Sly's Comments - Backlog

07/16/08
Happy Birthday, charlend! ...sorry it's not a real update.
For those of you who want to see page 9 finally (myself included), please send your encouragement to Luth'rai at a.luthrai_at_gmail_dot_com. You can do it, Luth! I believe in you~

Connecticon fast approacheth, and I continue to scrabble to get everything together. This is NOT helped by the fact that I had a fainting episode on Monday. I did not actually lose consciousness, so to this day I remain a syncope virgin (is that applicable?). Fortunately, it happened at the doctor's office, so I got assistance right away. Unfortunately, they're not entirely sure what caused it, although the doctor suspects vasovagal syncope over low blood sugar. I'm under orders to rest whenever I feel faint and not stray far from home by myself. Seeing as I've had frequent light-headedness and/or dizzy spells since the first trimester...this means I have to go lie down very often. This when I already feel like I'm not working often enough. Grrrr.

I'm working on something new to sell at our table this year: a bookmark! Still not sure if I'll be selling them for $.75 or $1.00... I guess I'll see what the quality is like, first. I'll probably put the design for it up here next week, as I really doubt Luth'll have gotten the page back to me in time. *sigh* But you all should come to Connecticon. It'll be crazy-fun-times, and you can stop by to say hi! And buy stuff! And possibly get a sneak peak at Luth and my secret project...

On a final note, yes my current rat-girls are named Tsunade and Nariko. Nariko is adorable, but terrified of anyone who isn't me and hates being outside the cage. Tsunade is a little homely, but very friendly and loves nothing more than exploring. I loves them so. ^.^

07/03/08
Long week. And this week is going to be longer.
So, Connecticon is in less than a month, which means we need to get our stuff ordered by next week. I also have three parties in a row this weekend - an Independence Day cook-out, and then two family reunions. Oi. And then probably some time spent with the mother-in-law. In light of all this, there can't possibly be an update on the 9th, so we're not even going to try.

As for an update this week, please hit refresh to see it. There's some more shading. Yeah.

Sorry, things have been so spotty lately. Our internet was spotty yesterday, too. I don't like Comcast, but they bought out all the other internet providers in Brattleboro. *sigh*

Go find out Where the Hell is Matt? It should make everything better. ^_^ See you all in a couple weeks! Hopefully with the ever elusive page 9!

06/25/08
Some shading updates, but not as many as I'd hoped for. (Hit refresh if you don't see any difference.)There's...so much to do on this page. 0_0

So, the current deal with page 9. We've scrapped the entire first panel (which is on par with panel 3 on this page) and are trying a different angle. Luth'rai built the Agricultural Market Square in Google Sketch-up to figure out why the last angle wasn't working and...well, let's just say it's been figured out. We've not scrapped the other two panels on the page, though, so I've got a good feeling about maybe finally showing this sucker to you guys next week. Then again, it takes me about 20% of the time to doodle in people than it takes Luth'rai to draw people. Now there's a scary thought.

Sadly, not much to report this week. Been tired, been oversleeping. Also been having lots of acid pain in my esophogus. Blagh. I've also played around some more with the Spore Creature Creator (but not very much, be proud of me ^_^), and got a facebook account. It's quite strange. I'm being friended by people I've not heard of in years and years. Do they know I'm having a baby? Heck, do they even know I'm married and a college graduate? Awkward.

06/18/08
Well...full-color, but no shading. Man, that looks really bad to me. Luth'rai, didn't you say you weren't going to flat color in texture anymore because it's too time consuming? Now you're just making my own plain old colors look bad. >.> I'll be working on it more this coming week. Maybe it won't looks so strange once I've shaded it all.

Leaf and Ayne still do not belong to us. They belong at Chasing the Sunset. Be sure to check it out!

Page 9...I'm hopeful that Luth'rai will be able to finish it by next week...but there hasn't been much progress on it during the last three weeks, so...I dunno. So, we'll hope for the next page, and be happy for shaded last page if all else fails?

In other, more consuming news: It's a boy! The baby that loves to spend his time kicking me in the bladder, that is. Man, that makes sleeping difficult. Monday we had the anatomy ultrasound. As it turned out, the placenta is attached between my stomach surface and the baby, and he was taking advantage of this and hiding behind it. He had his face right under my belly button, which cast a shadow and made it hard for the doctor to see what he was trying to see - the brain. After a lot of diligence on the doctor's part, he was indeed able to make sure that all parts of the skull were accounted for. Everything's accounted for, actually. 95% of all serious birth defects are ruled out. Yay! ...it just took over an hour, and me with a full bladder and a baby kicking it because he didn't like the ultrasound. *sigh* Maybe he'll find new places to stretch his legs in the future.

So, yes. Spore's Creature Creator has just come out, and like many, I've been bitten by the Spore bug and can't wait to get my hands dirty. My username is SlyEagle if you want to look up what I've done in the Sporepedia. Sweet, sweet wonderfulness. ^_^

See you all next week!

06/11/08
"These don't look like the Dwarven Lands..." And...that's because they're not. Leaf and Ayne also aren't ours, as they belong to Mithandir and Alien of the charming Chasing the Sunset. Feiht is also up there in panel 3 - but you can't see her because she's invisible. ;)

Well, in the amout of time it took Luth'rai to finish the backgrounds, I was able to color that ONE panel you see in the top corner. WOW, am I out of practice. I spent as much time trying to figure out how I used to color as I spent coloring, I think. One day for each character and one more for the background. Eep.

So, I've decided I need to get back into coloring things. Over the next week, while Luth works on the background intensive page 9, I'll continue strengthening my coloring muscles and have more of the color up for you on the 18th. Then page 9, probably without any color, but we'll see.

We're going to try this out for a bit. New pages every two or three weeks, but color updates every Wednesday. Maybe that'll get us back into the swing of things. With any luck, we'll be back in our A game and resume normal weekly updates after Connecticon. Oh right. We'll be at Connecticon in the Artist Alley again. Come say hi and buy something. ^_^

So, yes. Now you can check back every Wednesday for something new! See you next week.

06/04/08
Woof. Things have finally settled down around here. Someday I will learn that spending a week with family = a week and a couple days of recuperation during which no work gets done. Not that it wasn't awesome to see my family and have them at my place, mind. It was just kinda un-awesome for getting the comic done.

So, Page 8 is on my (new!) drawing table with only the last panel to go. So, we'll put it up on Friday, maybe even with some color. On the 11th, we'll try to have it up with color. On the 18th, we aim to post page 9.

We want to do this comic. Really, we do. Somehow we'll pull ourselves out of this rut. Just please be patient. ^_^

05/21/08
Yeah, no update, yet. Bugger.
I'm writing this on the train. I love how Amtrack provides 120v outlets at each seat. It lets me work on my computer while I ride for...nine hours. Oi. I could have finished the work for page 8 except there was a bit of a hiccup...okay, more of a cough and a nasty head cold that I came down with Saturday night. I still have it, and it's so bad that my midwife said I could take something with phenylephrine in it, which is something you're not supposed to take while pregnant. I hope I shake this thing soon, or this family visit is going to be sucktastic.

So Granitecon was decent enough. A $25 sink, plus gas, and I sold nothing, but it was a good, relaxed Sunday con. Which is good, because, given the cold, anything more demanding might have killed me. I had another writer-looking-for-artist pitch made to me, and it was admittedly the first project I might have considered taking. I didn't though, as I obviously have enough problems staying on top of this one. I saw some old acquaintances, met some new people, and had a few shoutouts planned... The URLs of which are all on my desk back in Vermont, and I'm now somewhere in Connecticut. Now there's an example of great planning for you. Bah, I have a cold. Give me a break.

Back to the update: I would have made Luth'rai scribble up some filler, except she has the same cold. I'm going to be rather busy until next Tuesday with family stuff, but I will be back in the vicinity of important things like Luth'rai and my scanner this weekend, so I'm going to go ahead and reschedule page 8 for May 28th and leave page 9 at June 4th for now. This is feasible because Luth'rai tells me she'll be working on her part of page 9 while I'm in Maryland, and Luth'rai rarely lies to me. We'll see how it goes.

Sorry for all the crappy scheduling these days. Things should settle over the summer. Then it'll be a race to build a buffer before the baby is born. >.> Until next week! Happy Memorial day!

05/14/08
All I can say is "much better."

I've been in a lot of pain this week, and throwing up pretty consistantly. It's practically part of my bedtime ritual to hang out beside the toilet for twenty minutes before turning in. My abdominal wall is loosening to make room for the ever-growing baby. If that doesn't hurt enough, my organs are feeling awful crowded. My stomach muscles can't even muster a decent heaving, making the act of puking prolonged and highly uncomfortable. I can't move suddenly, open windows, or pick up anything heavier than ten pounds for fear of tearing my abdominal muscles. Whee.

Furthermore, I'm hopping on a train to Maryland on the 20th to attend my brother's college graduation. This'll keep me engaged for a week at least.

In light of all this, please don't be too disappointed if I don't manage to get page 8 up next week. I'll do my absolute best, honest.

Or, if you're so inclined, you can harrange me in person this Sunday in Manchester, NH. At the last minute, Luth'rai and I have decided to attend the Granite State Comicon again. If you're in the area, feel free to stop by. We'll have a table and sell-ables. And we'll be hanging out with the guy who does Atomic Robo. Whoo!

...I guess now's the time to fess up that I have seen Iron Man. Twice in the past week, actually. This is saying quite a bit. I like comics, but I tend to hate American-made comic books. Especially the superhero ones. No offense to Jack Kirby, but I dislike the over-the-top Marvel art style. I dislike the nine-heads tall and ultra-masculinization (c'mon, even Marvel women have extra-manly faces). I dislike the total lack of facial expressions (there are, like, three per comic. On three different character varieties). And despite all the various claims readers make of "depth" and "character development," it always seems infantile at best. Am I supposed to be impressed at rudimentary characterization? Wow, this is better than what you find in first grade beginner books? Isn't that selling out to comics not being a true artform?

So why, exactly, am I seeing all these comic book movies? Not sure, really. I've liked some of them (Spiderman 1 and 2 and TMNT)...loved a couple, even (V for Vendetta and 300). But I was not enamored by Batman Begins, I wanted my money back from Fantastic Four, and...why did I subject myself to Ghost Rider, again? ...I think it had something to do with Nick Cage and Rawhide. Anyway. Iron Man was not a comic I was exposed to when I was younger, unlike Spiderman and Batman and Exman...X-men, sorry. So I can't say anything to the comic. But this movie is ending up on my shelf. It's simply an exceptional piece of filmwork. Maybe not a new all-time fav like V, but it ranks up there with Pirates of the Caribbean for enjoyability and rewatchability. And sweet ensemble work and movie magic. So, highly recommended. Get the soundtrack too.

05/07/08
You might laugh. In fact, go ahead, and you'll be the one with the last laugh. This page pretty much accurately represents how I felt when Luth'rai handed me the "completed" pencils of page 7. The potato is a metaphor. It is a metaphor for "what the hell is this?" Which is what I thought as I stared at what had previously been pretty good artwork if I do say so myself. For the past two years, my artistry has been developing, strengthening, deepening. Over the past year, and especially this past chapter, this "collaboration" business has been the most difficult obsticle to keeping regular weekly updates. And when I saw this page, the reason finally dawned on me: Luth'rai does not understand my artistic vision. Perhaps she never has. Hell, she can't even follow basic instructions. I mean they are walking through a tunnel. One ****ing tunnel, in one ****ing direction! How ****ing hard can that be?! I carefully describe the angles and lay things out in a thumbnail when I give these pages to her, but no! She listens intently, says she understands, and draws whateverthehell she wants! Regardless of whether it meshes with the mood and energy of the page or not! It's like she can't read my mind! Misunderstood by my own coartist, the shame! I cannot work like this. It's demeening and harmful to my delicate artistic soul. I cannot go on.

....Okay, in all seriousness: DO NOT WORRY. WE ARE NOT BREAKING UP OR QUITTING. But we are still trying to figure out how to work together. It's an ongoing, refining process. We've got something going for awhile, but then we're both developing our styles and subconsciously changing what we're doing and how we're doing it. And every now and then, it utterly smacks us in the face just how much our wires have crossed. So, as much as we hate to postpone the next scene another week, we're going to have to. Pages 8, 9, and 10 are architecturally intensive, and we're still trying to sort out page 7. One tunnel, people, and it showed us how much we've been fudging for the past few pages. We've got some ideas as to how to restreamline how we do these pages so that we can get back into a coloring swing, and hopefully back into a weekly swing. Yes, I know we've been working on this for the better part of the year. And I'm sorry, but we've got to do this, and it's going to take some time. I expect that we'll resume weekly updates in August...mostly because I happen to know that the scene that starts on page 14 will be easier to draw. Actually, that'll be three scenes in a row with consistant, interior settings. None of this walking around a bustling city business. Ha-cha.

In related news, my husband and I recieved our "economic stimulus check" from the U.S. government. $600 that we did not previously have. Ha-cha X 2. I've used my portion of it (in addition to preordering Gunnerkrigg Court: Orientation) to get myself a drafting table. I am very excited, as this will be the first drafting table I have ever owned. All the pages you see here are a product of me hunched over a clipboard, usually on the floor. Seeing as I'm about 14 weeks pregnant with stretching pains in my lower belly (not to mention random dizzy spells), this has become an increasingly difficult way to work. My desk is...uhm, laptop friendly, but I'm too short to be able to hunch over it to draw. Our apartment is to small for a table, so we don't have one. The other nice thing about my drawing table is that it's a fold-away. And it comes with an adjustable stool. ^_^

Last piece of news: I was back to vomiting and fatigue this past week. Apparently, there's nothing to worry about, as both I and the baby are healthy. However, I have tendonitis in my left foot and right hip. This is apparently caused by hormones screwing with my ligaments combined with the sudden weight gain. I can't take anti-inflammatories to treat it because ibuprofen and such will mess with the bloodflow to the fetus. Whee. I hope the doctor is WRONG and I will NOT get tendonitis in my drawing wrist too (he thinks I may because I use it so much). So yes, on top of everything else, it will hurt to walk and sit up for the next month or two. I begin to understand why making babies was a reasonable sole vocation for women for so long.

Next week: Page 7. Week after: Page 8. If humanly (or griffon/dragonly) possible.

04/23/08
Chivalry is dead, isn't it, Eloise?

We apologize for the lack of backgrounds, but it can't be helped at this point in time. Luth'rai's been sick, you see. She will finish them when she is no longer in danger of dripping snot all over the page. In the meantime, use your imagination to see that they are walking through the gate tunnel.

I do not know what is wrong with the shoutbox. I have contacted the support peeps and hopefully it'll get sorted out. In the meantime, I still want to hear your comments about the page (I love comments!) so do recall that we have both a FORUM and EMAIL.

Still working to normalize my life schedule so we can do full-color again. I think I'm getting better. At least, I've been sleeping from 12 am to 11 am or thereabouts for a full week now, and some mornings am able to get up as early as 10. Whoo!

We resently went to see Nim's Island, as we are fans of both Jodie Foster and Gerard Butler. And Jodie Foster plays a best-selling author and Gerard Butler plays her Gary Stu. The interaction between those two was much fun, but not worth the pain of the rest of the film, nor the cost of the tickets. Most painful was the portrayal of a bearded dragon...constantly doing non-lizard things like squawking in a parrot voice. Concerning was the lack of the "No Animals were harmed in the making of this film" notice...at least, we didn't see it. Erk. The ending was particularly...unfulfilling.

It's spring! FINALLY! Too bad I messed up my ankle and can't go walking. ;_; New page in a couple weeks. Keep your eyes peeled for a cameo appearance. ;)

04/09/08
Bill: ...but I dun wanna be excommunicated!
Ted: Don't worry! I am suave and debonair!

Yes, Jerome is an important person. You didn't honestly believe the government would entrust an important task like a decoy mission to a random ragtag group of adventurers, did you?

So we're a few hours late, because I really wanted that first panel done. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out and my eyes hurt from several hours of staring at the bright light. Magic is so much fun. ^_^ What will be obvious in later pages, if it's not already, is that only priests of Alos carry supernovas up their sleeves, so all Jerome really did was prove that he is who he (and his official papers) said he is. And blind and entire courtyard. Jerome, thou art a gentleman and a scholar. And a show-off.

Continuing the battle with fatigue. This week I'm down to needing only twelve hours of sleep a day. Yippee! I had my first sonogram on Monday. The baby is a healthy, wriggling sea monkey of ten weeks. Which is loads of a relief. Also loads of a relief is I qualify for both Medicaid and WIC. This makes affording the baby a lot more feasible. And I now have dental insurance, w00t. Well, on to the next page. We're taking two weeks on it in an attempt for a full-color update. Like, all the panels colored. Wouldn't that be something?

On a final note, congratulations to Cheeko for going indie! You can find the new official site for her wonderful comic One Question HERE.

04/02/08
I...I liiive!!
Yeah, so it's been about a month since you've heard from me. This is because for the better part of March, I've been either in bed with chronic fatigue or hugging the toilet with chronic nausea. I've lost over five pounds when I'm supposed to be undergoing a significant weight-gain. Fortunately, the doctors at the OB/GYN do not think this is any cause for concern and, like they promised me, after the 8-week mark came and went, I've been feeling significantly better. So much so that I am now going to return to my usual life of not puking and sleeping all the time.

So, after a month of medical hiatus, Ambition will be returning with a new page next week! And it is now April 2nd that I am telling you this, so you have to believe me. :P Speaking of April 1st, my vote for best prank is split between Sarah Ellerton over at Phoenix Requiem and Gmail, although there were a lot of good ones scattered throughout the internets. Luth'rai and I are wet blankets, uncreative wet blankets even, and we did no pranks. In fact...the only time I've bothered pranking on Ambition was the first year, when I replaced the yellow text with pink. And that's honestly the best I've ever come up with. >.>

Provided I got the html sorted out with Comicgenesis, you should be able to see some color update to page 5. If not, and you see a big blank spot where there should be a page, click "previous" to see it. I'm not altogether pleased with it and will likely do some fixes, but for now, it makes it much more obvious what's happening on that page.

Until next week!

02/27/08
Well, I've been wanting to do this page for a long time. And...I'm still wanting to do it. Bugger. The magic effects aren't quite up to par yet, eh? Or the rest of it. I'll try to get the color together for next week so you all can see what's really going on, although I do hope you can tell well enough as is.

For the record, action sequences are difficult.

Well, a lot of bombs dropping here in Ambition-land. I'll leave Luth to tell you her side of things. On my side, well... This page was late because I wasn't feeling well. I'm not feeling well again and can expect this to be an off and on thing for the next three months. If all goes well. See, I had an inkling at the time, and was in denial, but the home pregnancy test is a bit hard to argue with. (Pah, I resolve to spend more time with my husband, and look what happens.)

So yes, I'm pregnant, and I'm telling you this because it's going to affect my performance. Some women can breeze through this like they aren't hosting an alien parasite right next to their intestines. I am not one of those women. I will spend the next couple months sleeping twelve hours a day and wishing the prenatal vitamins made you fell better like they are supposed to. However, I've still got my heart set on full-color updates, and by golly, I'm going to get them to you. Every other week. I hope. Pray that this pregnancy goes better than the last one?

02/07/08
So. Where's Waldo?

This page took forever, but I had a lot of fun doing it. Yes, I drew all the little peoples. And the dogs and some of the horses and mules. By hand - there's no copy/paste. I wonder how many of them there are? I didn't count. The flags and uniforms and Jerome's papers (more once it's all photoshopped in) are of my design, and I've been researching these things all month. On the uniforms - I was pretty much on my own for designing those. Military uniforms as we know them were pretty much invented by the Prussians in the early seventeen hundreds. That's musket-era, and not particularly useful in a world setting where canons are at the rudimentary stage. The costs of outfitting an army aside, it seemed to me that a city guard should have uniforms to go with their partisans, so...there we have it. On the cuirass - yes, it's round. I know fantasy is supposed to do form-fitting armor and all, but that's, quite frankly, stupid. Armor that's flat against your chest is heavy and almost useless, as the Greeks discovered.

Now then. I suppose it's time for the low-down. Or the down low, as I am about this. Obviously, we've not been managing complete weekly updates. There's several reasons for this. For one, we're out of practice. Back before the November break, we weren't coloring, so we got used to spending the full week on the pencils. Habits are hard to break. For another, we're experimenting with how we do this. Luth'rai's taken to flat-coloring the backgrounds, and now we're reworking how we do the pencils. It USED to be I'd do the layout and characters, then pass the page for the backgrounds. While that worked relatively well in the jungle for a time, buildings are another breed. And we were never quite satisfied with what we put out under that method. So, we're trying to perfect a more back and forth method, where both characters and backgrounds are under development together. Finally, I'm trying to shed the "plastic/claylike" look on my shaded characters that was so prevelant in the Prologue and Chapter 1. While I've gotten the hang of cloth and leather, skin still continues to elude me. This has led to frustration and fixation regarding the matter - I spend as much time working the skin as I do the entire rest of the character.

These past weeks, and past two months have been similar, I have literally had no life beyond working on this comic. I get up, turn on the computer, stumble about the house while I wake up, then get to work. I go to bed when I can't keep my eyes open anymore. This really hit home when I took an hour break from working to get a back massage from my husband (my back's been really bad all week...maybe from hunching over a keyboard?). When I got up to get back to work, he thanked me for spending some time with him. You know what? Not cool. I'm very devoted to this project, and I love doing it, but this is not healthy.

So, we're going to temporarily go to an every other Wednesday updating schedule. We hope this'll give us time to finish the color on these last few pages and figure out and settle into a better method for working. One that lets me spend time with my husband and friends and play WoW occassionally. We also hope that this will only last through March, at which point, we'll return to the weekly schedule.

So, no page next week. But certainly fresh color.

Happy Year of the Rat. Your "fu" character is upside-down.

(Disclaimer: Waldo is not on this page.)

01/31/08
Someday, perhaps, Than will get tired of the sound of his own voice.

...okay, that's highly unlikely.

He may, however, in the near future, learn that speaking poorly of Phillipe in the presence of loyal Cerisian citizens may not have been the brightest idea he's ever had... >.>

So, lots of exposition on this page. For you eager beavers out there, there's a few more things about the political situation if you poke around the Oris and Lemallian parts of the World Setting section. For those of you who don't give a rat's bum about Than and his political views, all you really need to know is as follows:

Phillipe Dubrique is the king of Ceris. He's got enemies. They've killed both of his sons. His daughter is currently in Sheren (this city, even), and he'd like her back, thanks. Oh, and Augustus is king of Sheren.

01/25/08
Don't look now, Audriel. You're surrounded.

Didn't finish the shading in time. Again. wtf. I'll continue to pick at it throughout the week (the first page has similarly been picked at) and hopefully next week we'll suddenly have three fully colored pages in chapter 3...instead of 3 mostly colored pages. I need to get a bit looser with the color, I think. Nine days to complete a page doesn't quite work for "weekly" updates. >.>

Contests are now over, and we'll announce winners next week. Well, except for the Name of the Gods contest, seeing as there were no correct answers. We're currently debating posting the correct answers and retiring the contest. As for the Fanworks contest - we received five entries and we're having a hard time picking a winner. We'll have to pick one though, as it's too expensive to hand out five free prints. :P

This week was movie week for me. I saw three movies. Whoa. Stardust I'd already seen before. Just came out on DVD. Still love it. As Luth'rai is raving about, I also saw Sweeney Todd. Don't get me wrong; I liked it very much. But I didn't go out and get the soundtrack and listen to it on repeat for the rest of the week .*coughhackwheezelikeLuth'raicoughcough* Johnny Depp of course gave a magnificent performance as the titular character, but I felt he was totally upstaged by Helena Bonham Carter who gave a fabulous performance as Mrs. Lovett. And I mean fabulous.

Tonight I also saw Juno which I expected to enjoy very much given what I read about it. And I did enjoy it. I'm usually not one for comedy, but the dramedy can do it for me when witty dialogue is the clincher. Was quite so here. I was surprised to find I connected much better to the prospective adopter mother supporting character than the teenage girl main character. ...I guess I'm just not a teenager anymore. This may be a good thing.

Not a movie, exactly, but we also got through Baccano!, an anime I've been avoiding for some time because I knew I'd love it. At thirteen episodes, it's not nearly the time sink most anime tend to be, so it was fine. 1930s America, jazz-agers and mafia. I have a wretched soft-spot for that. Beautifully executed non-linear plot and gorgeous animation, but I can only recommended it to the 18+ and strong of stomach at that. The animators have some thing for exploding fingers... Not breaking or smashing or smearing - exploding. If you have any sort of hand injury in this thing, your fingers fly apart in fingery chunks. Gah. (Was quite pleased by the Jet Black from Cowboy Bebop cameo, by the by. Watch for him - he's on the train in his flash-back hat. ^_^)

Next week: Another page.

01/16/08
So, a couple miscalculations this week. For example, my brother came to visit this week. He brought his Wii. Nothing a little self-control couldn't overcome, sure... And page 2 does have the characters on it. But it doesn't have much in the way of backgrounds. We both also kinda forgot that Luth'rai was scheduled to have her wisdom teeth removed this week. Good thing the dentist's office called to confirm, eh? In our defense, the operation was scheduled two months ago - plenty of time to forget.

The procedure went well, and Luth'rai is doing well, but is still groggy and achey. We decided it would be best to postpone this week's page another week to give her time to recover and me time to spend with my brother before he heads back to Baltimore. We feel pretty lame about it, sure. We didn't want to skip any updates for several months to get our good name back, so to speak. Meh, it'll happen. Maybe I can use the time to make a semblance of a buffer? ...I had a buffer back in the day. WAY back in the day. >.>

Final reminder about the contests. You've got four more days until Canterrain wins by default. Although maybe he doesn't want competition. XD

01/09/08
This episode of Ambition is brought to you by the color yellow.

Audriel is happy on this page. Eloise is touching someone who isn't him. How about that?

Oh, and Than? You might want to put those away before someone sees them. Oh. Too late.

I've been looking forward to this page for some time - the reasons being panel one and panel five. These panels are also the reason the page is a bit late. After visualizing them for so long, wanted to get them right, you know? Panel one should be obvious from the new section in the World Settings arena on Lemallian. Panel five is also obvious. ...except for what's not obvious. Uhm...yes.

Well, what a way to kick off the chapter, yeah? Late. Even after an extra week on it. Obviously, there could be excuses in that I learned how to color an ocean on this page, and then there's that city, and...you know? I wanted it to look right so I took my time? Yup. I do hope we get a lot faster as we get back into the swing of things. It was good to finally do a page again. Get the story back up off the couch and all. If we can stay on top of this chapter, things like panel 5 will be explained by this time next year... Wait, progression? Now, wouldn't that be something?

Obviously, I haven't finished the shading on this page. That'll be remedied after I sleep, thank you.

Eleven days until the contest deadline, folks. Get those entries together! ...wow, that's actually a lot of time left. And...even more wow, Ambition is now two years old. Huhn.

01/02/08
Now that I've both slept and eaten, I will attempt making some form of comprehendable statement. Or something.

So, here is our map of Lemallian - the city where we'll be staying for Chapter 3. I had hoped to be completely done with the map by now, but Luth'rai only had time to do up the wealthy district (which is kinda silly, because it makes no appearance in the comic at all). Still, theres moe than enough there for you guys to get the idea, and I'll update it when the map is more complete. For the record, said map is on 6 sheets of graph paper. The "large" version of the map is actually quite small compared to the physical one. It should be noted that the thing is not exactly to scale. I'm completely amateur at designing maps and buildings and such. The roads in particular are shown much larger than they'd actually be. Even so, I hope you all like the city - we'll be here for a while.

I think I'm going to make the "Spotlights" section of the World Setting a usual thing to show off our concept work and such (seeing as only roughly 20% of such work actually shows up in the comic). I'll add Bellis (the town from Chapter 1) to the Spotlight section once we find the map for it - it seems it got misplaced during moving last year.

Last year...wow. It's 2008, isn't it? Yikes. Time to make good on all those resolutions and promises, eh?

Just a reminder that Ambition's birthday fast approches on the 8th. Because it's still so close to the holiday season, we've decided to push the contest deadline back to the 20th to give you all more time to work on entries. So please enter! Back next week with an actual page.

12/30/07
Important Announcement:

It seems the year will end much like it began. And I'm hoping that'll be the last of it. Ugh.

We've decided to postpone the page 1 update another week. We started it two days behind already from taking an extra two days to complete the chapter cover, and we still have some world setting work to finalize before Luth'rai can even start the rather intensive establishing shot. On top of that, Luth'rai has discovered that she has to work extra hours on New Year's day, rather than getting time off. So, rather than start back up already behind, we're pushing our deadline back a week so we'll be on top of it. So, page 1 goes up on the ninth. I'm working to get the city map and some information about it htmled up and into the WOrld Setting Section for you guys. We'll have that as our Wednesday update instead.

Another reminder that January 8th fast approaches. Because we can't keep a deadline around the holiday season, we can hardly expect you guys to do the same. We're pushing the deadlines to the Anniversary Contests back another two weeks. So, the deadline is now January 20th - same as last year. Ambition still turns 2 years old on the 8th, though. ;)

12/28/07
Only two days late, right? Bah. Page 1 will probably be late too, although it's still scheduled for January 2nd at this time. It has some kick-ass establishing shots that are making Luth'rai cry...

So the Chapter 3 cover was two weeks of work. Well, so it goes. I think it was worth it. Don't be surprised if I redo the borderwork and text on this page in the near future, though. I'm not happy with it, but I'm too burnt out at the moment to think of something to do instead. I may tweak some of the shadow work too.

All told, it's a good chapter cover, and actually represents what I want, unlike poor Chapter 2, whose cover still goes unfinished. Some notes about this cover - I originally intended to have them on either side of a wall in Lemallian, but Luth'rai suggested we use the front of the cathedral instead. I think that was a much better idea. So this is in front of the San Attillio Cathedral in Lemallian. I spent a good long while designing this sucker, so I'll probably give it a spot in the World Setting Section once we've got all the concept art cleaned up. It's made of rose limestone and alabaster, I believe. Oh, and the paper is made of hemp, for the curious among you. Ambition is not done on hemp paper, because it's not so good for pencil drawing, but you all should use hemp paper for non-art stuff! Save trees!

Okay, few more things... Oh, got another baby rat on Wednesday (didn't delay the update per se, but certainly didn't help the timeliness). Her name is Nariko, and she's...definitely the omega, poor dear. Tsunade is very happy to have company again (her sister died the day before Thanksgiving, and she was sick awhile with the same thing, but recovered), but she also wants to still be the one in charge of the cage. 9_9

Contests are still going on. The deadline is still set for Ambition's birthday on January 8th, but I'm considering pushing it back a couple of weeks because it seems it's too close to the holidays for a lot of people to be able to participate. Feel free to drop me a line if you'd like to enter but need more time.

Until next week. Have a happy New Year's.

12/17/07
Well, then. Welcome to the new site! Yay!

If you want to see where all my efforts have been going for the past month or so, take a gander around. There's a bit of new content (not as much as I was aiming for, but a bit) and a lot of things cleaned up. Overall facelift, too.

As always, new layout=new problems. I wager IE doesn't like this development in particular. If anyone knows how to tame Internet Exploder, please take a look at the source code and tell me how to fix it? It'd help so much. And even if you DON'T know anything about html, you can always just click on everything to make sure it all works and report errors to me if it doesn't.

So, there are a few more changes going around here other than the new site. Foremost, we'll be changing our update schedule to weeky on Wednesdays. This will (hopefully) work better with Luth'rai and my schedules and help us maintain a timely update schedule for the coming, oh, year. The Chapter 3 cover will be posted the day after Christmas, and the first page will go up January 2nd. My New Year's Resolution? Full-color every week.

Just another reminder that Ambition's second birthday is fast approaching. Which means that the contest deadlines are as well. January 8th, people, hop to it! Contest Rules.

So, see you all in a little over a week, and have a happy holiday!

12/08/07
Happy Chanukah. Does anyone in know where I can get candles in southern Vermont? Because my hannukiah has remained sadly unlit this year. ;_;

We don't go long without Mary Sue complaints, do we? We've been reviewed again, this time by Dr. Haus on Comixtalk. *sigh* Some people have no patience.

I am sick. Or actually, I'm finally better. Caught a stomach flu or sommat and spent most of the early week curled up in misery. That and playing the game the filler is based on. Okay, so for "only six hours of gameplay," Heavenly Sword is frickin' awesome. I'm not sure what I like the most...the "emotion-capture" (coined by me), the intensely wonderful polygon work (I love the way dead enemies are "animated" - ragdolling physics that make sense for once), the sweet, sweet fighting system (me vs. 500 guys at once, and yes, they're all visible on the screen), or just flat out the score. Seriously, where do I get the soundtrack? I really, really want the soundtrack.

I could prattle on about this game for hours, but I won't. I'll just mention a couple highlights. Funniest thing in the game is the sixaxis implementation. It's minimal in the actual fighting, and it's also pretty simple "shake to recover" and "shake to initiate aerial combos." It's more important for the ranged sections, where you can guide your missiles all the way in by tilting the the controller. Hurts your head as far as physics is concerned (having now made many a cannonball jerk upwards into the target at the last second), but it's a heck of a lot of fun. It's a gorgeous game. Highly recommended.

I have, in fact, also gotten some work done between the hugging the toilet and slaughtering asian-esque soldiers with quirky british accents by the thousands. I think we'll manage a site relaunch at some point during next weekend. Yay!

Reminder that we're holding Second anniversary contests. Rules are in the forums.

12/02/07
Half-assed filler done by...me! I'm sorry I didn't finish it - I spent all of Saturday working on it. Saturday was supposed to be my day off. Now I'm entirely burnt out. Bugger. I'll pick at it throughout the week and try to get it done.

I tried leaving some progress updates in the shoutbox, but it doesn't even work for me anymore. So, I've gotten a new one - it will go online with the new site.

It's December. Well, the November hiatus was not particularly productive. There's still a lot of color left to do. However, November is over, so that's getting backburnered. December is for Chapter 3.

I don't know when we'll start the new chapter proper, but I'll give you an idea of what we still have left to do:

The new website. I spent all week breaking my head on html, and it's actually mostly done. The World Setting and About Us sections still need coding, and there are a half dozen or so images I still need to make, but considering what needed to be done, that's really good. This week and the next will be dedicated to finishing the new site and the Chapter 3 cover. I'm hoping to launch both on the 15th.

As for resuming regular updates, we still have a lot to do to prepare for the new chapter. I need to break the script into pages and finish the map for the city. It's currently six times the size of the map we used for Bellis back in Chapter 1. It also includes some difficult design work, such as the city hall, cathedral/abbey, and wharf and drydock. We also need to make another font. So, seeing all that needs to be done before we can start working on the pages, I'm not sure when normal updates will resume. I'm hoping for before the end of the year, but with the holidays coming....hard to say.

So, my heartfelt apologies. We're working on it. Honest.

So~ We're doing our birthday bash again for 2008. Which means contests. Which also means prizes. Check out the details in the forums.

11/26/07
Announcement! The rules for the 2008 Birthday contests are up. Check them out in the forums. Thank you.

11/24/07
This week's guest filler was done by Karn! ...who has no comic of her own, as far as I know. Thanks for giving Bashirah some fan love - she's a-lovin' it. As you can see.

Updating from my parent's house in Maryland in between family stuff, here. And trying not to fall asleep as I type. Barely got any work done this week, but I was expecting that. :/ I have no estimates for when we'll get back underway with Chapter 3. We'll talk about that next week I guess.

By the time you all are reading this, I'll probably be on the road for the eight hour trip back. My husband and I are hoping the Saturday traffic will be much lighter than Sunday traffic, y'see. When I get back I'll post the details for the annual(?) contests that we're having to celebrate Ambition's upcoming birthday on January 8th. So, check back Sun/Monday for details for winning free prints and cameo appearances. Whoo!

Two pieces of news, one good, one bad. The bad is that one of my new rat babies, Ayame, died on Wednesday. ;_; We don't know what happened. She and her sister Tsunade seemed to have had colds for the past week, but it didn't seem serious. So far, Tsunade still seems okay. I'm pretty sad about this, though.

The GOOD news is that Luth'rai is now 23, as of Thursday. XD Happy Birthday!

Hope all you American types had good Thanksgivings! I know my intestines are still getting through it. >.>

11/17/07
This week's guest filler was done by Thane! Check out her webcomic/manga Chirault - it's pretty good and actually updating, which is more than we can say this month.

Page 36 is finally complete (yay!). 10 panels takes...a long time to color. I've been working on Page 31 as well and will try to have the completed version online before I get in the car for my 8+ hour trip to Maryland. Yay, going home for Thanksgiving.

This week was a lot of color, scripting, and not-sleeping but not for lack of trying. I think I spent at least 12 hours a day in bed every day, too tired to do anything, but not getting sleep. Frustrating.

I'm too spacey to think of anything else to say, so I'll just wish everyone a good Thanksgiving.  Until next week!

11/10/07
Two words: We suck.

No, really. We do. Page 36 is what we have to show for nearly two weeks worth of work, and it's not even done yet. Of course, yes, we've done other work that's not showing up here yet (one example is that we've started working on the map for the city that's in Chapter 3), but the filler is a pretty apt representation of every day this week. It figures. We cut out movies, World of Warcraft and other games, and any possible social life we have left out of our schedules to make more time for the comic, and what do we do with it?

Go right back to doing the biggest time-sink ever invented: collaborative writing.

RP-rough drafting might be a good term for it. Take the amount of time it takes any one person to draft a scene for a story and multiply it by at least 3, and that's how quickly roughing a scene goes when it's the two of us working on it simultaneously. Sure, it's a hell of a lot of fun. Sure, it's technically working on the comic. But, geez...this is chapter 16 we've gotten, granted, a good deal of work done on. Is the work we've gotten done this week worth another week behind schedule? No? I thought not. Erk.

Well, we need to stop sucking and start working. I don't want this comic to be stuck on hiatus for much longer while we keep taking our sweet time on an already finished Chapter. So. As director, November 30th is the cut-off for Chapter 2 work. No more until Chapter 3 is underway. We still have work to do for Chapter 3 so it can get underway, but I think that'll can be done in two weeks or so. So. Tentative relauch date: December 15th. ...won't be much of a relaunch what with the holidays happening right after but at least we'll get the chapter cover and the new site up. Maybe even the first page before New Years.

Certainly before our Anniversary. January 8th will be Ambition's second birthday, just so you all know. We'll be holding a few contests around this time - I'll post more information soon-ish, so keep your eyes peeled. Also, I'm still accepting filler art. It'd be much appreciated.

Also, I had three characters around for the work we've done this week, not only one. For the record.

11/03/07
Well, typical. We've just started and we're already way behind schedule. Gah. What you see is what you get this week. Page 36 is all colored and about half-way shaded, but may not be ready for another two days or so at our current pace. We were supposed to do not just that page, but the whole duck sequence this week. Instead, I spent most of the week in bed with a cold. Argh.

We'll see how this week goes. Maybe we'll get a handle on things. I sure hope so, because I've got a lot of things to do for this comic besides coloring. >.>

Well, the astute of you will notice, we now offer advertising space with Project Wonderful. So far, we haven't made much in the way of cash, but I expect that'll change soon (kinda like it'll take 5 days before our web traffic shows up appropriately). The idea is we'll save up a lot during our revamp and have a big advertising push when we relaunch the site with the start of Chapter 3. Yay! Now, whether that'll be December or January remains to be seen.... >.>

Breaking news over here is Ayame and Tsunade - my two new rat girls! They're so cute...and...itty bitty. Only four weeks old. They're scared of their ginormous cage that they'll grow into. I hope they get used to it soon. They're much too cute to live huddled in the corner.

As a final note...it's not too late to send me guest filler art. Seriously. I have exactly 0 pieces and any filler strips I don't have to do is more time to devote to getting the comic back underway. Send any contributions to theslyeagle[at]gmail[dot[com].

See you next week - with color upgrades (we mean it this time!)

10/28/07
Psht, no I'm not holding your hand for this one. You're smart - figure it out for yourself. And keep reading. :P

Also, please keep in mind that even on "normal" pages, if you're not looking carefully at the art, you're missing most of the story.

This page represents 100% of...my work. That's all me. Huhn. Guess I can't blame Luth'rai for any errors. Must say, I've been looking forward to doing this page for a long time. It was fun and experimental, but I've decided that digital painting takes too long. What's that? You think I've been painting already all this time? HA! The splash panel is very surreal to me. I look at it, and remember painting it, but it really looks like someone else's work to me.

I'll drop a few notes about the page. Indian grass is neat. That's what we got in the bottom right corner. The tree is a cottonwood, in full autumn phase. The autumn motif was something of a last minute change, inspired by October here in Vermont. The colors really got to me, and I was itching to use them. The motif for this sequence was scripted as spring, but I think autumn works equally well, possibly better, with different undertones. Yeah, highly metaphorical here. Yay!

Also, finally got a chance to use eyeshine. Orisian elves have it, so that's what's going on in that middle panel. Just in case that caught you all off guard.

Now for the sad news. I had to put Kasumi down on Thursday. I'll spare you the gory details of what was wrong with her, but I'm very sure it was the right thing to do. This is still a very sad time for me. She'd been a part of my life for the past three years and was a very, very special rat. Okay, time to stop before I start crying again.

So. Chapter 2 is finished. Woo! At this point, we're going to take a break from the story for the month of November and go on a revamping spree. So yes, coloring all the pages we missed and revamping the site. While the story proper will be on hiatus, we'll still be here. I've yet to recieve any guest pages, but I'll get  some form of filler up for you guys every Saturday (and I actually mean Saturday. Gasp!), along with news about how things are coming.

So. Off we go. I'm still accepting guest pages - e-mail me at theslyeagle[at]gmail[dot]com if you have a submission. Until next week!

10/21/07
What's that, Than? You can keep secrets from them, but they can't keep secrets from you? Hm?

One page left. Sooooooooooo close. I can't wait to finally finish this chapter. Of course, I've saved the most experimental page to date for last. >.> But I can do this! Yar!

And not just because I'm riding on a huge Nightwish high. ...okay, it may very well be because I am. I'm on a massively huge Nightwish high. I, like probably any other fans out there, was pretty nervous it was the end for Nightwish when they fired their lead singer Tarja Turunen two years ago to the day. Well, after much waiting and hoping, they released the single Eva with their new lead vocalist Anette Olzon. I cried when I heard it, both for joy because it was still Nightwish and also in sorrow because it was Nightwish without Tarja. But I think Nightwish has more than proven that it's fine without Tarja. Thriving even. As bittersweet as that is.

Dark Passion Play hasn't left my cd player since I got it (or my playlist since I ripped it). It'll take more words than I care to write here to say how good this album is, but I'll probably write up my thoughts on it elsewhere (say, the forum).

Aaaaand, last night I finally got to see them live in Worcester, Mass. It was my first metal concert and my ears are still ringing (my younger brother assures me this'll wear off after 24 hrs. or so). That show was worth every minute waiting for it, though. I was supposed to go with Luth, but she couldn't make it, so I went with my husband instead. They played all 14 minutes of "The Poet and the Pendulum," an epic piece I'm totally in love with and totally expected to not be played live. Wow. Wowowowow. Anette wins. In some ways, she's better than Tarja.

Okay, I'm going to stop squeeing now. Two last things. A) Still looking for guest strips for the November hiatus! Please send any contributions to theslyeagle[at]gmail[dot]com.

B) I mentioned last week that I might start a donation drive to get surgery for my rat, Kasumi. Well... I'm not going to, at least not at this time. She's currently too ill to undergo surgery, and while we're treating what we can, she's not likely to recover. :-/ Please keep her in your prayers.

10/14/07
The triumphant return of Eloise! And her less-dramatic cohorts.

I've been wanting to draw this page for SO long now. And it didn't come out quite right. ;_; There comes a time, when drawing, they I gues you just have to say "screw it" and bite the bullet. So, a less-than-perfect page 40. Oh well.

Word to the wise, though. If you want a fully-colored page done in a week, don't reintroduce three characters that you haven't drawn in nearly a year at highly dramatic angles. You don't have 12+ hours to spend on every panel. I sure didn't. ^.^;

So, this one's likely being shunted into the coloring queue. I'm starting the next page. Maybe that'll get colored. Maybe not. At this point, I just want it DONE. There's too much bad energy from a rough year hanging over this chapter. I need the finish, and I need the fresh start. And I'm so close.

Huh...this page more or less represents my week, so I don't have much to say. I'm enjoying Vermont autumn? I love autumn, especially in Vermont. Uhm, I've been playing Arathi Basin. I love Arathis Basin to death, often mine. Although way less often as a tankadin. I've discovered that I'm more respected as a player on the Horde side than the Alliance. I played AB for the Alliance for YEARS, and am an old pro at it, but no one ever, ever, ever wanted to listen to me. On the Horde side, people *gasp* follow my advice. In fact, since I play with a few friends with whom I'm designated leader, I'm often the battleground leader, and no one minds me just taking over as commander. We've won 11 out of 12 all week. I don't understand why the Horde has a higher level of intelligence, but I'm pretty much waving farewell to the Alliance. I was your best ninja, the old dog jack, and I capped thousands of flags for you; and you spat on me. Now I will divulge all the details of your disfunctionality to your enemies and reap the rewards from your downfall. And how do you like them apples?

One of these days, I'm going to write up an illustrated guide to Arathi Basin tactics. Too many people just don't know how to play it.

Hm, final thoughts: Some of you may have read this comic long enough to recall my rat Kasumi. She needed surgery back then, and she needs it again now. I have NOT set up a donation dealie at this time for her, as I'm going to talk to the vet about another payment plan. I was able to get the last set of tumors removed on a bi-montly payment plan, that I am unfortunately still paying off. So, I don't know if I can add more to my balance or what, and I know she's just a rat, but she's an animal in my care and I'd like to treat her. Depending what the deal with the vet is, I may be asking for donations. ANY help will be appreciated.

10/09/07
Audriel is recalling page 13, in case you guys aren't. I know it was a long time ago. Like...January. Eeeesh. Thus the countdown to the end of chapter 2 continues, with only 3 pages left. I will reiterate that we are going on hiatus for the month of November, after Chapter 2 is completed. The reason for this is site clean-up. During the month of November, there will be no new pages; however, we will be coloring the incomplete ones and going back and fixing text problems with the older pages (making them more legible). In addition, I'm revamping the entire site. This is a lot of work to complete in only one month, and we hope it's actually doable. In the meantime, I'd like to put out a call for guest strips for me to run during the month of November. Please e-mail me at theslyeagle[at]gmail[dot]com with any submissions. I'd much prefer to showcase some other artists out there than throw some crappy sketches up every week.

In stunning proof of the existence of a loving God, Cougar returned home on Saturday morning repaired  and with the harddrive in tact. Ignoring the fact that I'm playing WoW again, this means that there is a very, very good chance that we'll have a full-color update this weekend. Personally, I'd really prefer the next three to be in color. Less for me to go back and do later. >.>

I cant compete with Luth'rai's comments, so I won't even try. All I do anymore is draw, it seems. This was a pretty good page to do, by the way. A couple things didn't turn out the way I wanted, but I'm pleased with the overall flow and the expressions I ended up with.

Oh! I updated the dropdown up there, so you should be able to navigate the archives a little better. Also made some small changes to the page on elves and added a couple things. Yup.

Back to work on page 40 for me.

10/02/07
Oh, Cougar, how I already miss thee.
Seriously. Going back to the old hardware just to put the text in. It was like [Copy] *griiiiiiiiiiind* [Paste] *grrrriiiiiiiiind* [...Save] *grrrriiiiiiiiiii[goes off to do something for five minutes]. So. Painfully. Slow. How did I manage to do all those other pages like this?

So, Cougar didn't exactly die last week; he just went into a persistent vegetative state. Erm, which still means I can't use him. I managed to back up all my important files by doing a harddrive transplant into Luth's Cutter. (Note to other studios: This is just another great reason to have all artists using the same model.) So, the good news is we haven't lost the work we've done. The other good news is that Cougar is under warranty and arrived at the repair center today. The bad news is they're estimating 5-7 business days before he's fixed and back in the mail. ...yay. So, bottom line for me? SUCK. Bottom line for you? Definitely no color for page 39, and PRAY if you want color for page 40.

...it's a good thing my pencils can't short out, huh?

Well, only four pages left for this chapter. So close! Reminder that we'll be taking an end-of-chapter hiatus to go back and finish coloring the pages for the month of November (and only November, we hope). During that period, we're looking for guest strips to use as updates. Please send any contributions to theslyeagle_at_gmail_dot_com, and remember that we are rated Web14.

GraniteCon went pretty well. It's not the sort of con that's geared toward us, what with the grand majority of congoers going "Comics on the internet? And they're free? Huh?" But the price was right and it was a decent way to spend a Sunday. I sat next to one Mitch Breitweiser feeling that awkwardness one feels when they end up next to someone they know is famous, but they know nothing about. I also wondered the whole time just when Marvel comics started having good art in them. I sold three prints, one of which was a copy of Elvenpath to a guy who wants to get it tatooed on his back. I find this somewhat surreal, but I suppose I should be honored. I didn't look around the show, much. Mostly spent it working on this page and chatting with another webcomicker who was there as a volunteer.

This con once again convinced us that we need a book. Well, we're almost done with the free scripting of one of our projects - White Knight - and I've been looking into self-publishing. If anyone knows about good places to print full-color perfect-bound graphic novels, please drop me an e-mail. So far, it looks like our best bet for the project is Lulu, which'll probably cost us over $20 per book, meaning we'll have to sell it for $25-$30. I'll say more about White Knight some other time. ;)

09/25/07
I'm...never gonna live this page down, huh?

Oh well. 'twas worth it. So, we're back to color. no idea how well we'll keep up with the color in the coming weeks, seeing as even a simple page like this took far longer than expected. I chalk a bit of that up to getting used to the new hardware and a bit more to experimentation and even more up to just plain being out of practice. I spent a good amount of time wondering "So...how did I do this again?"

For the record, the ammunition round for Bashirah's duck-bombing here happens to be a male blue-winged teal. Just in case you all wondered.

Chapter 2 is finally winding to its end with this page kicking off the final scene. At the current pace, it'll be done at the end of October, at which point we'll begin our (hopefully just) November revamping hiatus, during which we'll finish the color for all pages involved, giving the website a make-over and the World Setting section a major update, and finalizing the script for Chapter 3 (it's written, but not broken into pages yet). I'll also be looking into getting high resolution pages available for download over at Wowio. So, I guess now's a good time to mention that we are looking for guest strips for the duration of November. We'll stagger as many as we get over the course of the month, provided that they fall within our web-rating standard of Web 14 (basically means keep the language/sex/violence moderate or lower). Send any contributions to theslyeagle_at_gmail_dot_com. Thanks!

In final news, drop by the Granite State Comicon (aka Granitecon) on this Sunday for a chance to see us (and buy some stuff.) Seems like it'll be a nice smaller con, too.

One last thing. Luth'rai's new machine is called Cutter? Well, mine's Cougar. I forgot to mention earlier. They're the same model, with slightly different specs. I'm still having screen trouble. I got a privacy filter to try to tone down the glare. It works pretty well...as...a privacy filter. So well even I can't see the corners of my screen. It doesn't help the glare much and makes it difficult to color so... Back to needing a custom screen. Which will cost another $300, it seems. Well, time to start saving. And I guess work on the next few donation wallpapers.

Also, Within Temptation is pretty damn sweet.

09/16/07
Than, what are you not telling us this time, eh?

Well, then. You all may recall back when I did the page with nine panels that I was never going to do a nine-panel page again. As you can see, I've kept my word. This page has ten. No, I don't know what's wrong with me (although my blood test results show that there IS, in fact, something wrong with me...although it has nothing to do with this page). This page was something of a nightmare to lay out, and I'm disappointed with the way 6, 7, 8 flow kinda backwards, but c'est la vie. I think it'll be better with color, particularly Than's spell there.  It'll have some effects once it's colored.

I mentioned something was wrong with me. Not to TMI, but I had blood work done to see what the cause of my fatigue may be. The lyme disease is over and done with, fortunately, but now I have cholesterol level problems which will only be fixed by work on my part. I don't think this'll effect the comic, though.

What will arrives tomorrow. That is to say, the privacy filter for my screen. If it makes it bearable to stare at my new screen for hours on end, we may have a color page on Saturday. Yay!

Not much other than page, oversleeping, and World of Warcraft happened this week, although I'd like to wish all my fellow Jews a l'shanah tovah.

...right, I'm making challah again. I should go do that. See you next week!

09/07/07
I'd kinda hoped to get this one fully shaded and all, but at the time of typing this, it's not even flat-colored. I intend to get to work on flatcoloring it after I update the site, though. A lot of this is so I can get used to my new hardware. That's right, my new arrival is here! I'm typing this on my shiney, shiney Alienware Area-51 mobile. It's a little too shiny, actually, particularly in the glossy screen area. To the morons who decided that anti-glare should no longer be an option on notebooks: "bleep you." Anti-glare lcds are probably the only reason I still don't need glasses given that half my life is spent staring at a computer screen. ...sigh, I need to buy a privacy filter. Maybe that'll stop the eye-fatigue and headaches.

Other than that, this machine is hella sweet. Need to break in the keyboard, though. It's rather resistant to the pressure of my fingers. I expect that there'll be a rise in the quality of the pages just from working on this thing. Already, I'm getting smoother text bubbles. I expect it'll take me a while to get used to the machine enough, though. Took me two days just to set everything up.

Ignore the fact that my work computer now plays games - we are not going to miss another update through the end of  this chapter. And we're trying Saturday as our new update-day. So, starting next week, expect updates on SATURDAY, not Friday. If that works, we'll keep it. If it doean't...er, we'll figure out a different day.

I'll try to change the voting incentives soon.

Oh, and a heads-up. We'll be attending the Granite State Comiccon on the 30th. It's a one-day only thing, and I think it's only $5 admission, so if you're in the Concord area, you should come check it out. And drop by our table to say Hi and maybe buy some stuff. <^_^>

08/17/07
Sorry, girls. The anti-yaoi mechanism was active.

If the last page was a bitch, this was an even bigger one. But it was my bitch. ...okay, yeah. So I went for some very difficult angles in this page. I think the end result is more than worth it. See? I can do action sequences. Yar.

Hm... News. I am sick. Again. This time I'm on medication for it. >.> If I'm to believe the doctor, I should be feeling a lot better next week. Of course, I've got a wedding to bridesmaid at tomorrow (congrats, Lynds!) and then not much time to recover from that before I have to hop on a plane for the next weekend. So, I continue to maintain that updates will be spotty until September. Mm, September, September. We've promised ourselves that we will pull our act back together in September. Whether it's safe to promise you guys that as well remains to be seen. So close to finishing Chapter 2 at this point...only eight pages left, which should mean we'll conclude in October. I think you guys will enjoy Chapter 3 a lot more. It too will focus on character development, but it also gets moving with that whole, uh, plot thing. You like plots, right?

We'll get page 35 up before I head off to Maryland, although it will likely be without color. Perhaps I can get my parents to help me finance a new computer finally. That would really, really help.

08/05/07
More bad language. We're rated "teen," after all. For the record, "Bitch" describes this page very, very well. Because it was. Page 33 in the script was seven panels. I really don't know what I was thinking when I scripted it like that, because there was no way I could effectively portray the sequence of events in flippin' seven panels. I took all of Monday and some of Tuesday just to rework the sequence. I ended up with twelve or thirteen panels, depending on some panel content factors. There was no way I was puting twelve panels on one page, so 33 has been split into two pages, giving us yet another page between us and the end of chapter 2. Oh well. Also, nine panels is a lot more work than the usual 6/7 that Ambition pages tend to have. The next page will have four panels, I think, but I love killing Luth'rai, so one will be a massive underpanel.

So don't expect the next page to be on time. Or in color. In fact... Luth'rai and I are thinking of changing our update day. Two and a half years ago, Friday was a great update day. I could work Sunday through Thursday, snagging Luth'rai early in the week for backgrounds and having Friday and Saturday off. The first year, the only updates we missed were due to holidays or health problems. Schedules and situations changed, making Friday not so feasible a day anymore, as I'm sure you've noticed. For a while, it was tighter, but I could still manage, but now we face a singularly difficult problem: The days I have work are the only days Luth'rai has off. This is certainly compounded by Luth'rai's theatre habit. If she came home and stayed home every day after work, we could still work together, but she doesn't. She has Sunday off, but that's the one day of the week I go to work (and it throws off my schedule immensely, seeing as I live like a normal person during the week, and work 1 am to 8 - 9 am Sunday morning only).

So scheduling is currently a huge issue. I am going to quit my job (for more reasons than the comic - being able to attend church and actually spend time with my husband when he's home instead of working and trying to get sleep is important), which means I need to find another way to make $200 a month... >.>  I'm not sure when I'm quitting, but it probably won't be before mid-September. In the meantime, we'll continue to have one update a week - we're just not sure which day of the week as of yet. Expect Sunday or Monday for the meantime, and we'll let you know for sure when things are worked out. It's also safe to assume that there will be no (real) color for the rest of August, what with theatre for Luth'rai and a wedding and 90th birthday bash for me to attend.

Mm, final thoughts. A thank you to Mr. Howard for the review last week over at Tangents. I'm wondering if author responses are appropriate? I'm not sure.

I really need to change those vote incentives, don't I?

07/20/07
Well, I had intended to use the three days after returning from the convention to finish up the color from last page, but it didn't happen. The plan was to take a day to destress and then get back to work. The day to destress happened. Then two hospitalizations happened after. The first was my cat and the second was my father. o_0 My father is recovering from surgery and doing well. My cat...we still don't know what's wrong with him. He's running a fever and possibly hallucinating. Bugger.

So. The PLAN as far as Ambition goes. July 27th updates will resume. Not only do they resume, but under no circumstances will they be missed (shy of bombing or power outages.) We do not promise complete updates, just story updates at least. Come the conclusion of chapter 2, we will be taking a month to clean up our act. That is, we will finish Chapter 2, and get all pages complete with complete color (which will go up as we finish them). We will also finish preparing for Chapter 3. Once Chapter 2 is completely complete, we'll go forth with Chapter 3. We'll be back on track with a fresh start and maybe even more updates. We'll just have to see. I'll keep you guys posted as things take more shape.

To keep you guys occupied in the meantime, we've got a discussion thread in the forums regarding which of our numbskull elves will fall asleep first.

My convention update is above, so I'll finish up with the hell, er Dell update. Attourney General ftw. I finally got in touch with Dell's mystical Customer Complaints Department and they are letting me return their blasted merchandise for a full refund (of my time not money). As of yesterday, the bloody laptop and back up battery are in the mail, never to be seen again. Good riddance, good riddance, good riddance. Of course, I'm not playing the victory music until I've got the refund check in my hands, but... Good enough for now! XD

I'll drop a final shout-out thanks to Luth'rai's relatives Debbie, Bob, and Tammy for helping us afford the Convention. You guys r0xx0rs.

07/12/07
You know, Than, no one's making you stay up... *sigh* Boys.

Okay, first of all, I'm really sorry for this half-assed update on top of all the other ones. Really. I feel like shit on the inside. But I simply didn't have the time. I would have had the time if things had gone smooth at the printers. Things did NOT go smooth. But, I have hard copies of the prologue and chapter 1 (with a couple errors, oh well...better than the first dozen round of errors) that you can see at our table at Connecticon. These past ten days I feel like I've barely been alive. I've certainly barely been here. Where the heck did the time go? How come conventions take so much preparation? Why is my bag still not packed when I'm supposed to be on the road in ten minutes? AUGH.

Well, a couple comments about this page, which I will likely finish as next week's update, along with *fingers crossed* one of the other not-all-colored pages. I just wanted to point out Than's speech slip in panel six. Orisian is Than's fourth language, and Than prides himself on his fluency. Some of you might have wondered at, since Than's a noble, his use of contractions and slang. Well. When speaking in Dark Elfish, he never touches them. In Dark Elfish, he's the epitome of a well-bred gentleman. In other languages, however, he prefers to display his control of the language instead of his social status. However, it's still his fourth language and it sometimes shows, especially when he's angry or tired. Any grammar teacher would cross out "you aren't" and write "you're not." I wonder if any of you know why, and furthermore if you know what caused the mistake?

More importantly...which of our two stubborn dolts is going to succeed over the others?

I'm off to the con. There will be updates of sorts after the con. Yup.

06/29/07
This page is more done than this, but I don't have time to finish it as I have to run an errand to Connecticut today, which will take me the better part of the day. I figured a flat-colored version is more comprehensible than a half-shaded one. There's also been work done on last week's. I'll have both completed ASAP.

Panel 1 turned up an unintentional Herge tribute while I was working on it - decided to go with it. After all, Herge did a lot for story comics. Now I get to see if any of you have a clue as to what I'm talking about.

I've been working on improving my line-art for the past few months. In specific, and some of you may have noticed, I've been working on ears and mouths. I've gotten more comfortable with elf ears nowadays - they feel more solid to me now than they did, and more importantly, Than's and Audj's ears are distinguishable from each other by shape alone (YAY!), so I've been working on adding the final factor to elf ears - articulation. Orisian elves were always meant to have ears that move (not a lot, but some), but I've been avoiding using that until now, as I was afraid of over-exaggerating and unintentional comedy (I did move ears from time to time for comedic effect, you may recall). I have a much better grasp on how elf ears articulate now, so, take a good look at Than's ears on this page. They're now a full part of the visual story-telling.

Mouths: actually, I've been lifting techinques from Masashi Kishimoto (previously, I was studying Masakazu Katsura for ideas on how to do facial expressions, if you're curious). Say what you want about Naruto, but I still consider it to be one of the better manga in existence and definitely one of the best still running.

No Dell news. Catch you all later.

06/22/07
Still working on the shading. It'll be done...when it's done. In the meantime, the story continues for you.

Because of the lack of shading, it may not be entirely clear what Than is doing in the sixth panel, so, I'll clarify: You may recall that Than got a nasty scratch on his wrist back on page 3 of this chapter? He sees an opportunity to wash the blood off, so he's taking it. Kinda like how he sees an opportunity to rub Audj's nose in things...

Let's see... lots of news this week. Changed the donation incentive finally. Been meaning to do that since April. I didn't manage to finish the piece I wanted to change it to, but, oh well. I still hope to finish it in time for Connecticon, but, seeing as that's July 13-15, and it's almost July... Geez, I have to rush my butt just to make up the business cards. Here's hoping I can manage on my husband's computer seeing as I still don't have one of my own. Correction, I still don't have one that can handle 600 dpi. The poor broken one that I'm still doing these pages on can barely handle 200 dpi, so...yeah.

What's currently happening on the computer front - I'm trying to convince my mom to help me finance an Alienware. She wants to wait to see how things with Dell work out first, which saddens me, as I truly doubt anything will be settled before the end of the month. Heck, I'd be surprised for things to be worked out by the end of the year. I have officially taken legal action against Dell and opened a case with the Attourney General of Vermont. Dell is supposed to contact me by June 29th and resolve things to my satisfaction or risk further legal involvement. I'll be posting the official complaint that I filed in the forum...and other fora. Feel free to e-mail me fora that would be a good place to post this sort of thing, or spread the work yourself. I don't want Dell thinking they can get away with this.

I'd like to post a quick shout out to Marten Kahr, who offered and is now hosting the downloadable Drakish font, which I've been meaning to find a host for for nearly a year. Now you guys can type like dragons...kinda!

In final news, Comic Genesis is getting a new server this weekend, so there should not be any more outages once everything moved over. While everything's being moved over, however, things should be spotty. So, bear with us, and remember that we have a mirror site. See you next week. Or earlier with this page shaded.

06/14/07
Just taking the advisory rating out for a spin, here...
Phew... That only took for-bloody-ever. I'm not going to offer any explanation other than I dove into this page knowing what I wanted and not knowing how to achieve it. The trial and error cost me several major headaches and has pushed page 29 back to next Friday, but I think, on the whole, it was worth it. I'm not offering any explanation for what's going on - youll just have to wait for the next page, which, as I said, won't be up until the 22nd. Sorry, but this little fae is showing up on the next page too, so if I start on her tonight, she mayt be done by then. >.>

As a consolation, I offer you a "making of"-type animation. HERE

As you may have noticed, Comic Genesis has been on the fritz. There are two major reasons for this. One, the server is running at 150% capacity and, consequently, failing. We get to hope the big guys replace it soon. Second, there seems to be a major error of somesort in the AutoKeen updater, which is basically crashing and preventing ComicGenners from updating. Our admin, Kisai, is working her tail off on it, as evidenced by this update, but she's still not sure what's causing the error. So. We now have a barebones mirror site over at DrunkDuck. It's nothing fancy, and will never be much more than the archives, but it's likely to be online when this site isn't. So, if you can't get the comic here for whatever reason, I'll have it over there, complete with announcements as to what's going on, if I have any.

In other news... I think I may need to sue Dell. They do not feel obligated to replace the broken computer they sent me with one of the same specs, and they also do not seem to want to let me return the latest incorrect replacement for a refund. They also refuse to put me in contact with someone of authority, making me deal with rude and incompetent representatives on the bottom rung. I'm going to e-mail the attorney general to see what I can do. This is obscene. Lesson learned: Do not ever, ever, ever get a Dell. Ever.

See you Friday after this one.

06/01/07
Technically you guys shouldn't be able to see the elvenpath either, but you get reader priveledges. ^.^

As I'm sure you guys have gathered, the color will be late this week. The reasons are manifold... Well, first off, my brother came up on a short notice visit and I wanted to spend time with him. Time with him equals not time with the page. Second, there is something horridly wrong with my cat, but the vet can't tell what. In the meantime, I get to deal with him hissing and spitting and rawling and...you get the gist. Third, wretched humidity. Those of you out there who deal with graphite with any frequency will understand. pencilling the page took nearly a third more as long as usual. Forth...I'm training Luth'rai to help me with the coloring. w00t! This will slow us down for a bit, I expect so you can expect the color to be a bit late for a while. But in the long run, we hope, this will mean less time needed per page, which wuld mean we can reach that far-off dream of updating twice a week.

Even without the color, I'm really pleased how this page came out. The dynamic between these two...well, it's pretty much why I'm doing this comic. XD Despite the pure head on angles, I think the art plays out nicely here. Panel 4 is almost perfect. Eee!

It's a new month, but I still don't have a new wallpaper for the donators. I'm considering using background featuring the high-quality Elvenpath glyph as the new donation incentive....

And, as you all have probably noticed, every other week I have new computer tales of woe. Replacement #...what are we on? 4? Well, whatever. It arrived. It, like replacement #3, has the wrong parts and the wrong operating system. The next replacement should be underway soon. Honestly, I'm saving my surprise for when they get the damn thing right.

05/26/07
Calculating shortest route. Please stand by.
Phew. This week's page brought late to you by...this week's page. I think that's pretty self-explanatory. I've had this page in my head for over a year now, and I decided to take the time to do it justice. I hope justice is done. ^_^

I know some of you were hoping that Audriel would get a chance to shine - well, here he is doing just that. Even a touch on the literal side. And on a side note, Karnanyd supplied me with an alternate page to this one on Friday morning. Even more shining occurs there. XD

I know a lot of you now have a ton of questions about magic and how it works in Oris. Well, tough.

Just kidding. We get some scant expanationy-type stuff next week. Really, would I do that to you? ...yeah, probably. I will get to work on the World Settings section...someday.

Not much going on right now. My brother is here visiting, and my cat seems to have gone psychotic (okay, more psychotic), but there's not much happening. Still no computer, surprise surprise.

Thanks to the bunch of you that sent advertising ideas. We're going to follow up on them this weekend. See you all next week!

05/19/07
Audriel, you've been upstaged.
This was an interesting page to do - specifically, the light source is opposite what you'd expect given the dramatic elements on the page. Specifically, you don't generally step downstage into the darkness, and you don't turn your face away to the light. However, I think it gives a different perspective on the element of lighting for dramatic effect. That Than steps into the shadow to steal the "spotlight," as it were, has some poetic justice to it... It works, I think. Not sure how well. Just waxing intellectual on my decision to use physical blocking in the scenes of this comic.

Anyway. Pages nowadays take a full five days to complete - 2 for drawing, and three for coloring. Being sick cuts your days shorter, especially when you're vomiting and therefore can't eat. My energy has been at a real low this week, hence the late page. Sorry about that. Also, that we're back up to five days of work per page is frustrating. I had it down to four a while back, and I was working on trying to cut it down to three, because then we could feasibly update twice a week. But back to five... *sigh* At least Luth'rai graduates tomorrow and is henceforth done with college. Now I can work her like a dog. XD ...or not.

I'd like to make a brief shoutout to Mr. Myth and his webcomics review blog, Damn Good Comics. He posted a review for Ambition on Monday that totally made my month. And it's been a month that could use some making, believe me.

In not comic related news, I've started looking for new music. Specifically, I've picked up some albums by Kamelot and Epica - both very, very good. They're not Nightwish, sure, but there's only one Nightwish. :p I also picked up Apocalyptica - interesting, but not as good. I also have a torrent for a Leaves' Eyes album, but it's downloading...not. Alas. Yay for symphonic metal.

There is also computer news. Of the infuriating variety. Replacement #3 arrived. It works, but it has the wrong screen, the wrong video card, and worst of all the wrong OS. I called Tech support before I even bothered turning the damn thing on. "How do you know it's wrong?" I looked at the specs on the orderform, dummy. "Well, turn it on to make sure?" Yup. All completely wrong. "It's got a better processor, though. And Bluetooth." For all the bloody good that'll do me when I'm running a system with Windows Vista. Long story short, this guy was an utter n00b. He knew almost nothing about computers, and it seems that Dell doesn't have supervisors working in the tech support offices. It took three hours just for him to figure out how to get the complaint into the system and such. He also kept forgetting to put me on hold while he did stuff, so I got to hear a whole lot of how the techs aren't working. 9_9 Best part was listening to him talk to the "dispatch coach." Heh. "What do you mean, she's got the wrong screen? What is she talking about? How does she know?" "She just keeps saying it's wrong...I dunno." "But that's just...oh...oh, wait. She's right. That's...not the right screen. We gotta get that back here."

And now I wait for replacement #4. As soon as I find the complaints department at Dell, they're getting their due. >:[

05/11/07
Teenagers can be so full of themselves.

Hey, look at that! We're back! And pretending that this page did not take me nearly fifty hours to color. Or something. I swear, I've spent my life coloring this week, wishing the whole time that I had a working screen to do it on. But I don't, because the Dell replacement that was ordered on the 1st of May has not arrived. In fact, there's been no hide nor hair of it, metaphorically speaking. I expect shortly after I finish updating, I'll be on the phone dealing with more tech support. ARGH. All of you, do not get a Dell! Do NOT ever get one! Ever!

In other news, despite multiple trips to the vet this week (or maybe, because of?), Kasumi is recovering from her surgery nicely. I was tempted to post pictures of her thirty stitches and drain, but decided that would be too gross. ;)

Now, in comic news... Understandably, we've had a significant drop in traffic since we went on hiatus. It seems we've lost about half of our regular readership, which I find awfully depressing. Also, you'll notice that the Fantasy Banner exchange no longer exists, so we've also seen a major drop in new traffic as well. Annoying, because that was the last good banner exchange on the web. Well, we plan to advertise on Alpha Shade later this month, and maybe Buzzcomix as well. If anyone knows any other good, and inexpensive, places for a webcomic to advertise, please drop me an e-mail at theslyeagle_at_gmail_dot_com. Also, if you guys just spread the word around a bit, that'd be awesome.

Voting incentives have changed! See you all next week with another page.

05/04/07
Alas, I did not have Luth'rai back in working condition this week. And also, while I did do a fair amount of slaving over various things that need doing for Ambition, I have bloody nothing to show for it (I've been working on the May donations wallpaper all day...and got almost nothing done). Sometimes, there's just no justice.

And speaking of no justice... The Trials of the Replacement Computer, episode 4,868:

I received the new harddrive on Monday, plugged it in, and happily watched it do it's little installing thing. Happily, that is, until it had the exact same freezing problem it's been having all three weeks I've had it. I call the guy who helped me last time. Voice mail. Sigh.  Back in the queue with me. Finally get a guy who, fortunately, spoke English. We run some troubleshooting, and it's very, very clear to this particular fellow now that this computer is @#$%ed up. Finally. He asks me what I want to do, and I tell him I want a working computer. Maybe a working one that isn't this one. So, he custom-ordered replacement #3 for me. Identical specs, but not this one. Heh. All I have to do is send Replacement #2 back when #3 arrives. Third time's the charm, maybe?

In other news, it seems we've received some controversial reports in the forum for The Order of the Stick. The thing that deeply insults me here is the claim that I copied R. A. Salvator's Drizzt with my original character Than. The reason this angers me so much is two-fold: 1, it accuses me of intellectual theft, and frankly art thieves are the scummiest scum of the earth, so I resent that. 2, it attributes my hard work to another artist (technically author, I guess, in this case), which I appreciate just as much. I'm influenced by other works just as much as the next artist, and I have in fact read the Homeland trilogy, but I did not copy it. Hell, I didn't even mimic it. But on the oher hand, this thread in the forums has gotten us over 200 referrals, so I guess there really is no such thing as bad publicity.

So, in final news, some of you may remember Kasumi. She had mammary tumors again (not bad, considering the last one was a year ago) that were nearly identical to the last case, only they grew at an even more alarming rate. As the vet said, "Gotta remove the rat from the tumor." The good news here is that they're already taken care of. The vet knows and trusts me now, so he was willing to do the surgery and let me pay it off over time with a payment plan (not to say I wouldn't appreciate more rat-health donations, but it's not life/death now). Last I heard she was doing well, but they're keeping her overnight to make sure her sutures stay closed, as she's a lot older now so her skin is a lot less elasticy.

And while we're being all ecologically-minded this week, I'm pretty sure I have some American readers here. You guys should help protect our wolves.

Next week, away from the creator drama and back to the story!

04/27/07
I'm almost done coloring page 9, plus I've picked at a couple others. I'll put at least 9 online later today. The reason for the delay is, again, Dell.

So, last week I shipped Replacement #2 out to the service station to get it fixed. It came back today. I pull it out of the box, find a note saying they replaced the memory. Good, good...I turn it on. It freezes, as per usual. I say a few choice words. I then call the tech support agent with the accent I can't cut with a knife. I spend most of the day leaving messages everywhere and being entirely unable to get ahold of him. 7 p.m. rolls around, so I take a well-deserved shower and then a deep breath before I hop back into the infernal pool of advertising that is the waiting queue of Dell tech support. Finally got ahold of someone...turns out my case number is incorrect. >.< I start explaining the problem from scratch... However, the guy is not only intelligible, but competent! Paraphrased:

Guy: Oh, I found their report.
Me: Oh, good. Can I stop doing all the pointless troubleshooting now?
Guy: Says your harddrive is faulty.
Me: Well no shit, Sherlock. Why didn't they replace it?
Guy: You're not supposed to send your harddrive to the repair center.
Me: Except that the harddrive was the thing that was broken, so I did. How else would they know it was faulty?
Guy: Well, right... So, it worked with the harddrive they used there.
Me: So?
Guy: Um, so, I'm going to send you a new hardrive, okay? A fully-loaded harddrive, so you don't have to install everything again. And I'll also send that driver's disk that you were supposed to get and didn't.
Me: ...really?
Guy: And here's my extension if that doesn't work. And here's your case number, plus the numbers you were missing that made it the correct case number.
Me: ...wow, thanks.
Guy: Have a nice day.

Maybe tomorrow, I will. Still working on the new site layout. I expect I'll finish it come summer.

04/20/07
Sorry about the lack of news last week, guys. I had no FTP, so no way to upload anything. I also had no computer. Replacement #2 did arrive in time for me to take it down to Maryland with me. However, replacement #2 has faulty hardware. Namely, it freezes, usually at startup. It works perfectly well during the rare few hours that it may actually work, but there were not enough of those to get any actual work done, really. I spent most of the time trouble-shooting, trying to find any way to get it to work. Way too many hours later, and still no dice, I called DELL tech support when I got home and spent nearly just as many hours on the phone with them, doing all the exact same trouble shooting I'd done all week before they were convinced they had sent me a second broken computer. Now I'm sending this one back, to get it fixed instead of taking my chances with a replacement #3. *many bad words go here* If I could get a non-Vista laptop anywhere else, I totally would. Stupid not having money...

So, I'm still working on my trusty old falling apart laptop with the dying screen. Didn't actually finish any pages this week either, with all the time on the phone with tech support, but I managed to pick away at the new layout whenever I was on hold. As you can see above, the graphic work is nearly done. Then I just have to code it. Har har.

I'll try to get some color-completed pages up throughout the week. See you next Friday with, hopefully, better news.

04/06/07
It feels like I've given you guys more excuses than pages this year. Fortunately, by looking at the archives, I see this is not the case. Out of the fourteen pages scheduled to have gone up so far, you've gotten twelve. Some have been late, and half have not been colored, but they are there.

So, on with the excuses, right? Of course right. The excuse is the scene change. The entire lunchtime scene took place on a shady incline. That meant large trees, shrubs, and not much else. While these pages still represented 32-40 hours of work for me, they were only 1-2 hours of work for Luth'rai. I even let the amount of detail slip for them because they were part of a "talking" scene and the setting wasn't so important - Luth'rai is working very, very hard on school and is majorly stressed. Suddenly we have a scene change which makes the environment important again...right when Luth'rai's boiling down to her deadline and cannot afford to up her workload back up to 6-10 hours on backgrounds.

So, I am giving her the month of April off.

I, however, am NOT taking the month of April off as well. There are nine pages, not including today's that are not fully colored in the archives, as well as the chapter 2 cover (which remains unfinished because my computer cannot handle the file size - barring replacement #2 having troubles like replacement #1 had, I'll finish it on the new hardware.)  I am going to go back and finish those. Replacement #2 is supposed to arrive on Tuesday, and if it arrives before I have to catch my plane to fly south for my grandmother's 90th birthday, you should get something of a coloring spree update. So, because NEXT Friday depends on UPS, I promise nothing. The next two Fridays however come with the promise of color in the archives and maybe even crappy filler comics. And speaking of filler... I won't say no to a little help from fans. It any of you want to make a guest comic of some form, go ahead and send it to theslyeagle_at_gmail_dot_com, and there will be updation! ...I'm really sorry to delay this scene though...it's a really good scene, especially if some of you are tired of Audriel seeming lame. Oh well...you'll just have to wait.

So...Luth'rai talks about the vernal pool over in her box (I added it to the script after she ranted - I think it fits pretty well and adds a bit more color to the scene (salamander!), anyway), I will talk about resurgences. I thought I'd be lazy and forward you to wikipedia...but wikipedia sucks and has no articles on the phenomenon. So. You've got water (from precipitation, thaw, etc.) going downhill. For whatever reason, the water insurges - it seeps into the ground. Usually that's because there's water-soluble or porous rock or a cave or some combination thereof. The water runs underground for a while and then for whatever reason resurges - comes back above ground. Could be that the ground is now saturated, below the water table, no longer porous, whathaveyou. That is a resurgence. It's often a pretty good indicator of active caves (a lot of resurgences flow through cave mouths) which is why our drow friend would be interested in it.

Whoo....lots of chatter today. Closing points - I've decided not to change the donation wallpaper for this month because we're barely updating. I'll change it in May, when we start updating normally again.

Secondly, I saw TMNT with Luth'rai. Unlike her, I never watched the Turtles as a kid, so I had no fond memories of the franchise going into it. Now, I'm usually a bit hard on movies anyway, but I have to say I liked it. I'll probably even buy it when it comes out on DVD. Yeah, it was VERY cheesey and the plot was paper-thin, but it's the kind of cheesey that's actuall funny because it's not loaded down with slapstick (and the one slapstick scene - Raphael vs. the Stitch clone - was amazingly funny). Also, I'm a bloody sucker for roof-top freestyling and there's nothing I love more than a fight scene without slow motion. Boo-yah. This movie had S-rated animation, dear readers, I kid you not. Only qualm was the sound mixing, and that might just have been our theatre. Go see it.

03/30/07
Finally getting some of the dirt on Than, yeah? Well, don't get too excited. I'm not about to start flashbacking yet. XD

I sent the new computer back. Because it seemed to have problems, I'm even getting my money back. Of course, I'm not getting it back until they've recieved and reshelved it. >.> Then, and only then, will I be able to get replacement #2. So what was wrong with that computer was NOT the screen, it turns out. Apparently it was the video card. Someone bought the best screen available with the crappiest video card available. And then I did the same thing by buying the refurbished one. Heh. When I finally get replacement #2, it will have a good video card. For the time being, I am careful with this computer and I hope that the screen does not fall off completely when I fly to Maryland for my granmother's 90th birthday. I don't know if I'll be able to manage a colored page on the 14th, but I'll try. You'll get a non-colored one at the very least.

New month - I am working on the April donation exclusive wallpaper now. It'll be available with next week's page. And, lo, the voting incentives have changed, so vote to see my shoddy pencilwork!

03/23/07
So much for updating every week in March. *sigh* I really apologize for the missed update, but it really couldn't be helped. You may recall that my computer screen was dying and I was getting a new one. Well, the new one is here, and I'm having all sorts of problems with it. For one thing, it did NOT arrive with all the drivers already installed. (And they also failed to include a driver disk.) For another...well, I got a new one because the screen on my other one was dying, right? Well, I got meself a "TrueLife" vibrant color monitor. Something's wrong if my dying screen has better colors than this "vibrant color" one, says I. For another, it randomly cuts out and won't connect to the web, and it won't save my windows settings, and...oh, I'll jut stop ranting. The bottom line is I think I'm sending this one back, if at all possible. And I'm not getting this model again if I can help it. Don't get me wrong, the Core Duo processor is sweeter than honey. But I can't work this way.

There will be a page next week, because I'll be doing it on my old computer at least, and not spending hours and hours just trying to get the new one to work.

That said, I hope the joke comic brings a smile to your faces at the very least.

03/16/07
I may have lovingly rendered this page more than absolutely necessary. ...nah. But it did take about seven more hours of work than I thought it would. In reference to Luth'rai's comments about the use of the "God Light," I experience no shame in admitting that I scrounge a lot of my dramatic effects from film and theatre. My story-telling is mostly manga-influenced, but manga is not in color, now is it?

All in all, a fun page to do. Very dialogue-light to make up for the last page. ^_^ This scene has one more page, and this chapter has four or five more scenes. ...this is a frickin' long chapter. ...or maybe chapter 1 was just very short.

This may be the last page I ever do on my beloved, six-year-old Inspiron 2500. It still runs, as the page attests, but I didn't want to wait for the screen to just fall off, so I now supposedly have a refurbished Inspiron 6400 on its way in the mail. Mm, $23/month payment plans.

See you next week, hopefully on better hardware. ;)

03/09/07
In other words, "The difference between you and me, Audriel, is I am informed and logical, and you are neither." Only not quite as snobby.

I hope you guys can stand to read all that text, there. Than can certainly prattle on. I like to keep the pages text-light, as a general rule, but it seems dumb to dedicate a whole page or two to Than's nerdy moments, so instead you get a panel of info-dump.

So, with this page, I discover I am now capable of coloring a full page in a day and a half. New record! I even managed to do things like eat while I was at it. Yeah, miscommunication between Luth'rai and I + Sly going to job interview and working on wallpaper = late page. >,< But, I tenatively have a 1-day-a-week job delivering newspapers during unholy hours. If this works out, I can work 8 hrs. a week to pay the bills and still be able to do the comic! Yatta! Donations will still be useful, of course. ^^; Especially since my computer is now broken, and I need a new one. Actually, I've been needing a new one for a long, long time. There's barely enough RAM to run Photoshop and Netscape at the same time on it, and the screen and keyboard are dying. It's a good laptop though, still chugging even though it's always getting harder to do art on it. But now the screen hinges have snapped off and it's only a matter of time before the screen falls off completely. I've discovered that I can buy a laptop ten times as powerful as this one for 2/3rds of what I paid. Now I feel old, remembering a time when gigabytes were expensive. If the job works out, I can get a new one on credit. It'd nice to be able to see the actual colors I'm working with on my actual screen instead of having to check on my husband's computer.

On a final note, I fixed a small error on the last page. In the scripting, I had our boys eating bread, and put "barley" in tentatively. When I got to the part with them eating the bread, I actually did research to see what grain would make the best "camping bread." Bread gets moldy, yaknow? I discovered that bannock keeps well and you can bake bannock loaves in a pan over an open fire without much trouble, so I used pictures of that for reference. ...all that work and then I forgot to change the text when I copied the lines over. 9_9

03/02/07
Yes, that is a short joke. I hope some of you all get it, because I certainly don't. Being a meager 5'1" myself, I was the brunt of many a short joke all through school, and never understood what was so funny. I mean, honestly, what are you supposed to do when someone comes up to and goes "You're short! hyuk hyuk", congratulate them for not being blind?

Oh, well. Maybe Than is sensitive about his vertically challengedness. You'll find out next week.

Well, it certainly felt good to finally be able to work full-time on the comic again. The unfortunate news is that the days of me being able to work full-time on this comic may be very short lived. A good part of the reason for the move was that we simply could not afford living at our old apartment, and the unfortunate thing is by moving we've only managed to save $150 a month. Granted, that's quite a bit, but the collection agencies do not want to hear it. Our budget is still short by $2-300 a month. Granted, $300 a month is not very much money, but I still need to come up with it and unless I magically find a job that lets me get away with working one day a week, I'll have to give up time that I spend working on the comic instead. Which means either no color or fewer updates.

However, I'm willing to see if I can get away without the job first. I'm making an exclusive wallpaper that will be sent to readers who donate $1 or more during the month of March. You can preview some of the wallpaper lineart on the Buzzcomix incentive - I'll be finishing it up and having a better preview this weekend. As long we raise $300 every month, you guys will get at least four fully-colored pages a month. If we can't, I'll probably cut down the update schedule when I get a different job. So, either way, you still get the comic.

The voting incentives have changed - see you all next week, with hopefully better news. Oh, and Happy Purim.

02/23/07
Contrary to previous conjecture, Than is not mooning Audriel. Just showing off old battle scars. This happens to be the largest visible scar on his body - the bigger ones are internal. Yay skeletal fractures. I actually tried researching arrow wounds to try to figure out what the scar would look like, but in the end I had to use my imagination.

Now, before anyone starts picking on Audriel for being squeamish, I'll point out that just about everyone on Oris is kinda wound-shy. This would be because healing magic, such that there is, is rare and not nearly as capable of reversing damage as healing magic in most world settings. No one's tossing "cure" spells around here. Balance magecraft, mana weaving, and natural elfin magic are all forms of magic that can heal, but only by speeding the natural processes up. Priests are able to implore their gods for miracles, and that's basically your only hope if you're hurt beyond what a physician can heal. Also, if you're dead, you're dead. Resurrection is a very, very rare miracle. It's more likely to occur if several hundred souls get sacrificed to the dark gods than if your nice god liked you. And why would someone who consorts with dark gods want to bring your sorry ass back, hm?

Well, stressful as it was, the move went well. My desk is even set up again, although it's in a room with no heat and no internet access amidst hundreds of boxes waiting to be unpacked. Oi vey.

See y'all next week.

02/16/07
A lot less faith now, eh? Honestly, I wasn't able to even start the next page. I forgot how much a pain moving is. >.> I'm still optimistic about getting the page up on Tuesday, though.

That said, I hope everyone had a happy Valentine's. A foot and a half of snow certainly didn't cool mine down...much. ;)

This filler is, in part, Karnanyd's fault, as she brought it to my attention that, on the whole, there's no information about the Sh'bera, or other races for that matter. I was aware of this, but...yeah. I have a lot typed up about the elves currently, but it's incomplete, so I haven't uploaded it. But here're the raider fatigues. So, now if any of you feel like drawing random Sh'bera raiders/soldiers, you know what to have them wearing.

...I really do need to get up more world setting info. We seem so generic still, and Oris isn't all that generic. Well, it is...but there's still a lot of work I've put into it that just doesn't show up in jungles. For example, the elves are broken into six subraces. Audriel is actually part of a racial minority. Orisian elves are very much not Tolkien elves in many respects. Orisian dwarves are, heck, respectful and respectable and not intended for comic relief in any fashion. Orisian humans are...well, they're humans. Whaddya want? But seriously, I need to finish typing up all that world history and stuff so you guys can read it. And distract you from the fact that we still don't have color... ^.^;

Hope to see you Tuesday. Maybe I'll even have internet in my office/studio by then.

02/09/07
Bwaha! I upload it early! Now I can pack.

It may interest some of you to know that this page is officially our 50th (not including chapter covers and the like). Our goal is to also have our 100th before the year is out. Which means we'd be into chapter 4 before 2008. Which further means you'd actually have any idea who any of these characters are. Wouldn't that be cool?

Anyway, this page continues with more conversational character development. I hope it's not boring you guys; I'd rather hoped to be updating more frequently around this part, but alas, I am switching apartments. Next week's page will likely be in black/white too.

BUT after that! Then there will be color! And Luth'rai and I wil go beck through and color all the uncolored ones! And I'll finish up with some more additions to the world settings page! And things will be beautiful! I have faith! ...which doesn't mean that you have faith, but you know.

The voting incentives have changed.

02/02/07
Teenagers shouldn't be allowed to be right, eh, Audriel?
I hope it's clear what's going on on this page; that is, that Audriel wants something to say to what Than said on the last page and can't think of anything. In scripting, I actually held off on continuing this scene for months while I waited for him to think of something to say. Fed up, I turned to Than and said "Do you have something to say?" and he said "I sure as hell do." So. Audriel forfeited his turn, and thus the scene can continue. Says I.

Well then, I suppose I should announce the contest results...

Oddly enough, I didn't get a single correct answer for the Name of the Gods contest. And here I was afraid it would be too easy.

As for the griffon's name, out of the eighty-four names we had to pick from, we chose "Araguis," suggested by Saeria. Congratulations to her.

Also, congratulations to Varethane for the winning entry in our fanworks contest. We got quite a few nice entries, but hers stood out for composition and polish. Thanks to all for entering! All entries can be viewed here.

We're moving this week and the next, but I think we'll still be able to get a non-colored page up on Friday (provided there is internet at the new place in time).

Voting incentives have *gasp* changed!

01/26/07
How's that for a conversation stopper?
Not too much to say about this page, except that I think I failed on a couple of the expressions. This scene will rely on a lot of expressions, so I feel the driving urge to get them right. Cause if I don't, the characterization is off.

As Luth'rai said, we are housesitting this weekend...for $$ even. We'll also be going through all the contest entries - winners will be announced on Friday with the next update. I'll also be posting the fanworks entries in the fanart gallery, so if you have a website you'd like me to link your entry to, drop me an e-mail.

Wow...my comments are shorter than Luth'rai's for once. How odd.

01/23/07
I have a feeling that a number of you will be somewhat disappointed by this page. There was talk going on about whether Than is a "good" or "evil" drow, and this page very deliberately avoids answering that question. This is only chapter 2, folks. There's a lot of ambiguity to come before conclusive evidence starts to settle into place. But, I promise you this: you'll know a lot more about both Than and Audriel by the time this chapter comes to a close.

So much news...

Obviously, I didn't finish coloring. I put this page into grayscale, as I think it reads easier without random colored bits. I think you should expect black-and-white for another month or so. Luth'rai has moved in, but we're moving into a new apartment on the 1st of February. The good news there is that Ambition will have a studio as a result of the move. The bad news - we have to move there first. After we move, I'm going to train Luth'rai how to help me color, and we'll go back and color all those pages I had to skip. Once that's done...maybe our update rate will pick up to twice a week. That's our goal, at least. If you hang in there for us, we'll hang in there for you. There will be an update on Friday.

The the contest is technically over, but there's an entry that got an extention until the weekend, so I'll accept any other entries through Friday. I think we got a decent turnout for our first year, actually. Winners will be announced on the 30th.

Final piece of news... Well, this year is continuous tragedies for Sly, it seems. Some of you may remember my rat Kasumi from the summer. Again, thank you all who donated to help me afford her surgery. She is still fine, if depressed. Her sister, my equally beloved Mizuki, died on Friday afternoon, though. She had a series of medical emergencies throughout the week that turned out to be caused by a brain tumor. Even if we'd known beforehand that she'd had one, those cannot be treated like Kasumi's tumor was. It's quite sad...she was a little over two years old. Fortunately, they had her on a pain killer, so she wasn't in too much pain.

01/12/07
Don't worry, Audj, Than's got your back. ...oh wait.

Well, let that be a lesson to you all; never turn your back on a drow. For any reason.

I have a half a dozen other jokes to go with this page as well, but that's enough, methinks. Well, we're back color. Complete with experimentation! Phew, if I'm not out of practice. Did it always take all this effort to color? ...it did, didn't it. Meep. Well, I'm working on coloring the pages that were missed over the insaneness of the holidays, so I'll get back up to speed soon. I hope.
This page is, yes, a bit late, at least in it's entirety. It's lateness is not caused by Legend of Zelda: Twilght Princess. Well...not entirely. It is more related to rat emergency #2. Nope, not Kasumi, this time. She is still well and good. This time it's her sister Mizuki. Mizuki seems to have let her teeth grow too long... Fortunately, this shouldn't be as expensive as a surgery for tumor removal. Not by a long shot. But it was still cause for concern.

On a final note, the contest is still going on, so keep spreading the word and working on those entries.

01/05/07
We're back. But not in color. ...oh, bugger, where to begin...

We'll start with the bad news. They tell you not to tell too many people that you're pregnant before the end of the first trimester because 20% of all pregnancies end in miscarriages. Well, I was 100% certain that coloring wasn't happening because I was pregnant and didn't have the energy, so I decided to tell you guys, to be fair. Well, seems the joke's on me. And I'm not finding it at all funny. There's no color this week because I lost the baby. I really wanted to muscle through and get the color done anyway, but that was before the bleeding set in in earnest and I really did need to rest, so, I apologize to all of you. Double that with Luth'rai's hectic week and be amazed that there's any page at all. For the morbidly curious who want more details, I present my livejournal.

I'm pretty depressed and in mourning, but I'm hanging in there. I really want this comic to go somewhere this year, and I'm pretty sure I can get the color back for next week (Luth'rai, in fact, already has next week's page). So, the good news. Monday, Ambition turns one year old. Yay! Please spread the word about our contests, details found HERE. We only have a handful of entries, so if people need me to extend the due date (currently the 22nd) in order to enter, I will.

Incentives have changed. I deal with depression by doing random projects. Here we have the first (TWC) and second (Buzz) floors of a house I designed.

12/22/06
Whew. The text took roughly eight times as much time as it usually does, but I really wanted to represent the timing of the dialogue visually as accurately as possible. I think it works. I also took more time on the expressions than usual. I think it paid off in that Audriel looks more masculine than I usually manage. Whoo! Well, here Audriel has the opportunity to learn why you shouldn't start arguments with Than - you won't win. Now. Who actually thinks our dear narrator will learn his lesson?

So, as I mentioned last week, January 8th will be Ambition's first birthday. In celebration, we are holding three contests, the details of which can be found HERE. They even h