I know I have that sales slip here somewhere…

“Evil: Like good, but without the guilt.”

For a lot of folks, the Internet is pretty much synonymous with the dark arts. Not because it’s evil, but because it’s arcane and obscure. Tell them “Enter these twelve numbers in the ‘DNS‘ field,” and you might as well be saying “Spin three times widdershins and recite the words ‘Anál nathrach, orth’ bháis’s bethad, do chél dénmha.'”

I don’t blame them. Peel back the net’s shiny veneer, and things get user-unfriendly awfully fast. As Alex often says midway through a marathon trouble-shooting effort with our home network/entertainment empire, “How do regular people do this?”

Answer: they don’t. And so they’ll just have to wait to see Iron Man 4.

We’ve all been there: WiFi that defies connection, usually at the very moment you need to post, edit or delete something right now.

If you’re a professional communicator in the digital age, Internet access is non-negotiable. You can’t leave yourself (or your employer, or your clients) to the tender mercies of coffee-shop connectivity.

For employers of professional communicators (and for freelancers), that means springing for whatever added cost your mobile teleco charges for tethering and a decent data plan. It can be pricey, but so is being unable to deal with an online firestorm until an overworked barista is able to restart the router.

I love drawing Aileen et al. Love it.

But when it comes to my own cartooning, I can be a perfectionist. That nose doesn’t look quite the same from frame to frame? That hand isn’t working exactly the way I’d like it to? Put on another pot of coffee: it’s gonna be a long night.

Which means I’m happy with the artwork… but not with the fact that it’s taking so long to tell the stories I want to tell. The perfect isn’t just the enemy of the good; it’s the enemy of the GTD.

(Yes, I’m planning on turning that into a meme image. Probably with a cat. It’ll be ready in three months.*)

Meanwhile, a Canadian service called Bitstrips is enjoying some startling success, after years of slogging in the trenches. It lets you crank out a cartoon mighty quickly, once you take the time to design your sets and characters. And I’m taking it for a spin with DC.

Now, nobody’s going to mistake this for anything that’s been touched by human hands (and Cassie’s hip flask from the previous strip wouldn’t be an option)… but compared to never telling the stories I want to tell here at all, or telling them at a pace that gets “Would you hurry up?” messages from glaciers, I’m willing to put up with it.

(Set design, by the way, is currently on the fritz… hence the sparse minimalism of today’s backgrounds. Bitstrips’ sudden surge in popularity means the usual growing pains as a small company tries to scale up overnight.)

Let me know what you think!

(Hmm, Cassie has that damn “begging hand” thing going on. And I should have varied it from panel 3 to 4. Geez, did I get the colours right? Because the palette seems a little hot. Hang on, let me start again from scratch…)

* Or sooner.

Hair of the Downward Dog that bit you?

Sure, Satan has a huge comms budget and a clear motivation to spend it.

On the other hand, the contract negotiations are brutal.

“I’m a little troubled by this language right here referring to my immortal soul…”
“Eh, that’s just boilerplate. Not to worry.”
“So you won’t mind if I strike it out?”
“I WILL FEAST ON YOUR ENTRAILS IF YOU TOUCH ONE COMMA.”

I have overheard the damnedest stuff while working in coffee shops. I’ll be writing away while the person at the next table is bellowing into his phone that of course we’re going to win the contract, we’ve paid off the right people and it’s in the bag, and if Martin doesn’t think so then no wonder Martin doesn’t realize he’s history as soon as he finishes documenting his code.

Or Well, then, I guess you’ll just have to lie your face off, won’t you? Come on, it’s a radio reporter, for Christ’s sake. Dumb as a brick and half as good-looking, or he’d be on TV instead.

Or Nobody, I mean nobody, can know we’re remaking [name of movie redacted]. Okay? Cos otherwise the lawyers are all over it, and we’re sitting around with our thumbs up our asses for the next three years.

Or I just crop “Noise to Signal” off the top of the cartoon, slap my own name on it and bam: I’m a cartoonist. Of course it’s legal – that’s what a Creative Commons license is for.

Or Hold on a moment while I move – I think the guy at the next table is eavesdropping.

I mean, really.

P.S. – We’re back! Thanks for waiting. You, especially, for gently reminding me.

Oh, that moment when you’ve said something you wish you hadn’t. In public. To a big audience.

It’s doubly tricky because the adrenaline starts squirting into your bloodstream and your judgement is suddenly impaired. There are a lot of times when your instincts will serve you well, but this may not be one of them. Your fight-or-flight mechanism may well be tempting you to wrap your comments quickly, get the hell off the stage and then hide… or, worse, to double down. “Yeah, that’s right! I just said I support shooting Canada Geese! What’s more, I support locking up kindly old people who toss out bread crumbs for them! And I think every youth between the ages of 12 and 17 ought to be conscripted into an army whose sole purpose is to wipe out the little lawn-soiling bastards! Uh, the geese. Not the elderly.”

Take a breath. Take two. Assess what you’ve just said. And consider telling your audience something like “You know, that didn’t come out the way I intended. Here’s what I actually think…”

The Q&A session: for many speakers, the part of a presentation they dread the most. It’s the part they can’t script, can’t control, can’t reduce to three terse bullet points and a cute photo of a baby using a computer.

Me, I love questions and conversation, and I encourage them throughout my sessions. For one thing, if someone’s confused about a point, or if I’ve said something way off the mark, I don’t want them either lost at sea or stewing in silence throughout the whole thing. And for another, if you’re engaging your audience actively from the outset, chances are a lot fewer minds will be wandering around the 20-minute mark.

One of the great things about social media is the way it’s transforming the audience/speaker relationship, with the rise of live backchannels on services like Twitter, and the evolution of supportive infrastructure like wikis that ensure the exchange of knowledge and ideas goes on well before the speaker gets on stage and long after they step down.

But that means the unpredictability and give-and-take of a Q&A are now happening throughout your speech. Just how you cope with it – and not only cope, but thrive – is the focus of The Backchannel, a great book by Cliff Atkinson. He has a number of suggestions  that are well worth following: among them, taking regular “Twitter breaks” during your session; having another person monitor the backchannel and feed you questions to answer from the stage; creating an online hub to support your presentation; and distilling your key points into easily-tweeted slides.

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Your voices have been heard! It’s back to hand-lettering – at least for the time being.