When I was a kid, I LOVED to draw. Not just a little. A LOT. Drawing was my life. I lived for it. I breathed drawing. I drank drawing. I sleeped drawing… I wanted to grow up to be a draw-er… didn’t realize till later that there was no such word…

I don’t know for sure exactly when that became my favorite thing to do. It just always was. I especially drew in church. It was my church-going activity. While everyone else sang, I drew. While the preacher preached, I drew. I was made to stop during prayers… but I would have drawn then too if I could have gotten away with it.

And it wasn’t just me. My best friend at that time was Keith Hensley, and he loved to draw too. We both sat in church and drew. And other times. We had notebooks (lined writing paper notebooks) that we filled with drawings. And when it came time for the Hartsburgs to move away to Germany, we traded notebooks… But even then, Keith continued to be a influence in my drawing because it was he who got me into comics even while we were in different countries. So of course, comics became my new primary influence in my artwork. I stopped drawing cartoons and started drawing comic characters. I lined my walls with my drawings. I had an endless slew of my own characters that were by and large decently-veiled knock-offs of the X-Men. I had hundreds of potential continuing stories for them in my head and I mainly drew what could have been covers for those stories…

Until, at some point, I realized that I had much more of knack for the stories than the artwork, came to lose faith in my ability to draw at all, and eventually let it fall by the wayside. It would be many, many years before I would really come back into drawing. Sure, I drew a bit here and there. I took some art and drawing classes in school. But I never really took it seriously again. And in time, I let the passion fizzle out and die. Or… at least, I thought it died… It wouldn’t be until I was about 22 or 23 years old before I would discover that the passion was just lying dormant, and when that happened, it was once again due to a friend of mine, this time: Jon Surber.

Although, Josh Turner deserves some credit here as well. It was he who basically pushed me into trying to take my love of writing and turning it into something I could do for God… ‘cuz that’s what Josh does… so he got it into his head that I should spearhead a newsletter for the singles of Eastside with various articles both humorous and otherwise… and Jon thought it should have comics. And Jon planned to make those comics… He made the first one. And apparently, I may subconsciously get a little competitive in the drawing arena, because I thought, “Well, hey, I could do that!” So Jon made one comic… and I made three. And I just kept going…

They were simple little, gag-comics, but they led me to wanting to do more… to make something with more of a continuing story but that was still funny… and that’s how Adventures of Josh was born… Now, here, you probably have more or less heard the story. Adventures of Josh was fun and really reignited the passion for me, but it still managed to fall by the wayside until ydk was forged in my mind, and AoA became something of a descendent of AoJ. That, you know…

So why am I telling you all this in this blog? Well, it’s not just to flesh out my history with art to you… It’s because this past weekend at work, the reignition of my passion took one more huge step forward… and for the first time since childhood, I discovered that I really LOVED to draw…

 See, with the birth of the Singular Times comics, I discovered that I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. With the birth of Adventures of Josh, I rediscovered a passion for using artwork as a storytelling device. And over time, with Adventures of Ak, I rediscovered that I actually liked drawing. But this past weekend, I found that I loved it. I found that it gave me a joy I had not experienced in drawing since I was a kid, filling notebooks with my silly little drawings during church. I loved it then. It was my joy. And this past weekend, it became a joy to me again.

Once again, I realized that I may be a little competitive in this particular arena as it was my coworker Jimmy showing me what he draws (he likes to draw all sorts of snazzy little designs that mostly look like something people like to get tattooed on their bodies) that inspired me to bring my own work to… er… work with me… And as I sat there at the desk with the pad of paper sitting in front of me, going to work on drawings without my usual concern for who was looking over my shoulder at what I was doing that I rediscovered my love.

I know it’s weird that I have a comic in which I display my artwork for all to see online but still usually hesitate to let anyone see what I’m doing as I’m actually drawing it. But that’s what I do… But I made an effort to ignore that particular compulsion and started drawing at work. It was the first time since childhood I had drawn unabashedly like that, and it clicked something inside me. I reflected upon it as I drove around the golf-cart and that’s when I realized the most wonderful thing: I was really loving it.

I tell you all this for a couple reasons: First off, it’s hard to describe just how wonderful a thing that was to realize. I haven’t described it well enough here. It may not be something you can fully describe. It may just be something you have to feel. But it was wonderful and I felt I had to tell people about that wonderful feeling. Secondly… I want to use it to encourage you to find your own childhood passion. I don’t know what it might be for you… but there was something for you in childhood that created an incredible sense of unadulterated wonder and joy in you that, chances are, you haven’t experienced since then. You probably never thought you could again. But you can. And I want to encourage you to find it. Because there’s nothing like it. But it’s something that everyone should get the chance to feel, at least every now and again. So do what you have to do to find it. But DO make sure that you do it. Life is too hard not to let yourself feel that way sometimes. That’s the stuff that makes the hard parts worth the struggle.

Trust me: I know what I’m talking about.

The unicorn is an elusive creature, this is true. But does this mean it does not exist? Well… yeah, probably… but at least in the case of the “unicorn” of Episode 10, it absolutely exists, however elusive it may have been.

Technically speaking, Episode 10 was originally supposed to be on the site way back around March or August. But shooting of earlier episodes at the time became hampered and the gaps between new episodes started stretching out to as much as months at a time. Then came my new job, and we were probably lucky to get Episode 9 out when we did (it was pretty off schedule too, having been originally promised months earlier, then set for May, it ended up coming to us in June). Despite all this, though, I was optimistic about getting Episode 10 done and online by the end of June… and then by the end of July… and then by the day after Labor Day… and then the Friday after Labor Day… and then the Monday after that… and finally, it’s up (though work still needs to be done to get it on par or better with/than the presentation of previous episodes) on the following Tuesday…

There was such an unbelievably long time between Episodes 9 and 10 that many came to believe Episode 10 would in fact NEVER come… and I have to say: as much as I’ve insisted that it really was real and really would come, there were moments where I even had to doubt myself. When it came down to the wire and I had just a week left before my “final” deadline of the day after Labor Day, I was trying to arrange shooting like mad, and a lot of it was just falling through. Which is why I had to reschedule for the Friday after Labor Day so I could finish shooting that very same week. But I underestimated a few things.

First, I underestimated… or rather I OVERestimated my ability to say, “No,” to my boss guilting me into working extra hours. I suck. Secondly, I underestimated how much shooting really needed to be done and how long the script I had written really was. Thirdly and biggest…. er… -ly… I MAJORLY underestimated how long the editing process was actually going to take. Not only is this our longest episode (five whole minutes longer than the previous longest episode, which was in turn the ten-minute Episode 9), but it included a great many little tidbits from previous episodes and old footage only seen by the cast itself and seventy or so of our closest friends (collectively speaking). Which meant a whole lot of sifting through tapes that I’ve neglected to properly mark (I have a lot of unmarked tapes), uploading, editing, deleting, uploading some more, more editing, deleting, even more uploading, etc.

All in all, even if I had managed to start the editing process earlier, I never had a hope of finishing by my Friday deadline. There just wasn’t enough time. But there were all sorts of things ready to step in and eat up more of the time… and so they did. But I remained optimistic and insisted to myself (even as I had a nagging doubt at the back of my mind attempting to assert its presence) that I could at least finish it and get it online after I got off my 12-hour shift on Sunday so that it would be online by the time most got up on Monday… well, I actually almost succeeded on that one. Almost…

I worked for hours after my shift on Sunday and finished the editing process. I drearily kept myself awake at six and seven in the morning on Monday as I waited for the stupid thing to copy onto a disc (this was after, by the way, a fun little bit where I ran out of usable discs that I could record the episode on which resulted in a frantic search for a blank disc that eventually rewarded me). Meanwhile, I opened a new account on youtube, this one a Director account (having previously just used my original regular account to upload videos), because I THOUGHT that those with Director accounts could upload longer videos (I’m pretty sure that they could when youtube first introduced Director accounts anyway….), but I was evidently wrong…

I was running out of available time to get some sleep in before I would have to get up again to go to work on Monday afternoon, so I frustratedly gave up and resolved to get the episode up instead on Tuesday. It was a big disappointment for me. I had already pushed the episode back enough times. I hated doing it this last time more than any, but I had little choice. I started to make a go at at least informing site-goers of my failure before I crashed, but the computer was acting too slowly and I was too frustrated and tired, so I ultimately just gave up, and collapsed into bed.

And so… this was a much more interesting story when I thought about telling it several hours ago, but I guess exhaustion and accumulated frustration still present and reviving itself with the memory of all the trouble all combines to make this particulary difficult to make very entertaining… So… suffice it to say: I’ve caught the unicorn, it’s on display FINALLY, and I hope you find it to be the best unicorn ydk has ever given you.

That is all. For now… Come to the forums and we’ll discuss episode 10 in more detail. There’s certainly a lot of interesting new information from it that we could delve into. Plus, we could talk about the artists who allowed us to use their music. Much like Episode 9, the addition of this music added A LOT to the episode, and really helped to cement it into a solid finished product.

“The Director” has spoken!