Hello there!

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted an author’s note or responded to comments. There are reasons for this, and all of them boil down to how busy I currently am.  What am I busy with? Well, comic pages for starters–I want to be able to take a week off this summer, and I’ll be comfortable doing that when I have at least a two month buffer, but I’m actually using a bit of it right now, and here is why:

totalprogress

I’ve been sitting on the finished book for a while, and as we get closer to finally printing it (more details on that to come, I don’t want to give you an exact date until the money has been exchanged and we’re just waiting on the turnaround), we decided to sit down and go through it again to make sure that we’re printing the absolute best product that we can be. We were not super impressed.

The first version of the print and digital files were fine, but they actually had quite a few spelling errors we missed, as well as a page that was just straight up missing (no one mentioned this, and it was a miracle we caught it because we clearly did not the first several times we read the print version through somehow). On top of that, while I found a way to lessen how bad pure cyans look in CMYK, it was only kind of okay and all pages with blue lighting effects looked a little dull. I also wasn’t happy with the cover–I was happy with elements of it, but not the main art, which was a big problem for me. And, lastly, I wasn’t happy with the bonus pages, of which there were technically nine.

So I’ve been working my butt off to get everything up to snuff. I redrew the cover (which I am very, very happy with) and actually made it into a template for subsequent books (which I will be handling myself instead of through Hiveworks), redesigned the bookmark which was the last print reward that I needed to actually print aside from the book itself (the rest are already printed and sorted into folders for each tier), and I am currently going through every page of the book to fix all 19 spelling errors, add in that missing page and colour fix all of the pages with cyan lighting effects (I found a pretty vibrant teal that’s getting the job done).

Now, because adding in that extra page throws off the page count, we decided to do away with all of the white pages that were in there to force new chapters to always start on the next page on the left hand side of the book, which means we have twelve bonus content spaces instead of nine. Instead of just adding to the ones we’ve already got, we’re actually going to be redoing every single one since we had a fantastic idea for the space that will essentially take up the entire section–I won’t spoil the surprise, but I promise you you’ll like it!

Anyhow, I just wanted to let you all know that I’m not just sitting on my thumbs over here–I’m pulling 60+ hours a week on all of this stuff, and I want all of this done and the books printed more than anyone. GGaR’s kickstarter and shipping is finally paid off, and we are the only Hiveworks managed Kickstarter left to fill, and I promise to keep you as updated as I can. I’m so, so sorry for the delay, and I want to thank you all, for the millionth time, for being so patient. Don’t worry if I’m not answering comments or leaving author’s notes–I’ll try and get Cory to take over those to cut me some slack.

I’ll have a preview of the new cover and the bookmarks up here with Friday’s update, and hopefully by then I’ll be done the rest of the edits and Meg can recompile the book in its new size and with all the new edits, and after that, all it needs to do is go to the printers. I’ll be adding this info to the kickstarter some time later today (it’s actually yesterday as I am typing this and I want to get a few more pages fixed before I pass out).

Anyhow, see you all Friday for what wordpress informs me is our 300th page? News to me!