Lea Hernandez, a fellow cartoonist and comic-book artist who I’m only marginally worthy to call a peer, just lost her home, computer, artwork, and pets in a house fire.

Immediate needs appear to have been met, but speaking from (my wife’s) experience, she’s going to (ahem) burn through money pretty quickly just trying to find ways to keep working, eating, and feeding and housing her family.

You can help. The button above is hooked up straight to the PayPal account for “divalea [at] gmail”.

You can read more about the ordeal here, here, and here.

Be generous, please.

Okay… the last two pages of the Bonus Story for Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between have been painted and uploaded for assembly into the book.

I still have a whole bunch of margin space to fill, and I have a deadline of September 10th. Oh, and I need to create the cover, too.

No more score-keeping on rows. I need to come up with a new system for counting the remaining book-and-buffer work, and restart the game on Monday the 28th.
–Howard

click here for the comic

Today I flood-filled all 26 remaining rows of Bonus Story, and then finished shading 10 of them.

By row-count, I’m still way behind, but I’m going to have the Bonus Story finished by the time I leave. I may even finish it tomorrow. If I do, I’ll have plenty of time to script the Schlock that needs to be drawn upon my return.

Scorecard: 61 rows to go, 2 workdays left (and they’re both half-days.)

But let’s look at what work REALLY needs to be done before I go:

1) Shade 8 rows of Bonus Story.
2) Script 18 rows of Buffer.

I’ve decided to sacrifice a week of buffer for Worldcon, so there’s 36 rows I don’t have to do this month. 61-36=25, which means I dropped a row in my math somewhere. Still, it feels pretty good to know that I’ve adhered so well to the plan (which included losing a week if necessary.)

Tomorrow: 8 rows of Bonus Story get put to bed.