Rita: the home stretch.

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Half the money has been wired to the printer. The interior files are done. I’m uploading two zip files to the printer’s FTP site; they’re the compressed result of asking InDesign to “package” my files. Which means that it created a directory containing the 223 Illustrator files that make up the pages of the book, all the fonts used, a PDF export of the whole book, and a version of the InDesign file that has the proper path references to use all those files.

Four and a half years of work. Four and a half years of drawing, writing, thinking, and drawing. Each page is in there three times: the Illustrator-only representation in its .AI file, the larger PDF-compatible representation in the same file that InDesign can read, and a print-res image contained in the PDF. It’s a little under two gigabytes.

And somehow that doesn’t feel like very much data for four and a half years of work.

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On the other hand book 3 is gonna take about three days to upload, and the omnibus is gonna take another three or four. So maybe that’s a hell of a lot of data. It’s certainly a hell of a lot of data to upload on my asymmetric consumer-level connection. Maybe I should see if I have a friend with a fast connection at home or work who’ll let me use it. Or just put these things on a USB key and FedEx that.

(It’s also a lot of data to be uploading three times, as Dropbox and Backblaze both try to synch it… pausing those sounds like a good idea.)


It is also Thanksgiving, which I have been spending very happily alone. And I suppose I should do the traditional listing of Things I’m Thankful For. Let’s see:

I’m thankful to my grandfather for taking advantage of a bank offering scandalously low interest rates on a loan, and leaving me a big enough pile of money that I haven’t had to worry about a day job for the  time I spent drawing this comic.

I’m thankful to all the people who now support me on Patreon; their small per-page donations add up to about a hundred bucks per page, and when I’m cranking out two pages a week that ends up paying a significant chunk of my rent every month. I’m thankful to the folks who built Patreon, too!

I’m thankful the three-way relationship that broke up not too long before starting Rita ended up with me having an ex-with-benefits who’s a great creative partner, as well as a source of, you know, regular, um, benefits.

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