Weekly Update - 53 (Patreon)

I was hoping we'd be moved by now, but we're still waiting for the home builders to give us a damn date. We've been slowly filling a few boxes here and there but there's been no urgency because we still don't know when the hell we can move. I'm pretty sick of waiting by this point. It really is going to be the sort of thing where no matter how well we tried to plan, everything that needs doing is going to be crammed into a hectic two-week long nightmare period.

Comic on Wednesday? Yes!

Poster Progress:

Kiera - Flats and shading

Max - Ready for lines

Riley - Shading and polish

Didn't make a whole lot of progress on posters this week, but I did do a little more shading.

Drawing: Page 96

Playing: Loop Hero, AiDungeon (yeah, really), WoW

Rambling:

The hardest part of writing is the stuff in between the scenes you actually want to write. If I only focused on the scenes I wanted to write, however, we'd all get so sick of Riley and Max that you'd probably never want to see them again. Also Kiva's story just wouldn't make any sense.

So for now we have Donno, and I'm honestly really struggling to get through his scene. I think there's very good reason for why Donno's scenes feel like they do. Conversations with Donno are meant to feel tense, painful and awkward. They are just torture for Kiva, he hates every moment spent with Donno, and I guess, since I'm always getting into the heads of my characters, that makes them torture for me as well.

Unfortunately, this scene in particular doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. Kiva keeps his distance from Donno, doesn't move much, and doesn't say much. Donno, on the other hand, likes to talk. Just talk. He KNOWS that everyone else knows he's the alpha, and he doesn't have to do shit to prove it. I imagine him like a perfect predator, he doesn't like to waste energy when he doesn't need to. As a side-effect, that makes him very passive and he doesn't do much. Furthermore, the "balcony" outside Kiva's living space is kind of plain, and it's nighttime over a dark city so I can't even play around much with the lighting or the landscape.

I've vowed though, not to cut his scene short this time, and I'm glad I'm not.  I very much regret not giving Donno his originally planned 3-4 pages in Chapter 3 -- instead skipping over that whole conversation and having to reference it in flashbacks so we don't lose the context of what occurred -- I'm glad to finally SHOW him in a way that has a real impact on the story. Until now, he's been sort of this vague, intangible threat. That's why I felt it was important to show that, yes, he can, in fact, make Kiva's life absolutely more terrible if he sets his mind to it.

But what does Donno REALLY want? Why is he here and what is he actually after? Those are interesting things to me and I won't spoil them here.