Surfin’ the Briny Blue

So, I’ve been on a strange odyssey, searching the world for pirate clothes. Yep. Clothes for pirates. But not for me.

I’ve been teaching myself Blender, a free and very cool 3D modeling program. It has tons of cool features, and isn’t all that hard to learn. Sort of.

Hang with me, now. There’s a writer’s story in here.

So, as you probably don’t recall, I’d written a sailing adventure novel called Marigold’s End. In fact, here’s a promo for it.

Well, my wife suggested that I rewrite it again. The version for sale is roughly the 2 gazillionth draft.

You’re a writer. You know how it goes. Writing the stupid thing is about 10 percent of the whole ordeal. It’s rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, until they take the bloody pencil away from you. Or keyboard.

But her suggestion is that I rewrite in a diary format. Funny story – version 3 of the novel WAS a diary, and it got all the way to Disney’s senior editor. Yes, that Disney. He thought about the book for a solid month before rejecting it, feeling that it just wasn’t marketable. Insert sinking ship noise.

Anyway, I rewrote it about forty-seven more times, until it achieved its not very good online version. It’s not bad. It’s just not great. It made my daughter cry within the first fifteen pages – “you call this a kid’s story?” she sobbed. I answered “well, no…”

Anyway, my wife suggested that I make my own feature length film of it. After I settled down, we talked about it, and agreed that it would be cool, really cool, to instead make it into a series on YouTube. Each segment just a few minutes long, visually covering an important aspect of the book.

My best friend from way back suggested that I make it an audio book, and I’ve thought about it. This video thing is a second cousin to that.

So far, I’ve got a ship, I’ve got stories, I’ve got a rigged, animated crew, even a theme song. Everything I need.

Except flippin’ clothes. For the life of me, I cannot get the clothes-making dealio in Blender to work. There must be 400 tutorials about HOW to make it work, but none of them DO make it work.

This video, however, shows you why I need the clothes, among other things. All three of those guys, and particularly poor, shabby Phineas, there, at the desk, could use some appropriate clothing!

It will eventually be the introduction to each episode – we’ll dolly over the desk and zoom in on the book, which will rise up to become the title. Oh yeah, I’ve got it worked out.

I just cannot get the clothes to work right. And that’s why I’m surfin’ the briny blue to find pirate clothes. No wonder they said “arrrrrrrghhh.”