Woo. Just sent off the file for the second attempt at printing book 2. Hopefully the last; any more mistakes I made, I’m just gonna have to live with until the third edition or the omnibus.

I’m really hoping that I never make a mistake like this again. I’ve automated the part I screwed up doing by hand, and I’m also planning on printing out a couple proof copies of the next book on my own printer for a few friends to check over. And making myself do a couple of slow proof passes of my own.

Work on the next page is moving slow, partially because of this, and partially because it’s gonna have some crazy backgrounds going on. It’ll be done when it’s done. But at least it’ll mean the end of the fifth chapter of book 3! (Out of 12, some of which are just a page long.)

I know it’s been a week with no page. It’ll probably be another week until the next one; I need to deal with reprinting book 2.

You see, it went to print, and I got an advance copy this Friday. It looked great. Until I got to chapter X and realized there was an entire page missing. I was horrified, as I knew there were 399 more copies just like it sitting on the loading dock, waiting for my approval.

I went and checked, and it was of course entirely my fault. I’d somehow missed a page when I did the batch import to create the initial InDesign file for book 2, and never caught that when going through building all the files, or when going over the proofs. I feel pretty stupid about this; this mistake is pretty much going to eat the profits from this print run. Good thing I’m not depending on my comics to pay my rent yet or anything like that.

Anyway, I’m going to get book 2 out the door for once and for all this week if all goes well. And then it’s back to drawing.

(I’m having most of the first run disposed of, but I’m probably going to end up with a small pile of the misprints. Mostly to keep around to remind me to always check my proofs for big stupid mistakes like this, along with a close examination to make sure all my crazy printing effects are coming out correctly!)

I’m finally recovered enough from ECCC to start thinking about drawing comics again. There’s always a dead week in which I recover from running Table Peggy for three days straight.

I’ve been procrastinating a little extra because I don’t have dialogue for the next couple pages yet and I haven’t really felt like writing it. But then I had an idea: after doing that Winsor McCay riff as an April Fools joke, why not pay some <em>real</em> respect to him by doing one of the insanely detailed cityscapes he’s known for? So I drew out a huge closeup of the Goddess’ Head filling the page, and noodled out a rough shape.

See the light area where it turns up? That is going to be completely filled with City. And may well be the only page this coming week. I think it’ll be worth it.

There might be dialogue over this, there might not. I dunno right now. I’m pretty sure that I’ll have a high-res copy of it available for Patreon supporters, though.

Emerald City Comic-Con is over, and went pretty well! (I really should have mentioned it on the blog here. Oops. Slipped my mind.)

Big thanks to all the existing fans who stopped by and told me Rita is awesome! I’m sorry I didn’t have a book 2 for you to spend money on. Life happens.

But I’m mostly writing this post to let you know about a Kickstarter by one of my idols. It is pretty safe to say you wouldn’t be reading this comic if it wasn’t for Matt Howarth; his work is a huge influence on both my drawing and my storytelling. I think I sent y’all to the first incarnation of this campaign; that one failed, as it was asking for enough money to work on for a year or so, but then Matt went and drew it in a month anyway because he is a machine optimized for making awesome science-fiction comics, and the new Kickstarter has succeeded.

There’s like five days left, so go hit it up! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/704723768/myriad-quest-a-graphic-novel-of-the-myriad-song

Hey wow I got some proofs of book 2 in the mail this morning! I posted about them on the book 2 Kickstarter, go have a look at it here if you’re curious.

I’m going to spend the next few hours dealing with that. Hopefully I can get the next page of the comic drawn as well, but I ain’t gonna hold my breath – there’s new backgrounds to be drawn. Nothing as elaborate as the LAST couple of pages but still, that stuff can a while. One of these days I’ll get a buffer again.

Okay now time to wash this excess dye out of my hair and go do some BUSINESS.

I just spent about three hours sitting in a cafe with my notes for Rita. Book 3 is now ready to start drawing; I have all the parts laid out in the proper order. There'll probably be some rearrangement here and there, but I feel confident that when I look back at these notes around the end of the year, they'll be about 90% the same as what I've drawn.

I'm probably going to work on the first couple of pages of book 3 when I go to the cartoonist's meetup at the local bar tonight. I'll probably sit on them until after Further Confusion, it would be cruel to post like one or two pages and then vanish for a week!

Book 2 status: 99% ready to go to the printer, waiting for them to get back to me with the final quote. I kinda wish I'd been able to get it printed early enough to have it for FC, but I didn't. Oh well.

I am REALLY HAPPY about this; my break stretched too long. I had fun when I wasn't fighting seasonal depression, but I really started missing the sensation of knowing what I was probably going to work on when I got up every morning.

I’m getting a few questions about Rita’s current status. Here’s the rundown:

As winter sets in, my productivity slows to a crawl; these past couple of weeks, I’ve been lucky if I could make myself focus on drawing for a single half hour. I love Seattle for a lot of other things but even with a 2′ square sun lamp I still shut down for a couple months. This year I started making noises about maybe migrating south for the worst of the winter, next year I might actually get together with a friend and do it. “Days” consisting of eight hours of grey skies just don’t work for a girl raised in the tropics like me.

Book 2 is ever so close to being ready for the printer. All I need to do is finish drawing the Kickstarter backers and the map of Rita’s travels through the Skylands that will be at the back of the book, then I can just drop those files in and send it off. Then I have a pile of books to ship. Thankfully I learnt from book 1 and severely limited how many I’ll have to draw in!

Book 3… hasn’t been touched at all. It’s in exactly the same state it was when I wrapped up book 2 – I’ve got the blue world all plotted out to the end, and haven’t spent any time thinking about how the red, orange, or green worlds really weave in and out of it. I need to be somewhere sunny with nothing but my notes and a lot of weed for about a week, then I’ll have it ready.

My current best guess for actually getting back to work is February or March; my original estimate of “a couple weeks off to deal with the book and some side projects” was comedically optimistic. Maybe next year I’ll have the sense to say “expect my next project to start sometime in spring 2015” when I finish Rita in winter ’14.

Here’s hoping your winter holidays have been pretty good, whether spent with family, friends, or in solitude.

Megan Rose Gedris is taking down her fabulous ‘Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space’ due to bad publisher shenanigans. But before she does, she’s posted zips of the whole thing on her site. But she ran out of bandwidth. So here is fan-art of it, and a link to a copy of all of it as one zip full of cbzs, ready to drop into your favorite comic book reader.

Also if you are here from her pointing to it, maybe check out my own comic about a bi robot lady with reality problems.

I'm getting ready to hit Jet City Comic Con down in Tacoma tomorrow. While packing my bag, I realized something: I have about 160 copies left of book 1 of Rita. Almost 100 of them are spoken for by backers of the Kickstarter for book 2. I've marked them as such so I don't accidentally dip into those.

I usually sell around at least ten copies at any con I go to. I'm definitely going to be doing more than six cons between now and next winter. I think it's pretty likely that book 1 will be out of print by the time I'm ready to go to print with book 3. I am pretty happy about this. Especially because I feel like the third Kickstarter has a good chance of making a “print a second edition of book 1” stretch goal. Thanks a ton to everyone who's supported the comic, whether it be through money, telling your friends, or whatever!

Current status of Rita: still poking at the files for book 2, my “fix before printing” list is down to just three things; then I'll be able to put together a PDF and send it off to the printer, and start getting all my plot ducks in a row for book 3.

Also, here is a photo of my Halloween costume. I was a sexy robot ghost, and my ex-with-benefits Nick was a death-god.

I found a website that attempts to create dubstep remixes of arbitrary tracks. Naturally, I chose The Very Sorry Song. The results are… well, they make me laugh.

The Kickstarter for book 2 of Rita is almost over; there’s slightly more than two days left. A mere $1500 shy of the $9k “spot gloss on the cover” stretch goal looks pretty achievable, given how the campaign’s been going overall!

So spread the word, tell your friends, maybe grab a copy if you haven’t yet. And thanks for all your support!

Current book 3/book 2 prepress status: still on vacation, guys, I just did Geek Girl Con this weekend to boot so I’m on double vacation today. I should be getting the files for book 2 together in the next week or two.

Hey, it’s some fan art.

Thanks, Rachel! (Let me know if you want that link to point somewhere else.)

She also sent along a version with all of the different Ritas she drew to overlap:

…which is something I’ve started doing for ads and suchlike several times, but have never actually followed through on. n.n

Meanwhile, the Kickstarter’s still running, but it’s almost over. Just nine days left to push towards spot gloss, and mmmaybe towards the secret goal of “drop the price on book 2” if I can get enough people buying a copy.

The Kickstarter climbed up to 70% of the goal ($4000 out of $6000) during its first week, then kinda flattened out. To help counteract this, I added a couple new tiers – one for both books and a t-shirt, one for dinner with me in my capacity as Guest of Honor at Rainfurrest 2014. (Oh yeah, if you’re only following this comic and no my blog/twitter, that was announced at the end of RF13 this weekend. The theme is CYBERPUNK.) I’ll also be trying to get a few more places linking to the comic or the Kickstarter this week.

Anyway, check ’em out, and whether or not you pledge, spread the word!

There will probably be a new page this week, one of the last two of this volume.

I just hit the big green LAUNCH button. Can I get $6000 in thirty days? I’m crossing my fingers!

Check it out, and tell your friends!

Here’s a thought I had on the way home from Rose City Comic-Con: I need to get Rita in front of the eyes of people who review SF. Not just SF comics; I think a lot of people who review prose SF would find this of interest, too – I suspect a large percentage of the people following this thing are the kind of people who actively enjoy being dropped in at the deep end and figuring things out as they go along, which is a skill you tend to pick up by reading lots of SF.

But I’m kind of out of that loop. The last time I was getting regular reviews of SF books was when I was subscribing to Analog, Asimov, and F&SF, and had a bookshelf full of the things. Mostly I think I just get occasional pointers to new stuff via BoingBoing, nowadays. I’m not reading any kind of active review columns any more.

So I’m turning to my readership: Where do you get your reviews of new SF these days?

(PS: The Kickstarter for book 2 should be launching Tuesday or Wednesday.)

This looks like an interesting game. I’ve backed it.

The setup reminds me a lot of Iain M. Banks’s short story ‘Descendant’ (in the ‘State of the Art’ collection). But the AI-rights angle is new to this piece – and it’s set in a pretty different environment, too.

I’m deliberately avoiding doing a story about the rights of AIs in ‘Decrypting Rita’; it’s a problem I think we’re going to need to be confronting soon, and one I have definitely taken sides on – but it’s not an issue I’m interested in grappling with. I’d rather just tell a story set in a world where that battle has been had, and my side won. (If you’re wondering, there ARE people in Rita1’s world who think AIs shouldn’t be treated as fully human, but they have about as much respect as a backwoods Louisiana bigot who misses the days of slave ownership. You won’t be seeing any of them in the story.)

I don’t want to tell a Struggle For AI Rights story, but I’m glad there are people who do. And I’m glad to be able to support them when it looks like they’re going to make an interesting one.

Rita was recently critiqued on a comics board I’m on. In the various comments, a few themes emerged. One of them was “I want an archive page full of thumbnails!”. I didn’t quite do that, but I think I did something that better addresses the underlying problem of wanting to flip back and forth between pages a whole ton: I almost completely ditched the single-page model, in favor of full chapter views.

I’ve also switched out some of the underlying code – I moved from the ComicPress plugin to its successor, Comic Easel. I built a new theme, found a plugin to fill a hole in which Comic Easel was willing to generate, made a custom icon font for the arrows and did some CSS and PHP hackery to make it work just right.

Let me know what you think of the new look, especially if it seems broken on your browser – all I’ve tested on is the latest Mac versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. I want to have a good reading experience for new visitors who come in via the Kickstarter!

(Stuff I know is not done: the about page is still the same mess it was beforehand, blog archive needs space between posts, links to other comics are gone. I need to fix a thing under the hood though it’s not too high priority as I’ve always cached aggressively. I also suspect some tricks aren’t gonna work on every web designer’s favorite browser. Also I need to donate some bucks to the dude behind Comic Easel.)

This change is, of course, at the expense of the next page. It’s about half done, and not especially complex. I’m hoping to get it up Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday.

I’m at Anthrocon. This year’s theme is “The Fast and the Furryous”. The GOH brought his awesome restored Shelby Cobra, and a friend who was helping wrangle it dragged me off to be photographed on it.

Iiii think I may have an author photo for Rita now.

Oh man I keep on pulling up page 100, being scared of the fact that it has ten panels on it, and getting about a half hour of work in on it before I go do something else. Why do super-dense pages like that scare me? Four panels are done, and four have parts of them done. I’ll try my damndest to get a big chunk of it done tomorrow, because I’m really tired of my schedule slipping again.

It’s a good thing that page 101 will shift back to just two realities instead of three.

Anyway, tonight I stayed up far too late doing some tweaks to the site. You’ll see a big “hi new reader, this is how to read this comic” banner pop up on your first visit with a particular browser. And I’ve also reactivated the archives – now you can read a whole chapter at once when you want to catch up! There’s links beneath the page for that.

I’m noticing that sometimes the chapter view will have a couple broken images for me; hopefully this doesn’t happen for everyone. And for some reason the last page of chapter 5 – with the big half-open purple eye floating in the void – doesn’t show up in the chapter view. …Ah, I fixed the “missing pages at the end of chapters”. It was only showing the first ten pages because of WordPress’ “reading” settings.

So! It’s Thursday and you are not seeing a comic. You’re also not seeing a “sorry no comic” drawing because those are, IMHO, a really bad idea – they drain the energy one could use for pushing the next page forward to SOME degree, and ruin the flow when reading through the archives.

What happened? Well, I went to Furlandia this past weekend. Got Thursday’s page finished and uploaded on the train down, but I spent the train back home to Seattle just reading a book because I needed to unwind after spending a weekend selling, then a day and a half chilling in my friend’s very cat-inhabited apartment. Concrud plus allergies do not make for a happy brain.

Then Wednesday when I opened up Illustrator to work on the next page I realized I was at a point where I really needed to do some scripting. I ended up writing rough script (and panel flow diagrams, and some little panel thumbnails) out to page 102, which is to say to the end of this current chapter. And starting to organize my thoughts on the next chapter, which will probably be the last one of book 2 – and even starting to think about how to lead into book 3 elegantly. Which is to say “with lots of glitches”.

I should be able to get another page in the can this weekend, and then hopefully get back on track again! It’s a LOT easier to draw comics when you know what the heck’s supposed to happen on the page at hand.

Also, some things of interest: by request, you can now buy a big poster of the Vesta space station, and also by request, here is a desktop-sized copy of the previous page. I should really make a “desktop images” category at some point!

And ALSO here is a signal boost: want a copy of the latest volume of Girl Genius? And maybe some perks? Go here and do that Kickstarter thing. The Foglios are a huge influence on me; Rita would still probably exist without ‘Buck Godot‘ and ‘Girl Genius‘, but it would be a very different-looking beast.

Just a quickie post here. I’m working on getting some pages into the queue, you should be seeing Chapter X in a couple weeks.

I’m also up for “Best New Talent” in the Stumptown Comics Arts awards. The voting closes at noon on the 22nd, so if you want to vote, now would be a good time.

I finally got around to setting up some kind of store! If you missed out on the Kickstarter but want a copy of the book, now you can order one here. It’s US$25 plus shipping – $3-10 depending on where you live.

(Or if you’d rather buy it in person, I’ll be at Further Confusion next weekend. And Emerald City Comic Con, and Anthrocon, later in the year.)

In the backer forms for the Rita kickstarter, I asked people who were getting a sketch what they wanted. A lot of people said “whatever”; a few people asked for my dragon self. Of those expressing a preference for a character from Decrypting Rita, here’s the statistics:

Rita1 (blue, robot): 5
Rita2 (red, human): 1
Rita3 (orange, dragon): 5
Rita4 (green, Timelord): 0

Barrett3 (orange, elf): 1

Also there was one vote for whatever, maybe either Rita1, or maybe Rita3 because they figure I’ll be drawing a lot of Rita1.

NOBODY LOVES MY GALIFREYAN FAN CHARA WAAAAAAHHH but about 1/4 of the people who didn’t specify A Particular Rita or something else entirely will probably get her!

It looks like all the drawings are going to be on the inside back cover. That and the inside front cover are the only places I could actually find any white space to draw in. So when you get your signed-and-drawn-in book, don’t be disappointed when the flyleaf just has a signature!

Books books books books booksbooksbooks books!

Boooooks!

SQUEEE

happy happy happy

All the gloss came out pretty much as planned, too! It’s not quite as intense as it was on the Silicon Dawn – different process, I guess. Hopefully I can bump it up some for the second volume, the second run of this, and the ultimate omnibus. But wait until you see the technical diagram of Rita in the back… magical.

Now to start signing and drawing in them where needed, and getting them into the mail along with those robot lady prints! If you missed out on the Kickstarter and want a copy, drop me a line. $25 plus $3 shipping via Paypal, $20 if you’re outside North America. Eventually I’ll get a store up to automate this.

Rita: The next page is in progress. I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks dealing with cons, and trying to get various other things out of my way. And to get my schedule rearranged with less sitting around feeling dopey and more drawing.

I think the next page is about 1/3 done. I’m also thrashing out the script for the next few pages of the blue thread; the story’s changing gears and I want to make sure the transition is smooth.

The book: This morning, there was e-mail from my printer telling me they’re ready to ship, and if I could give them one last bit of data they needed in the next hour they could have it on the road today. Sadly I didn’t see this until about three hours after they sent it. So the books should be on their way Monday! Then I get to start signing and shipping them. And pulling together those prints I promised to go along with ’em, too.

I have made several mistakes during the production of this book. Unsurprising, given that it’s my first try – it’s not entirely my first book, but I don’t think “printed about 50 copies of Absinthe via Lulu” really counts. I may be making some more before all is said and done. But hopefully I’ll manage to avoid making most of them for the next collection of Rita, and for the short story anthology I’m putting together! I’m quite sure there will be exciting NEW mistakes for those projects…

If all goes well I’ll have a few copies of the book at APE. Which will be my first time there. Hopefully I’ll make some new fans!

So what with one thing and another (Foolscap this past weekend, Rainfurrest this coming weekend, unexpectedly hosting a guest for RF for a few days this weekend, going back and forth on the final proofs of the Rita book), I suspect the number of Rita pages that will happen this week is zero. I’m gonna try to get something out anyway but if it’s not ready it’s just not ready.

But! If you would like a dose of my narrative and visuals, you can get it with this guest strip I did for ‘The End’. All you really need to know is that the human in two panels is the same person as the bird alien in the rest of the strip, though I would certainly recommend catching up on the rest of the story as well!

I won’t have Rita books at Rainfurrest, but I’ll be there with a bunch of Tarot decks and the usual prints and table commissions. I’ll also be doing a couple of panels – there’s the whirlwind tour of Illustrator that I do at pretty much every con (2pm Friday), and a webcomics Q&A panel with me, Dana Simpson, and Thomas Dye (5pm Saturday). Plus you might see me SHAKING MY BOOTY LIKE THERE’S NO TOMORROW at the dances, if I can find one that’s sufficiently glitchy to make my bottom happy. My bottom is very picky sometimes. Wait that sounds… oh never mind.

This nice review on IO9 (thanks, Lauren!) made me start wondering just which Rita people see as the real one, of whom all the other Ritas are dreams, shadows, or delusions. So here’s a little poll.

So here’s something that might be interesting – a Youtube original series called “DR0NE”, about a military combat robot in trouble.

Although one thing bugged me about it very quickly: in the protagonist’s view of the combat scenes, there are target reticules over both friendlies and enemies. These reticules are almost absolutely identical for both sides; the friendly ones are, to my eyes, MORE visually interesting because they have “FRIENDLY” written by them, while the enemies just have anonymous reticules.

Moreover, there’s a lot of scenes where the enemies are against a bright sky – and the white reticule is almost completely invisible against it. This is just some terrible information design.

So I guess this leads me to propose two theories of information overlay design:

1. Important information should be more prominent than unimportant information. In the example here of a combat HUD, for instance, the reticules over enemies should be much more noticeable than those over friendlies, which can be achieved by color, shape, and amount of detail.

2. Your HUD should always be visible over the world. If you want it to be all white as in this example (which I would not recommend, color is an important cue) then find SOME way to make your information appear over bright things – maybe a black outline behind it, maybe having mission-critical stuff blink between black and white, SOMETHING.

I’ve been thinking about this sort of thing a lot, since I’m constantly superimposing bits of Rita1’s HUD on the world. I do things like big gaudy triangles with exclamation points hovering over the heads of hostiles to make it a pretty unambiguous communication to both the reader and to Rita that HERE IS A VERY IMPORTANT THING, I’ll hint at color changes here and there – admittedly I’m constrained in that a lot by the abstracted nature of the comic; if I was doing more representational color, you’d definitely be seeing bright reds and yellows as cues for DANGER!!! and CAUTION!!.

I’m not entirely sure this little piece is worth critiquing – but heck, seeing it made me codify a couple of the unconscious rules I’d been applying in the comic, so I guess that’s good!

It’s also worth noting that this HUD is MARGINALLY better than the Terminator’s; here’s a compilation of all those scenes from Terminator 2. Notice how pretty much ALL the text overlays are out on the periphery of the screen, drawing your attention away from what’s happening? Bad, bad, bad design, at least from the point of view of “would this work for an enhanced human”.

(Also there is the plot hole where the drone is clearly shown to be able to see through walls now and then, but is then surrounded. I guess its heat-sensing camera takes power it doesn’t have? Or the environment it’s in before that is really IR-opaque? I dunno, it bugs me that they spend several shots establishing quite firmly that it can see through walls, then have him ambushed.)

normal operations have been resumed

we thank you for your patience

as always, please keep your hands inside the car at all times and enjoy the ride

Oh man I am so glad to have things mostly back to normal. I spent the last two weeks mostly working on my damn site instead of Rita or other projects. Hopefully the changes I made will make it harder to hack and easier to maintain. It’s still not done but I feel like I can actually DRAW STUFF again now. I’m really sorry to have left it on a cliffhanger for a couple of weeks!