But I'm A Cat Person

That’s all of Volume 2 (it should be out in a couple of weeks, pending bonus material) and the better half of Volume 3.

For pagecount reasons, Volume 3 is only going to have chapters 9-11 — the Whiskercon chapters, making a nice set — bundled with Interludes 1 and 2.

Now the big question is, how do I arrange them? Interlude 1 (holiday flashbacks) at the front and Interlude 2 (Walker’s Travels) at the back, the order they were posted in? Or both Interludes at the back, the way manga volumes are organized, so you get the main continuity first before switching gears?

Readers, do any of you have a preference?

Stray observations:

I had forgotten that Kara Lynn originally had these complex frilly ears. Not sure when they got streamlined into human-but-pointed. (I picked the simple pointy version as the winner.) She also had huge eyes for a while in chapter 9, but they’d settled down into their current format by the middle of chapter 10.

Bianca spent the whole of chapter 10 with her eyes the wrong color. Whoops. I was also using two subtly-different shades of purple on Poe’s eyes for a while there.

Dotan and Tina have most of their appearance in chapter 9, but come back briefly in chapter 10…and I drew Dotan’s hair completely differently. Also, left out Tina’s fox, which I decided was a little too much work to add back in.

The only panel I’ve flat-out redrawn was back in chapter 7. It bothered me even at the time, so it’s a relief to finally do it right.

Chapter 6 was drawn while catching up on a ton of podcasts I’d fallen behind on.

Chapter 7 got me through the second “season” of DokiDoki Precure (the Netflix “Glitter Force” dub)…then a ton of false starts on bad audiobooks before I gave up and used Grey’s Anatomy to finish it off. (Also on Netflix. They have 13 seasons of it. Yikes.)

Seriously, one of those audiobooks had the female protagonist lamenting that her crush is an uninterested heterosexual…while said crush is actively in the middle of kissing her. In the moonlight. On the beach. After saying “I’m interested in you.” It is impossible to exaggerate how ridiculous this was.

Chapter 8, I played it safe and put on something I knew would be good — Terry Pratchett’s The Truth.

Chapter 9 took me for-frickin’-ever for some reason. Possibly the combination of “several new characters” and “lots of panels crowded with characters, very few scenery/establishing shots/splash panels.” I got all the way through John Grisham’s The Runaway Jury, and a second Discworld book — Thief of Time.

Chapter 10 was back to a single book — Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora — with podcasts filling it out at the end. The accuracy of the time-scale is a little fuzzier on this one, since I did take a break in the middle of the book to make cookies.

Check out Volume 1 if you haven’t yet, and stand by for volumes 2 and 3!

In other words — I have 5 chapters completely edited and updated, out of the 25 that exist. Anatomy fixed, lighting and textures neatened, shading enriched. (It won’t be until chapter 23 that pages were fully-shaded when originally published.)

I’ve also been moving dialogue bubbles around, sometimes to make the reading flow better, mostly for the sake of margins. The alpha proof copy of Volume 1 made it clear that, even if text bubbles are within Lulu’s official safety lines, they can still be so close to the binding that they’re hard to read.

For the record, it’ll only be available on Lulu. The price is much lower than if I tried to distribute it through other book sites, and the print quality is visibly higher than the alternate proof copy I got from Amazon.

Working through chapter 5 (Miranda and Poe’s first confrontation with Bianca) really drove home how much I was samefacing the black characters at that point.

It wasn’t a conscious plan, it was a combination effect of “mostly drawing anime” and “not enough experience drawing black people.” As the characters’ designs evolved over the years, they’ve gotten more differentiated. I’d forgotten how they used to all have the same nose, same proportions, same jawline.

They also were shaded with the same grey — like the white characters still are — even though they’re supposed to have a range of skin tones. (Part of that was just…laziness. It’s easier if your palettes are interchangeable, you can pull from the same references for everyone.)

In the updated versions, Cybele’s skin is darker-grey and Miranda’s is lighter-grey. And I’m doing what I can to make the faces work.

Chapter 3 was drawn while listening to the entire audiobook of Orson Scott Card’s The Lost Gate. It was alarmingly standard cut-rate YA. Had to add a few more movies at the end to get all the pages done.

Chapter 4, the audiobook of Christopher Moore’s Secondhand Souls, the second of two books about ad-hoc soul reapers. The main character spends a good chunk of the book with his soul possessing a reanimated fourteen-inch-tall squirrel-bone puppet in a hand-sewn wizard robe. It’s very non-standard, and very good.

Interlude 1 was done mostly while listening to episodes of the Webcomics Weekly podcast.

Chapter 5, I remembered that I have on-demand TV to watch. Possibly just in time, because this chapter took work. It got me through all this season’s currently-released episodes of Scandal, Family Guy, and Law & Over: SVU.

Currently in the mail: beta proof copy of Volume 1, with the new art!

Cross your fingers that it looks good, because that’ll be all I need to put it on sale.