Hey all, lots to cover tonight!

First off, we had a bit of an explosion this weekend. Anyone following me on twitter will know that Friday afternoon I discovered that both our cloud backup and external hard drive backup had had some pretty catastrophic issues that were completely separate from each other but did pretty much the same thing–made a lot of our original files go poof. For the bulk of transferring things over to my new work computer, we relied on dropbox, which is all well and good unless my old computer says it is synced up and that all my files are in the cloud when in fact they are not. Which is what happened. The folders I opened on my new computer just so happened to be the only 2 folders that weren’t mostly missing, so I felt secure in telling dropbox to delete the transfer folder so it would self delete off of my old computer.

We lost 136 print quality pages of book 2, and thanks to Undeleter Plus and my stubborn refusal to accept that two years of work were just gone, we recovered all but 21 pages from chapter 15. They’ll have to be redone, but the difference between having to redo a couple months of work versus having to redo a couple years of work is large enough that I am mostly just relieved.

However, we were planning for the worst during the time we were trying to recover files, and worked out a brand new schedule that should give us a giant buffer as well as make sure we’re creating more things like podcasts and world building stuff for Patreon.  On top of that, I distracted myself during the entire process the only way I know how–making more comics. I currently have 5 pages ready to colour, and here is the current progress meter:

progress

Anyhow, the five new pages (inked, no words) are currently available on Patreon at the $1+ level. We also posted the first in a series of worldbuilding articles Cory wrote on the varying flora of Ith. We’ve already posted up an illustration and some info on Sweet Caps (seen in comic on this page), and later today I’ll be posting a new one for Widow’s Tears, also mentioned on that same page. We have two more mushrooms for the week so far, and should have 5 finished pages for the upper tier to read early by the weekend.

Aaand on that note, we decided to lower the cost of the upper tier to $5/month. This means that if you are currently pledging $10 to it, feel free to drop you pledge down, we won’t be offended. This also means that if you’re pledging $5 to us already, you may want to change your pledge level so that you can actually see links to the buffer folder whenever we add to it. If you were maybe on the fence about donating a little more to us than a buck or two, this is a nice time to reconsider! The buffer folder currently has no pages in it because we caught up to it with today’s page, but that’ll change over the course of the week.

Last but certainly not least, my kickass friend Ama and her wife have been trying to add to their family. There have been some bumps in the road, and they’re now going to have to opt for extremely expensive fertility treatments. To help raise money, Ama drew this super cute 20 page comic that she’s selling on gumroad and through her paypal. Click the image below to read more about it! These ladies are basically the most awesome, and it would mean lots if you gave them a hand or even just reblogged on tumblr so that more people will see it!

jade