Remember Closed Galaxy, guys?

So, last time I checked in, I mentioned how I was (probably) leaving the country for a month for work. Well… I’m still here. The scheduling of this trip has been almost entirely out of my hands, depending on the availability of other people. It got narrowed down to a range of days between September and October. It got scheduled to start on September 24 and rescheduled like a single hour later. Then it was October 1st. And now it’s “maybe January.” This has all been immensely frustrating for me. A month is a long time. It has been stressful for me not to know when a month is disappearing from my personal life, and it has been at least as frustrating not knowing what to do with CG. I didn’t want to start running Chapter 5 and then just stop in the middle of a scene or something. I didn’t think I’d be able to bank enough pages to run in the month I was gone, especially not knowing when I was going. Additionally, there’s this… and I don’t know how serious you might take this, but it’s important to me. I don’t stay “on model” too well. The way my characters look, the way the whole of the art looks, changes pretty dramatically between chapters. I have to work really hard to try to just keep things consistent for 20 pages. The only way I am able to do that is to do the whole thing, one page or more a week, with as few breaks as possible. I couldn’t guarantee myself that with this month-sized hole ever looming, never materializing in my schedule. And in the face of that, I just kind of shut down. It really bums me out. The last 6 months have been really stressful, and yet, nothing has actually happened. Not ideal.

At any rate, I’ve started work on the next chapter. I took a break from inking the first page to type this. I don’t know what else to do. It’s been way too long already. We’ll just see what happens when the holidays roll up, and when “maybe January” gets here. If I worked without any gaps, I project I’d finish Chapter 5 on January 30th. But I obviously won’t be able to do that. Who knows. I kind of have to throw up my hands, at this point.

But I’m also going to be publishing this one differently. I don’t think a page a week is terribly satisfying. I don’t think a scene has rhythm delivered that way. So rather than a page at a time, I’m going to put this one up a scene at a time. The amount of pages (and the time between posts) will be determined by how long each scene is. I think the first scene in Chapter 5 is 4 pages long. So I finish those 4 pages, and then I put them all up. Then I go away for a few weeks, and then the next scene appears. I think it will read better this way. We’ll see if I’m right.

With that in mind, I think I’m going to give myself a little bit of a lead, just because, so in something like (uuuuggghhh) 5 or 6 weeks, expect the beginning of Chapter 5 to appear. End of October, I guess. End of October. So much time lost this year. I’m so disappointed. Ah, well. Can’t do anything about it. I think the next one is going to be really entertaining. I hope you’re still here to read it.