• Tag Archives writers
  • Straight Talk: Stop Stealing Books, Comics, Art or Any Form of Entertainment, Please

    I am writing this statement on behalf of my fellow writers and artists whose livelihoods depend on the honesty of our readers. This statement is going to be perfectly blunt to ensure crystal clarity in the message.

    And the message is this: Please, stop pirating–also known as downloading illegally–our books, comics, movies, music, audio performances or presentations, art, and anything else that does not belong to you.

    When someone takes something that doesn’t belong to them, it is called stealing. This makes a person a thief. That is what someone who steals is. It does not matter whether the item you took cost pennies or hundreds–even thousands–of dollars to create. In the case of movies, these numbers can run into the millions. The value is irrelevant when it comes to the principle of taking something you didn’t buy and/or did not have permission to use.

    There is a sad and, frankly, pathetic mentality out there that everything on the Internet is free and up for grabs to be consumed however anyone wishes.

    This is not true.

    Yes, there are platforms out there where entertainment work is posted for free in various mediums, but that is where this work is to remain. If a creator posted a piece of art or a photograph to the Internet, you cannot assume you can take it and use it how you see fit. There are rules and there are guidelines and there are permissions to be asked.

    Please, stop stealing our work.

    Downloading pirated movies, TV shows, music, books, comics, art, and anything else illegally is just that: illegal. It is a crime and it is wrong.

    It is even worse when someone takes someone else’s intellectual property and uses it for financial gain. You are profiting off theft. This is also illegal. The excessive amount of fan art in the comic community is a good example of this.

    Please, stop stealing our work.

    Most creators–despite what you might read in the news or see on TV–live paycheck to paycheck just like plenty of other people. We cannot afford to have our readers not pay for our work. If you like our work and want to read it, we thank you, but we ask that you do it ethically and compensate us for the lengthy amount of time and effort and sometimes stress put into various projects.

    If some creators flat out say they are fine with their stuff being pirated, then that’s different and that’s on that particular creator that they are acting ethically to ensure all parties involved with the work are okay with them allowing it to be used and/or consumed for free.

    The Internet does not equal free in the purest sense.

    Please, stop stealing our work.

    Sure, it is understood amongst many creators that many of our readers do not have the means to purchase our material. And while, having lived on the street, I can fully emphasize with that, stealing is stealing. End of story.

    When you steal a piece of entertainment, you are stealing not just the compensation for creating that piece of work, you are stealing a person’s time, which is, like I always say, the most valuable thing any living person has because our lives our finite. You are stealing something that is worth more than any treasure or wealth on the planet. Time is more valuable than diamonds.

    Please, stop stealing our work.

    This is a moral issue.

    It is up to you to decide who you want to be: Someone who is fair and respectful, or someone who steals from others.

    Please, stop stealing our work.

    Thank you.


  • Cracking the Webcomics Code – Thoughts

    For what seems like ages, I’ve wanted to get back into webcomics. I briefly had one when I aired the first issues of Axiom-man many years back (along with some Canister X Comix stuff), then took everything down for various reasons. Recently, I’ve been wanting to do a comic again but know it’s a long slog and one that may or may not pay off, whether via viewership or compensation. (Ideally both.)

    As I mentioned in my Patreon reflections article, if I didn’t have bills to pay, I’d gladly give away my work for free. But I can’t. I have myself and a family to take care of.

    I love comics . . . but they take a long time to create. It takes anywhere from approximately eight to twenty-four hours to make a single page depending on your process and how many people you’re working with. Twenty-four hours. A whole day . . . just for the page to be read in a minute or less. And that’s the main hangup with webcomics: Time. Comics take a ton of time and unless you are independently wealthy, a good chunk of that time is taken up by a part- or full-time job so you can fund the basic essentials for life.

    The standard model for webcomics–which typically make money from ads and merchandise while the comic itself is on-line for free–only works for a tiny percentage of webcomikers. All those other webcomics you love have someone behind them who stays up to all hours working on pages and making enough money off it for a few items but not enough to make a full-time living (if they make any money at all).

    And this is the conundrum: How do I make my webcomic monetarily worthwhile so I have the time to make more of the comic on a regular basis?

    I have some ideas, but thus far they all cater to the standard webcomics’ long game. And by “long game” I mean that getting traction can take anywhere from a few months to several years. There is no recipe I can think of that will shrink that time frame, and I’ve done my research.

    This blog post isn’t a complaint, by the way. It’s just getting my thoughts on webcomics out in front of me so I can see them.

    I’d like to be able to share with you my still-formulating webcomic plan–which incorporates old ideas with [hopefully] new ones–but I can’t because it’s still formulating.

    I’ve had a webcomic in my head for coming up on a week–or maybe it has already been a week? I don’t know–that’s slowly being added to every day, my subconscious bringing ideas and notions to my conscious brain and filing them away as both solid form and possibilities. I’m also not overthinking this stuff either because overthinking and painfully analyzing something leads to disaster, if not immediately then inevitably.

    All I know is there is room for innovation in webcomics. I think what happened was webcomics came out under a certain model thus that model became the norm for comic readers. It’s going to take time to break that norm.

    After being in publishing for sixteen years, I know the industry is constantly changing. What worked for book authors ten years ago doesn’t work now so writers made changes. The same holds true for comics: What worked in the old webcomics model doesn’t work now so it needs an upgrade.

    Back to formulating. Will post more thoughts when I have them.


  • 5 Books that have Influenced me as a Writer

    Like all writers, I’ve read countless books over the years. Some were awesome, some so-so, and even the ones that weren’t that great I still appreciated for the story even if the writing needed some work. Out of all those books, some have impacted me in different ways both personally and professionally.

    Here is a list of 5 books in no particular order that have influenced my writing. I’ve stuck to fiction for this list instead of any writing how-to book.

    1. Stone of Tears by Terry Goodkind – an ultra long read, but worth every page. The dude knows how to paint pictures in your head with his words and, aside from Stone of Tears being a killer story, it was this word-painting that stuck with me and set the bar for how I paint pictures for the reader in my own work. Not saying I’m anywhere near Terry Goodkind’s caliber, but his great description definitely stuck with me over the years.

     

     

     

    2. Batman: Knightfall by Dennis O’Neil – The first superhero fiction book I ever read and my favorite book of all time. (Yeah, I have a soft spot for superheroes, as you well know.) This book got me in Batman’s head in a way the comics didn’t, and humanized him in a way I could relate to on different levels. It also showed me superheroes didn’t have to be confined to four-color comics or to movies. Clearly, this influenced me later on when it came time to write The Axiom-man Saga.

     

     

     

    3. The Summer I Died by Ryan C. Thomas – Easily the most brutal book I’ve ever read, and I don’t mean brutal as in bad. Not only is it an intense story–people kidnapped by a madman–but the violence level in this thing is through the roof. I loved reading it, and I hated reading it. Ryan made you live each terrifying and painful moment his characters went through. Like live-live. Crazy. But it showed me how to get nasty with violence when needed and how to draw the reader in when it came to someone getting hurt, and it reemphasized for me the importance of ensuring the reader is indeed in your characters’ shoes and not outside of them no matter what is happening.

     

    4. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks – Such a bittersweet love story, and it was this book that demonstrated the difference between a romance book and a love story book. It was the love story between the characters that impacted me the most, not their romance, and nowadays when I write two characters in love, I play up the love story angle versus the romantic one. I did this in my book, April, written under the name Peter Fox. To me, love stories have so much more heart than romances.

     

     

    5. Left Behind by Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye – Aside from the entire series being an interesting story of the Earth’s last days before Christ’s return, the writing takeaway from this book–and the rest of the series–were the constant cliffhanger endings to each chapter. It was just non-stop, and since I’ve read them I’ve done my best to cliffhang each scene and each chapter in my own books. Even cliffhang the ending of book one of a series to get the reader pumped for book two. Cliffhangers keep those pages turning.

     

     

    So there you have it. A quick list of 5 books that impacted me as a writer. There are more, but I’ll save those for another post.

    What books have influenced you, whether personally or professionally? Sound off in the comments below.


  • The Meaning Behind Canister X

    Canister X

    “Canister X” is an unusual name for a blog. There’s a story behind why that name was chosen. It’s not a terribly exciting story, but perhaps one that’s slightly amusing.

    As is required of authors, a website is needed. Most writers use their name as their domain name. I did that, too, once upon a time. But one year–I can’t remember which–I forgot to renew the apfuchs.com domain and then I lost it. I tried to re-register it only to find out someone had snatched it up. The site was in German. I had no idea who this person was and didn’t know how to go about reaching them to see if I could have my domain back, so I had to come up with something else. If memory serves me correctly, I decided to rename the site with something unique. I can’t remember the options I went through but “Canister X” came to mind and I assigned meaning to that name. The “Canister” part is after Ninja Turtles, you know, the container that had the mutagen in it. The “X” part was about the site being about anything and not locking me into a particular idea or theme, and as you can see from the content on this site, it’s fairly varied. Sort of a “you never know what you’re gonna get.”

    Later, “Canister X” also became part of the title of my minicomics: Canister X Comix.

    I hope to one day get my A.P. Fuchs domain back and then use it to point to here or vice versa, but until then, Canister X is the name of this thing so we’re running with it.

    This is your blog history lesson for the day.