“WEB OTAKU provides in-depth coverage by expanding on stories in the magazine, along with daily updates of what’s hot in Japanese pop culture, additional manga chapters, game coverage, interviews with artists and writers too extensive to fit in print pages, writing contests, drawing contests, web-only reviews and tips, reader forums and an online community program, bringing an immediacy to the market that has never before been seen.” – From Web OtakuUSA

For Otaku USA, I’m now submitting weekly articles showcasing the new volumes of English-translated manga* coming out each week. It’s a fun column where I get to chat with readers about what new books are coming out, what my top recommendations are and simultaneously plan out my own shopping week. You can check out some of my recent articles posted to the site: August 24 2011, August 17 2011, August 10 2011 and August 3 2011.

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I was hesitant to jump on-board with a new freelance writing job however. Recently I’d stepped down from my role as manga reviewer for the website, AnimeNewsNetwork. Though manga reviewing used to be something I did on a daily basis, today I find myself with much less time to dedicate to it. Leaving ANN was bittersweet – I adore the site and the staff were wonderful, but I couldn’t commit as much as I wanted and they needed. Because of this when the opportunity to write for OtakuUSA came up, I was concerned. Wouldn’t I just run into the same problem?

It was here when I realized what the real ‘wall’ was that I’d hit lately with my reviews. Too much choice. It’s one of the toughest dilemmas with freelance work, it’s often harder to get around than time management. Knowing you have something you have to do but with no set time frame, no defined details. It’s a similar feeling to when a client comes to me saying they want a website – they don’t know what it’ll look like, or even at this point what they’ll use it for, they just know they want one. It’s a hard place to start. Why is it when you can do anything , we often end up feeling pressured to the point of doing or coming up with nothing?

In context to my writing, I used to get review copies sent to me from a variety of book publishers. This would usually equate to about 10-20 a month spanning a couple years. During this time, I reviewed almost everyday. I made a point to read and review each and every title sent to me for my website, Kuriousity – something I was more than happy to do when it thanked the generous companies and helped support sales of the books.

Things in the industry were changing though and eventually  I stopped getting books almost altogether. Granted, I still had no shortage of books at home – I buy a good 10-20 a month on my own. However, my reviewing quickly slowed to nearly a stop. Though I continue to read as much, collect as much, and certainly love just as much, I no longer had that feeling of ‘obligation’ to review them. I still wanted to review them but feeling like the choice was all up to me (which of course it really always was in the first place), suddenly I wasn’t making any ‘choices’ at all.

Being able to realize this issue is an important step towards me fixing it and it remains a work-in-progress. The self-control to work on projects others dictate is one thing, but to set my own personal goals and follow them through is something I find much more difficult. We never want to let down someone else, but yourself? Sure it’s easy in the short term but it’s not a good habit to fall into.

My article writing for OtakuUSA offers a perfect blend of freelance and structure. It makes all the difference for me right now when balancing freelance with a full-time Monday-Friday job along with other project responsibilities. I have a set topic and a set date but the how and when remains in my control.

I still want to find a comfortable way to get back in the swing of my review and casual writing however, something I’ll continue to pursue for now on Kuriousity. * manga = Japanese graphic novels/comics

Today is the launch date for one of my largest web projects – an online web comic for a series called Friends With Boys.

This wasn’t my first experience designing a webcomic utilizing WordPress software. However the scale of this site was considerably different. I’d have a complete archive to work with in advance, hundreds of pages to schedule and the task of designing a website that not only suited the material visually, but would also be easy to navigate for a very large audience.

Creating a webcomic website with WordPress usually brings people to a theme bundle called ComicPress. It’s a popular one-click install that allows users to upload comic pages and have the system automatically create and schedule the posts that display them. I’d used ComicPress in the past but always ran into the same issues. While the system worked wonderfully when it everything was in tip-top shape, if something went wrong – a stray piece of code, a conflict with a web server – there was a huge sea of coding to sift through to find the issue and sometimes it just wasn’t possible. Often a complete re-install was recommended by the theme’s help team which put a huge time damper on the process. Theme editing was the easiest way to screw up the programming and was a huge undertaking all on its own when compared to making custom alterations on a more standard blogging site.

While I taught myself WordPress customization by making alterations to open source templates, over the past two years I’ve stopped doing that and instead prefer to code any theme from scratch. It’s much easier to maintain a website you know the complete ins-and-outs of, plus you learn a lot this way. With what I’d learned, I felt confident I could utilize WordPress as a webcomic platform without the use of ComicPress. I was too worried about something going wrong and not being able to fix it myself.

Creating Friends With Boys utilized a lot of different elements I wouldn’t normally need to utilize in a WordPress website:

• pages that change to accommodate varying comic page sizes
• utilizing blog posts as a comic archive + maintaining area for regular posts
• scheduling large quantity of ‘hidden’ advance posts
• custom image navigation for specific category

Overall this was a great website to work on – I learned a lot and really enjoyed working with the comics’ creator, Faith Erin Hicks. She’s a good friend of mine and we’d previously worked together on her online portfolio. I’ll be continuing to check in on the website and perform maintenance if needed for the duration of its time online.