You may have noticed the site’s archives were down over the weekend.  While trying to fix something, I broke the rewrite rules for permalinks here and didn’t realize it because the main page was working fine.  They should be working again now. Lucky I happened to check it.

Actually, it’s not luck, it’s related to my next point.  I was out of town for Dragon*Con at the time (not as a guest, but an attendee).  I always come back from Dragon*Con fired up to be creative (somewhat limited this time by having caught a cold on the last day, but still noticeably present), which is why I decided to reread the broken dolls story.

(While I was at the con, I’d hoped to talk to someone about a thing I want to do in the comic on down the road, but I never quite got a chance.  I think I’ll email instead while it’s still fresh.)

As I posted to twitter a month or two ago, I was also gathering reference material to start work on the comic again, but got distracted by other things.  D*C is now days in the past/a year in the future (depending on perspective).

All of this means that you may start seeing new pages in a few weeks.  I still would really prefer to go back and finish coloring (or better yet, redraw) the old pages before moving on, and I really, really need a solid buffer, but given my present respiratory difficulties, I really say with any accuracy how likely any of this is.

I may also have a scanner again soon, thanks to one of my friends.  While I like certain aspects of doing this digitally (especially consistent page format and panels, since I no longer have a drafting table), I prefer actually drawing with a physical pencil.  Returning to scanned art and trying to fuse it with the digital parts would, however, mean another upheaval in my process.

I suspect this post may come across as slightly disjointed, for which I blame the microorganisms.

I hid the April Fools comic (and the shadslymon art day) so as to have the most recent comic on the main page and not make people think I was serious about it being the end of Shadsly.  When I start updating the site again, they will make their reappearance.

I intend to go through and finish up all the older unshaded pages that I utterly failed to update while actually working on the story and pages that I need to redraw, before I start posting new pages again.  Which means I need to … actually get to working on them.

Anyway, I just thought the site had gone long enough without any updates.

If it weren’t clear (though I’ve mentioned it in the twitter feed), the comic posted on 4/1 was an April Fools joke.  However, it was a somewhat ill-timed one, considering that I’ve been making precisely zero progress on the comic recently, pretty much ever since I got sick.  I’m long since past my cold, but it completely destroyed my sense of momentum, and I’ve yet to recover it.

I will get back to Shadsly, hopefully soon, but as of right now I have no idea when. Maybe I will just pick up and wave my wacom stylus and a few hours later a page will magically appear (yeah, right).

If you read this comic and want to help … well, some nice positive comments won’t hurt.  I’ve no idea how many people, if any, were following this regularly (as opposed to when I reminded/nagged my friends and family to look at new pages).