april 2018

it's a new month, so, thank you everybody for the support and welcome to april fools' day.

this is a queued post because i'm in the middle of a long move and that is Not a prank or a joke despite the timing.
the poll for this month's streams will not be up until i have myself situated to make it obvious when i'm back online. for those of you who follow me on various other sites, i'll probably be posting on them periodically during my transit time, but i can't log into patreon on my phone, so it will be quiet for a day or 2 here.

that aside... april updates.
i'm supposed to start borderline this month, but i'm not confident in my progress in either the script or the buffer i have so far. the buffer is still just 5 pages and the title page sketched, not lined, much less colored.
the script itself is currently 53 scenes in, 30 pages long, and 2 of the 3 main plot threads aren't even halfway through the "checkpoints" they need to hit. for a frame of scale, drop-out was only about 23 scenes (not including the breather pages) and ~32 pages long script-wise.

i wasn't expecting borderline to be so big, but retrospectively, i'm not sure why; the cast is much larger, it has 3 separate plot threads braided together, and it takes course over a lot more than a week. overall, it's made me anxious to start illustrating the story at all until the script is solid and finished completely, because i have a feeling that i will want to go back and try to shave down A LOT just to try making it less of an undertaking.
additionally, i've lost more and more interest in borderline over time, which has just made it harder to write. this is probably in part because when i came up with the idea when i was ~21; my experiences from when i was 19 were still sort of fresh and unprocessed and the feelings behind it were still strong. i still want to write it, though, and i feel drastically changing bailey's age would hamper a lot that i wanted to say with the story. so i've been tweaking bailey's personality just a bit, and might tweak where i'm taking the story as necessary until i find it compelling again, no ETA. i feel like it's self-evident when an artist's heart isn't into what they're working on and have a gut feeling a lot of people would probably want it later and better rather than sooner and worse.

in the meantime, i'm thinking i'll clean up the fresh meat script that's been lying around and trying to complete that while i keep nursing borderline's script. it's a much shorter story set in the frame of a week like drop-out was, but with a larger cast and singular protagonist, more similar to borderline.
wasn't sure when i was going to have time to do that one starting borderline this month and it'll also give me some experimenting with figuring out how to balance updates for full color comics and side comics.
for those of you who are newer, fresh meat was a comic idea i came up with a little bit after borderline during drop-out, which has gone through several rewrites. it's a short one-off (hopefully only 30 pages long) about a girl who is put on suicide watch in a psych ward after an attempt. it's mainly supposed to be just an honest look and recount of what being in a modern psychiatric institution is like, because i feel like they are sorely misrepresented in just about every direction.

in other news, last month i finally got my ass around to paying for some self-hosting + a domain and making a website instead of hosting all of my comics with a secondary hosting site. i'm still working on it and don't want to release the URL yet, but after about 16 collective hours of grappling with it, i have a working bare-bones structure. at the moment, what's functioning pretty cleanly on it:

• a launcher that lets me upload comic pages immediately or on a schedule (harder to get working than you'd expect)
• a comments section (have not tested the actual registration feature yet, but you can leave comments without registering)
• a tagging system that lets you view archives by tag, which can also show you a random post in any given tag
• an additional, separate tagging system for characters
• a third, separate tagging system for specific comics that allows you to read through a comic normally without getting hit with unrelated content
• a cast bar above any comic page that shows small icons of every character present in the page you're looking at
• a character/cast page that lists every character, with a larger version of said icon, a summary about them, the most recent comic they were seen in, and the very first comic they appeared in
• a content warning feature that blurs images with immediately triggering content, deactivated with a click
• page navigation with basic first/prev/next/latest buttons, a "random page" button, l/r arrow key shortcuts for page flipping, and a dropdown to jump to different stories entirely
• bare-minimum back-end security and anti-spam protocols
• ability to register a user account/log into it/customize it slightly (currently disabled after just confirming it was functional, so still pretty buggy)

i haven't worked on the aesthetic elements much at all yet because i wanted to prioritize working code. my next goal is smoothing over some bugs with subcategorizations in the drop-down menu, laying down a subdomain for non-comic art and text posts so they don't trash up comic archives, and getting the code for transcripts in working order.

anyway, the appropriate tiers may send commission information now, but i won't be able to look over them or respond until i'm at my new residence.

as a note, all times and deadlines will be switching to pacific standard (idaho face) because that is my time zone now.

that's about everything, stay safe out there, folks.