I’m getting over a cold and feeling sluggish. Let’s get on with it, shall we?

I know I said I WANTED to do a little more writing, but this weekend I HAD to do a little more writing. I’d drawn the last of my Animus Wars scripts last week, and I was down to the last strip of the current storyline in Animus Funnies. I had to have something to draw NOW.

I draw Animus Wars a week in advance. I had a huge buffer and I let it all go before I started drawing again. Couldn’t get motivated to draw it. The necessity of having a new strip every Friday fuels me. If somehow I don’t get the strip done (which I thought happened not too long ago) I’d do without a Friday update, but I’d rather not. The last two Fridays I had some new written content about Pelaria, so I would have had something go up anyway. I just want to keep to my schedule.

Animus Wars is slow-moving. When I started it, I thought I’d get through the story in a year’s worth of installments (that’d be 52 strips). This Friday, strip number 17 will go up, which is a third of that, and I feel I still have a lot of story left to go. But then I think that it took me nine pages just to get through the opening crawl and within the next seven pages I got through the tinkers’ escape, meeting Tara and setting out to find Oonchie-Wan. I cut out the jawa stuff and Tara’s life on the farm for practical reasons (I have nobody to play Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru or the jawas). All this to say, who knows? I might make it in a year, or I might not. For right now, I just finished writing Prince Cyran’s first encounter with Darth Todrick.

In Animus Funnies, I just finished the current story sequence that will conclude in the first week of February. I set out that I wanted to start my next big story sequence in March so that the chain of events get me to a trek away from Bree during the summer. What to do then, in February? In particular, I needed something to draw on Sunday. I came up with a quick gag featuring the Pickle Patch Bandits, which grew to a trilogy of gags on the same theme. When I introduced the Bandits back in May, I didn’t think I’d have any use for them beyond that one story point. Then I gave them names in July and featured them in mash-ups. Now they’re recurring cast members. I like drawing the curve of Nolan’s nose.

For the rest of what I came up with for February, you’ll just have to check back in. (See what I did there?)

I started drawing new Mash-ups last week. You may have seen the sketch I put up on Facebook. The theme is Final Fantasy IX (my favorite game in the series). I’ll talk more about them (and the game) when they go up next week.

Okay, that’s all for now. Talkatchall later.