I just roughed out the last few pages of book 2 of Rita. It’s going to be 58 pages of story, which is two more than book one. Which I think means book two will be the same size, with almost exactly the same front/backmatter, except no “Ask Rita” this time.
And I guess that means it’s time to nail down my quotes and rough shipping date estimates, and put the Kickstarter video together. I’m thinking I’ll try to launch that sometime next week. Then all I have to do is prepare the files for printing, which should be a lot easier the second time around. The big thing to do is some edits for clarity I want to do on the dance routine in chapter X – I need to make it clear Rita 2 is pretending to stab herself, not actually stabbing herself, and see how it works if I run some music over the whole thing to make it clear it’s a dance number. Plus I have to go through and make sure all the spot gloss is set up properly, and consider adding a little more here and there. I’m sure that doing all of this will eat up the one-week buffer I currently have, and probably slow production of the start of book 3 down. But at least I think I’ve limited the sketches enough that I won’t take like three months in the middle of winter to get those done instead of drawing pages. Which also might mean that I’ll have book 3 done a little earlier, in time for Rainfurrest.
Damn. Book two. I can’t believe I’ve managed to get this far on so big a project. And I really can’t see any reason why book three won’t be happening in another year or so, barring complete and utter catastrophe. I’m happy.
When it’s all done, my reward? Draw more comics. What else?