Friday arrives like a flock of migrating geese!
Friday is the dream that you forget upon waking!
Friday is the fifth dwarf, Snow White’s favorite!
Friday is the moment when you see your lost love again!
Friday lurks in the darkness and springs upon the unwary!
Friday is a cat on a windowsill soaking in sunlight!
Friday is … here.
(Unless you’re reading this on some other day of the week. Those days are cool too. Mostly.)

These Days …

The process of getting Billi 99 back in print in a new snazzy edition has reminded me how much I’ve been relying on annual projects to get things done. For the past few years I’ve had some regular thing, a large project planned, that got me to produce some art. One year it was to do a daily half hour sketch. One year it was Daughter of Spiders. One year it was to produce a coffee mug design on a weekly basis. This year I’d planned to create Mighty Nizz comics and write/illustrate The Surrilana Depths. Billi 99 was only vaguely on the table.

When it started to look like there would be a reprint, it looked like it would be a simple thing – a hardcover edition in black and white. My participation was expected to be limited to some touch up on pages that had problems in the original scans. We had a publisher. Someone else had volunteered to do the book design.

And then …

The designer quit.

Sarah has been trying to get a new edition of Billi out for a few years now. With a publisher being ready to print a new edition, I stepped in to do the production work and book design. Then we got more ambitious. We’d previously considered doing a Kickstarter to fund a deluxe hardback printing but neither I nor Sarah had felt like we had the focus to manage it. I had my postal job and Mighty Nizz and Surrilana filling my time. But once I was doing production work we started reconsidering the idea. And once a Kickstarter was an option we figured – why not go full color? Sarah and Tim Sale, the artist, had discussed doing a color version in years previous. Sarah researched costs. She contacted José Villarrubia about coloring the book.

A lot has happened in the last few weeks. José has created beautiful colors on a few pages that can be used on the Kickstarter campaign. I’d love to show them but we want to keep them under wraps until closer to launch.

The project has grown. More folks than Sarah and I are working on it. If all goes well someone else, with far more experience, will be stepping in to design the book. Among other things.

That’s a relief. That’s exciting. I wish I could write all about it but negotiations are still happening.

So I should be able to pick up with Mighty Nizz and Surrilana soon. It’s tricky. I don’t shift gears well. I figured I could manage two projects this year, if I was both the boss and the worker bee. Three projects (especially when the third project has deadlines and big time publishers and stuff I’m figuring out how to do on the fly) is more than I could manage and still be pleasant company. Add in concerns and attention to/about friends and family with life threatening medical issues …. Bleah. I haven’t been willing to work on anything but Billi because I haven’t wanted to get too attached to any other project. So instead of spending a few minutes here and there on Nizz and Surrilana I’ve spent my unstructured time surfing the web.

That’s been fun. But not terribly productive.

Billi is still a project that requires my attention. Assuming that negotiations work out, I’ll still need to be involved. It will just require a different sort of attention. I should have the mental energy to focus on Nizz and Surrilana again.

Whew.

In the Meantime

While we’re working out the details on Billi I’m doing a miniproject just for this newsletter. I need practice doing digital coloring. (Yes, I’ve been doing digital coloring for years now. I still need practice.) I did these six pages of sketches. This week I’m posting scans of the physical art. Next week I’ll post the (mostly) cleaned up black and white versions. The week after that I’ll start adding color. Every week I’ll do another stage in the coloring process. Hopefully y’all will find it amusing.

And that’s it for this week. Thank you for being patient with my rambling.

I hope the last seven days have been good to you. I hope the next seven are even better.

See you on May 26th!