Part 3: God may not answer your prayers, but he’ll always call your bluff.

Part 3: God may not answer your prayers, but he’ll always call your bluff.

So, when I got back from Disney World, I got to work on my new comic strip “Guy.” The plan was to take one last solid shot at mainstream syndication. After a couple of months, I had enough strips I was happy with to put together a package and send it in to the syndicates. A few examples are at the end of this post.

The syndicates didn’t bite, and that didn’t bother me for two reasons. One, I knew it was a tremendous long shot from the get-go, and two, about halfway through the creation of my 65 guy strips for the submission package I realized that while it was fun, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as doing Basic Instructions. When the no thanks letters started rolling in, I started weekly production on Basic Instructions. One added reason I’m glad I gave daily syndication one last shot is that working on guy forced me to develop some techniques that really streamlined my art production. Basic Instructions looks much better and is much easier to produce because of it.

Around this time my wife attended an Improv festival in Chicago. A couple of weeks before she left she informed me that Disney was conducting an audition at the festival. She auditioned, and she felt it went well, but these people were auditioning hundreds of people, so she knew the odds of something coming of it were slim.

As last fall was beginning to set in, my wife received a phone call from representatives from Disney. They were coming to Seattle and wanted her to attend those auditions. Also, there were some call back auditions in Orlando in about a month and she was welcome to come out at her own expense to attend those if she wished. We looked at our finances and at the cost of airfares at the time, and decided that our Christmas gift to ourselves that year would be a late fall, weekend trip to Disneyworld. We would be there for two days. Day one would be her audition and day two would be a full assault on the parks. It’s a good thing we went, because the Seattle audition was eventually canceled due to weather.

Again, her audition went well, but there were about twenty people auditioning for something like three jobs, and all but two of the people auditioning already lived in Orlando and Worked for Disney, so she was not optimistic. Our one day Disney-Blitzkrieg was a ton of fun and left us exhausted for days afterward. During this trip I took a camera-phone picture of my favorite ride (The Tower of Terror) and set it as the wallpaper on my phone.

Two weeks later or so, I was playing poker with some friends and one of them told me I should send Basic Instructions into the Seattle Weekly. I had been thinking of the strip as being strictly a web comic, but my friend convinced me that I had nothing to lose. I took his advice and sent in my 12 most recent strips and a short letter, expecting to receive another rejection to throw on the pile.

Next time, Part 4: Everything happens at once.