I officially started penciling Furlough tonight. I meant to do it forever ago, but I got completely bogged down in the editing process.

“Why,” I asked myself, “is this proving to be so damned hard? I’ve been writing stories since I was 12, I’ve written a metric fuckton in the last decade, so I shouldn’t be so stuck on a 20-page comic script for a four-issue comic.” (That’s my current estimate, incidentally.)

Well, I figured it out. Yes, I have written a metric fuckton. What I haven’t done oodles of is, um, finishing things. Finishing them and taking them through the editing process and watching it necessarily mutate as you show it to other people and hammer out dents and make it into something real that can survive daylight. Workshopping? My degree might as well be in that. But finishing something and making it right? No.

I’m there now. I thumbnailed the entire first issue, and I penciled the first three pages tonight. That’s the vicious, thrilling schedule: three pages penciled or inked each day through March 7. Why March 7? Because the Emerald City Comicon is March 13th, and I will have a completed issue of Furlough for it, if I have to draw til my fingers bleed and stay at my desk until my eyes dry out. So: three pages per day. OR BUST. Lookit:

From page two.

Amy Martin told me that a convention would make me get things done. She should’ve cackled maniacally afterward, like a movie gypsy delivering a prophecy.

I also posted more zines on my Etsy store. I had to refresh my inventory of the Creativity Zine and the Surreal Moments zine (exciting!), so I added a couple other smaller ones I made for swaps, but with an eye to other people as well. One’s just text, which is funny to me; it feels so weird to make a zine entirely on the computer. Like I faked it or something. The other is, um, the opposite of that. Wholly handwritten, done in one draft, and possibly done while being influenced by a fair and welcome amount of tequila. It’s a screed, make no mistake, but it’s a screed that looked just fine to me the next morning.