Well, it's been a couple of months since my last post.

I have a problem where I'll start getting good at something, say "That's good enough." and then lose all interest. That's more or less what happened with me and my contributions to the art community. I ended up finding a job bartending at a little hole in the wall, it's been helping me stay afloat with bills and such, but I stopped doing anything art-wise for a while.

Last month I finally started working on the website for my comic, www.bartenerds.com. (Yeah, yeah, it's a corny name. Think of something better, and I'll be happy to steal it.) Everything on the site is made from scratch, while finally learning Photoshop, I've been dabbling in Dreamweaver and HTML as well. I told myself I wasn't going to advertise for it at all unless I managed to at least go a month without falling behind. Well, I got to a month's worth of material (Updated Monday, Wednesday, Friday) and I'm working on uploading the last few comics from the last week and I'll be caught up to the current date.

This has been the most ambitious thing I've ever done in my sad little life and just from posting a few comics on here and Reddit, the site has already had over 10,000 views since October 1st. Granted, in the grand scheme of things, that doesn't mean a whole lot compared to the millions of views the more well known webcomics attract every week. Still, considering that up until this summer I've never contributed anything to the Internet other than a post on Toonzone (member since 2001), I'd be content with just getting 20 views a day.

Newgrounds, to me, is where any motivation I have was born. Between the positive responses to the Flash and constantly seeing better artists than me posting their work every day, I can honestly say that without this site, I would never have done any of this. This post is just a way to say thank you all for helping me start this race and attempt to do something more with my life than serve people drinks.

I've been an artist since I was a kid, but I've never actually worked on anything of my own for more than a few hours. All my work has been copies of other people's work, or a portrait of someone I know. I've never even opened the Photoshop program before, and despite having a Wacom Intuous 2 tablet since 2006, it's just been collecting dust in front of four different computers since then.

I've easily drawn more in the last month than I have in my entire life and I can already see a notable improvement in my work despite still not attempting anything crazy (yet). Every day I must spend at least 8 hours in front of my computer working on shit, and I haven't been able to get any instant feedback from the site considering I haven't shown anyone. I've decided to keep everyone in my life and the 500+ people on my Facebook in the dark as to the existence of what I'm attempting here. If this actually takes off, I want it to be simply from you all, the people of the Internet. The only people in my life that I can relate to, despite never having met any of you.

Once the last few comics are uploaded to the site by the end of the weekend, I've been simultaneously working on a Flash animation for the "About" portion of the site as an introduction to what I'm trying to accomplish here. Hopefully that goes up here within the next week. It's 7:30 am on November 11th and I wanted to get this written down before I lost my train of thought as I've got like 3 Adobe programs open in the background all waiting for me to get back to them.

Thanks again, Newgrounds.
You're all my muse.
Cool runnings!

Joe Sim
www.bartenerds.com