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  How's about two A* pages a day?Sep 22, 2011 5:18 AM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:I'm going to try to go back to doing two A* pages a day.
 
That will probably mean one in the evening and one in what will technically be the morning of the next day. I'll post a link to every new page on Facebook and on Twitter as soon as each one goes up, so follow me on one of those if you'd like to get notification immediately when there's a new page! Or you could just reload the front page of the site every few hours, I don't mind. :D
 
I'll probably only manage one page on most Fridays, since that's the one evening of the week when I peel myself off the computer and go hang out with my poor neglected friends. And if you were following the comic back when I was doing two pages a day before (that was prior to this latest episode, more or less), you'll know that there will just be days here and there where something will come up and I'll only manage page. But still, it should be mostly two pages a day.
 
I don't want to sacrifice visual quality, but I think I've gotten faster lately--I had to when I switched to a standing desk mid-episode, because I couldn't stand and draw for very long! :o--so I think I have a shot at pulling this off semi-decently. And there's a certain brisk energy my two-a-day pages sometimes had that my one-a-day pages are sometimes lacking, if that makes sense. And I worry less about the pacing if I can get two pages done a day; with just one a day, I feel much less comfortable doing sort of dramatic pauses and glances and all that--which are things I really want to be able to do; I've already found myself cutting pages a few times in this episode to move things along, and I don't like doing that.
 
I haven't got *that* much faster at drawing, though, and I don't want to feel *too* rushed and sloppy as I try to get two pages out, so I'm going to have to cut down on a few non-A*-comic things I've been doing.
 
For one thing, I'm pausing what had been my other daily comic, Sketchy. It's a nice warm-up each day and I do have some fun with it, but even drawing it as hastily as possible, it still takes a measurable chunk of each work day--and while there are maybe a few dozen really lovely people who follow it (thank you!!!), A* has at least 100 times more readers, so Sketchy is looking like a not-all-that-clever use of my time. Alas, poor Sketchy!
 
I also probably won't have nearly as many lengthy semi science/research blog entries, since those actually take quite a bit of time to prepare. I'll miss doing that, because I really do enjoy looking into interesting space science things or whatever, and posting nice big cool photos of them, but I'm pretty sure 99% of A* readers are here primarily--or even exclusively--for the comic, so that's probably what I should concentrate on.
 
It's possible this won't work out at all, in which case I'll happily be able to resurrect Sketchy, and do more in-depth blog articles. But for now I'll be trying this two-a-day thing again.
 
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And I don't have a nice photo sciencey article or new Lance Murdoch (Unqualified Psychoanalyst) comic today 'cause I spent the rest of my time switching the "portfolio" page for my photo-based portraits from a regular old HTML page to a nice tidy script-generated display that will update itself so I don't have to muck with my text editor every time I make a new drawing. It doesn't look any different at the moment--except for being centered--but once it gets more than a certain number of images in there--the default is currently set to 20--it will automatically split them into sorted displays across multiple pages. And that sounds dumb and boring but I'm actually quite pleased with it because split-page lists have always scared me and I'd avoided trying them up until now. =P (If you do want to see the simple split-page listing I'm so inordinately pleased with, you can see it if you set the per-page image limit to something small, like one.)
 
 
 
 
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