Weekly Update - 88 (Patreon)

Gilly looks almost like a vampire in this panel.  Rest assured, he's not actually a vampire, though I can't say he'd be above drinking the blood of innocents.

Comic This Week:  It's nowhere close to being done, but I'm gonna try to get it finished by Wednesday.

Drawing: Page 122

Playing: Nothing before I'm done with 122 and have a good start on 123.

Ramble:

The imposter syndrome is pretty heavy today.  There's over a thousand people who visit the site each month from all over the world and I still have no idea what I'm even doing.  So many eyes, so many minds all reading and following along and being attentive.  It feels like a lot of pressure, honestly, though I'm sure much of that pressure is just being imagined by me.  I've met many of you already and I like everyone I've met and chatted with.  Still, some of you, I'm sure, are smarter than me.  Some of you are better writers than me.  Many of you are almost certainly better artists than me.  But there's something about this thing I'm making that keeps you all coming back and I honestly don't know what it is.

I'm starting to feel... impuissant is a fun word.  As if I'm not up to the task I have ahead of me.  I've wrapped up Part 1 of Kiva's story.  All 120 pages of it.  Part of me is maybe a little sad that it's done.  Part of me wants to go back through it and update it with shiny new art, since I've come so far since I first started.  But now I have Part 2 ahead of me, and Part 3 beyond that.  Might there be a Part 4?  It will depend largely on what ends up being cut before the end, most likely.

Stories are easiest to write from the beginning.  When you have a blank canvas with nothing established, the readers are the most open-minded and you have a lot of freedom to explore this setting with them.  The more you paint onto that canvas, the more lore you establish, the more character development you show, the easier it is for you, the author, to slip up and make a mistake and try to write something that doesn't jive with what's already been established.  For example, so many of you know Max by this point.  You know him almost as well as I do, and that means I've lost the freedom to put a gun in his hand and have anyone expect him to ever pull the trigger.  That's just one example, but over time, you can see how my freedom to write this story narrows, how it becomes harder to continue writing because the list of implausible story threads grows and expands.

Now that... is also a terrible way to think about writing.  I do myself a disservice with this train of thought.  I've come this far not by trying to navigate a minefield of missteps and more by just believing in my world and staying true to my characters.  I don't write to force Kiva and Max into a relationship despite their differences.  I write because I picked up on their natural attraction to each other in an earlier draft and I wanted to shine more of a spotlight on it.  If my world makes sense to me, and my characters behave like I would expect them to, then I think I am doing the best I can.  Max wouldn't pull the trigger of that gun, I cannot imagine a situation where he would choose to pick it up in the first place.

But, even still, as we head into Part 2 of Kiva's story, I sadly remain only human, a human backed up by a lifetime of mistakes, and the journey ahead of me, the one that inevitably concludes Kiva's story, is very long and frightening.  I want to deliver the best story I can.  I don't know if I'm up to the task, honestly, but I also don't know what else there is to do but try.