Whew, okay, so, I am pretty overwhelmed right now. Today’s page is the last page of my buffer! I kind of thought I’d be done Valor right now and would be back to bolstering it, but between shipping books, Valor being more time consuming than I thought and Briar is going through a phase where she’s super clingy all of the time, I am super behind. Valor needs to be done by the end of the month, but personally, I need to get it done sooner than that. So I’ve got a few options…

  • Option one is that I take next week off. I don’t wanna do it, because I haven’t missed a single update this year and I’m so close to the end of the year…but it would give me the time to finish Valor and get back on track for the next week.

  • Option two is that I drop down to one update a week for the rest of the month. I’ll still have to squeeze them in to the time it’ll take me to get Valor completely done, but it’ll be less stressful and require that I not give up on sleep altogether.

  • Option three is that I devote some time this weekend to hopefully colouring two pages and keeping on track, but that means that Valor will drag out until the end of the month and possibly kill me with stress in the process (though I can straight up tell you that I’m sorely tempted to try and do this one anyways so as not to break my record aaargh).

Tell me what you think I should do–I feel weirdly guilty about taking time off and am not sure how to make this decision on my own.

On top of that, I still need to do Patreon wallpapers for next month! I’m trying out something new and asking all of our regular readers who you would like to see bonus art of–even if the wallpapers are patron only, I’m still gonna release a nice version of the finished pictures to the public. Vote for any character you like by typing their name into this form. Names will be added to the options automatically as soon as one person votes for them, so if you do see the character you want to vote for’s name, then check the appropriate option. If you don’t see it, just add it into the final box and it’ll be added to the options for others to vote on automatically:

[yop_poll id=”3″]

Voting will last until next Saturday!

Edit: I don’t mind the joke votes, because I WILL draw them if they win, but make sure your joke post has an actual character from this comic in it. I removed Kanye West from the list, but left the other two. Sorry! Those of you who voted for him can recast your vote or suggest someone else.

Edit TWO: Removed more joke votes for a food item (???) and a character who doesn’t exist (Saki???), and while I was briefly excited to know that I probably would be making a wallpaper for the background character we have lovingly dubbed ‘Sailor Goon’, actually looking at the votes told me they were all within seconds to minutes of each other and all came from the same IP address.

Honestly, if you (whoever you are) had just put it up there for fun and voted on it the one time it really might have been a contender, because it’s a joke vote I’d allow and other people might find funny. But knowing that it was all one person prompted me to delete it because it defeats the purpose of finding out what readers want to see and caters to a single reader. I felt obligated (and kind of disappointed) to nuke it, but it had to be done. If I see any more really obvious attempts to game the system, then I’ll delete those too. If you really want a specific character to win, suggest them by voting the once and then try and drum up support in the comments and see where it goes.

The IP in question has been banned from voting on this specific poll, but will be allowed back on the next time we do one. It’s nothing personal, but I’m extremely overworked right now and having to manually delete almost 60 votes by the same person takes up more time than I can spare for it. Sorry! 🙁

And last but not least, I’ve been pretty slow on the uptake on Patreon all month because of Valor and the books, so I’ve taken the time this evening (or rather, early morning because aaaargh time management) to give Patrons a few nice things that probably won’t make up for how crap I’ve been but will hopefully make up for it a little. If you are  Patron, you can now find full page colour previews (no words!) of the first 7 pages and a preview of a tentative book 2 cover I started ages ago but haven’t had time to finish. I have a lot of stuff that’s just been sitting there in sketch phases that I hope to finish up once Valor is done, though I might finish one of them a as warmup this weekend if I decide to go with any above option that isn’t option three.