Seedling

It’s been a while, huh?

First of all – hi! Thanks for sticking around, and sorry about the disappearance.

Alongside many, many new experiences and lessons in running this project, I’ve now got the dubious honor of having participated in that old and noble webcomic tradition – the long, silent hiatus.

So how did it come about? What happened in that time, and where’s the comic heading now?

What happened?

In truth, nothing major. The reason for my extended break from the comic wasn’t one thing, but rather the sum of different things. I’d been wearing myself thin on several fronts for a while. I was trying to balance a new, demanding and not all that awesome job while also keeping up with an, in hindsight, neck-breaking update schedule for the comic, both on here and on Webtoons. Towards the end, I stayed up half the night to finish pages that would still end up delayed. It affected the artwork as I had to cut out details I’d originally planned on including. It was, in a word, unsatisfying.

Instead of trying to correct my schedule, I took a break. I promised the comic would be back, then kept postponing the return. During the same time I kept getting sick, nothing serious but enough to be very annoying and delay my attempts at a return further. A new lesson was learned – the longer it takes to come back, the harder it is. It got to the point where it was very hard, hence further and further delay.

Even so, I never really thought I’d abandon the comic forever, though it might have seemed like it. I always had the rest of the story nagging in the back of my mind, and the desire to tell it.

So what happens now?

Right now I’ve got the last pages of Chapter 3 all sketched out, save for just a couple of pages. The current, short-term plan is to finish the chapter as quickly as can be done without sacrificing quality. I want to bring you the end of the chapter that has been cliff-hung for so long, and I feel it’s the least I can do for leaving you waiting.

The long term plan is still in the works, but I feel I’m close to finding a new schedule that works better for me. It will likely involve taking another (not quite as long) break to finish writing and sketching out the pages for Chapter 4. That is the de-facto planning phase of any chapter and will lighten my workload a lot for when publishing re-commences.

Even so, I can’t see myself doing 2-3 page updates a week as I did before. So I will start at a more gentle 1 page a week and go from there.

I’ve been torn about webtoons – I like the platform a lot, and the response and support I’ve gotten for Seedling through there has been amazing and something I’ve been very grateful for. But editing the comic to the mobile format alongside drawing and writing it is a lot of extra work. I really do want to keep publishing Seedling in both formats though, so right now I’m considering hiring an editor to edit the pages for me. It’s a new thing for me that I’ll have to take some time to look into.

There’s older pages I want to revisit and rework. This is less of a priority though – the main priority is still moving the story forward. But I might take some time out to do some edits for my own satisfaction.

My tumblr has been dead alongside this site, and I’ve moved most of my other activity to instagram. Seedling does have an instagram account of its own that I created way back. It’s almost empty right now, but I’m planning on using that for uploading mini-comics, sketches and concepts in the future. This means I’ll likely exchange the tumblr link in the top menu with the instagram link.

There’s other things, but I’ll leave it here for now.  Thank you for sticking around on the bumpy road of this comic project, and for all your encouragement both during the comics creation and through its long hiatus. ♥

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