It's been a long three years since I first became involved with Studio 8's day-to-day functions. I've made new friends, found new enemies, created lots of reasons to dismantle your computer, built and demolished a real live satire newspaper, and spent days upon days learning nearly ten percent of all I need to learn about being a writer and comedian and comedian writer of comedic writing about comedy.
       But lately, this site hasn't been as spectacular as it has been in the past. That's due to a number of reasons, several of which I have lightly touched upon in the past month. But I guess it really bothers me that the site hasn't been and won't be "up to snuff" (I heard my grandpa say that once in reference to my inability to lift heavy objects without whining or crying). And I know that several, if not all, of you people must be wondering what our problem is. Hopefully, though, the below explanation will properly satiate your curiosity while allowing me to get some things off my chest. I've neatly separated Studio 8's problems into several projects that require our immediate attention and resources.

The first big project: our movie, Everything is Everything. We're shopping this mug around to film festivals and trying to promote it in whatever way we can. We're also hard at work on a DVD of the film, but producing a fancy DVD is a technically exhausting and very intimidating experience, requiring the expenditure of a lot of time and equipment. And with the number of fun features and extras that we want to include on there, it looks like we'll have to make it a double DVD set. After we're finished with this and we begin selling E is E DVD's, the DVD of our sketch comedy show might follow soon after, but that's a long ways away.

The second big project: Redesigning our website. This is huge. Our current layout looks decent and allows the average visitor to navigate around fairly easily, but we have major problems here and there. As of this moment, we're close to planning out the new look, but we're also switching the coding language that we use to update this thing in hopes of slimming down the site's download time. We're also beefing up our server to handle more traffic and more content. Our archives are pretty damn extensive and it's going to take a long time to transfer everything over, but it will be worth it.
       So if we keep regularly adding new content over the next month of so, we'll just be creating more transferring work for ourselves. Thus, one of the reasons that updates like articles, media reviews, special reports, coupons, comics, and AOL victims will be relatively slender until the new layout is completed. It's frustrating for us, believe me, because we have tons of unreleased material and we come up with new stuff every day.
       At least we have years of comedic material left to share with you people. It could be worse. We could be uninspired and lazy.
       In the future, we hope to make Studio8.net more interactive and somewhat cohesive (as opposed to its current awkward and befuddling state of being). Also, we'd like to make it funnier, but that may require the writing of a few jokes and that's something we don't know how to do right now.

The third big project: Music. We've got two albums in the works - one already recorded and being edited and one sort of recorded a little and halfway written. And despite the nice tinkling of income that we've received from the sales of Stall 4, producing new music is time-consuming and intense work. We like to produce the freshest, funniest songs and skits possible so we literally have to cut off all other activity and record and edit (just like real rock n' roll bands do). It's coming, though, and it's going to be more awesome than you might expect.

The fourth big project: A live comedy show. We've got a couple of venues that are willing to house us and we even have a solid idea of what we'd like to perform in those venues, but in order to make it as good as it could be (it's a terrifically fantastic concept for a show), we have to treat it like it's the only food on our plate, which it's not. However, this is still a factor in our usage of free time because we really really want to get it off the ground soon.

The fifth big project: Moving to LA. We're gearing up to be gone by the middle of the summer and that means we have to set up jobs, secure living quarters, and map out all of the trendiest nighttime hotspots over in LA while at the same time working at out current jobs, cleaning our present living quarters, and hanging out at all of the nerdiest nighttime hotspots in Baton Rouge.
       Think about it: We're a fully-functioning video production company with a fully-functioning music recording studio and a couple of fully-functioning Comedy-O-Matic Humorous Item Writing Machines.
       And we're growing.
       So when the summer comes, Studio 8 will have another possible hiatus as we migrate from one side of the US to another. Once we get everything set up, though, you can be sure that we'll have lots of new material (and perhaps some new talented entertainers onboard) for you to feast upon and obsess over.

The sixth big project: Establishing ourselves in the entertainment industry. If you've gotten this far in this editorial, congratulations. I haven't and I'm writing the damn thing. But seriously, this might be the most important point (because it's about me, Brock).
       It's almost impossible to "be discovered" or generate enough buzz about yourself without making the right connections. As a serious writer-type fellow, I'm constantly wrestling with the desire to write silly things for Studio8.net and the desire to write things that get published and win literary contests. Neither is monetarily rewarding, but I don't care about attaining much money anyway. I just want people to read what I write and get something out of it, whether it be a laugh or some kind of inspiration that keeps them going or helps them create their own stories.
       On a personal side note, I think that some of the best pieces of writing that I've ever done have been for this site and I don't regret one second of work that I've put into it. I sincerely wish I had an infinite amount of time or perhaps a time machine that would allow me to work on the site more than I get to. Take for instance the Studio 8 forum: I love this thing. I read it almost every day and I write in it (in various voices and personas) not even half as frequently as I'd like to. It's funny, we've got decent participation in there, and it allows our fans to get to know us and our fictional characters in a way that other comedy sites like The Onion simply don't provide.
       But back to the subject at hand: Despite the fact that I've written a screenplay, a book, countless articles, poems, short stories, sketches, songs, etc., with tons more of each in the works, it's pretty hard to break into the world of real, respected, frequently published writers.
       As of my writing this, I'm working in the lower levels of the movie industry in hopes of making the right connections and hooking up with the right people. It's finally starting to pay off a little, but that means less time in front of my computer working on stuff for either myself or Studio 8. In the long run, this will pay off, but in the short run, it sucks donkey nuts.
       Short story long, I need an agent. If you are a literary agent or if you know a literary agent or if there's a secret agent trying to kill you, e-mail me at brock@studio8.net. The help would be much appreciated.

This is perhaps half of what I'd like to say, but there will be more days to speak and I hope in the coming months I have nothing but good news to post in this spot.

Damn, I should have written this thing weeks ago.