"when will MUTED update`? ; _;)"

is a question i get asked a lot these days! even i'm asking myself that LOL

here's a small update on what's going on and why it's taking so long!

as you all know i started drawing shallow sleep out of the blue in august, because i thought i'd give the webtoons discover contest a go! i didn't even make it to the next round, so that's that! lol (i didn't really expect to have a chance, i don't think my storytelling is what they were looking for and i don't make use of the usual vertical webcomic format either because i.... actually don't like it much, so it's fine! maybe one day i'll experiment with that kind of comic format)
so that took up quite a bit of time and forced me to take a break with MUTED.

after that i took a week off to recover from the grind, and this week i only just now found the time to pick up my work on MUTED again! naturally after a week of not working there's things to do other than draw, mainly reply to messages, organise schedules, and so on. it also took some time to get back into my drawing routine,  but i think that issue's mostly solved now x)

and now to the most important answer as to why the next update is taking so long:

as mentioned in the picture this is just a rather small part of the story about kai, it's supposed to be put into maximum 10 pages but it's all a bit much and makes use of a few metaphors that i need to explain carefully. and as you probably noticed by now, i have a tendency to ramble on and on and on when i want to say something, which makes things more complicated than they need to be sometimes LOL

so, yeah i'm trying to do this properly and it's taking more time than my usual planning of chapters, i'm sorry! but i can finally say i'm confident to have this under control and a direction to go in, if i cut all this text down just a liiiittle more or separate it into multiple smaller portions, then i should be good to go!

so that's what i'm doing right now next to fulfilling patron requests and sketching things during low-energy moments (this is something i've missed a lot, for the last 2? months i wasn't able to just freely sketch and explore various things at all, every drawing i did had a purpose and had to be finished, so this is quite freeing)

that's all! if you have anything else you wanna know, feel free to leave a comment below and i'll do my best to answer :)