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It’s the beginning of a new chapter! Again. This one’s even in numeric sequence with the previous one – how long has it been since that happened?

My notes had things going from chapter 23 into chapter 25, with some indecision about whether I’d call attention to the missing scene, but I decided to to show most of what happens here after all. Jumbled timelines are fun to read and write if done well, but sometimes you need islands of coherence.

There are about 32-35 more pages left, in this chapter and five more. Next page status: I have first draft dialogue for the blue timeline throughout this chapter, and four panels roughed out of about, oh, eight or ten, probably. Depends on how I handle the other timelines.

Edit. This just came out of the queue and the next page isn’t done. I might be able to finish it on the plane tomorrow but I’m not making any promises, especially since I’m going to be at Wizard World New Orleans this weekend. I also have the next seven pages completely roughed out, so things should be moving again soon. Expect a brief hiatus and be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t happen.

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Today I walked from my mom’s place to a cafe in the French Quarter. As I did, I wrote down all kinds of things I was noticing as part of the look of New Orleans – both in the Quarter and in other parts of the city. Ultimately I hope to only draw a lot of these things one or two times, and turn them into parts of a massive library of art brushes, graphic styles, and symbols that I can use to make drawing ‘The Drowning City’ go super-fast.

And then I sat in EnVie for about an hour and drew the big central world 2 panel, and edited a copy of the first one into the second one. And now this page is done.

 

Tomorrow I fly back to Seattle, and this page gets posted. Buffer? What’s that. But I’ll be able to draw on the plane.

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This page concludes chapter 24. Which has generally just not been a good chapter for Rita, has it?

Next up is, at last, the full version of chapter 14.

 

30-40 pages left. I really need to figure out what the hell goes on in the chapter marked ‘denouemont’, my notes on chapter order just say “How long is this? What exactly happens here? Does it really exist or does it just shade into the epilogue?“. Which is not very enlightening when trying to estimate how many pages this final volume will be.

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