Other Sleep

So, um, I hate to have to admit this, but? I want to always be up front with my small handful of readers.

It’s with a little bit of shame that I have to tell you that chapter four of Other Sleep is going to be late. Rather late. I’m still aiming for it to go online at the tail end of July, but it’s hard to say whether that will happen or not.

The one biggest reason is that uh, slump I was in that I mentioned last post, which delayed chapter 3. After I powered my way through it and got online, I dropped back down and lost all motivation to get moving with the fourth chapter. I was once again barely drawing, barely reading any comics, just feeling kind of down. After all that work to finish the third chapter, it seemed like no one was really looking at it or reading it, which was really bumming me out. Of course, I wasn’t really going out of my way to try and promote it the way I did the first two chapters, but I’m kind of weary of that. It’s necessary, I know, it’s something I need to do because no one else is going to do it for me, but still…just…kind of tiresome.

This past weekend was HeroesCon in Charlotte, and my friends and I made a pilgrimage down there for all three days, which turned out to be the perfect remedy that I needed. This was my first real Con experience, and there were SO MANY artists there that I’m really fond of, including one of my absolute favorites, Geof Darrow. Other dudes included James Harren, Paul Maybury, Ben Templesmith, Nathan Fox, and well, so many more. I spent all three days of the con in the artists alley just looking at everything, buying stuff, talking, and handing people copies of my Burst Reach comic. It was so invigorating and inspiring to see all that talent in one place, to look at all they’ve accomplished, to talk about some of the pain of drawing, all of it. I especially loved seeing the original pages of James Harren’s incredible run on BPRD: The Long Death,  a portfolio of Sean Murphy’s pages for Joe the Barbarian, Mike Mignola’s covers, and so much more. Having the art itself right there to look at, seeing every stroke, every error that they whited out or pasted over, for me was like a religious experience. I came home pumped, ready to leap back into work and to try even harder and become even better!

Buuuuuuut there’s another reason chapter 4 is going to be late. Rob-Con, the comic convention here in Bristol, is less than a month away, July 21st, and I NEED to get things ready for that. I’ve been dragging my feet way too much on the three books I want to have ready for it, so now that it’s coming down soon, I’m pushing through them. My goal is to finish drawing and designing everything for Burst Reach 2. I also need to get together everything I need to make a print version of chapter 1 of OS happen. And finally there’s that collection of my Distinguished Gentlemen and Exciting Tales! strips that I’ve been promising people all damn year.

So I’m going to work on all of those and try to get some pages of chapter 4 done in between. It’s not as many pages as chapter 3 was, so technically it should be a bit quicker and easier, but I’m just letting you know it’s not quite my top priority for the time being. I don’t want my readers to think I’m lazy, no, I’m anything but that. In the meantime, I’m also going to dive back into promoting the comic on forums and stuff in the hope of attaining more readers and attention, yeah?

Oh, and to make matters a tad worse? In the middle of writing this, I got hit hard with what I believe experts refer to as the “Con Crud.” Shit.

Just hang in there with me, guys, I promise I’m not abandoning you or this comic. I have big things in store for Ninel, trust me…

[Brett]