Get back get back up

I was too tired/happy to post anything at the time, but I finished my Oni book last week!!!!


I really wanted to finish before the holidays. Now I have a bit more capacity to handle the holiday+birthday+other time constraints and stress that are coming up.

I made this progress chart in November to help motivate me to finish:


(24 penciled/inked/toned pages in a month, what's up)

The 9 check-offable boxes after 'Celebrate' were a joke, but looking at it later I decided that I should create 9 distinct rewards for myself -- turn it into a kind of ritual and commemorate the end of a big book project. It was fun coming up with a list of things that I'd been wanting to do (rather than buy, it being the holidays anyway and material rewards requiring less creativity/more money):

• Spend a day drawing fan art
  
• Climb the *****'s fire escape onto the roof
  
• Hike somewhere nice and watch the sun rise on New Years morning for good luck
  
• Go to the Sky High trampoline gym (can you tell that I like heights??)
• Christmas movie marathon (The Snowman, Just Friends, Love Actually, Die Hard, Tokyo Godfathers, Elf, Rudolph)
• Get dressed up and spend a day going into EVERY boutique on 23rd (more to satisfy my curiosity than to actually shop...how are there so many nice boutiques on one street?!)
• Go into Counter Media (The porn scares me off every time I think I'm going to go in! xD But I've heard there are good comics in there...!)
• Spend a long, lazy weekend morning at the gym (work out, hot tub, sauna, shower and get dressed nicely, eat lunch at one of the nice restaurants upstairs)
• Draw a cover for my Ghibli sketchbook and give it to the next person to draw in

I've done 2 of these already, and am looking forward to the rest. :)

So take it easy I'll make it so easy

I'm sorry for the absence here; I went out of town for a few days for Thanksgiving, got pretty sick right afterward, fell behind on work, etc. I've been having a lot of fun, though, too--going out more than usual and saying 'yes' to more invitations.

Emi and I did an interview on Wednesday with the Pedal Powered Talk Show that was SUPER fun. We talked about Emitown V2 and Between Gears, which are coming out at the same time next year. We also had an impromptu, on-show challenge with some high stakes! It will air in January, and I'll be sure to post when it does. Here's the set, Emi, the back of host Boaz Frankel, and 2" of my forehead:


December is characteristically jam-packed with stress and joy. One of my books wraps up next week, my family is going on vacation again and I need to decide whether or not I can join, my birthday is the week after that, I still have pretty much all of my presents to make/buy, and then there's a slew of holiday parties, the actual holidays, and back to encroaching (or blown!) deadlines...

I used to get really sick every Christmas; it was too much excitement and my body invariably succumbed to some awful thing. I'm going to try to get healthy quickly and stay healthy this year, take one thing at a time and not be dumb about biting off more than I can chew.

Okay okay okay, but how about some art??

I'm inking the LAST CHAPTER OMG of my book with Jamie! And I'm trying to find a panel I can post as a preview...but I'm pretty sure that every single one is in some way a spoiler. Sorry! There will be new art soon. Whole books full of it!

This is what I've been obsessively listening to lately.