Bonus Comics and Staff Picks (Patreon)

Matt and I are officially in pre-production mode for OJST Volume Two. Like last year, we'll be launching the Kickstarter in May again. Today we had a 2.5 hour long brainstorming session with Anne Moloney, who made our last Kickstarter video and will, of course, be making the next one. Matt's been hard at work this whole month roughly assembling the InDesign file of the second book's layout and adding in all the pages I've produced since the last volume. 

This week I focused on making the introduction comic for the book, which means I'll be running a guest comic this Tuesday. To be honest, I'm pretty disappointed in myself that I didn't get more work done. Of this four page comic, I only inked the first page (which you can see here! Plz don't share, shhhh it's secret). The rest are laid out and have stick figures drawn in. I totally should have been able to finish four measly pages, but I got kinda flipped out by my To Do list and sort of just shut down instead of making real progress? It's a list of all the comics and illustrations I need to make for this next book, and I somehow thought that I was supposed to get ALL of them done THIS WEEK. Which, no, it was just an *overall* list that needs to get done in the next couple months. Woops. 

Hey, but in other news: two things that made me feel really good. 

1) Patreon sent me an email saying "We just wanted to let you know that you're among the Top 100 Creators on Patreon in 2014! The Top 100 are those Creators who earned the most support for their creations throughout the year." 

So, uh, wow O.O
Thank you again to all of you lovely, generous patrons for supporting this project and being the reason why Matt and I can both work on this full time. 

2) OJST is a staff pick at Powell's!!!!! (See "Bonus Pictures") "Erika," You say. "I don't live in the ridiculous city of Portland, what on earth is a Powell's?" Powell's is only THE BEST BOOK STORE IN THE WORLD. It takes up an entire city block here, with a bunch of little satellite stores around it and it's kind of my Happy Place. The Gold Room is where they keep all the nerdy books, including graphic novels, and OJST made it on to their "The Best of 2014 in the Gold Room" wall! Out of all the graphic novels and sci-fi/fantasy novels produced last year by established authors with big deal traditional publishers, our little Kickstarter-funded, self-published book of cartoon boners made the cut. 

Like. For reals. That means the fucking world to me. 

Even better, they had to *shrink wrap* all the copies on display and include a warning label commanding "Do Not Open: ask an employee for assistance"-- yes, it IS the only book treated like that on the shelf ;) TOO HOT TO HANDEL. 

An employee at Powell’s told me they’d put one un-shrink wrapped copy in the Health/Sexuality section and it just… immediately disappeared. People are too embarrassed to buy a book full of naughty pictures, so they just shove them into their coats and skedaddle. The rest of their OJST stock is kept in a locked glass case in the Gold Room. 

So that's what I've been up to this last week. Working on volume two, alternating between feeling like a complete failure who can't do her job and a total champ whose hard work is paying off. You know, the usual.