Stuff I did today:

I drew this. It is based on an amateurish porn drawing a friend linked to in her private Twitter. Which I will not link to publically because that starts to feel like bad form.

I sketched out the panel flow of the climactic chapter of Rita, and was kind of dumbstruck by that. I’ve been working towards the visual trick that happens in this chapter for almost four years; the enormity of finally getting to this point is a strange thing to grapple with. Other people might have shaken it off and just kept drawing, but I am kind of a slacker, so I put the stylus down and went to get some paper towels. Because I was out. And when I finished that errand, I puttered online for a bit, then ran off to circus class.

On the way there I nattered about the weird sensation of being Almost Done With My Biggest Project Ever on Twitter:

I just roughed out the framework for some Rita pages I’ve been planning for four years.
It is still so damn weird to see the end of an artistic journey i’ve been on for four years coming close.
Kinda hard to keep working. I am so ready to be DONE with Rita and move on. And have a vacation.
For what it’s worth, the plans for my next comics also have definite endings.
I dunno. I feel like I want to discuss these end-of-long-project feels with someone else who’s been there.
I guess I was sorta here six years ago when I finished the Tarot deck. I had an external deadline for that, though.
With Rita, there’s just the work.
Wonder if I could push myself to have the whole ending roughed out before my Monument Valley vacation.
Kinda feel like a solid month of NO WORK might be a good idea after I finish Rita.
Maybe clear out old lingering commissions at most. Go somewhere else. Or just enjoy a month of Seattle summer.
I dunno. I’m just sitting here on the bus pondering this, and using Twitter as a place to dump these thoughts.
My blog would probably be better for it.
Also I have a couple games I backed on ks dropping the final version soon. That will help vacation.
I also kinda want to… Not THINK for a month.

I’ve got plans for what I’ll do after finishing Rita, but I think this near-future plan of “take a damn vacation to clear my mind” is a very good one. Once it’s all drawn and I’ve recovered, then I get to deal with edits, the volume 3 Kickstarter, picking up Absinthe, and starting Drowning City. And those things will probably keep me busy for another five years, at least. After that? Who knows. I’ve got ideas for future comics lying around; maybe I’ll work on one of them, maybe I’ll take a break and make a video game, maybe some other crazy opportunity will pop up as a result of all this comics-making. It’s way too far off to make any decisions; mostly I just need to keep myself moving forwards until I’m actually Done Drawing Rita.

Circus class today was Strength and Flexibility. And it was brutal. Among other things, we did one of the most gruelling exercises I know of, the burpee – a horrible hybrid of push-ups and jumping jacks. And because that wasn’t bad enough, we then went to to do something known only as RUSSIAN ABS. I wrote about that beautifully hideous exercise on the bus home.

I had some supper on the way home; when I made it inside, I went straight to the living room and plopped my ass in the giant beanbag chair for a while. I played Pix the Cat (recommended, it’s like a puzzle version of Championship Pac-Man DX, which is one of my favorite modern arcade remixes; also it is very French) until my eyes bled; now it is time for sleep.

Today in circus strength & fitness class we did burpees. Then we did something even worse. Something known simply as “Russian Abs”.

They were brutal and horrible and my inner sadist wants to make me do some every fucking day.

1. Lie on your back, arms and legs straight. Arms are above your head.
2.Lift your arms and legs slightly off the floor.
3. Keeping your legs off the floor, lift your torso up towards verticality.
4. Go back down to 2; repeat 3/2 two more times.
5. Do 3/2 again, except lifting your legs up and keeping your torso slightly off the ground. 3x for this, too.
6. Lift arms and legs together. Yeah. Good luck with doing this once, lay alone three times.

You’re not done.

7. Roll onto one side. Stretch arms and legs out. Keep them just off the ground.
8. 3x: lift arms/torso.
9. 3x: lift legs.
10. 3x: lift arms and legs. Consider weeping.

11. Roll onto the other side. It must suffer identically.

12. On your front. One last time. Same as the first round except you’re on your belly bending backwards, instead of on your back bending forwards.

13. Weep openly. Embrace Mother Earth; be thankful for her support. You are done with the horror of Russian Abs. You may want to lie to your body and say you will never do them again.

This is what I signed up for. I hate my past self.

Also it turns out that the school is going to be closed on the day I was planning on skipping the Strength & Flexibility class for my impulsive trip to the desert. Yay!

Yesterday, I went to the comic shop and bought a couple of short boxes for comics. All of my comics are now in them. In order. I also decided that, you know what, none of these are ever going to be worth anything, and the stupid mylar sleeves make it harder to read the things. So I have a pile of mylar sleeves that need to be tossed sitting on top of the comic boxes.
(I feel like I need to find somewhere to put the comic boxes besides ‘at the foot of the shelves’; they look really janky compared to the nice orderly shapes of the bookcase. Probably they’ll end up somewhere in the closet, or maybe behind the beanbag chair. Dunno.)

Nick came over in the evening and we went out to dinner at Liam’s, on my mom – she’d sent me some money for Christmas to be used for this purpose. It was tasty and delightful.

In the morning, I had breakfast with Nick, and we chose a date for the trip I’ve been kicking around. I now have two tickets to Salt Lake City, bought mostly with frequent flier points. We’ll deal with hotels and car rental as we get closer. But this is a definite thing that’s going to happen now!

And then I just kinda puttered around the apartment reading the internet and playing video games. When I went out to Trader Joe’s for something for dinner they were playing the Super Bowl over the store speakers; that was pretty much my entire contact with that. I realized around ten that I hadn’t heard a bunch of people hollering SEEE HOOOOOOOGSSSS outside like I did last year, so I guess they lost. Which, honestly, will make life as a non-sports-caring-about person easy.

I should make sure to get some work done on Rita tomorrow. Plus of course going to strength/flexibility class at the circus school.

Today, I woke up early. Early enough to go do yoga but I blew it off because of a small website weirdness that needed fixing.

Soon after that, I found myself looking for a particular book in my library. “Unauthorized Portraits”, a collection of Edward Sorel's work. I couldn't find it. I ended up going through all the piles of books and comics sitting in front of the shelves, waiting to be put in place, and finally doing just that. I held myself to my promise to not get more shelves when the current ones got full; the pile of books that was destined for the used bookstore has grown. And is now in the studio in several boxes, waiting for the next visit from Nick – I proposed renting a car to take them around a few used bookstores, then to take us to dinner, and he thought that sounded like a good idea.

In the middle of this shelving frenzy, I found myself in the studio, glaring at the “books to read” pile next to the reading chair. One of that chair's legs broke a while back, and I haven't gotten around to getting it fixed, so my “to read” pile has been growing out of hand. I now have the chair sitting upside down near the door; after determining that I was not going to be disassembling it and attempting to bodge the broken leg on, I put the folding chair where the reading chair lives.

I will have to call a carpenter to get the thing somehow fixed soon. Because it's a lovely chair that I got for a fraction of what something as stylish as it normally goes for. But right now I am sitting in the Reading Spot next to the window in my backup folding chair, and I just finished going through several volumes of BPRD: Hell on Earth that are overdue at the library.

I need to get a small longbox to put my comics in, and there are still a few books kicking around, but the ecosystem around me reading is in much better shape. Which will help make me happier. And make it easier for me to sit down with research materials for Drowning City…

I did not get any art done but damn, today was definitely a day full of some work that had been put off for far too long. I am not completely done shaving this particular yak – chair repair and a comics box need to happen – but two cluttered, dysfunctional corners of my apartment are now USABLE again.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Its nihilism will be, I think, a pleasing counterpart to the aggressive lack on meaning that is “Jabberwocky”, the only other poem I’ve bothered to memorize.

Today, I went to the comic book shop and traded some copies of the comic books I made for the 5th Edition D&D Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. I mean really. How rad is that. Twelve year old me would be amazed that I can actually draw well enough to make a trade like that. (And even more amazed if I told him that the day before, I got $90 for finishing a single page of my comic.)

Then I went to circus school and, as I expected would be happening sometime in the first few weeks, found myself really hating my past self for signing myself up for this. But I’m pretty sure that if I can tough it out for a few weeks of building muscle, future me will be very grateful to current me when she, like, grabs ahold of a rope, slithers up it without a care in the world, and poses gracefully.

Also future me will be generally happy at having a body that is in shape. I’ve had that in the past thanks to burlesque and pole dance; I kinda stumbled into it by utter accident and it turns out it’s really nice to be in shape. I never imagined. So yeah. Fuck you, past me. But you’re welcome, future me.

(I actually say things like that out loud sometimes. It may or may not help with making it easier to do stuff like ‘gruelling exercises’.)

I also got to stop on the way home to have a sandwich, and eat it in a waterfront park, looking out at the brightly-lit Ferris wheel and the gently twinkling lights of… I dunno, whatever the hell is across the sound from downtown. Bainbridge Island, judging from Google Maps. I like living in Seattle, it’s pretty when the sun’s not hiding for days on end.

And I also played with the new version of that use-my-ipad-as-a-cintiq program I’m in the beta test for. I need to fiddle with it a little more and write up my reactions to its UI changes. Maybe tomorrow.

Some things I've learnt about doing large projects over the course of doing Rita.

• Begin with an end in mind. It's very useful to have a narrative goal to be aiming for, and to have a point in the future where you are finished. Things may change, you may not arrive at that end from the direction you thought you would, you may come up with a better ending to aim for halfway through – but you're aiming somewhere instead of just flailing about aimlessly.
• Don't stress about schedules, but don't abandon it. If you're at a point in your life where all you can dedicate to the Huge Project in one day is a half hour, that's still a half hour of work that you're closer to the end. Sure, four solid hours of work would be a lot better – but a half hour is still tons better than nothing. Working on Rita has been much easier ever since my official schedule became “aim for two pages a week, don't fret if life gets in the way”; it frees me from traps like spending the precious little energy I have during down phases on making a page whose entire purpose is to HAVE A PAGE UP ON SCHEDULE, even if it's just a drawing of a sad person apologizing for no page.
• The easier it is to work on it wherever, the better. I'm told that Sergio Aragones draws his stuff on typing paper stuck to a clipboard; this means that he can work on an issue of Groo anywhere, even in a seat on a full airplane. I haven't reached that ideal quite yet, but I'm getting closer; much of Rita happens in my studio, but a lot of it also happens at coffee shops, in parks, even on the bus.

These are the principles that have let a complete slacker with no discernible work ethic like myself get a dense, 200p graphic novel done all by herself. Other people might have taken less than four years to do it, but I don't care. I've spent the time and energy my highly distractable, intensely solar-powered nervous system allowed me to spend on it, without ever turning a passion project into drudgery and an obligation.

A friend is debating moving from Arizona to Seattle. Telling them some of my thoughts on living in Seattle as a very solar powered person somehow became me talking myself into taking a desert vacation. To Monument Valley, specifically – I’ve wanted to visit there for most of my life, ever since falling in love with the caricature of it Herriman set “Krazy Kat” in.

I couldn’t do it by myself; it’s really a destination that requires driving to get around. But I think I may have just managed to propose a weekend trip to my ex-with-benefits, who does drive. And I have enough points piled up on Southwest that we could fly to Salt Lake City, which is only about a 6-hour drive from there. He’d proposed just driving but that’s about an 18 hour drive each way, over nasty wintry mountains, sort of over the edge of what’s quite sane.

Will this stoned impulse turn into a brief “charge up on solar power” vacation? We will see.