Stumptown and Powell's updates!

It's been a tough couple of months over here at Casa Grindstone. I spent most of February and the first week or two of March pounding away at the Girl Scouts job, managing to churn everything out just slightly past deadline - not even a week - and I'm very happy with the results. So were they, thank god. It was a real gauntlet and I was happy to get through it.

I intended to take a small vacation to clear my head for a few days between wrapping up the GS job and diving headlong into chapter 4 of Ivy - just a few days out of town, spending time in good company - and things didn't go quite as I planned. I returned home to an angry ex and a bunch of sticky, problematic issues regarding the house and splitting up our shared property. I wish I could have kept my blithe naivete as long as possible regarding my optimism about this breakup - that it could be not-unpleasant, or smooth, or at least not more hurtful and unhappy than it absolutely had to be. Sadly, like all divorces this one has grown ugly, and dealing with not just the pain of the breakup itself but a hurt and vengeful ex has made an already tough situation pretty fucking crappy.

I had three weeks to draw my chapter. I was perhaps ten pages into it when I finished the GS job, and I needed to get it all completed by April 7th (tomorrow), because I am leaving for NYC on the 8th and not returning until the 16th, two days before the Stumptown Comics Fest. If I was to have it printed up by the Fest, it would need to be at the printer's by the 7th. And try as I might, producing 29 pages in 21 days was just beyond my powers.

Oh, I tried. In the last week alone I busted out 15 pages. But two days before I hop on a plane, there are still 9 half-inked pages and three yet to even start. So I'm cutting my losses and preparing a preview mini for Stumptown, and once at the Fest I'll have a pre-order option for people to pay now and have the mini sent to them a week later once it's ready. They will also be available at my reading at Powell's on the 27th, where I'll be showing much of this new chapter, along with my friends Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Reklaw who are also reading from their new works. Come on by if you'll be in town! I'm excited and terrified!

Mostly however, I'm just glad that not making this self-imposed deadline isn't getting me down. I've been working very, very hard at this chapter and it's well on its way. Last night at one in the morning I noticed my line quality going down and I thought, "Is it worth it to get this in under the gun when you're getting sloppy? You can't sacrifice quality for fast turnaround." So you WILL get your new chapter, it WILL be a week late, and that... is... okay. Getting shingles from stress was an enormous wake-up call for me about the way I live my life - nothing is so important that it's worth getting sick over. So I'm off to NYC and Philadelphia, see you at the Fest on the 18th, and stop by and pick up your preview mini - for free!