Waffle

It's half past nine on Saturday evening, and I haven't even started on the Feral update that's due on Monday. The odds of there being an update on Monday are not zero, but they are slim.

Yesterday after work, I made a conscious decision to tackle my to-do list in the order of easiest-to-hardest rather than starting with the most urgent or most important thing. This strategy has worked well in the past (except in situations where the most important thing is critical, which completing a Feral update is not). It eliminates the distraction of having little nagging tasks at the back of my head, and assures that the doable tasks actually get done even if the harder tasks end up taking more time than expected. So on Friday evening I took out the trash, did grocery shopping, washed dishes, and so on; I got the household chores out of the way so I'd have more time to work on the comics-related stuff in the morning.

Then I went to bed early, with the alarm still set to my regular workday wake-up time of seven AM. When the alarm went off, I turned it off and slept until noon.

Oops.

I guess I needed the sleep, but it did eliminate all the time savings I made by doing my chores the evening before. Still, I went on as planned:

My first task was setting up a load of voting incentives (Vote for ROCR on Topwebcomics and get rewarded with a behind-the scenes look at preliminary sketches for ROCR and related comics) and blog posts to remind readers to vote, all scheduled in advance. They are buffered until April 28, so I won't have to do any more until then. This took more time than planned; in all, I spent over five hours on the process. I will need to bring that amount down in the future.

My second task was a little more involved: I wanted to prepare a single episode of the old storyline The Corby Tribe for republication on the Drunk Duck mirror. To do that, I needed to reassemble the images and add two columns of text in a PNG file, and to do that properly, that is in a way that would allow me to reuse the result later, I needed to work with the DTP program I have, Scribus. This turned out to be less than intuitive (and wasn't helped by Scribus's Dutch localization, which like many open-source projects is of very poor quality). Also, it turned out that the master image needed a lot of extra work, so this, too, took several hours. I've got the hang of the basics now, though, and I expect that the next attempt will take less than half an hour.

The thing I've uploaded to Drunk Duck looks like this:

Image-ized version of the first episode of The Corby Tribe. Click for full view

By the time I was done with those things, with cooking dinner and the occasional break into the equasion, it was well into the evening and too late to get started on Feral. I may still do the work tomorrow, and maybe go back to pencil-only for a while. That's a fast process and one that I could do outdoors if the weather is nice enough.

I am, however, very concerned about my ability to get Feral updates done on a weekly schedule. It looks to me like the weekly schedule is dependent on me not having any other things to do during the weekend, and not oversleeping. If I had not lost five hours to oversleeping, I would have had five hours more today to work on it and would have been mostly done with the art. But i don't like cutting the schedule even further, and not having an update on Monday would leave me with 10 days worth of voter incentives without giving my audience anything to come back for that would entice them to vote. Bit of a waste, that.

I may need to make an unpleasant decision about Feral soon.

I've been doing a lot of stuff to the website lately. Here's what's been changed in the latest tune-up:

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan and Chronicles of the Witch Queen now have ads from a new ad provider, Webcomics World. This represents a significant policy change for me as I will be allowing some Flash ads, which will have Behaviours. I will pre-approve those on a case-by-case basis but I will no longer be denying them automatically. We'll see what happens - there's the potential for good earnings there, which will make it easier for me to spend more time and effort on webcomicking again.

To compensate, I've cut the horizontal Google ads on the archive pages on the main site, and will be looking to cull more advertising if this pans out.

The Drunk Duck mirror also gets one of the new ads, because a) it is actually bringing in decent pageview numbers, and b) it looks like I will have to put a lot more work into it in the next month or two, as the infamous FRAMED!!! Great Escape Crossover is due to be repeated there. I will have to write to the other artists involved to try and give all pages a permanent location.

The cast page for Invasion has been updated, as has the main cast page. Individual cast bios on the main site now have comments enabled, so people can write their own notes on the characters. I have also made a start on a cast section for the archives on Modern Tales, and updated the Fan art section there. The interface for uploading fan art was broken the last few times I tried using it last year, but it works now.

I have added some new stuff to Odds and Ends and to the DeviantArt site

This leaves me still having to update the old Comicgenesis site which I essentially forgot about midway through Aggie's tenure as a guest artist. That might be a more complicated job, but as I'm sitting at home with a sore foot, I might as well do it now.

All this work on various mirrors entails a serious reduplication of effort, but that is paying off. Because of the different automated cross-promotion/reader-alerting tools that the various systems have, the combined sites now have about 200,000 pageviews a month, for a comic that has in recent months updated once a month. The reason I'm doing it now is that the Invasion storyline is due to end next Monday, and after that, I want to get back to Feral as soon as I can, though it's likely I'll post a little bit of filler first. If the new ads pay off, I may well soon be updating more frequently again, though it's unlikely that I'll go back to three or more new updates a week.

There was one page missing from the Courtly Manners serial currently running on rocr.net. This has now been restored. Thanks to Geir for pointing it out.

All right, so I speeded things up a little. Invasion updated today, Friday August 1, and will update weekly from now until the end of the storyline. This update is unusual in that all the art was done by me, but the colouring was done by regular collaborator Calvin Bexfield, whose normal input consists of scene visualisations and backgrounds.

This weekend, I'll work on the unfinished updates, finishing one and getting two to scanner-readyness. Hopefully, I'll be able to draw one more as well. The whole series is scripted to the very end, so it should be relatively easy from here on.