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.

It’s not usually a term I use, as it suggests that my cat is a child substitute. (He is not, as I want a cat, but very much do not want children. There are other distinctions, but that’s the only relevant one.)

However, Christmas has made the occasional cat/baby similarity hard to ignore. A friend’s blog about having a baby has had shown some eerie parallels to my life lately. Christina and I both spent the morning playing with our little friends in seas of wrapping paper. We both enjoy pestering our little friends until they make funny noises or faces, and then sometimes we take pictures of them. There’s that sense of seeing the world in a new way because of the way some other, smaller, less developed creature reacts to things.

This morning (aka 1-4 pm), boyfriend and I did Christmas at home with le chat; this evening was spent at a friend’s house, watching his pissed off, territorial cat interact with an invading Boston terrier in a red hoodie. Both of these things made me want to try drawing them. (White cat is mine; black cat is the friend’s.) I usually (um, obsessively) draw people; I should draw animals more often, because it’s fun. Secondary benefit: if I make the cat’s nose or ears too big, I’m not going to hear about it.

I’m working on a cat zine, and the preoccupation is clearly rearing its furry head.

*Edited December 26th to add a link to Christina’s blog, once I got her ok about referring people to a site about her kidlet.

After a relatively active few days (seeing John Oliver at Snoqualmie, going to Brian Despain’s show opening), I had a thoroughly vegging Sunday.  See if you can guess why that might be, based on a sample of tonight’s sketchbook work.

My imagery is deeply opaque.  That is all.