November Update - Odds, Ends, and an Obsession with Color coding

Hi folks! Before I begin, I just want to thank you all so, so much for being here. My little family (my long-time partner and our cats) had a bunch of medical scares in October, and the income I made from Patreon was enough to cover one of our unexpected trips to the vet! That's huge. I could not safely work on Keeping Time without this passive income, and I'm so grateful to you all.

 So... what's been going on since I finished the intro pages? 

I did a massive overhaul of the middle of the script, which I sent off to my editor, Mark, for comments. He's in the middle of some big life changes, so he couldn't get to them right away, so in the meantime, I finished making Fake Chicago in Blender. 

I've been quietly building this entire city in Blender in a way that important settings (Daniel's apartment building, Denver's apartment building, the piano bar, etc.) are far enough away from each other that each area feels unique.

I really enjoy this work. It feels like playing Legos, or building a house in The Sims. I'm proud of the city I built, and I'm excited to put it to good use in the backgrounds I draw!

It took me about a week to finish the Blender city, and the rest of my time was spent moving my entire script from Google Docs over to...

Scrivener!

I've heard other writers talk about how powerful Scrivener is, and I always sort of shrugged and dismissed it because I thought, "A word processing program's a word processing program, how different can it be?"

FRIENDS, I WAS SO NAIVE. 

Scrivener is probably the best thing that's ever happened to me in my 15 years of writing stories. It's so powerful and makes everything SO EASY. The built in script/screenplay templates saves me a ton of time, and its ability to separate individual comic page scripts as their own little subdocuments within the larger Scrivener doc is SO HANDY. 

It also lets me color code pages, which is extremely important for me, because there's a bunch of disparate threads that I have to keep a bird's eye view of as the story progresses... which is also why you're all about to finally figure out the importance of the comic name with the next batch of pages. 😌

Speaking of which, since Editor Mark got back to me, I'm once again working on pencils and inks!! Drawing's felt really good, and I've been in a bit of a groove with figuring out gesture and bodies, probably because I've also spent a decent amount of time doing figure studies again. 

I have about 8 pages to get to completion before I can start posting finished pages here for you all, and I already have three of those penciled! :) Hopefully some finished pages will be heading your way sooner than later. My goal is to launch Keeping Time once I have about, uh, 40? Ish? Pages? Done? 🥲 Actually, I'd feel a lot more comfortable if that number was closer to 60... I basically want at least a 4-month buffer's worth of pages before I go public, because I am SO SLOW AT ART. (Wouldn't it be nice if I had a year's worth of buffer? Hahaha... ha.. if.. only...)

That's all for now! Thank you all for sticking around. I'm sorry I don't have more content for you all. I feel bad about it on a daily basis. I appreciate you all sticking with me nonetheless!!