Good things this past week and a half or so:

1) Registered and confirmed for the New England Small Press Assembly, which will happen in Rhode Island next July. Also awaiting a decision on the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, which is May. Thinking also about Boston Zine Fest, Maine, SPX again... we'll see about New York.

2) American, Eh? is in Ada Books in Providence and Harrison's up in Salem - just promo copies for right now, but hoping to establish a relationship and get the books regularly in the stores. Will be taking trips to Worcester and Boston this winter to see about other sites for distribution.

3) First sale on Etsy! Three books gone. Very nice.

Not bad, not bad at all.

On the production front, my goal is to finish American, Eh? #4 and Juniper Key and the Very Serious Girl by Christmas. Then, when I go home to Canada for my annual two week vacation, I can have peace of mind..... and not bring ink bottles on the plane. I can start sketches for Cake Brat (hopefully figured out by then what I'm doing with the concept) and maybe my long-dreamed-of project of comics about going to Japan with my mum three years ago, but those are slow, dreamy pencil sketches that I can do in front of a fire sitting with my brown dog.

Juniper Key is steadily coming to a close, which is exciting. I just finished the tenth illustration out of twelve, not including the cover (which I still have to decide on). Right now, they're just inked - I'm scanning them and then I will add watercolor to the images and rescan. Just want to preserve the original images in case I screw up. :-)

American, Eh #4 is shaping up to be a challenge, mainly because I'm making it so. I read a review of the earlier issues that talked about how simply drawn it was, and for whatever reason, that kind of irked me. And I read somewhere else an artists' quote that said people who don't bother or concentrate on background details are lazy and missing out on half the impact.

Now, of course that's not true of everyone, but I'm the type that stuff like that sticks in my mind (AE#1 was heavily influenced by another quote I read that said that comic panels should be at least 50% black, and look how dark it is in parts!). So AE#4 has been a different animal. I'm concentrating heavily on background and especially texture. That's something that's been missing from earlier issues: parallel lines, cross-hatching, stippling, etc., just to add that texture and dimension. You can see from an earlier post on this blog Page#1 and how much detail I put into that first page - that was a headache, but I can't deny that it's a strong image. Add to that those Hitchcock stills, again from an earlier post, with all that tiled flooring and it's been more work. But good though. I think whoever made that quote was right.