> Errant Story

More hospital fun, this time in Poe flavor!

February 9th, 2013 - by Impy

Okay, so, here’s what’s going on…

At the start of January, Poe started getting really sick. At first, we thought it was the same wretched bug I had gotten, but I got better after about a week of misery, while Poe never really did, and instead he just kept getting worse. He hates going to the doctor, though, because he had cancer as a kid, and he doesn’t have insurance, so it took until this Monday to finally get him to go to the doctor. The doctor ran some tests, and then Friday we got a call saying, “Go to the emergency room immediately.” Poe finally went, and after a day of standard emergency room limbo, they admitted him to the hospital for acute renal failure. As of the time I’m writing this, I don’t know much more than that, but I trust this hospital. They’re the ones who saved me back in 2011, and if it is possible to do it at all, they will find and fix the problem for Michael.

Now, back to the part about no insurance. I know that the first instinct any time this kind of terrible bad luck hits someone is to try to donate to help them with their medical bills. The thought is appreciated, but please… DO NOT GIVE US DONATIONS. Donations are very unlikely to cover the bill, but they are guaranteed to make Michael ineligible for the existing financial aid options. Instead, if you really want to pitch in, please go to either our Etsy shop or our online store and buy the original Errant Story comic pages. Those purchases will put money into the business, and won’t affect Michael’s eligibility for financial aid. No matter how this turns out in the long run, they’re beautiful pieces and a good investment for you, and the money going into the business will give us options to figure out what on earth we’re going to do when this is over. So that’s the best way to help. Well, unless you’re a comic artist. Then you could maybe give us fan art or fan comics to run on the site for a while. Either Does Not Play Well With Others or Errant Story fan comics would be awesome, and hell, if you’ve got pent up Exploitation Now fandom bubbling away inside you, we’ll gladly run with that, too.

As always, your thoughts and prayers are welcome, and I’ll try to keep you updated as I learn more. Now it’s time for me to sleep, because I only got two hours last night and I have to be up in about four to go back to the hospital. Whee.

- Hilary

P.S. Oh, but for those keeping track, I actually came through my thyroidectomy last week just fine, and I’m breathing a lot better now. But I am getting really tired of all this bad health luck, guys. Seriously, the never-ending sickness and death that we’ve been dealing with since 2010 is well past the stage of becoming farce, except that it really isn’t at all funny to live through. More like terrifying, exhausting, and traumatic. We’re spending all this time and energy on real life problems, without getting any breathers to enjoy real life, let alone spend time on our webcomic lives, or for that matter sleep, and every time it starts looking like we’ll finally be done with one problem so we can resume our regular programming, something else comes along and screws it all up again. I just want things to stop going wrong and get better so we can go back to getting some fucking work done, you know?


Hey, where’s the comic?

February 4th, 2013 - by Impy

Sorry guys, right now Michael is sick and I’m recovering from yet another surgery, so although the comics are done and commentary would theoretically be simple to add, neither can go up until this afternoon when we can hopefully both see straight enough to work out exactly which comics we’re supposed to be posting when. Seriously, I look at the calendar and it goes all swimmy and brings on a splitting headache. This here is what we call touch typing. So, yeah, we’ll be back this afternoon.


Collector’s Edition Update!

January 2nd, 2013 - by Impy

Well folks, it’s a new year, and I have good news to report about our progress on assembling the collector’s edition! I have now completely finished editing and relettering the comics from Volume One! Whoo!

In theory, Volume One was always going to be the hardest because it needed the most work in terms of formatting, corrections, and relettering. It was originally only about 130 pages, but between shuffling the page order, splitting the truly wordy pages in twain, and bringing in some pages from Volume Two so that Volume One doesn’t end on such an expository note, we’re now up to 192 pages in Volume One! At this point Michael has about 27 pages left to do some additional art for (including four new chapter pages), and then he can start shading Volume One.

Meanwhile, I’m moving on to Volume Two, which is the other volume that needs a lot of work (the ones after that will all be easier). Essentially, it’s the same process as for Volume One, but hopefully it’ll be faster because I’ve got a finished script and a lot more experience at this point, and also I won’t be in a coma. I won’t be trying to cram all the original dialogue onto overcrowded pages anymore, either, I’ll just be going straight to splitting the pages, and that will save a lot of time and frustration. Those overcrowded pages completely killed my focus every single time.

But, all this work on the print collection does bring up a question, and we’d really like your input on it. When you get right down to it, Errant Story has kinda always been a print comic masquerading as a webcomic. Or rather, the webcomic has been its caterpillar stage, inching along and developing over time, but the finished collector’s edition books will be the butterfly stage (which I suppose makes this editing process the cocoon, appropriately enough). They’re functionally two different creatures, so the question is… what happens to the caterpillar version of the comic once the metamorphosis is complete? Webcomics are living things that exist best in the moment, growing and interacting with the readers and with each other. Errant Story has ended, so it can’t be that anymore, and while we do have plans for Errant Tales and a couple of actual sequels, those will be very much like Errant Story in that they are going to be print comics at heart. So what do we do with the website that best honors the webcomic that was while promoting the transformed version to new readers who missed out on the caterpillar process? How would you like to see us integrating those two aspects of the comic in future?

So, that’s where we are with the editing now, and a glimpse of where we’re headed, too. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

^-^’


Newer Entries ↑
↓ Previous Entries