Fight or Flight

You have noticed a change, haven’t you?  It’s unsettled you, perhaps made you twitch.  Can’t quite put your finger on it?  It’s okay, everything will be all right.  Breathe in, breathe out.  It’s just a donation button.

Both Artist and myself have, so far, been doing this project for free.  In our free time.  Which, as you might notice from our last post, is slipping away from us.

Now, I want us to update more often.  I want to get back on a weekly schedule, and possibly, a three-times-a-week schedule in the future.  For that to happen, both Artist and I would have to be able to justify the time that this took in monetary terms.

As a first step, I unveil our shiny PayPal donation button.  If you like the story, and you can, and you want to, drop some pennies in the jar.  :)  If you’d like something more concrete in return for your hard-earned fundage, we have that coming up in short order.

Thanks for your time, and thanks for reading the comic!

Flyers are created and printed.  I’m only bringing fifty with me to the con, and I’m pretty sure that they’ll go fast.  If you’re headed to the con and want one, find me and ask.

There are going to be a ton of panels on the different aspects of running a successful webcomic, and I’m going to be attending quite a few of them.  I’ll also be speaking on a panel on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, though those will be more novel- and short story-focused.

To say that I am excited would be an understatement.

If I were just awakened from a slumber of who-knows-how-long, I’m not sure if I’d be asking the voice in my head if it was my creator.

I’d be asking where the bathroom is.  I would need to pee very, VERY badly.  Wouldn’t you?

I can’t blame First for wanting to know things.  There’s very little, if anything, that he can remember.  He’s woken up, knowing that he needs to run some self-repairs.  That implies that he was at some other point new, and awoken for the first time.  His nearest source of info is in his head, so he goes straight to asking questions.  I have to applaud his bluntness, really.

Because I’m an interactive kind of guy, I’m wondering what kinds of things you, our wonderful readers, would like to read about in these blog entries.  More personal life stuff?  More how-this-works stuff?  More background about the story?  More advertising links to my/our other projects? (*cough*Writery Page*cough*)  Let us know!

With all of the webcomics that I read – and I am addicted, let me tell you – I should have some clue about what writers generally talk about in their rants. Sure, the story development, tweaks they’ve made, and major events in their lives…
My wife and I are going to have another baby! I’m worried financially, but ecstatic emotionally. I have more than enough room in my heart for another little bundle of crazy (hey, I can’t imagine that any offspring of mine would be sane), that’s for sure.
So, riddle me this: what happens when an AI figures out that it shouldn’t be alone?

Chapter 0 progresses! After a short glimpse into the mind of an intelligence that’s not quite right, we have our first glimpse at interaction. There’s a new error in the system.

I had to purposefully shift my writing style when Rick and I began this project. Anything that I’d done in this short of increments had come out somewhere between bursts of one-pagers and short stories. Visual elements were implied and described, not explicitly stated. Writing frame-by-frame has presented a new challenge. I’m verbose by nature, and there’s no place for that in comic dialogue. Capturing the essence of the characters that will be unfolding over these upcoming Fridays will be a continual challenge, I think.

I hope that you’ll visit next Friday (or anywhen in between, really). Until then, stay caffeinated.

P.S. – The navigation buttons should appear in the upper-right, as well as the link to our RSS feed.