We grow, we bloom

It's the Chapter Three Patron Acknowledgement pages! To tie in with Alexandra's mom's garden scene, I chose a rustic potting shed sort of motif.

As I have been saying since I started this campaign back in 2021, thank you to everyone who has supported this project. I will continue to say this as long as it takes! 

How long will it take? I imagine you are all wondering this, all of the time, but I am perhaps an anxious person. By the end of this year, Chapter Four should be done or in the process of being done, and I estimate that will mark roughly the half-way point for this whole project.

This year, I have had, on average, two to three working days per week. The rest of my time is spent taking care of our now-toddler while my wife works a "real" job. This was both a personal and an economic choice, as discussed in the very first posts here.

Our schedule will change in the fall, though - our kiddo will be going to preschool for a couple mornings per week, and we've kicked around the idea of having his grandparents look after him once a week. Hopefully this all nets out to an average of three to four working days per week.

So: I have a lot of work still to do, but I may be able to do it faster, starting soon.

OKAY, BOOKS!

When will there be books? Here is my current thinking.

At the end of Chapter Four, PRACTICAL DEFENCE will be roughly 230 pages long. That's the length of DD3. And I can see the story being another 230 pages on top of that. 

If you're me, the upside to this is: hey, it only took three years of half-time work to make a book as long as one that took two years of full-time work! Hooray! On the other hand, what do I do with a 500-page project? Do I wait and make one big book, similar in form to Kate Beaton's DUCKS? Or does PRACTICAL DEFENCE become a multi-volume story, like Faith Erin Hicks' THE NAMELESS CITY? (I am not entertaining the possibility of it being infinitely ongoing like, say, So Many Manga.)

Narratively speaking, the end of Chapter Four would be a good spot to split it up. I am considering crowdfunding a "PRACTICAL DEFENCE: BOOK ONE." I'm going to reach out to printers and fulfillment folks, do a little estimation and a little math, and see whether it makes sense to run such a campaign. Ideally, this could help financially support the rest of the project. On the other hand, there are so many unknowns and it's such a time-consuming process, maybe it wouldn't be worth it. Plus — and I know some of you will reassure me that this is unlikely — there is the possibility that the whole thing could fail. And I have to consider how would impact the possibility of the book being traditionally published (the details of which I'll discuss with my literary agent).

If I crowdfund a "Book One" and it succeeds, I'm guessing the earliest you'd see it would be fall/winter 2024.

If I signed this project up for a traditional publishing contract today, the very earliest you'd see a "Book One" would be sometime in 2025, Because Publishing.

And the entire, beginning-to-end story of PRACTICAL DEFENCE is still further off. But when we get there, we'll have an exciting, intense, unique story that transports readers to another time and place and which says to its audience, "yeah, you're perfectly justified in being bewildered by the adults in your life, and no, maybe you shouldn't be asked to solve so many of the world's problems." Maybe the younger readers won't be so young anymore, but the really young readers will be just the right age.

THANK YOU, PATRONS

So many of you have been so generous, and I appreciate it greatly, especially when it seems like money is tight for everyone these days. If it's become too tight for you, please: do what you need to do! You'll only receive the fullest understanding from me, someone for whom money is tight. Please stay in touch somehow — Mastodon, Instagram, or via the DD Newsletter. Come back if and when you can!

To everyone who has been a patron and who continues to be: you have my fullest gratitude. I have loved sharing my favourite sketches, panels, jokes and moments and pages with you, and I am never going to stop. Thank you, too, for your comments: your encouragement, your feedback, and your criticisms. You all are so smart and thoughtful and I feel so lucky that this project has put me in touch with you. I hope it continues to thrill and delight you.

NEXT!

• I need to print out the whole comic and give it a complete read in order to be as informed as possible before I lock down Chapter Four. It's been so long since I started, I should have relatively clear eyes as to how the story reads. What will I discover? Will it inspire any great changes? No joke: I'm scared to find out. But it's got to be done, or else I'm not doing this properly and I'm letting down my boyfriend George Saunders.
• I have a SKULLMIST cover to share next week!
• Unrelated mystery surprise?

Until next week,
I remain,
uncharacteristically earnest,

TC