Happy New Year!

I like to touch base with everyone around New Years to give you all an idea of what to expect for the year, so here we go!

In 2020 I spent the first half of the year working on a particularly demanding chapter of Eros & Psyche. It proved to me that I really can't just work on it and TQ at the same time so rather than going back and forth between them I decided after finishing the chapter that I would finish TQ's first volume before working on anything else. For over a year and a half, that's what I've been doing. As soon as I finished chapter 4 I started editing older pages to make everything pretty and uniform for print. I still have a ways to go, so for the time being I will continue posting side-by-sides and extras made for the book.

In early December I confirmed on TQ's website that I would be having a Kickstarter for TQ volume 1 in 2022. A few days after I said that, Kickstarter announced (without either consulting or even telling their team, I might add) that they were "pivoting to blockchain." What does this mean? It's hard to say, since when creators and KS team members asked this very question the founder essentially yelled "SYNERGY" at us. The closest thing to an answer we've gotten is that it's meant to decentralize crowdfunding, which sounds silly since the whole value of KS is that it's centralized and there's no reason to have anything to do with blockchain or crypto if all you want to do is make your website's code opensource. One of their team members has resigned over this and there is a theory running around that management is intentionally pissing off their userbase and nosediving the company in retaliation against the team for unionizing. There is no proof of course, just speculation.

At any rate, I am no longer comfortable hosting a campaign on KS. Hiveworks is going to be setting up a pre-order system for its creators so I will be using that to print TQ. I'll be yelling all about it from here and social media once a link is available, so please look forward to it!

Next on the agenda: Eros & Psyche! I'm going to be focusing on finishing the book. Full chapters are still going to be exclusive to the $10 tier for now but I will be posting more thumbnails and early pages for it at the lower tiers. I will also be posting new thumbnails for TQ while I work on E&P, so hopefully once E&P is done I'll have a big stack of pages ready for line art and the next chapter of TQ will be a fast one.

This year will probably be more Eros & Psyche than anything else and aside from the book there won't be much for me to post about on TQ's own site. Eros & Psyche will likely be the last full-length book I work on outside of TQ and Far to the North. I think any future side projects will be like zines or something that I can post in full upon completion so people aren't waiting on new chapters.

Speaking of Far to the North, will I ever get back to that? Yes. It's not a priority for 2022, though. I do want to say that in the future I would like to work on FTTN quietly with no pressure, then yell "SURPRISE!" and release a tome all at once. The story has a lot going on in a short span of in-universe time and it isn't divided into chapters, so I feel it's best read all at once instead of the standard weekly updates we tend to expect from webcomics. If I show you guys any concept art or early pages here I would really appreciate it if you all kept it secret and didn't mention anything about it to non-patrons.

Thank you all for being here, I wish you all excellent health!