The saga of Page 10 (Patreon)

The hardest part of making this page was writing it.  I wrote and rewrote and tweaked the dialogue so many times it actually became somewhat of a joke to me.  It was kind of an important page, and I wanted it to be impactful and meaningful.  I wanted it to show a dichotomy of siblings that loved each other and how that conflicted with the kind of distrust that can be caused by a power like Vim.  I also wanted to give the "power" of my world a concrete name, instead of always having everyone refer to it as "power" or "talent" or "special ability" or any number of other fluffy words that take up too much space inside of a word bubble, and I struggled for a long time with how to introduce such a term without it seeming out of place.

In my first original sketch it was a huge full-page exposition dump about gods and Vim and what Kiera was and what she could do.  Since I've decided to walk back on a LOT of the narration and exposition, the actual text in this page got cut back to a fraction of what it was, but I kept the central hug as the focal point, because I wanted to show that yes, despite all the fighting throughout this chapter, Kiva and Kiera are still siblings that love each other.  They are not enemies.

The problem, then, lies mostly with Kiva's distrust of his sister's Vim.  If you've been paying really close attention, she's been using it all throughout the first 9 pages.  I declined to explain what it actually IS here though, and I may continue to decline to explain it going forward, preferring instead to simply SHOW it in various forms.  I think that's more interesting to read anyway.

The absolute best part of publishing this page at last is just having it finally out of my reach so I can make no more changes to it, because no doubt, tomorrow, an idea will strike me for a rewrite, and then I'll be all like, HAH, YOU'RE TOO LATE BRAIN, TOO LATE.  And then I can go back to thinking on all the things going on in Chapter 2.