Oh man that helped SO MUCH. After a couple of plaintive HELP IM A SAD SICK DRAGON WHO NEEDS PETTING emails yesterday, when I was in a bad pit of being sick and making it worse because I didn’t want to get out of bed to even get a glass of water, much less eat, Nick decided to risk getting this con crud and came over to pet me for a while today. We spent several hours just curled up in the giant bean bag in the living room while he petted me and talked about various stuff, and I just curled up and tried not to cough on him too much. I asked him a couple of semi-useful questions about the game idea he was talking about at a few points; it’s one he’s been working on for a while, that’s really starting to sound like a playable thing now.

I really hope his reward for this valiant act of rescuing a dragon in distress is not a case of this con crud. We were both pretty sad that he couldn’t stay for the night to keep me warm and happy in bed, but… I think that would have boosted the chance of him catching this thing to pretty much assured, and I don’t want to wish this on him if I can help it. (And if he did get it, well he actually lives with other people who he can make do things like “get orange juice pleeease”. I will still feel terrible though.)

Also: first new page of Rita showing up tomorrow. Wahoo.

Well. That was a couple of weeks.

I think this was the worst concrud I’ve had in a long time. I was down for.. five days I think? I’m not kidding. I generated so much snot. I probably stretched it out some by not eating or drinking enough, but I really just didn’t have the energy to do anything besides hide under the covers where it was warm and wish I had someone who was obligated to come pet me despite being infectious.

Now to clean up a week’s worth of feeling like shit. I’ve stuffed a trash bag full of all the tissues I filled, next is taking out the pizza box with crusts and one unloved piece from two days ago, and dealing with my con suitcase, which is still where I left it when I got back from FC: open, partially blocking the apartment door.

FC was a really good time overall – despite some weird moments of feeling disconnected from the whole thing – but man this is a harsh fucking comedown.

Let’s see, what do I need to deal with… turns out the publisher does still have some Tarot decks left, so I need to get those; my printer’s written back, so I need to get those last little bits of the Rita 2 book done and the files off, and wasn’t I going to be posting the first pages of book 3 of Rita when I got back from the con? And then there’s dealing with the con in New Orleans I’m going to next week. God I’m barely recovered from the last one, I need to not schedule cons this close together.

Back on the Red Queen’s treadmill, girl. You got stuff to do.

I just had a thought.

I want to see an open-world video game that lets you get, and use, mountain-climbing gear. It’d be awesome for sneaky playstyles like I tend to use: oh, to do this quest I have to get into the top of an impenetrable mountaintop tower, with its entire approach well-guarded? No problem. I’ll just slowly crawl up this vertical cliff-face. Including the parts where there’s an overhang. And keep going up the back side of the tower, while I’m at it. Slip into the top window, steal the magic ring/assassinate the target/whatever, and slip out as silently as I came.

While I’m wishing, I really want the ability to do more edificeering in games in general. And not in the “hold a button and move the stick” way the Assassin’s Creed games do it.

(Also I should install this skyrim mod as it adds rope arrows. And other cool arrows inspired by “Thief” that I kept on wanting when doing a sneaky playthrough.)

It looks like I did all of 35 pages of Rita last year. That’s… not as many as I’d like. I really want to about double that, so I can finish book 3 by the end of the year. Ultimately it’ll be done when it’s done, but holy crap that’s slow.

On the other hand, I also did ten conventions last year, one of which was Anthrocon, plus a couple trips home. Each of those ends up being a bite out of my work time, both for going to the con itself and recovering. I also did some chunks of work on stuff for Interesting Venues, which I need to spend some time finishing off in the next month or so.

It also looks like I managed about 46 pages in 2012. I dunno. I feel slow. Maybe this is the year I try to push myself to do comics like it’s my day job that pays my rent or something.

It may also be the year I move to a place with better heating; it’s just hard enough to keep my place warm that this might be a factor in my general lack of spoons. I should probably also find some way to exercise more, I’ve been pretty lax these past few months.

Or maybe it’s the year I hook up with some other artists in Seattle and co-rent studio space somewhere downtown. Having a place that I go to Work might help a lot; I like my home studio but it’s real easy to slack in there too.

Right now I’ve got four cons definitely lined up for this year, and four that I’ve applied for, or that haven’t opened their apps up again. Three are in town, three are in Portland, two are in California and one’s in New Orleans. So that should be less super-stressful travel, at least.

And maybe one of these comic cons will result in a connection with a publisher. That’d be nice; not having to wrangle printing and distributing my books would give me a couple months that I could work on drawing instead of publishing. I’m not holding my breath of course.

Well that’s three hours of my life gone to frobbing computers, then.

A few days ago, I lost my phone. It didn’t show up on Find my Iphone, so after a few days I just told it to wipe itself when next connecting to the net, and got a new one. I was tempted to try and go without it for a while, but I’m going to need to have net connectivity next week when I sit down to sell stuff at Further Confusion.

Today I got a new sim chip for it and started setting it up. Download the apps I really use on a regular basis and a couple of maybes, then… jailbreak that bastard and start installing some tweaks. Because it’s just not my phone without spending several hours changing little things around.

I’ve still got to finalize the arrangement of crap on the home screen, but it’s usable now.

Last night: stayed up until 4AM fucking with some Skyrim mods. Mostly this one, also the beginning of this one.

Tonight: stayed up until 4AM lounging in the big purple beanbag chair in the living room eating cookies, poking at the internet, and drawing a naked picture of my dragon avatar with hooves. [NSFW: titties]

Well I guess that’s marginally better? I am so totally not gonna make yoga tomorrow morning. Today. Whatever. It’s not tomorrow until I sleep.

Ah well, at least I spent about four hours in Illustrator according to Time Sink; I got the map for the back of Rita 2 done. I just need to add one thing to the stuff surrounding it, and draw one last backer, then it’s ready to send to the printer. Hopefully I can make spending about that much time working a regular thing again; it’d be nice to start making dents in my to-do list again. Winter, feh.

map teaser fragment