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.

The title of this page and the previous one is a reference to Rush’s song “Red Barchetta “. What’s your favorite song about COOL CARS WHAT GO FAST VROOM VROOM?

Also holy cow this is page #92. This is getting close to being the biggest thing I’ve ever done.

So I spent Tuesday working on this, and now I get to spend all Wednesday working to try and have something in the buffer again once this page goes live. A minor setback in Project Build A @#$% Buffer, but I’m not letting it get me down.

PS. You should basically be playing your favorite THIS FAST CAR IS WAY COOL song while reading this entire chapter.

ALSO! Elon Musk is talking to Google about putting their autodrive technology in Tesla’s cars! Bits of this story are set a looong while from now, but other bits are really only about a decade off. HELLO FUTURE.

Still: by uploading this just before midnight on Wednesday, I get to continue to have one page in the buffer after the preceding page drops one minute after midnight on Thursday. PROJECT BUFFER CONTINUES.

…and then I fooled around with it on Thursday and Friday to tweak the dialogue a little and add the red triangles. Which are done by making huge pattern fills the size of the page with scribbles of a pressure-sensitive pattern brush, and applying them to the shapes – it’s a very sideways and Illustratory way to say “hey I want to paint in these twenty shapes”. Big thanks to Nick for helping me decide that yes, I do want to make an ambiguous statement in the language of color this story has going – I think we talked about it for like an hour.

Also, here is the reference self-shot I used for that panel of Carol plugging herself into the car.

One: I’m playing with the name for the car. Originally I had it as “Mazzigatti”, but Nick was of the opinion that sounded too much like a parody of “Maserati”, which was not my intent – I just wanted an Italian name, because Italians + cars = impractical, gorgeous, fast things.

I went digging around for Italian cryptographers, and found Silvio Micali, one of the co-inventors of the zero-knowledge proof. Which is a thing I have vaguely heard of but honestly cannot be said to really understand.

Two: This past weekend, I went down to the Stumptown Comic Fest for an important rite of passage – losing my first award. This didn’t bum me out too much; I found myself contemplating some clear indicators as to why I didn’t do well in a popular vote for “best new talent”. But more importantly, the day after the awards, I said hi to Phil Foglio. Who, it turns out, has been eagerly following Rita since I gave him a flier at ECCC 2012 and loves pretty much everything about it except the frequency of updates.

I’d already been thinking that it’s really time to get my work habits and Rita’s schedule back in gear; having one of my top three or four living influences give me a kick in the ass over my schedule was a hell of a reinforcement of those thoughts.

So I’m trying to make some changes in my habits and my expectations for myself. No promises. But hopefully chapter 10 will spool out a LOT quicker than 9 did.

It also took a while because I dipped my toe into a new world: 3D modeling. I made a little reference maquette of the car in Silo!

I ended up getting it into Illustrator via an awkward process involving dropping a copy of the half-finished page into Silo, posing the model to match the loose sketches, then screengrabbing that and registering it with the image in Illustrator.

And then I treated the car images like any other thing on my sketch layers, and drew what you see here. I can see one or two refinements to the process – mostly, make two screengrabs of the setup in Silo, one with the page, one without, and swap them in Illustrator once I think things are registered – but that’s really it. I may also end up doing separate reference shots for future pages, with more varied perspective on the car.

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.

There’s a cafe in Seattle called Trabant; I was sitting there when I drew the first panel, and borrowed its name and logotype for the high-end restaurant Carol took Rita out to. If you’re ever in the U District during winter I thoroughly recommend their “Freddy Quimby”, a yummy concoction of chai and apple cider.

Also! If you’re here because you met me at the Emerald City Comic-Con the other week, then hi! (and if you went to ECCC and came home with a very green 9 of Wands card with a galaxy on the back, that’s from my personal Tarot deck that I was using for display – I’d love to have it back.)

I got this finished Thursday night, so I get to post it for this week. I dunno if I’ll have another one on next Thursday what with ECCC but WHAT THE HELL.

(Also – I’ll be at ECCC! Booth 2503, hidden in a corner among tattooists and autograph sellers and stuff. Next year I gotta grab a booth earlier.)