Impatient

I've been trying to put this thing together in a systematic way, applying the lessons of a lifetime studying film and comics and writing, and learning from the successes of people like Scott Kurtz and Howard Tayler. So I set a launch date far enough out to give me a five-week buffer of finished strips. That is, if I could maintain a schedule of at least a page a week. The long lead time was also meant to let me see if I could do that and put out an acceptable product.

So here I am, three pages into the project, and trying to double my output this week, because I decided to do a splash page (I'm approaching this with an eye toward a finished printed product, so even though I'm splitting the pages into strips, I'm laying them out a page at a time, which means that even though each strip will have a constant width, the the height of strips will vary depending on the layout I'm following for that page).

In addition to the increased workload, I opened a Project Wonderful account with an eye toward putting ads on the site (I've got holes in the site layout specifically for ads), but I can't put Project Wonderful ads on my webcomic blog until I've got 30 strips published, which means 10 weeks. And I'm determined not to solicit readers until I've got at least a month's worth of strips for them to read coming in.

So that means another week-and-a-half before I've got anything published at all, another month after that before I begin getting any kind of real traffic (if ever), another month or two after that before I can fill my ad holes, and who knows how many months after that before I can pay for a beer out of my income from the strip. And probably two years before I collect enough pages to do a printed collection. And I'm kind of anxious say, "To hell with the schedule and the buffer and being systematic. Let's just throw stuff out there right now."

In the meantime, I'm going to be unemployed in nine days.

So both my confidence and my motivation are taking a hit at the moment. But I am frantically inking pages 4 and 5 right now, and as a small preview, here's a look at a portion of page 4. I almost hate to ink over this, because I think it kinda looks cool with all the perspective lines.

And no, it's not upside down.