gunfighter mentality in other young women at this business; that other young women would then want a crack at me.  And so it came to pass.

The third challenger in this mix turned out to be about as vexing as the young woman that started it all.  I knew enough just to slow things down and pick my spots.  Leonard Cohen has a line from his song, "Hallelujah," that goes, "The only thing I ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew ya."  And so it came to pass.

The point of this entry is this: someone has to be the responsible party in these little dances, and long before any of these women were born, I decided that would be me.  Yes, at 23, untreated mental illness and all, relatively inexperienced in dating and relationships, not really looked at as someone who could take charge, I had no choice but to be the responsible party.  When I left it up to the girl to call the shots, if it was a certain kind of girl with a certain kind of attitude towards me, things could go sideways in a hurry

Being the responsible party, it became less about taking advantage of "opportunities," and more about making "intelligent decisions."  "Intelligent decision" is code for cutting them loose.  I've never dated someone who's presented themselves as an elusive/unavailable woman.  I don't think I've ever stood in the way of such a person from dating me if they really wanted to.  I've simply never dated someone who's been like that with me, and I don't expect that to change.

In conclusion, it it is indeed the case that employees of this particular business read this blog, then I hope I've given you something.  If the young women concerned read this, I hope I've given you more than you would get from reading a daily horoscope.