Queer Fantasy and Weird Tales for the People
Things are moving along! I am officially 1/3 of the way through the draft!
I’m trying to keep a pace of four pages a day. Some of these pages will slow me down (like if I need to redraw entire panels), but I’m sticking with it as best I can. At this rate, I should finish before the end of October, and spend the last week or so of the month on front and back material, like concept art and a map!
I’ll update you again next week. Thanks for reading!
But first, new fonts! Check them out!
So, if you’re familiar with printing, you probably know all this already and can laugh at me, but I am not familiar with printing. I can barely get a wireless printer to connect long enough to print a single page. As it turns out, when you’re dealing with CMYK colors, basically any saturated color (including black) tells the printer to just layer on SO MUCH INK that it can cause the ink to bleed and smudge. You have to go through a lot of silliness to get Photoshop to just make a normal color with a normal amount of ink. The best part is, the visual difference between 300% CMYK (the value of all the black areas on all my images before I started doing this) and 240% (IngramSpark’s maximum) is NOTHING. IT LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME.
Okay. Rant over. I have, hopefully, figured out how to make this work and finished seven pages of the new draft. I kept having to go back and redo all the pages I thought I had already completed. I expect my pace will pick up as I move forward.
In the meantime, if you’d like to tell me how much you did or didn’t enjoy the comic in its initial run, or if you have a word of encouragement as I learn new, fascinating things about printing, comments are open. Or if you just want to say hi. I appreciate you!
Hello!
Since I was here last, I have completed two readthroughs of the draft, one for my many, many art errors and one for pacing. The pacing wasn’t bad! I think you and I are going to have a genuine comic book on our hands very soon.
I’ve been getting some comments on the pages hosted here, and I appreciate them! Keep them coming! Any thoughts you have will be helpful to me as I get the draft into shape.
I’ve touched up a couple pages to start with, and you can see a bit of one of them above. The skull looks much more menacing with some more shading on it. Today, I’m going to see if I can fit these touched up pages into IngramSpark’s book builder. Their website says they publish comics, but gives no hints as to how to format them, so I’ll be figuring it out as I go.
Starting next week, I’ll be doing edits, and this will continue until they are done. I’m hoping for a late October release date, but that might be a vain hope, so I’m going to guess mid to late November. I’ll have a better idea once I’ve done a few days of edits.
Thanks for being here! I’ll be back next week with more updates. I’ll also be talking about potential new projects soon.
Hi!
Episode 10 of The Well Below the Valley is just finished, but I think I want to stick to the Wednesday schedule for the time being. It will go up on Patreon next Wednesday and here the following Wednesday. This will give me a little more time to work on the comic. My baby has had the worst time napping 4/5 days so far this week, and I didn’t have the time to work that I thought I would. As I type, she is asleep on my chest, because she will scream if I try to put her down.
Thanks for your patience. I’ll have new stuff for both Patrons and blog readers soon.
Jesse Welles, “War Is a God”
Good morning!
I’m not sure if I can say I’m back yet, but I’m giving it a try. I’m almost done with Episode 9 of The Well Below the Valley, so that will be up on Patreon later this week (hopefully Wednesday), and then up here next week for free reading. As I work on the next episode, I’ll be trying to work out a sustainable posting schedule.
I’m also maybe two thirds of the way done with thumbnails for the first volume of the comic! Basically, I’m just sketching out panel layouts based on the script I’ve already completed. Once that’s done, I’ll be starting to draw.
Having given it some more thought, I’m not sure how much I love the title Chrysanthemum Dawn. It maybe has too many connotations of Imperial Japan, which I would like to tone down for two reasons: the setting is not Japan, though it takes some inspiration, and I’m opposed to imperialism generally as a human and more specifically as a human of Korean descent. I’ll do some brainstorming and get back to you. I’ll also take some pictures of the thumbnails to show you later this week.
Here’s some petitions that I’ve signed and you might like to as well:
Via Win Without War: Congress must pass War Powers Resolution
Via Civic Shout: Defend gender-affirming care to save lives
Via the Juggernaut Project: Don’t deport kids
As always, thanks for reading. I’ve missed you! Come by again soon.
This is Miranda. I made her out of love and…mostly cheese (I had gestational diabetes). She is here and real and healthy as can be–almost a month old now.
I’m not quite ready to get back to regular posting, but I wanted to let you know that I’m still alive and slowly picking my work back up. I’ve finished the script for the first volume of Chrysanthemum Dawn! I’ll have some sketches for you soon. I’m also outlining the next episode of The Well Below the Valley today, and should start writing it this week.
I’ll check back in again soon. In the meantime, happy Pride, and thanks for stopping by!
This Cold Night, “Black Cathedral”
Hello!
This is almost certainly going to be the last weekly update before I go on maternity leave. My baby is proving incredibly stubborn and likely won’t be born without some help (she’s still head-up and seems very comfortable there), so I’m going in on Thursday to get that help.
The latest episode of The Well Below the Valley will be up here on Wednesday, then you won’t hear from me for a little while. I plan to return you to your regularly scheduled nonsense sometime in June, probably later in the month. I’ll have a new episode (and, baby willing, a new posting schedule) and some comic sketches shortly after. There will also not be another newsletter until the end of June, and I won’t be at any in-person events until the July edition of the Kenosha Book Festival.
If everything continues to go according to plan, I’ll put some maternity leave announcements up here and on my social media on Wednesday. I’ll be able to answer emails and comments (though likely not immediately) if you need me for anything, and of course, my books will be available from wherever you buy books.
In the meantime, wish me luck, and I’ll be back soon! Thanks for reading.
128,404 words! I have two chapters (more like one and three-quarters) left! Starting Chapter XXX: The Long Walk, which was Chapter LXV in the serial version.
I should be finishing this draft next week. After that, I’ll get you a release date and start formatting and final edits.
Thanks for sticking with me.
I’d say I’m close to three-quarters of the way through my rewrites. I appreciate your patience as I’m working to get them done! I know it’s taken me forever and a half to come up with a release date, but I should be able to give you one soon.
I’ll be absent from the blog and my social media for a week, as I’m going on vacation. I will return Monday, October 7, and get back to regular posting as well as finishing this book.
The Figuratively Speaking Mermaid Tarot Kickstarter has reached ALL its stretch goals! There are still a couple of days left to back: it will close at the end of the day (midnight) on Monday, September 30. Thank you so much to everyone who has pledged so far and made this beautiful project a reality.
The newsletter will be going out tomorrow at noon my time (CDT), so if you haven’t yet and would like to, put your email address in the box at this link to sign up. You’ll then need to check your inbox for a confirmation.
I’ll see you on October 7. Until then, take care!
I am working on getting the newsletter back on track, but for now, I’m unable to send it. Google and Yahoo have changed their policies, making it more likely that emails sent from free accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.) will end up in a spam trap. MailerLite has made the decision to ban free email accounts from sending emails with their service. I thought I had managed a workaround by using the account the university gave me back in the day, but that is no longer viable. I have to 1) purchase a domain, 2) use that domain to get a new email address, and 3) register and verify all this with MailerLite. At this point, I’m reluctant to add another recurring charge to my budget, but it looks like I’m being forced to do so in order to keep the newsletter running. Prevailing wisdom says that authors need to have a newsletter. Who am I to argue?
In any case, I’m not going to be able to get this sorted out before the month ends in…fifteen hours? So I’ll skip this month and hopefully have a newsletter to send at the end of March. Thank you so much for your patience! In the meantime, MailerLite is maintaining the subscriber list, so you won’t need to sign up again.
If you’d like to help out with operational costs, and are able to do so, I have a Patreon and a Ko-fi. You can also buy one or more of my books! In any case, I appreciate you.
