Neko Machi

Piggy’s internet is out, and we probably won’t be able to get any new comics up until next week. In the meantime, here’s a blog post.

I don’t have a huge amount of experience collaborating with artists, but a lot of the time when I do I feel like I have it easy and they’re they ones killing themselves to make things really happen. Lately not so much. I’ve kind of been bit with a sort of “perfectionist bug” about writing scripts for Neko Machi, which will hopefully make the comic that much more enjoyable for you guys, but is also driving me a little crazy. Writing in general can be at turns effortless and agonizing, and I absolutely cannot just write a strip and let it be. I have enough scripts to last us a year or more, but it’s a struggle to whip them into shape to my satisfaction. If I’m very lucky I can transfer a script for one strip fully formed from my head to my word processor in a few minutes, but other times I can rack up hours coming back to the same script and trying to figure out the right damn punchline.

Anyway, here’s some of the specific issues that have been on my mind as far as writing is concerned.

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Most Americans don’t drink much tea, but I do, and so does piggy, (and Kitty too for that matter), so I thought I’d spend some time writing about it for the edification of our readers. Piggy has added some comments too, which should be easy to see. As Douglas Adams once pointed out, Americans often wonder why the British are so into tea, but most Americans haven’t ever actually had properly-made tea (though according to him not many British people have either). Properly defined, all tea comes from the camellia sinensis plant, and the many different varieties come from a combination of different subspecies and preparation methods (and sometimes the addition of other stuff). Herbal teas, also known as tisanes, can be very good too, but they’re not technically tea.

Throughout history, tea has been given a place of immense reverence, and coffee coming in to replace it is a relatively recent thing. Tea has great cultural importance all across Asia, and tea and sugar were very important in driving England’s colonial expansion. To me good tea tastes like civilization and refinement calling to me from across the centuries and coffee tastes like evidence of our inability to properly cope with the world we created, but I’ll be the first one to admit that’s a little unfair to coffee, which has its own long history. (And from what I’ve heard, any coffee lovers out there simply must experience an Ethiopian coffee ceremony some time.)

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