...a bleed-free drawing pad. And here I went, using my wishes on silly things like towels and cooking utensils. God, I hope this is the only time I'll ever have to spend my Christmas wishes on
cooking utensils. Damn you, moving away from home for a limited amount of time! >_<
...wait, that wasn't the point of this post at all.
The point was more along the lines of something like: Merry Christmas, Happy
Hanukkah (no, I do not know how to spell that one), Cool
Kwanza, Heavenly Hajj (no, I don't know how to spell that one either),
Yurilicious... no, wait...
erm...
Nice Yule (next time you start a holiday, please name it something that can be
alliterated with something other than
yuri, please?) and
Splendid Secular-break-in-winter-that-really-means-nothing-to-you-but-is-nice-because-days-off-from-work-are-always-welcome. Phew. That should have everyone covered. What
is it with all these holidays at the same time, anyways? (Well, at
least the fact that they are spread all over these few weeks enables me to use them to draw attention away from
the fact that this drawing should really have been up yesterday, if not the day before. Except I just pointed attention AT that fact. Oh crap.)
Since you're my readers, you're pretty clever (and I'm
saying that not from an egoist
viewpoint of MY readers = as clever as ME, but from the experience of three and a half years with you, your spot-on
analysis es and the nagging feeling that all my carefully crafted mysteries will be pulled apart by you years before their time because you're simply a good deal smarter than I am), and so, you've probably found out that there will be no regular update this week. Okay, so one doesn't have to be particularly clever to figure that one out, especially not considering the
Universal Law of
Webcomics's statement that "Filler = No Update" (and "Almost Missed Filler = Of Course There's No Update You
Dumbass" - this filler is here primarily because I didn't want to break just about the only unbroken tradition set by this comic: we've had a Christmas filler every year, and we're damn sure going to continue to have that!), there will be no comic this week. And if you didn't make it through
the jumbled mess of lousy
parabombing that was the last sentence, I'll just repeat that: There will be no
comic this week. Not that it's much of a surprise, though,
considering that there have hardly been any comic for the last six months. Sigh.
But, and there is always a but (but this is a positive but): Next year will be differnet. Oh yeah, next year will be differnet. Why, you ask? Because I've made it my New Year's resolution to update this thing. And as we all know, New Year's resolutions NEVER fail.
...
Seriously though, at least the first few updates of next year should be on schedule. I haven't made up my mind about next week yet - technically, Monday is not the first day of the new year but the last of the old, so my resolution will not come into effect until the week after that, so... We'll see. It will most liekly depend entirely on how big my buffer will be by then. ^_~
Well, that was all for now. Merry (belated) multitude of winter holidays, and happy (not belated) New Year!
As anyone who has been following this website should know, I've been very absent for the last few weeks. And if you
haven't noticed my absence, well, that probably means that you've given up on the comic and won't be reading this anyway, so I'm not going to speak to you. Deal with it.
So, now that we've established that I've been absent, I suppose the time has come to explain
why I've been absent. Since I'm working by the
hypothetical idea that there are still some (very faithful and AWESOME) readers out there to whom I can write this, let's just imagine that said (very faithful and AWESOME) readers will now point out the thing I am about to write. I can do this, of course, because the readers are hypothetical. These hypothetical readers will now say: "but Ida, haven't you been absent because you've been working all the time?" (that is, if they're nice readers; a more realistic quote would
probably be "get drawing, you lazy scumbag!" but since they're
my hypothetical readers,
I decide what they get to call me. And "scumbag" is not one of the allowed epithets.) To that question, my answer would be this: "Yes, I
have been working all the time, but what I haven't told you is
why I've been working." And really, my readers should know me well enough to know that I wouldn't be working full-time (and in a crappy super, even) if I didn't have a mighty good reason not just to slack off and draw all the time. That mighty good reason is this: For the last 5 months, I've been working to save up money to take
this half-year course. "Fair enough (except for the lack of comic, of course)" my hypothetical readers might say, but then why haven't you told us anything about it before? Well, that's where it
gets embarrassing. I would probably blush, and then I'd say something more or less identical to this: "
Uhm... well... That's because there is an entrance exam and a limited number of openings in the course, so only the best applicants get to go there. In other words, I didn't want to say that I was going there, because I didn't know if (or, in fact, believe that) I would make it there, and I didn't want to end up bragging high and low about going there and then ending up flunking the exam." "So", my
hypothetical readers would ask, "why are you telling us about it now". To this, I would turn bright red and reply: "because the exam was a month ago and I just
found out that I BLOODY MADE IT!!!"
Hypothetically, this is where my readers would break into unstoppable applause. More realistically, they'd probably ask where the next 5
months's comics will come from.
So, now you know. Or rather, you don't know very much, because I spent so many words saying not very much at all above. Okay, enough with the
hypothetical, here's the hard and cold facts: (this is, in fact, the only part of this post that you really need to read, but most likely, you've already read everything above it, so this information will not come in handy at all. Too bad.)
On
January 7th, I will enroll into
The Animation Workshop's Drawing Academy, a 20-week intensive course teaching, well, drawing. When I finish it on
June 13th, my drawing skills will hopefully be at least 3,000x the level they are at now, but hopefully more, since 3,000
xcrappy isn't very good. This course is something I've been wanting to do since my first year of High School, and the school (which is, coincidentally, the only Animation College in Denmark) is very close yo being the coolest place on earth, so this is more or less a dream come true. It is, however, breathtakingly expensive, because our lovely Ministry of Education apparently doesn't believe art to be something worth much of anything, so that's why I've been working so hard to get enough money. I'm very close to my goal by now. (And if you were wondering what I've working with now that the job at the goddamn super is over: I'm a substitute mailman, helping out at various post offices. It's actually a really good job - the pay is better than in the super, I get exercise, I won't have to talk to grumpy customers, I can listen to music while I work, and since I get a new route every day, it never gets truly repetitive. It can, however, be pretty
tiring, so I've had plenty of afternoons where I didn't have any energy left when I got home. And yes, that IS affecting the comic.)
So, there you have half of why I'm busy doing everything else than the
comic currently. The other half of that is that the school is located in the town of
Viborg, which, for those who've never heard of it before, is in the other end of the country from Copenhagen. Which means I'll have to move away from home. Which again means that in the less than a month I have left here, I have to finish up most of the loose ends I have dangling around, say goodbye to all the people I won't be seeing until summer, and, most work-heavy, actually prepare to move. Which in a weird twist of nonsense has come to mean that I'm currently entangled in a massive project to shine up the room that I will
not be living in for the next six months. The world is a weird place.
So, and now we're finally reaching the part that's directly relevant to you people,
hypothetical and not: What about the comic? I'll be absolutely honest and say that I simply don't
know. Oh, sure I want to do it, but we all know how little my wanting to do the comic has to do with my actually making it. The major obstacles I can see to future updates are simply that I will probably be very busy while I'm at the school, and since what I will be busy with will be drawing, there is also a not insignificant chance that I will be sick and tired of drawing when I finally have the time. Oh, and there is the possibility of me developing an all-encompassing, hectic and popularity-filled social life that will take all my time away from drawing over there, but since it's me, I severely doubt that
that'll happen. On the plus side, me going away from home will mean a
lot more free time, since I won't have to do 'weekend projects' with my mother (the dreaded bane of my weekends, normally revolves around cleaning, tidying or
IKEA), I suppose I won't have homework, and *sob* my friends are in the other end of the country, so our sleepovers will probably become a great deal more sparse. There is also the possibility that drawing all the time will make me
more creative (especially since the course focuses mainly on life drawing; I'll probably develop at least semi-painful urges to do
manga artwork on a regular basis) and that doing the
comic will be a lot easier once I (
hopefully) improve my drawing speed. That, and I really want to do this thing.
And now I want to sleep.
