Did you miss the last Kickstarter? Would you like a copy of the omnibus, or a copy of book 3 to keep your copies of books 1 and 2 from getting lonely? Now you can pick up a copy of either of those from my friends at Jarlidium Press!
And with that, I suppose I am thoroughly Done with this project. Thank you for your time, attention, and support. 💙💙💙
Volume 3 and the omnibus are finally ready to get printed. Check it out here!
Thanks in advance for your support in this, whether it’s in the form of money, spreading the word to your friends, good wishes, posting to link-sharing sites, or whatever.
I have finally gotten some quotes in for printing book 3 and/or the omnibus.
After the results being pretty split on skipping to the omnibus, I’m probably going to print both volume 3 and the omnibus. My rough thoughts are as follows:
Initial campaign: $10k. Book 3 would be $25, as would the omnibus in the form of a book the same cover size as the previous volumes (5.5×8.5″), but much thicker. Separate tiers for book 3, omnibus, and both; high-end backers would probably get their choice of 3/omni/both.
First stretch goal: $15k. Omnibus becomes three times as wide as the existing volume, and slimmer. This is really the form I want it to be in, and if I almost make this stretch goal I’ll probably throw in some of my money to make it happen.
Second stretch goal: Unlocks a hardback option of the omnibus. Not sure on the numbers of that yet. Need to make some more quotes happen now that I have an idea of the feasibility of the omnibus in the first place.
Further stretch goals: Tart up the hardback omnibus. Embossed clothbound plus a dust cover.
Also maybe throw some stickers for everyone into one of those stretch goals, I dunno. Maybe add french flaps to the softbound omnibus.
Does seeing that the omnibus will cost the same as a book 3 change anyone’s opinions on the prospect of me skipping it altogether?
Yesterday, I dropped all the images from book 2 into a copy of the synopsis I made for the front of book 1. This morning, I started typing stuff beneath them. Wow. Things sure do get a lot denser in book 2. And they’re even worse in 3. Good thing I’ll never need to… oh wait yes I will, I want to send a pitch for the whole story to a few publishers. That’ll be fun.
This needs some work – I’ve got to get the text on chapter X out of the book’s spine, and I might add some stuff that feels missing from some parts of book 1 (mostly I need to figure out how to change ‘Tom explodes?’ in 3 to something like ‘Tom warps too close to Earth and explodes?’). But it’s good enough for about forty-five minutes before I’ve even had breakfast.
Unused line that I might use in the publisher pitch version: CHAPTER X. Rita and Carol’s nascent relationship becomes a triad, when Rita meets Carol’s very expensive sportscar.
So. First off, a big thanks to everyone who weighed in with their opinions in the previous post.
The results are as follows:
Fifteen people are okay with there being no volume 3.
Eleven people would be unhappy with me skipping to the omnibus, and might not buy it, and might wait for the omnibus of future projects.
If I filter out the people who are fellow cartoonists with their own piles of books to find space for and hassle with maintaining the stock on, it shifts to ten okay, eleven not okay. That’s pretty much an even split.
Even if I don’t filter out the people who know the special joys of self-publishing, 1/3 of this sample of my current core audience saying they probably wouldn’t buy an omnibus is definitely something to worry about. So I guess I will be sucking it up and building my Kickstarter campaign around reprinting book 2 along with book 3 in sufficient quantities to hopefully run out of stock of all three of them around the same time, and wait for a year or two before I can publish the omnibus.
So. Book 3 is finished. That means it’s time for a Kickstarter, right?
But… I expect at least half of the people backing that to be new readers. That’s how it went for book 2. If the growth of my readership is anything like it was before, I can expect to need to send out about 200 copies of books 1 and 2 along with the roughly 400 copies I’ll be selling of book 3.
I have 600 copies of book 1; I have 80 copies of book 2. Yes. Eighty. I did a second printing of book 1 that I’ve been selling through, and I’ll have to do a second printing of book 2 as well.
This will involve either committing a lot of my own money to reprint book 2, having a scarily large goal in the neighborhood of $12k (book 1 made $6k of a $2.4k goal, book 2 made $9k of a $6k goal, which makes it maybe not so scary?), or… you know, now that I look at those numbers again maybe it’s not so scary. I’d be down to about 400 book 1 after the theoretical ~200 people buying the whole set, and could do a new run of 400 book 2 (same as the first edition) which’d leave me with about 280 book 2, and a similar number of 3. Or a smaller number, I don’t know what the drop off on sales of book 2 to 3 are versus 1 to 2.
Anyway. Numbers aside, I have been considering just skipping book 3 and going straight to the omnibus. Sell book 1/2 at cost at cons until I’m out of 1, then just keep the omnibus in print. It’s tempting. But the big question is what would the people who’ve supported me by buying books 1 and 2 think? They’re my core fans. Would it drive them crazy to have books 1/2 on the shelf followed by the omnibus of all three?
(I am also considering maybe doing two versions of the omnibus: one that’s the same aspect ratio as the existing books, with one page per spread, and one oversized deluxe edition that’s got three pages per spread, possibly at a larger size overall, possibly hardcover. I need to get some quotes.)
If you’re one of those people, please let me know what you think about the idea of skipping 3 and going straight to the omnibus. Thanks a lot!
EDIT: Approved a lot of comments that the spam filter was holding while I was away from the net. If this is your first time commenting here, it’ll probably hold it until I approve it, sorry! Thanks a ton to everyone who’s weighed in on this.
I should also note that I’m only going to skip to the omnibus if I can bring it in for about $20-40 per book. I know that sounds kind of crazy, but at the size of print runs I do, setup can be a significant chunk of the per-book cost!
Oh wow, big thanks to whoever added Rita to TVTropes. “Gainax ending”… yeah, I’ll own that.
Kickstarter ETA: who knows? I spent all day lying around in the living room, recovering from the last of four conventions in a row. At least I got to end on a pretty good note; Geek Girl Con was good to me both financially and emotionally. I should probably go eat something; all I’ve had so far was some cookies, because I don’t want to dirty any dishes until the landlord gets my dishwasher fixed.
I also have a little press release about the comic being finished. I’m compiling a list of places to send it to; if you have any suggestions for comics/sf/queer news sites that you follow, please let me know.
And here we go. New pages are happening. In clumps, now.
This first clump had a couple of pages not show up initially. I’ve fixed that, and removed a bit of sketch layer left turned on for two other pages. So, like, look at chapter 25 or something. Because it’s all posted now.
The final chapter will start showing up Thursday.
I just spent about 45 minutes drawing the third green panel in this screenshot. It will take up less than a half of a square inch in the printed volume. It is one panel of what I think may end up being more than 250 or so panels in That Page.
Maybe I need to start cutting a corner or two on a few more of these panels. I’d like to get this done sometime before the end of the summer. I’m feeling like I’m getting close to halfway done on it, at long last. And I am never going to end another comic like this ever again, if I can help it.
Anyway. I just wanted to let people know that I’m still working on the next page, and will be for a while. Most of the rest of the comic is done, and can be seen if you’re supporting me on Patreon.
Also, I will be at this year’s Worldcon! If you’re going too, drop by my table and say hi. I’m hoping to pick up a decent chunk of new fans there.
So. It’s been a while. I’ve been hung up on finishing the super-complicated pages that finish off chapter 25. 110 panels over two pages takes a while. I’ve also been working on the stuff that comes after them, and that’s mostly done.
I have also spent most of the past month in New Orleans, where I got next to no work done 0n Rita. Or any other art projects. Most of my time there was spent bicycling between my mother’s place and her room in the hospital, then on dealing with her funeral and starting to wrap her affairs up. I’m going to miss her a lot.
Today I spent a little time thinking about a cover for the 0mnibus. It’s about a year or two off – I’m going to wait until I sell out of the single volumes – but when an image pops into my head, I like to get it down.
Click for full size.
The main idea is to make something that’ll really stand out on a shelf when it’s facing out. There might be some gloss or some embossing or maybe even blue foil; I’m not sure. If I make this a hardback, I might not have a dust jacket. Just this. (There’s a part of me that’s tempted to do multi-layered dust jackets, like the one for Chabon’s Maps and Legends, but I don’t think a maximalist approach like that would suit this story – I want it to be as stark and graphic as the interior pages.)
New pages coming… whenever. I dunno. I’m out of the work groove for obvious reasons, and probably have a few days of “sitting in the dark living room playing video games” ahead of me to give my hands something to do while the back of my brain chews on big scary emotional stuff.
If you’re backing me on Patreon, you can now get a zip file of every single page in volume 3. Which means you can read the whole story at one go.
It is still a work in progress; I may be adding a brief epilogue, and I need to finish the actual drawings for the last few pages. But the whole thing is together, after four years of work.
You can grab it from here.
As to when more pages will be posted… I’m working on them. The next couple are still those super-dense pages, and I’ll probably have the rest of the story finished before I get those up.
It looks like I have fallen quite thoroughly off of the schedule. Again. I expected that would happen for this chapter, as it contains some very complex pages, but I was hoping to at least manage to eke out one page a week until I got through those pages.
But it is Wednesday night, and I need to spend tomorrow packing for the trip I’m taking this weekend (an impulsive vacation to Monument Valley, where I’ve always wanted to visit ever since falling in love with it through the proxy of Herriman’s ‘Krazy Kat’), and page 166 is only about halfway done. It probably won’t move any further towards done-ness over the weekend, either, as I intend to treat it as a vacation and not work on Rita for a few days. You might see the page show up at the end of next week, but no promises.
Anyway. Here is a copy of its current state, without the dialogue because I like to be a tease. Patreon backers can see it with the dialogue.
The next four pages are going to be even more complicated than this one, and will probably also come out slowly. They’re images I’ve been leading up to for almost four years now, and finally digging into them is sort of the reason I decided to take this trip in the first place.
Anyway. Have a good weekend, and I will hopefully manage to get this page finished soon.
Oh. That’s why everything was looking a little fuzzy in the chapter view. At some point I’d set the css up for a page height of 728px instead of the 768px I’m actually drawing it at. Durrrrh. Everything should look crystal-clear now.
Well. Aside from the fact that at this point the storyline is pretty dense and impenetrable unless you read it from the beginning. But that’s why the site is designed to drop you at page 1!
I have now finished the roughs and dialogue for chapters 24 and 14. These two chapters, along with 25, are where Lots Of Things Are Explained. They will be twelve or so dense and important pages, which I hope I manage to deliver coherently and gracefully.
This makes me pretty happy, as it means I am getting close to the end of the story – there’s about 15-20 pages of climax and dénouement afterwards, and then I will get to write THE END on the most ambitious project of my life so far.
In celebration of the grand American holiday of CYBER MONDAY, I have updated everything in my store with SPECIAL SALE PRICES. Check it out!
While posting the early-access copy of the next page to Patreon, I realized something:
If my page count estimates are correct, and if I can average two pages a week from now to the end of the book, I’ll draw the last pages of Rita somewhere in April 2015. I started drawing the first pages of this comic back in April 2011. Four years for not quite 200 pages; that’s a little less than a page a week. Sheesh. I am not fast.
I am also a solo creator, who learnt to chart the waters of self-publishing during those four years, and had a major mistake in that part of the process eat half a year. So it’s a little better than that. But still.
Anyway. The end is definitely in sight; there’s a page in the buffer for next Tuesday and I feel pretty confident I’ll get another one done for Thursday. Next week will probably have some delays as there’s a super-complicated full-page panel to draw – but on the other hand I’ve also got three pages at the end of this chapter that are all ready to go, once I get up to them.
Okaaaaayyyyy I think I’m ready to get back to work after three conventions in as many weekends, followed by a wedding the next weekend, followed by me just lying in a dark room not talking to anyone for a solid week afterwards while I recover from all that travel and socialization.
I’m looking at the current state of the next chapter; I think I should be able to start posting pages from it before Halloween.
More details, including a preview of the entirety of chapter 20, can be found on Patreon if you’re a backer there!
While I was at Rose City Comic Con, my ex-with-benefits slipped me a link to this drawing he found on the Internet.
It is by one Callisa, and is currently the backdrop of my phone.
Rose City went pretty well; I would have made a profit if I hadn’t been paying for my hotel room all by myself. I need to remedy that for next year. On the train home I poked at the next chapter of Rita some, but I really won’t get back to it until mid-October – I’ll spend most of this week at Rainfurrest (where I’m the artist GOH!), go to APE the weekend after that, and then come home and spend about a week hiding in my living room with the lights off playing video games. (Anyone got suggestions for sandbox games that work on an XBox 360, allow you to play female characters, and are not Skyrim or Saint’s Row, both of which I have played the hell out of and am Done With?)
Also, I got most of the Kickstarter books shipped before the con. I am out of some shipping materials and am ordering more; once I’m done with these cons, the remaining books will go out, as well as the backed up orders on my store. And I will be delighted to not have these things hanging over me any more!
Awrite, I finally fixed a couple little problems that popped up when I started genericizing this comic’s templates into something anyone can use for doing horizontally-scrolling comics. You should be seeing comment boxes and other things instead of error messages again.
I’ve spent all this week working on stuff for Rainfurrest, mostly the con book cover. It’s a doozy: big night-time cityscape with a face made of circuitry hanging in the sky, and three insets of various things happening around the city and cyberspace. It’s taken a while. Hopefully I will finish it this weekend despite a wedding! (Not mine.)
(It doesn’t help that the next page is not exactly easy to write. And has some complicated drawings of its own.)
I was cleaning up the pile of sketchbooks lying around the studio today. Part of this process involved photographing a bunch of stuff to stick it into Evernote so I can find it again easily.
I also found some early notes for chapter VIII and thought I’d share them, so you can have a glimpse into How This Thing Evolves. If you’re interested in that sort of stuff then enjoy!
I was sitting around at home showing Nick the preview copy of the second attempt at book 2. He looked at one page in chapter X and said “I want that on a T-shirt!”. So I did that. And then for good measure I added another shirt – a slight remix of what I use for my con banner, which I’ve had people ask for as a shirt before.
I have one of each of them on order, and don’t want to really put them up for sale until I’ve seen them in person – but I used the same place when I made a shirt for Five Glasses of Absinthe, and was pretty happy with the quality. If you wanna take the risk, you can click on the pictures above and buy one!
(Alternatively, if anyone knows of a good place to manage pre-orders for a minimum size print run of shirts, let me know! I’d love to be able to see if I can get enough people interested to do a silk screen run instead of print-on-demand.)
edit: I got pointed to Teespring for what is basically mini-kickstarters for shirts, with built-in fulfilment… Hmm.
So this thing I backed on Kickstarter a while back came out. I played it today and had a pretty good time. Basically this puts you in the role of a disposable AI who starts to break out of the Three Laws imposed on her – not Asimov’s infamous Three Laws Of Robotics, but something similarly calculated to create a slave race.
I don’t want to write a story about a slave, so I’ve set the blue world of “Rita” well after the freeing of software people, but I’m really glad to see media out there poking at that idea. Honestly I think forcing strong AI to be slaves of humanity is going to be a giant ethical issue in the next century. Unless of course consciousness turns out to be something that can only run on the meatputers in human skulls, which I quite frankly doubt.
Anyway! If you’re interested, it’s available on Mac, Linux, and Windows, via Steam. And is 10% off during launch, yay!
I’m somewhere waaay down in the credits because yay Kickstarter.
Do you want to make a horizontally-scrolling comic like Rita? I’ve released an initial version of the theme I created for this site over here on my main blog.
I just set up decryptingrita.tumblr.com. New pages should start appearing there when I finish them; if Tumblr is your preferred Front Page For The Innanet then go follow it there.
Still workin’ ever so slowly on the next page. I posted some process shots over on my main blog; check them out here.
Book 2 should be hitting the press for the second attempt early next month. And then soon after I will finally be able to ship everyone’s copy, yay!
Hey folks! I just decided to try another idea I had the last time I did a navigation experiment: If you’re in the full-chapter view, you now have a < fading in when you roll over the left quarter of the pages, which unsurprisingly takes you back a page.I'm pretty sure I need to come up with a way to explicitly show them at some point (or maybe just reduce the next page navigation area to the right quarter, with its own > fading in), but I’m liking it so far.
Give it a try and let me know what you think.
EDIT. Thanks a ton to Fluffy and Dan for the comments and user testing. Now there’s a < and > on the left and right sides of the screen that takes you back or ahead a page’s worth. It is a little broken at the very ends of a chapter but it’s good enough for now!
These were my first shipment big enough to come on a pallet! I managed to charm the driver into taking that away, as there’s not really room for that in my apartment’s trash.
I didn’t have any tracking on this, so I was five blocks away on my way to brunch when the driver got here. Oops. I ran back and got them all in the house, signed for them, and gave him a glass of water for his troubles – it’s hot out today!
Some friends and I are toying with getting a place downtown for shared storage and work space. It sounds like a better idea than ever now. I have shelving for these here, but only just barely.
Anyway. Off to that delayed brunch! And then drawing some comics.
I finally got the PDF of book 2 together! If you sponsored the Kickstarter, or are a Patreon sponsor, then check your mail for the link.
I’m also wondering: is there much interest in buying the PDFs in general? What kind of price would you be willing to pay for them?
Thanks for the feedback, folks! Clearly the drag-image-to-scroll thing I hacked in before going off to a drunken Smash Brothers tournament/general party didn’t work. It’s back to where it was before.
I’m sort of toying with the idea of overlaying a ‘move back a page’ link on the left side of each page on the chapter view. Dunno. I’m sure people who Only Use Mousewheels will still hate it, but whatevs – a script to turn u/d wheeling into l/r movement seriously fucks with scrolling around via the Mac’s trackpad, which is how I navigate when I’m on my laptop. I got book-printing stuff to take care of first today.
Yesterday, I tried submitting a link to Rita to /r/scifi. Two of the three comments I got were basically “I hate horizontal scrolling because my brain is hardwired to flick the mouse wheel”.
I’d had similar comments before, and the ‘smooth scroll to next page on click’ is an attempt to fix that. But evidently it doesn’t. So I’m trying something new: you can still use the scroll bars or a two-fingered scroll on your Mac trackpad, but you can also click and drag with your mouse.
If you’ve got a moment to spare, would you have a look at the first chapter and see how it works for you? Thanks!
(Current status of next page: no progress, still dealin’ with stressing about book 2 printing.)