Arctic Light

I went to bed at a reasonable hour, like a responsible adult, and then woke up -sproing- at 2 a.m., as usually happens when I try to be responsible that way.

On the other hand, the aurora was having a gorgeous display, so I went out in the yard and watched that for awhile, enjoying the novel sensation of watching the aurora without freezing to death while doing it. We rarely get really striking auroras this late in the year -- it's already not quite getting dark at night, so the aurora glimmering above a bright horizon was really interesting and novel. Plus, at one point I saw an owl fly across it, which in all my years of aurora-watching is totally a new one for me.

And now I'm wide awake, since my body thinks I had a nice refreshing nap. So I decided screw being an adult, I'm awake anyway and I don't have to be up early in the morning, may as well have a beer.

I went ahead and updated Sun-Cutter since I'm awake anyway. This particular update is a meet-cute between two characters whose first meeting I've had in mind for close to 15 years, but I never did it as a side story because I never really had a plot for the rest of it. Eventually I realized it would work fine as a flashback, since most of the rest of their story is in flashbacks anyway. And I got to play with a limited color palette for this, which is fun. (Next week, things go off the rails, as usual.)

I think I should probably spend the upcoming week doing mostly Kismet. My comfortable page buffer has been nibbled away to a little over a month, and summers are always very busy for me, so I'd like to get all the pages done through early fall in the next few weeks.

I also want to start doing more Kismet stuff on Tumblr, but I'm completely drawing a blank on, like ... what to do? Because most of Kismet these days is either working on pages, or it's mental plot noodling that exists entirely in my head. There used to be a time when I wrote a ton of Kismet snippets outside the main continuity, and sketched a bunch (well, I still do that, but it's mostly working out costume designs for upcoming characters and other spoilery stuff), and made gifs and cartoons and so forth. I feel like I should start playing with it more again. I'm having trouble even figuring out where to start with that, though.

Maybe if I set a goal of starting on May 1 (that's a nice day for starting a new venture - Beltane!) and posting one new Kismet thing per day on Tumblr. That might work. And it'll give me some time to work on stuff. I kinda just want to get the word out about the comic a little bit more, because it has a loyal audience, but a very small audience, and I think there are probably more people out there who'd like it if they knew about it! But there is just so much of it, about 500 pages so far. And that's a significant chunk of comic if you are just checking out something new. I think maybe it's easier to entice a new audience for a webcomic if it's brand new and there isn't much of a time commitment. (On the other hand ... Exhibit A: Homestuck.)

In genuinely unrelated news, I really, really wish the AO3 had a blacklist function. It would make certain fandoms 1000% more fun.

It's interesting to me what's fun for different people. Like ... today, I wrote for a few hours in the morning, and then I've spent the last 10 hours or so buried in InDesign (with occasional detours over to Photoshop), first working on a freelance project I'm actually getting paid for, then working on getting Freebird reformatted for a digital edition. It's immensely fun to me. I don't mind that I spent 15 hours in front of the computer today. I don't really want to stop. However, I can imagine this being absolute boring hell for some people. (I haven't spoken to a single other human being besides Orion. I did take a walk with the dog and made from-scratch beef stew, though!)

On a completely different topic, I'm reading a book called The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, which is a lot of fun, but I was going through the chapter on city life, which was discussing fraud and shoddy business practices in city markets (spoiled grain concealed by handfuls of fresh grain, fraudulent measuring tools, iron baked into loaves of bread to increase its weight, etc) and the merchant guilds' policing of such things .... which obviously sent my brain straight to Peter Burke, Medieval Market Fraud Inspector. PLEASE, someone tell me I'm much too busy to write this.