Waffle

First off: follow my NaNoWriMo effort on My DeviantArt site. It’s a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story and actually fills in the big gap in the archives between The Stone of Contention and the stories that feature Jodoque as a character.

Second, here are my latest original scans for Invasion:

It’s slow going… it’s not so much a question of time as of motivation and priorities. For the weekends, my number one priority now is catching up on sleep. After that follow some time talking to Aggie online, grocery shopping, household and administrative chores, NaNoWrimo (during November only), and then working on ROCR if I still have time and energy. I find writing Feral particularly hard at that point so I work on Invasion first as that’s already scripted. The reason Feral is hard to write is because the original outline has been superceded by the shape the story ended up taking in execution. This means that I can’t end it on a cheap gag as originally planned and have to rethink in mid-story. This takes effort and concentration which I may not necessarily have in me. I do hope that the discipline of NaNoWriMo will help me improve in this area.

Because I sleep very little during the working week, I give my body as much time as it needs to catch up during the weekends. I turn off all external wake-up cues. So today I slept until half past one, PM! Admittedly, it had been a late night as I’d been up writing until past 2 AM, but that’s still a long time to spend in bed.

So for ROCR outside of the NaNoWriMO novel-in-progress, this weekend is once again a bust; I know I’ve been racking up a lot of busts in the past six months, and I do want readers to know that despite appearances to the contrary, I am still engaged in my work on the series as a whole, just at my own pace and in the media that I can work with the most easily, which right now is the written word.

What does this mean in practice?
One way or another, the King Groy story will make it to the ROCR website, resulting in a complete archive by the time I finish off the series. What I think will happen is that the second draft of the novel will go on the blog. The final draft will then be posted to the website proper, with illustrations. Historically, putting prose based stories into a webcomic archive has not been a successful move for those who have tried it, because readers tend to get stuck on their expectations and can’t get over the work not being a comic anymore. However, I’m willing to give it another shot, provided I am convinced that the finished product is really, really good. It’s going to take a lot of work to get from what is on the DeviantArt site to the quality I’m looking for. So it won’t be any time soon.

I didn’t get to work on Feral again this weekend, and it’s time I stopped kidding myself: I can’t keep up with a schedule, so I’m going to take another break and putting up some filler in the mean time, until I’ve built a buffer.

The filler I’ve picked is the two Courtly Manners stories from 2002 and 2005, respectively. The second one used to be on the old site when ROCR was primarily available as a subscription comic, but didn’t survive the transition to free and to WillowCMS. It’s been posted on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site, though, but it never got the audiences there that Invasion and Feral did get. Courtly Manners 1 has been languishing there as well.

The comics will be posted at a frequency of 1 a day, every day. I’ve always thought that’d be the perfect schedule, and so it annoys me that right now, I can’t even swing one a week. A buffer will help.

Feral will be back at the beginning of November.

Using uninked pencil art, like I’ve done on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan for the past three weeks and on American Gothic before that, saves me some time, but not as much as you would think. The time savings don’t come from skipping the inking and colouring phases - all the effort that used to go into inking and colouring (keeping in mind that DFG has been doing the colour flats on my comics for almost two years now) now go into the final pencil line art and the grey pencil tones.

The time savings that I do get come from a) simplifying the process so there is no longer a separate Photoshop colouring stage after I get the colour flats back from DFG, and b) the elimination of wet media accidents, which I’m very prone to. The comic creation process still takes a whole afternoon even if I cut corners in drawing backgrounds - a page full of close-ups is easier for me to do than one with lots of scenery or action, so that’s the sort of pages I’ve been drawing. I am very envious of Aggie’s ability to just knock out an American Gothic page in a few hours.

Last long weekend (a local holiday), I didn’t get two pages of Feral done so there’s still no buffer. The buffer for Invasion is running out already. Next weekend, I may end up not having an afternoon of uninterrupted drawing time. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride, and it’s only three weeks into my resumption of art duties on Feral.

Aggie’s facing a huge workload, and my schedule has stabilised a lot. I’m drawing two pages of Invasion a week even though that’s set after the end of Feral. So we’ve decided that it’s time for me to get back to drawing it myself, all the way to the finish, starting with the next update. The next update will be on Monday, August 18, because we’ve been unable to get the update done this weekend.

I’ll run some filler though… even if it’s just a re-run of an old story. There must be something I haven’t dug up yet from the old galleries. Sorry.

Not everyone liked Aggie’s work. I enjoyed her take on the story a great deal, and learned a lot from the six months she worked on it. Especially when it came to tightening up the scripts. I think you will see that reflected in the new pages I’ll be drawing.

I’ve got some more character art for sale through my Comicspace galleries. This time it’s four nude character drawings, of Abui, Sash, Kel and Shireen, made in preparation for the Feral and Invasion storylines. Because they’re nudes, only members of Comicspace can see them, but signing up is easy and safe (and if you sign up, you can see all my other galleries, mark some as your favourites and join my friends list there, which is one good way for a reader to help raise my profile just a little bit).

Sizes range from A4 (210 x 297 mm) to A4+ (297 x 370 mm) and prices range from $20 to $40, depending on the size and my subjective assessment of what they’re worth - if you disagree with my assessment, you might get a bargain! As with all character art pieces, shipping is free if you also buy any item from the Invasion or Feral galleries!

I’ve added 11 character drawings made in preparation for Feral to my Comicspace galleries and put price tags on them. These were some of my most popular postings on my DeviantArt space at the time. Prices range from $ 15 to $ 30, with shipping free if you also buy an original from the Feral or Invasion gallery. Sorry, the Devil originals are sold out. All originals will come with a print of the finished digital artwork as published.

One thing that’s different about this new gallery is that it contains no NSFW images, and so can be seen by all visitors even if they don’t have a ComicSpace account. With the other ones, I probably lost business as a result of the galleries being blocked to visitors who weren’t logged in to Comicspace. I would encourage everyone who wants to buy one of my images from the older galleries to sign up; it’s easy, free and painless, your data will not be sold or given away, and it’ll allow you, if you want, to boost my profile within Comicspace by adding me to your friends list and marking the galleries as your favorites.

However, I’m looking into ways to host the sale of art on my own server, which should resolve the problem of people being blocked from seeing the images for good.