Vlog 20170415 - Rolling into Fulfillment! (Patreon)

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Okay! Hello Patrons, it is Saturday. It's actually a beautiful Saturday today which is unexpected. I was out shopping earlier and I got rained on and it was supposed to rain all day long and be nicer tomorrow... so I rearranged all my plans to do my inside stuff today and I really really hope that my outside stuff that I planned for tomorrow actually does have a nice day for it... but anyway.

It's 15th of April! The big day that I've been working towards. The last day where I'm collecting peoples' information for Kickstarter fulfilment. And now I'm going to lock all of that down and that means I can finally extract the data and give that data to the fulfilment centre so they can start sending people their books. And then I get started on customizing bookplates and sending out original art. So that's huge, that's gonna kick off a huge piece of work for me but I'm excited about it because its the last stage of this Kickstarter and once that rolls off I'll be able to you know... dig into something else with confidence, I think. Because I've been waiting for this stage to arrive. I've been very leery of starting something and getting too deep into it and then needing to put it down. So I've been doing these little pieces here and there.

Speaking of little pieces, I hope you like the patron answers that I've been posting over the last couple weeks. I have one more that I'm working on which is gonna be three pages long and I'll post that sometime next week... I think? We'll see when I manage to get that done.

And otherwise... I got this book in the mail... "Wendy's Revenge"... this is a book that I need to read for Tradewaiters and... yeah, I started looking through it and I don't know if this book is gonna be for me. to give you kind of an impression of what it looks like. And, you know, I read the first couple of pages of book 1 and it was about this character Wendy. And she's kind of a... "ditz" I guess is what the word you would use to describe her. Which is a word that is a little bit degrading of women and I choose that word specifically because I think that the portrayal is a little bit degrading of women. And that's a quick take, right? I need to read a little bit more deeply to see if it's, you know, genuine satire with something to say or whether it's just you know...  like, "eyy women do stupid things sometimes" and I-- I don't know how I feel about that. I had to put the book down because I just was not in the mood to dig into it when I started reading. 

The other book that we're gonna be talking about for Kickstarter -- sorry,  for Tradewaiters next time is one I recommended called "Your lie in April" which is a manga and it's about a young boy-- a highschooler-- who was a very talented concert pianist. So he was one of these kids who was pushed at a very young age to excel in piano but then there was a tragedy in his life and he kind of stopped playing the piano for a little while. And he comes to meet this concert violinist and the two of them start becoming friends and -- you know-- because of it's a shojo manga --probably more than friends... but we'll see.  But it was just a really... it was a much more lighthearted comic.  And as I was reading through a bunch of different books for what I wanted to recommend to the Tradewaiters, I just wanted something lighthearted these days.  So I'm gonna be reading that pretty soon.

The other piece of news is that my story for Cloudscape's next book -- Cloudscape's last anthology I should say -- which is called "Swan Song". Their last anthology project is gonna be "Swan Song" and it's going to be a square book the size of a record-- which is quite big for a comic.  A big format.  They told me it was going to be hard cover and I put together a pitch with my friend Jonathan Dalton. And the pitch that we put together is about a kid who moves to a new town and takes up a musical instrument and joins the band. And we're kind of using that metaphor to describe what it's been like for the two of us to be part of Cloudscape. Where, you know, you do things in isolation... you have things you're trying to tackle yourself, but there's something really special about lending your efforts to a collective and what you can achieve in a collective group, and what that group can give back to you. So that's the crux of our story and I'm actually really excited about it, because I think it's gonna be a great collaborative experience with my friend Jonathan Dalton who brought me into the Cloudscape collective when it was very young-- very beginning. So it kind of book ends that experience and I'm glad I got accepted. But revisions are coming back from the editors it sounds like, so I have to wait for that, and it's gonna be a while before I dig into that.

On the other anthology front, I am considering applying to another anthology which is called "Sweaty Palms" and it's an anthology all about anxiety, and people's different experiences with anxiety.  Which I think is really interesting and something that I could speak to. So I'll be putting together another pitch for that, but again-- pitches! You know, they they go-- some come back, some don't. Just a process... so I think I'll be digging-- it's not due until September, so I have a little while... but I just came up with the idea of what I want to pitch, so I might be putting some effort into that in the next couple weeks.

The last thing that I wanted to tell you guys about today is that I've been finally digging into the Beyond inks. I finished page 1 and now I'm into page 2 of inking Sfé R. Monster's project for Beyond. And that's been really fun so far... we'll see if I can get permission to give a couple of previews of what I've been working on, but I think the comic is really solid and I'm having a good time inking it.

But that's it! A lot going on... a lot more coming to be going on...  [That sentence didn't really make sense.] A lot more will be going on soon, so I hope-- I'm really grateful for all of you sticking through what I think has been a little bit of a Patreon break, a Patreon dip as I've had to re-collect myself after the big energy output of running the Kickstarter and getting all of that produced. I'll be posting all of my bookplates as I draw them, and there will be 100 drawings there, so that'll take me awhile to get through for sure. 

That's it! I hope your weekend is as beautiful as ours and and I will see on Internet. Alright... baiee <3