20 Comments
Schedule update and other stuff
on 8th March 2020
Phew! It’s been a while. Okay. Here’s what’s going on.
Back in November, when I outlined my plan going forward, my original schedule was to roll out Chapter 2 when all of Chapter 1 was uploaded to Webtoons. Well, Chapter 1 is on Webtoons now, but with no Chapter 2 on this site as of yet.
When I first decided on the original plan, I knew I was being very optimistic. A few weeks into the new job I’d gotten around the same time, and I knew the plan would be near impossible. But I still wanted to give it a try.
I’m a fresh-out-of-school teacher, graduated this summer. They say the first year of being a teacher is the hardest – after 4 months, I’m inclined to think they were right. It’s been a wild experience on several levels, and I’m learning an incredible amount of things in an extremely condensed amount of time. In the last few months, the new experiences and the sheer drain of it all – including the mental drain of doing everything for the first time as well as long travel distances – left precious little time for comic making, and the time I did get has been more incidental than anything.
I’m not complaining, and I’m not disheartened – I’m still learning as I go, and that includes working on this comic. The purpose of this post isn’t to make excuses, but to restate this fact, and to tell any potentially worried readers out there not to be worried. The comic is coming. And I constantly work towards creating a schedule for myself that I can maintain. It might take a few, or a lot, of tries. But I’m determined to do it.
So, the new/current plan: I’m going to release Chapter 2, here and on Webtoons, when it’s ready. I have my own plans and inner hopes for when that might be, and I don’t like giving vague release dates, but I’ve decided that being vague is better than setting up a much too optimistic deadline that I can’t realistically reach. I need to give myself time to figure out how to balance my work life with comic making, and so this is the state of things until further notice.
There’ll still be new things to see on my blog (and my patreon!), and if you feel like sharing my work with others, know that it’ll be hugely appreciated. 🙂
Thank you all for your patience, and keep on being awesome ♥
Happy New Year! And some (last) dialogue changes
on 2nd January 2020
Not a long post, just a quick update to wish you all a happy new year, and my continued thanks for sticking with Seedling for this long!
The comic is doing well over at Webtoons, where it got a staff pick in December (woo!), and has gained 13k plus subscribers to date as a result. I’m honestly amazed – I didn’t expect Seedling to get any sort of following this fast, and it’s a ride knowing there are now people reading and commenting on each new episodes the moment they’re released. I’m thrilled by the positive response the comic has received so far!
As a result of editing down pages into episodes, I’m offered a second look at each page, and decided that there’s a couple of dialogue exchanges that still didn’t quite flow as I wanted them to, or conveyed exactly what they were meant to convey. So I’ve gone back and changed a bit again – specifically, some dialogue on page 52, 55, 63 and 64.
I really don’t want to make it a habit to go back and change things once they’re published, so I’m leaving a note to myself here that this is the last I’m touching up on Chapter 1. From this point on it’s done. Finito. It’s what it is.
I never thought of myself as a perfectionist, but I guess you learn things about yourself when you start working on your comic epic.
Anyhoo, thanks again for your readership, and see you in the new year! ♥
Chapter 1 finished! And the road ahead
on 19th November 2019
The Seedling comic project started out as a 30 page stand-alone comic I made pretty much on a whim, and out of a desire to play with some character ideas. When I decided to make it into a full-fledged webcomic and remake the stand-alone into Chapter 1, I figured it’d probably double in length. Well, here we are, Chapter 1 is done at 95 pages, three times longer than the original, yet it allowed me to kick off Seedling in the best way. I’m so immensely proud of this accomplishment – and now the real work begins.
Working on Chapter 1 has been eye-opening in many ways. I now know pretty much how long I need to finish pages of various detail levels, and how to organize my work time both practically and planning-wise. And planning has been on my mind a lot as of late. In my previous post I mentioned publishing Seedling on other websites, and I’ve come to a decision on how this will be done.
A mobile-friendly version of Seedling will be uploaded on Webtoons – the first three episodes have already been released, and the comic will continue to update on this platform with a new episode every Friday. Over the course of the next 5 months, all of Chapter 1 will be released episodically in this manner. While this happens, there will be no new page uploads to this website. I’ve decided to spend the time working on the next chapters, rebuilding my buffer and dedicating more time towards worldbuilding and fleshing out the overall story, as well as continuously looking for possible ways of advertising the comic and gain more readers.
By the time the Webtoon version catches up with the website version, Chapter 2 will roll out both here and on Webtoons – on top of this, I will publish the entirety of Chapter 1 on my profile at Deviantart as well. I’ll also be using Deviantart as an archive for all the concept and behind-the-scenes work I do on the comic (as well as art-stuff I do not related to Seedling), releasing these as they become relevant (though nothing containing spoilers).
My tumblr won’t stay vacant during this hiatus. I plan to upload sketches, mini-comics and anything else I can think of in the between-time, and overall it’s gonna be a lot of fun! 🙂
In summary – by the time Chapter 2 comes around, Seedling will be published:
- On Webtoons once a week, currently Fridays, for people who prefer the mobile format.
- On this website twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, for people who like the page-format.
- On Deviantart whenever a chapter is finished. I’ll upload full chapters in the page-format here for people who don’t mind to wait and just want to read entire chapters at a time.
It’s all subject to change – my current situation is that I’m looking for full time work. This means that whatever happens from here on out can easily upend any plans I make now, and so I consider this current plan my starting point. However, I do know that I love this project, and I want to keep working on it no matter what. And I’ll keep this space updated with any changes that happen along the way.
As always, thank you for reading! ♥
FiveHourSleep
Summer break and post-chapter 1 plans
on 7th July 2019
Exams are well over with, I got my degree, and because of the summer break I can now finally dedicate some quality time to this project. So far the time has been mostly spent on behind-the-scenes stuff. I’ve untangled a lot of story-knots, a task which was way overdue, and I’m looking forward to cracking down on the most important task of all, the actual drawing of pages. Up until this point I’ve had a solid buffer, but in the past 1,5 month I’ve been focused on my exams more than the comic. Rather than trying to do two things at once I decided to make good use of my buffer and let it run its course, which was definitely the right decision, but now means that I’ve no more buffer to fall back on anymore.
This means that I need to rebuild my buffer, which I hope to do as effectively as possible over the course of the summer break. Barring any unseen setbacks, the pages should still update as normal for the rest of this chapter, two pages a week as usual.
Since my last update, a few people have confirmed to me that they’re reading and enjoying the comic! A heartfelt thanks to you! When I decided to put this comic up on its own website, I realized it would be a long while before anyone would notice it, if ever! I’ve done little to no advertising of the comic (I post updates to my few followers on my blog, and that’s about it) as I wanted to build the website and add some pages first, but already now things are starting to happen on their own, and your positive feedback is very encouraging. On that note, as the first chapter comes to a close, I feel I’m ready to reach for that audience and see if more people would be interested in reading Seedling, and I’ve already started making some preparations.
A few weeks ago (while I should have been studying towards my exams…) I made the comic more mobile-friendly, a thing that has been on my mind since the last news-post update. This effectively meant going through 50 odd pages of comic, enlarging the font, adjusting every speech bubble, and cutting away unnecessary text where needed.
It took three full days. Eugh.
I also took the opportunity to make some minor changes to the art and dialogue. So if you’ve re-read some pages and thought they were different, they most likely were! Nothing major has changed, but I hope you like the small changes as much as I do.
In the end it means that the comic will now be ready for upload on other websites, hopefully increasing its chances of being seen by others. I’m not fully decided on what websites to upload to yet, but I’ve got a couple I’m definitely planning on using, and a few that I’m still considering. Once everything is ready, I’ll update this space with links to my new upload websites, and you’ll have a choice of which one(s) you prefer to read from! 🙂 My plan is to begin uploading pages off-site as soon as I’ve completed work on all of chapter 1.
Gallery update is also underway, though for now I’ve no time frame on it, and will most likely fiddle with it in between other tasks.
Thanks once more for reading! And please have this picture of my moms growing avocado-plant, which reminds me a lot of Ivee’s seed:
Exams and stuff
on 16th April 2019
So first off, I’m happy to announce that I’ve been able to update Seedling consistently twice a week since I launched the site back in January. As the comic is still in its infancy, I’ve let myself use this time to see if I’d be able to keep to my planned schedule, or if I needed to tweak some things. And, for the most part, I’ve been able to produce what I needed to not eat too much into my buffer, which is pretty awesome.
My plan from this point on is to keep updating the way I’m doing right now until summertime, after which I’m hoping to up the production a bit. If I had one other wish for this comic it would be to produce and release pages more frequently – right now, and despite the consistent updates, it feels agonizingly slow. But this might also be because the first chapter is a rewrite/recreation of a comic I did back in 2017 (soon to be added to the gallery), and so a lot of this feels like retreading old steps. Hopefully, once I get into the ‘new’ chapters, I’ll feel the pace picking up a bit. I’ve so much story yet to tell and so many wonderful characters to introduce, and I simply can’t wait.
I’m also looking into updating the way the gallery is displayed, possibly by connecting to an off-site portfolio page, unless I find a way to make my WordPress theme do what I want. I’d love to fill the gallery with all the process pictures and concepts I got in storage. For now, you can check the current gallery to see some absolutely lovely fanart and commissions I’ve received.
I’ve been looking into perhaps getting Seedling on mobile platforms, to increase viewership and try a different format (not to replace the current one but to expand on the ways the comic can be viewed), but although I pretty much know how to do it, time simply doesn’t allow for it right now. As seen in the the title of the post, I’m swamped by exams and finding work. As much as I’d like to make Seedling my first priority, it won’t happen just yet.
So I’ll continue with this cozy schedule for a while. I’ll try to come with more frequent posts like this, with updates on how working on the comic is going. For now, I hope you’ll excuse me as I bury myself in books and (hopefully) get myself a new bachelors degree. Heh.
Thanks for reading <3