I was originally intending to get some work done on the next page of Rita today, but I ended up doing book prep work instead. I muttered under my breath a lot as I tried to work out a way to get the images into the final InDesign file without either having a printer-chokingly huge file or all the spot gloss screwed up. I think I’m probably gonna end up going with the ugly manual method that was used for the Silcon Dawn.

This offends pretty much all of my sensibilities, and resulted in a bug report sent to Adobe. So did a couple changes I had to make to every single page by hand because Illustrator only records a certain subset of things you do when you record an action. After I did that I was surprisingly tired, and ended up taking a break for a while because I am a slacker.

With all this finicky stuff done, now it’s time for pretty much the last bit of prep: going through all the pages and finding things that Need To Be Changed Before I Go To Print. Mostly for reasons of me forgetting that I can never, ever, ever put anything important to the story down the middle of the page, but also (as you can see in the notes here) fixing a few drawings that have always bugged me every time I look at them, and catching a few details I forgot. I suspect there will probably be one of these passes for every book, and maybe even an extra one when I make the deluxe omnibus at the end of the whole project.

Tomorrow: fix Carol’s hair throughout, do something about those four unchecked boxes for book 1. Then either generate the TIFFs or work on Something Else for a couple of hours, I’ll want a break from Rita by then!

Oh wait also I’m scheduled to go to a meeting about some Foolscap graphics stuff tomorrow. I am juggling way too many things. Plus I need to get some travel/hotel plans for APE together.

I’m going through all the pages of Rita, modifying the safe areas, crop, and bleed to fit what’s gonna need to happen for printing. This would, in general, go a lot faster if Illustrator actually let you record events like “select a particular layer” and “manipulate it’s visibility/lock status” when making macros.

So I gotta do it all myself. Teeeeeediuuuuuuum.

Also I am seriously thinking that the deluxe omnibus edition of Rita needs to be printed on 8.5×11″ pages, there are some things that I am just unavoidably going to lose in the gutter between pages no matter what I do. I’m tweaking where I can, but some stuff would require a complete recompose and that’s just not gonna happen. Sigh.

Ah well, I’m experimenting a lot while making this comic, and that’s the nature of experiments – not all of them succeed, and you lear from them. I think overall most of the risks I’m taking work out. It’s just a few here and there that don’t.

edit, 11:30. Well that’s all 78 pages so far with new text-safe areas, and with the dialogue nudged around to fit. Next: crop/bleed. I wonder if Illustrator will fail on letting me macro that as well? I think I’m gonna take a shower first.

that brief moment of horror when you realized you deleted what you thought were copies of several important files but were actually the only instance due to you just moving them instead of copying

followed by intense relief when you remember that not only are your files automatically backed up every hour or so, but that you explicitly told Time Machine to make sure your backups were up to date before making that mistake

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. If you’ve got a Mac then get a big external drive, plug it in, and tell the system to use it for Time Machine. If you hate plugging stuff into your laptop then get a Time Capsule. If you’ve got a Windows box then… um… does Windows have built-in backup yet? I hope so. Because at some point you will make some stupid little mistake that wipes out a ton of hard work, and be delighted that you can recover in seconds.

And then sign up for a cloud backup service, so that if theft/fire/etc happens to your computer and the external drive, you’re only out the cost of a new machine, and not all the stuff on it.

Woohoo. I just queued up two more pages of Rita. Admittedly this is because I’ve arrived at a place in the story that needs to be super-minimal again, so I was able to knock them out very quickly. In an attempt to not completely try the patience of the people who’re actually reading each new page as it comes out, I’ve queued them both up for the coming week.

These pages are also the end of chapter VIII, so this might be a good time to catch up: start of chapter VIII, the start of book 2, or even the start of the whole thing, back in spring of last year.

I think this is pretty close to being the halfway point of the whole story, too – book 1 was five chapters, and I’m hoping to keep books 3 and 4 about the same length. Though I would not be surprised if each successive book is a little longer than the previous one, as I realize there are more things I have to set up for the ending than I’ve anticipated, or things I thought would be brief throwaway lines that turn out to need more exploration.

Oh, man, it feels good to be queuing up a page of Rita again. You’ll see it Tuesday.