Weekly Update - 60 (Patreon)

Moving sucks.  It seems like no matter what we do to prepare, it always sucks.  None of the dates line up properly, there's always a bizarre period of limbo where your entire life is upended, and anything that can go wrong does go wrong.

The hope was that I would be able to maybe finish another comic page this week or next, but it just doesn't seem very likely to happen.  My computer is in a box.  Did I plan for it to be in a box?  No.  My plan was to drive it to the new house and have it be the first thing that was set up once we got there so I could keep on making comics.

At the moment, my husband and I are in different states, because he stayed behind to help get the old house ready for sale, while I moved ahead to make sure to take care of all the things so we had a place to live over here.  And... it sucks!  It sucks to be apart.  Him and I have been inseparable probably since our college days, and he's stuck out there all alone, tearing his hair out to make sure all of our stuff gets here.

We're not moving again. That's for sure. That's what I said a few moves ago.  This time I mean it for reals though.

Comic This Week: Nope.  Next week is a maybe, but it will really depend on how much I can draw versus how much gets unpacked.

Posters: On Hold

Drawing: Sketches and storyboarding for upcoming chapters

Playing: Not much of anything really.

Ramblings:

Kinda already did a lot of rambling already in this post, but in this period of moving limbo I've been trying to do a lot of planning and storyboarding for upcoming chapters.

It's a painstaking process of evaluating character motives, writing interesting scenes as they come to me, and patching plot holes.  The story is written from Kiva's perspective, (he is the one telling the story, after all) but I'm toying with the idea of allowing other characters to tell their side of the story as well, if only to break it up a bit more and give us a little more of a window into the world.  If I don't, just due to the nature of posting pages periodically, we may go actual years without seeing Kiera, Riley or Max, and I don't know that anyone wants that, myself included.

I'm thinking of making it so that the characters would later tell Kiva what happened, and he would let us know in his retelling of the story what went on with them, inserted appropriately on the timeline.  However, this method of storytelling is spoilery in its own right.  We already know that Kiva survives to tell his tale.  That's not a mystery from the beginning, and we will know that any time he's in apparent danger, he will pull through.  (Unless, of course, he's dead, and he's telling the story post-mortem, but come on, that's about as cheap a twist as "it was all a dream!").  If I have other characters share what was happening to them, I'd be letting you all know that those characters probably survived the story as well.  Again, removing the tension from any dangerous scenes involving them.

On the other hand, I'm not trying to write misery porn.  (And I do sympathize with and I apologize to Patreon's Trust and Safety team for the use of the word "porn" in this context.) I'm not interested in telling a story where I build up a bunch of cute and rich characters and get all my readers attached to them only to GoT them in some spectacularly gruesome and depressing way.  Not every character is safe, mind you, and Kuserra is a harsh and dark place, but the general theme I keep coming back to for God Slayers is that it's possible and important to have hope in a horrible and harsh world.  The world Kiva lives in is a depressing, terrible place, but I have to believe there is some good in it, despite all that.  I don't know if Kiva's story has a happy ending, but I am almost certain it is not a tragic one.