Okay, let’s do this! I’m gonna try this “Actually laying out a schedule,” thing, and see how that goes! First up, I’m gonna put Anything But Ordinary and Thus Spake the Gods: Humans Suck on hiatus.

Thus Spake’s reason is easy: after Bipsy passed...it’s hard to look at or work on. Also I was kinda writing it on the fly, so I don’t have anything that had been plotted out or waiting in the wings that I’m really desperate to get to. I have a few comics penciled that were fun jokes with Wynn and Taryn, and a couple that were trying to bridge the gap and introduce Taryn, and...yeah. Not much else. I’d originally cannibalized Wynn’s design from some half-started ideas I’d been playing around with, and might bring him back in some capacity down the line, cuz I do have a couple fun one-off jokes written...but right now I wanna re-focus on The New Normal...and It Doesn’t Matter.

That kinda leads in to why I’m benching Anything But Ordinary...especially right after starting Chapter 2. I like working on it, it’s a lot of fun and has been a great place to experiment, and I dunno, maybe it can still be that...? But how depressing an idea is that? “This comic is the gulag for whenever I want to try a different approach?” Blurgh. I don’t love that idea. But anyway, Anything But Ordinary is good and fun, and I like working on it...but time is limited, and I kinda want to pour more of the time I’m working on it into other projects...namely projects I’ve written myself. Plus, 36 pages in 9 years? That’s embarrassingly low.

...Which is kinda why I want to refocus on the two projects I pretty much can’t imagine cutting. The comic I don’t know if it’ll even have an audience, and the ridiculously bloated Sonic TF animation story that takes forever to get a couple of seconds of footage finished. Clearly, I am the best at decision-making. Buuut, yeah...these projects are the ones closest to my heart. The New Normal is a long-form comic story built of so many ideas and thought threads that’ve percolated in the back of my head over years that embraces TF, unicorns, mythical creatures, magic, acclimating to new forms, and finding strength through community...it’s fun, and dramatic, and gives me an outlet for the unicorn part of myself when it rises up strong and fierce. It Doesn’t Matter...is the worst idea I’ve ever pursued so hard, because if you strip away all pretension, it’s just me. I break every stipulation and storytelling rule I have for myself with it, from concept to execution, because It Doesn’t Matter. And honestly if I could work on only one project for the rest of my life (which would be awful, I am an Idea Factory), it would be this one...despite the fact that that’s probably the worst possible choice I could possibly make. But It Doesn’t Matter, I’d work on It Doesn’t Matter anyway. Even if that makes me a hack.

Okay, well, that’s a lot of words. So what does all that mean? Before...November, really, when Bippy passed, and then the holidays hit with a deluge of familial obligations, I’d been working to update a comic per week, releasing on Patreon on the weekend upon completion (be that Friday, Saturday, or Sunday), and then here (and everywhere else) on Tuesday. That was good. I liked that. Buuut it basically meant that each comic was updated once per month, and IDM happened whenever I squeezed it in and sometimes took over space in the rotation, even though I didn’t have it scheduled there...I’d just previously been pumping out a shot a week for IDM and had tried to plaster the comic schedule on top of that...yeah, that didn’t work.

So! In an effort to have a consistent, dare I say “predictable” schedule, and to get some movement on the two projects I’ve chosen, The Plan is to rotate weeks between It Doesn’t Matter and The New Normal, with the idea being that I’ll finish It Doesn’t Matter shots on its weeks, and the next page of The New Normal on its week. Also I want to throw in mid-week illustrations, or design swag, because I really want to have more to show for myself than what I do, and yeah.

So yeah. Current week is set to be an It Doesn’t Matter week, with the goal of posting the current shot I...honestly spent way too much time backgrounding already this weekend on Patreon, and then making it live everywhere else Tuesday January 14, New Normal would be the next week and go live everywhere January 21, then back to IDM, and so on and so forth. We’ll try that ‘til March, and I can even lay out a concrete schedule to actually hold myself to with dates and everything...that I will promptly probably fuck up, but whatever, we’ll try anyway!