Comic Concerns

So, I’m drawing this comic, you see, and I’m slowly getting to the point where I’m finally ready to put it online. I’ve more or less decided to get a webcomicsnation.com account, but right now I can’t really afford it. Or rather; I could afford to get an account for one month, and after a month, I would most likely be able to pay for a whole year, and then I’m sure a miracle would happen before I have to pay again. But if I pay for a month now, the sum of money remaining on my bank account will, for a couple of weeks, be so small that I won’t be able to make any withdrawals, because they don’t make money that small anymore. So I’m looking for a temporary solution.

I’ve got a web page on a universtity server, and it’s free, and has no hard limits for storage and bandwidth, but the only way to update it that I’ve been able to figure out is to upload html files by hand. I’ve done that, once, and it took so much time and energy that I never got around to the content. It was only today that I realized I could set up a new blog with only a couple of clicks, and put it on my own webpage. I’ve only had a blogger account for three months or so, you see, and I've only seen that little “get your own blog” link up in the corner about four thousand times, so it took a while for me to figure it out.

I must have done something wrong, however, because it didn’t work. I tried fixing it for a while (it’s obviously caused by my own incompetence, but I haven’t yet been able to figure out if I failed to understand the embarrassingly simple setup process, or if I failed to understand the rather more complicated university sftp server, but I prefer to believe that it’s the latter, because that makes me look slightly less ignorant), but every time I changed something and failed, the strategically placed link for swithing from using an sftp account to using a .blogspot.com address started to look more tempting. It’s only temporary, after all, and ***.blogspot.com is actually a whole lot better than www.abo.fi/~jsandas/***, as addresses go. So I clicked on the link.

And noticed that the name I had chosen was already taken. For a while now, I’ve been calling my comic Unreal City, because it’s a good name, and a reference to The Waste Land, and not completely unfitting for the story. It also tends to be occupied. I already knew that unrealcity.com, .net and .org were in use, but I wasn’t planning to name the whole webpage after the comic anyway, so it didn’t matter. In a way, of course, the fact that unrealcity.blogspot.com (probably not safe for work, if anyone who reads this happens to be working. Definitely not safe for Clockmaker, anyway...) is taken matters even less, because I’m only planning to use whichever .blogspot.com address I happen to choose for a short time.

Only, names tend to stick. I’m not very good at names (you could say that it's my greatest limitation as a writer, but then you’d be neglecting that small “sometimes takes a year to get started” thing. And “regularly fails to complete anything”. But I'm not very good at names either), so the ones I do choose, after excruciating agony (or at least mild discomfort. Excruciating mild discomfort), stay with me.

Most often, it’s names for characters or places (the main character of this very comic, for example, uses a name that I’ve been keeping around for several years. Sometimes, I’ve stopped writing a story because it wasn't good enough for the name. I don’t recommend this), and not so much the titles of stories. If you write a short story or a novel you don’t have to choose title until after you’ve finished it, and if you never finish it, you never have to choose (I don’t recommend this, either).

In this case, however, I’m going to start publishing the story, piece by piece, long before the whole thing is finished (there are problems with this approach, of course, but compared to publishing it after it’s completed, and never completing it, it doesn’t look so bad), so I won't be able to change the name. And I like the name Unreal City. It has stuck.

A common solution when somebody else has taken your domain name of choice is to compromise. People use domain names like ***comic.whatever (to distinguish it from the other websites which are not comics), or ***online.something (to distinguish it from the other websites which, presumably, are not online). Or you can choose a completely different name, especially if you plan to do more than one comic, or to do other things than comics. As I already mentioned, this is what I’ve been planning do, sooner or later, but I haven’t thought of a good enough name yet...

At the moment, though, all I really need is a name that I can use for my temporary blogspot address, preferably one that I won’t be completely embarrassed by ten yers from now when I realize it's ended up as the name of my official website, production company, line of customized elephant memorabilia, and first-born child.

Any suggestions?