I’m about twenty pages away from the end of book 2 of Rita, which means I’m about twenty pages away from the Kickstarter.

Here’s what I’m considering:

$5 – PDF of book 1 and book 2

$25 – Physical copy of book 2, plus PDFs.

$? – book 2 plus PDFs plus some other stuff, personalized signature?

$100 – Text sponsorship in the book, a sketch in your copy, pdfs, and whatever physical tokens I’m offering at lower levels.

$150 – Same as $100 but with an image sponsorship.

$250 – Same as $100 but with a big image sponsorship.

Add some extra for international shipping.
Add +15 and you can get a copy of book 1. I have like 230 of them in my closet; if I get more people buying both books then I will happily pay for the second printing out of my pocket!

I want to avoid drawing in a ton of books. I priced that way too low for book 1 – just $10 more – and that ate up a TON of time and energy I would have really rather poured into drawing more pages. I’m also probably not offering a commission level of sponsorship, as I still haven’t delivered on the ones from the first book. (And the two super sponsors are cool with this, one hasn’t even decided what he wants me to draw yet.)

Stretch goals? Spot gloss cover, or maybe something crazier like UV-reactive. I will ask printers what kind of crazy inks and processes they have available when I start looking for quotes.

So I’ve got most of it planned out already. But I’m stuck for the mid-list backers. The ones who want to give me more than the $25 for a book but don’t want to spend about $100 or more for a sponsorship.

What kind of stuff would you like to see as perks for a level or two somewhere between “book for $25” and “sponsorship for $100+”? Give me your ideas and they may become cool perks. Especially if they can fit into the same envelope as the 5.5×8.5″ book!

Maybe a space tourism poster? Though sourcing and shipping that could be a pain.

Buttons? Charms? It’s a shame I don’t have any recurring insignia, as those could work as patches.

Stickers? I’ve got some halfway drawn. I had that as an idea partway through the first Kickstarter, thought of adding it as a perk for a minor stretch goal, but ended up just shelving them. I figure a sheet or two (depending on how big I draw them) of all four Ritas and some Panopticon eyes would work. Who doesn’t want to put Panopticon eyes on things?

Right now there are actually two whole pages of Rita in the queue. In about a half an hour, this will go back down to one, as the first one – finished and uploaded last week – goes live.

I’ve decided on some rules to try and follow to get my shit back in order here.

1. Start each weekday by assigning eight pomodoros worth of work for the day. That’s about four hours of solid, uninterrupted work. Experience has shown that I tend to only get about half of them done, but that’s still better than the one hour I’ve been managing lately because oh god fuck my work ethic these past few months. These work units will not all be Rita – there’s other things that need doing too!

2. I am not allowed to let my buffer shrink. Every time a page posts, I have to have at least replaced it with a new page queued up. Mega bonus points for having gotten ahead far enough that there’s a replacement plus another page.

3. Once I’ve started rebuilding the habit of “working a lot” start gradually raising my expectations as to how much I actually get done in a day, whether it be by disciplining myself to actually check more of those pomodoros off before the end of the day, or by assigning myself more to do in the morning and still only getting about half of ’em done. Whichever way works best to motivate Impulsive, Lazy Peggy to do what Thoughtful Peggy With A Mission wants to have happen.

Hopefully this will eventually result in me pulling far enough ahead that I can consider things like changing the schedule to 3 pages a week, or putting book 2 or 3 up on Kickstarter early enough that prompt delivery of the book will mean backers get to read it ahead of online readers. Hey, I can dream.

Also it is time to resume aikido and yoga. My rib’s still a little grumpy but it’s largely fine. I was intending to hit up aikido tonight, but I only had about an hour between getting home and the start of class; too soon after about four hours of travel between my hotel in Portland and my apartment. So yoga tomorrow, and aikido the day after. And again and again and again.

I’m doing rough scripts for the next few pages of Rita. Funny. I’ve currently got Rita1 in a dragon chassis – but all my little emote doodles of her are quite clearly back in a more normal chassis. I guess that’s me telling myself I should get her back in her normal look soon.

Holy crap I just read the whole damn thing in one hour. I sorta feel like nearly two years of my life should take longer to read? Ffff.

Anyway, I know what needs doing to the next page now. Pretty much what I thought needed doing. Maybe there will be a NEW PAGE OF RITA soon! That’d be nice.

There’s art I should be working on, there’s cleaning I should be doing, but I think right now what I’m going to do is sit down with my iPad and a cbz of the entirety of Decrypting Rita so far. I’ve been looking at the next page in progress and can’t get going on it for the past couple of days. I’m not sure if this means I’m just tired and can’t really focus on anything, or that there is something wrong with the page – sometimes my inner critic will make it known that This Page Is Not Ready Yet, and I just can’t make myself finish the drawing until I fix whatever’s wrong with the narrative.

I figure that reading the whole thing will give me ideas. And help swap it all back into my head; I’ve been away from it longer than I’d like.

(and to be honest I kinda know where the trouble spot is, I really think I just need to refine two dialogue balloons in the middle of the page. But I want to read the whole thing and see just what my brain says needs to happen when I get there.)

There are times I really wish I could treat this like I treated chapter one of Absinthe and skip around when I’m a little stuck on one page. But the multiple-narratives nature of this beast means that I really just have to take it one page at a time, as the overall timing of stuff is really, really based on exactly how things play out when I sketch out the pages. And some important ideas seem to only occur to me as I’m actually doing that – R1 getting stuck in Megaera’s head as a passenger, instead of simply taking over R4 to save her, for instance, happened entirely due to a sudden whim while I was putting together the page where it happens.

I don’t know if someone who was better at Writing Comic Books could actually put together a usable script for this beforehand. I’m the one telling this story, and this is the only way I’ve figured out how to tell it, so I have to wrestle with it sometimes. At best sometimes I have like three pages roughly scripted at any point in time! I have looser plans for the whole thing; I pretty much know what’s going to happen in the rest of Book 2 and 3. But the details… those don’t seem to come until I’m hip-deep in a section of the story.

Also my next couple of comics are probably going to be told VERY NORMALLY because holy shit doing this kind of trick on an extended basis is a lot of work. I’ve definitely learnt a lot about page layout and how to write a story on this project, and I’ll certainly be deploying the parallel narratives trick again in future stuff, but I won’t be building the whole thing around it!

(Tangentially, if you’re hungry for other stories that do this, I’d suggest picking up Matt Kindt’s “Mind Mgmt” – he mostly tells the story straight ahead, but there’s all these… things… in the margins that contribute to the overall gestalt.)