Man, it’s good to be able to do some of my usual routines again. I went to the farmer’s market for the first time in three weeks; I was out at conventions the last two weekends and missed it. So now I have REALLY SPICY CHEESE and AWESOME HEIRLOOM TOMATOES for salads.
I puttered around the house for a while doing things like folding my socks – this takes a while when every pair is different, and when part of me insists they have to be sorted by color – and neurotically refreshing the page for the Rita 2 Kickstarter. Eventually I said “fuck this”, grabbed the iPad and a sketchbook, and went out to work on the layouts for a 5-page short I’ve promised to do in the next couple of months. I got four pages done; I’ll need to do some reorganizing of the third and shuffle some stuff from 4 onto 3 before I can really finish it. It’s a first draft, and it mostly works, so I’m happy.
I also grabbed a new mechanical pencil on my way out to work on that. The sketchbook I had on me was too small for really working out pages with a slowly-blunting 2B. I used to use .5mm mechanical pencils ALL THE TIME when I was in high school and college, then abandoned them when I discovered the joys of roughing stuff in with the side of a wooden pencil. I’d had a nice mechanical .5 one in the past few years, but I gave it away to a friend who was positively drooling over it, then the place I’d gotten it from never had it again. So I looked at the stuff in the closed display case at the UW bookstore’s art department, and ended up getting a .7mm Pentel Graphgear, with this really cool retractible tip – most drafting-oriented mechanical pencils have a little metal sleeve sticking out a quarter of an inch or so, to protect the lead when you’re drawing against a ruler/template/etc, and also tends to snag in a pocket; this one has that but can pull it back in. I loaded it up with 2B lead and I’m really liking the experience a lot; the slightly thicker lead feels a lot less snap-prone than .5mm was. I used to scoff at the idea of anything thicker than .5mm; I guess things change as we age, huh? I tried a .9mm as well, but found it to be too thick for what I was looking for. Also the .9 was yellow and silver, while the .7 was blue and silver. Yes I am a shallow thing who likes surface appearances.
The Kickstarter is taking longer than I’d initially hoped – I’d thought I might end up celebrating 100% funding last weekend – but I’m not complaining. $6000 in two weeks (I figure it’ll hit 100% tomorrow or Sunday) is still a little more than twice as fast as it took book 1 to crrraaaawllllll to a little short of its $6000 stretch goal. I dunno if I’ll hit any of the stretch goals I’ve got planned, but I’m not really much bothered if I do – spot gloss on the cover would be nice, but is by no means as crucial as spot gloss on the interiors is. Having the “two books” tier REALLY HELPED; right now that’s both the most popular reward, and the biggest chunk of the money. In fact, given that it’s accounting for almost $2200 right now, it will probably always be the biggest chunk of money – even if all the sponsor-level slots are taken, those are still limited to a total of $2500 because they involve me actually drawing unique stuff. I said when I started that I wanted this campaign to work primarily by just selling some books to more people than I did with the first volume, and it’s doing just that. (In fact, I just did some counting – as of now, 107 people have pledged at a tier that gets them a copy of Rita 2 and possibly more, versus 102 people who got a copy of Rita 1.) I’m pretty happy with that result. It’s not INSTANT INTERNET BEST-SELLER EXPLOSION!!! but it’s looking pretty damn good, and I figure Rita 3 will go even better.