June 12th, Thursday (Book Cover) (Patreon)

Here are the things I had on my To Do list:
-Finish cover
-Work on the favor illustration
-Send next week's OJST strip + preview graphic to my syndicates
-Reserve this one book at the library
-Research next comic's topic 

I thought the cover would take, like, 1-2 hours. MAX. And then the illustration would be the time sink, with maybe another hour or two for researching my next comic's topic. Emailing my syndicates only took a coupl'a minutes and I'm gunna reserve that book at the library right after I post this update. 

The cover took me all day. 

All. Day. 

That sounds impossible. I mean, the art part of it was already done, all I had to do was create my ISBN's barcode, go through my press archives to find quotes from fancy shmancy people to slot into the remaining spaces and BAM. Cover Done. Right? 

Going through those press archives actually took a pretty good amount of time. In the end, I compiled a list of 14 decent-good pull quotes. Eventually I whittled it down to five to go on the frenchflaps. Oh my gosh, arranging them, adding colors, taking out colors, scootching them to the left, inching them back to the right, making some of the text bigger, some smaller... I have no graphic design training so not only did it take me hours of second-guessing myself, it actually made my brain 5x more tired than if I had just spent the day drawing comics. Like, I felt exhausted at the end of it. 

I fully recognize how ridiculous that sounds, please don't tell anyone who has a hard manual labor job that I said that. 

AND THEN, on top of all that pixel pushing and design agonizing, there's a chance I may have to scrap some of the quotes, because I don't think it would be ethical of me to put somebody's name on my book, endorsing my work, without their express permission. One of the quote-makers, I'd already asked him THREE TIMES over the last few months if I could use his words on my book and EACH TIME he conveniently evaded the question. Like, not even telling me "no", just making a joke or answering a different question. 

But then, today, after my fourth prompting (which I felt so guily for nagging him!), he not only gave me permission to use an existing adequate quote, but he actually gave me a brand new perfect one that works way better (So I don't have to do that thing where you add [these boxes] to make the sentence not a fragment). 

Alright, one permission granted, four more to go. So then I spent the rest of the day trying to find these authors' email addresses and OH WOW they do not make those easy to find. 

As of this moment, four of my five writers have given me permission. I'm waiting on the last one, who is a Big Deal Fancy Man and is all kinds of Internet Famous, so I don't know how likely it is he'll see my letter :-/ 

Keep your fingers crossed for me, folks!