A Waste of Time

This strip actually concludes me posting the strips that are collected in my recently published book, but the story doesn’t end here at all.  When I was putting together the book, I tried to organize the strips and stuff that was included in a way that lent it a structure and brought it to a place where I felt the characters had a satisfying moment that could serve as their last moment in the book and hopefully create a good experience for the reader, but the things I have planned for these characters all feed into big arcs that will go on for quite a while.  Actually this strip that I’m posting today isn’t even the end of this particular scene, the comic that I’m going to be posting on Monday picks up exactly where this one leaves off and shows some more of what’s going on in Prester’s room.

There are also still several spot illustrations and other odds and ends from the book that I’m going to be posting here, and one of the next things that I’m going to do on this website after the next few strips and drawings is a character guide with profiles for the main characters in these comics, which will hopefully be fun for people to read, and also a way for newer readers to jump in, since I think at this point I’ve accumulated enough material that it might be a bit confusing for somebody new trying to figure out what’s going on.

After the character guide, some more strips and drawings and stuff, I’m going to start posting two things that I’ve been writing.  One of them is the collection of strips that will eventually form my next book, which at this point I’m planning to call Damaged Goods.  It’s the next part in the ongoing saga of my rabbit, Rickets, Truckstop, and Prester, and all those characters, and it will also heavily feature some of my other characters like Capitalist Pig, and there are also going to be a couple of new characters that I’m pretty excited about.

When I plan these things, I usually at some point think in terms of big story arcs and things that I want to tackle, and so all the comics I’m doing under the banner of A Waste of Time are part of something that’s going to take me a long time to tell.  Within the structures of the bigger stories I’m trying to do, I also like to leave enough wiggle room for things to be included as they happen, since a lot of the strips are meant to be autobiographical in one way or another, and I don’t know yet what’s going to happen in the parts of my life that I haven’t yet lived :) The storylines and collections that I’m doing are meant to be chunks of all of this, so that people can read one bit or storyline and understand it without reading every single thing that I’ve done.  Although, of course, who wouldn’t want to read every single thing that I’ve done? :P

The other thing I’m doing is a big project that will still fall under the A Waste of Time banner, but that’s taken on a life of its own.  It was originally supposed to be kind of a fun, short thing, maybe five pages or so, but once I started going I felt like there was so much more I could do.  I’ve been doing a ton of research for it, so I want to talk about it, but I feel like I should keep it kind of secretive until I have more to show.  Although, of course, it’s not totally secret, because some people who know me know that I’ve already been talking about it a lot.  That’s because I’m excited, I think it’s gonna be a great comic!  I’m trying to script this out fully before I start doing too much of the illustration, and the drawing side of it is going to be pretty complicated in some places, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to do three pages a week of it the whole time that I’m doing it, so the idea is to get far enough ahead on it before I start posting it that, when I start posting pages, I’ll be able to keep putting them up in a pretty timely fashion.  So, more on that as it develops :)

Anyway, keep checking back, a whole ton of stuff coming up!  Thanks to everybody that’s been reading my website all this time, and if you’ve been enjoying the recent strips, check out the store page for information about how you can order my book collection, which, I have to say, looks really pretty, and I’m proud of!