I scripted, pencilled, and inked the last of the Bonus Story for Schlock Mercenary: The Blackness Between today. It’s more violent than the last bonus story. four of the eight pages have some sort of weapon discharge depicted, and of the four non-firing pages, only one of them doesn’t have a weapon being drawn or brandished.

There is BLAM. There is Omminous Hummmm. I haven’t colored them yet, but when I do there will be THOOOOM.

By the way, 8 rows of work I thought I’d be doing isn’t on my plate anymore. The Bonus Story topped out at 30 strips, not 32.

The score, then, is 115 rows to go, and 8 days left. I’m more than halfway there – backtracking through the scorecards, I started this with 264 rows on my plate. In 8 workdays I’ve pencilled, inked, scripted, or colored 141 rows (and decided not to do 8).

(I would be much happier if this work-to-do counter included the cover and the huge pile of needed marginalia. I refuse to distract myself just yet, though.)

Apparently the Schlock Mercenary webserver had some issues last night. I missed all the excitement because I was in bed early. It’s probably a good thing — I’ve got work to do today, and needed the 11 hours of rest I got.

The server guys, bless their 24×7 hearts, are looking into the problem, which only manifests itself under extremely heavy loads. Yes, it’s related to the dynamic page content, but it shouldn’t be difficult to track down and kill. For the next couple of days, however, the blog under the comic is going to be absent.

–Howard

I’m taking the day off today. It’s Sunday.

Unfortunately, for me that means THINKING about work instead of doing it, and I just realized that there is an additional 47(ish) rows of work to do on the book before it’s done… That’s how many pages need margin art or new footnotes.

That’s fine. I can do that. But I’m not going to do it TODAY, no matter how tempting it is, and regardless of the fact that next Friday and Saturday have activities on them that turn them from two workdays into one half-day.

I’m taking the day off today.

It was slow going today. Lots of killed time early on. I got Five rows colored, then took off to the Keep where I got five rows inked.

Ten just isn’t good enough. I got home around 8:00pm, and decided to forge ahead for 18 or better. I pulled it off, and got another 11 rows colored, for a total of 21 rows today.

Scorecard: 145 rows to go, 9 days left.

I’m hoping to have the Bonus Story completely inked by the end of the day on Monday. With almost no effort at all I should have the buffer colored through September 2nd by Tuesday. That leaves me seven days (four of which are half-days, but let’s not think too hard on that) to get the Bonus story completely colored, and to get a couple more weeks of buffer scripted, pencilled and inked.

Couched in those terms, it seems unlikely I’ll pull it off without slipping one of those weeks of buffer. We shall see…

Tomorrow is Sunday. I’m taking the day off to go to Church and re-read Makeshift Miracle by Jim Zubkavich.