I originally meant to write this back in May. It is now almost the end of July. Oops. Suffice to say, it’s been a bit busy over here!
So what’s been going on?
In real life terms, and the cause for most of the delays, I have started college, which I am going back to this year for animation and coding. June was taken up by a particularly difficult course in which a four-month curriculum was compressed into four weeks. Whew! This fall semester will be heavy in math and physics as I get some of my core curriculum out of the way before I get to start in on the fun stuff.
Why does school do this? It sure seems like it’d be better to start with the fun stuff and fit in the drudgery in bursts wherever it’s relevant, but then, I’m no professor, so what do I know?
Comics
In the meantime, I have been plugging away at the Gentleman Assassins comics. I still have quite a backlog of ideas to sketch and then finalize, so the good news is these shouldn’t become a chore anytime soon. The bad news? Work here was slowed down as I was made unofficial raid leader after our old leader Ian left. Downtime during raids that I normally spent compiling ideas instead got taken up by yelling at my raid members. Yup, I’m afraid I’ve become the stereotype.
As far as the Trials comics go, I have reached the end of the first chapter. I haven’t released more pages yet as I saw there were some parts of my art that needed drastic improvement, and I wanted to take some time out to work on these. So far, these have spawned character studies like this one. Unfortunately, this seems to have made my perfectionism worse rather than better, and the next page for Trials may be a while in coming…
Writing
In the writing world, work still continues on the Talmenor sourcebook, which I teased in this post. Currently we are working on finishing the map to be included with the sourcebook, as well as sections on notable NPCs and factions, which were an oversight from the first pass of the sourcebook’s writing. This time has also been spent gathering suitable stock art for the book–I’m really pleased with the two artists we’ve found, and I think you will be too, once it is all ready!
All this work has left little time (or perhaps confidence?) for sending out my short stories to prospective publishers. It has, however, led to my publishing of several more fanfiction shorts on this site. I also took the time to change the website’s filtering so that posts meant to further scenes in private roleplay is now more or less hidden to the general public. As mentioned in the first few of these posts, though there is nothing innately cringe-worthy about these, they are about happenings that I don’t intend to fully explain in a fanfiction, posted here solely for the lack of a better venue for them.
Finally, I still have not heard from the publisher I sent Hottest Day to. I’m told this particular publisher is extremely slow in responding to submissions, so I’m not worried yet–or at least, no more worried than usual. My first novel getting rejected (again) may be all for the best; as I have continued work on the lore behind the novel’s universe, I see now several places where I want to better expand on the world behind Ned’s story. This would probably help in bringing the manuscript’s word count up to current industry standards, too, now I mention it…
Still, if all else fails and I do get rejected, I do have some other publishers in mind to pitch the novel to, including, perhaps, signing a deal with the one who is behind the Talmenor sourcebook!