The last 7 weeks were the craziest time I ever experienced in my whole life. When I launched the Wormworld Saga Online Graphic Novel on 25th December I had no idea what would follow. Sure, I anticipated to get some attention from the digital art community that I'm a member of for 10 years now. And I also hoped for some feedback from the webcomics community that I entered at the beginning of 2010 in order to find out how webcomics were done these days. What I wasn't prepared for was the avalanche of positive feedback from all sorts of people from all around the world that literally floored me when it hit. And just when I thought that things couldn't possibly get more exciting, I had to drive my wife to the hospital because our son was going to be born.
The last weeks were a surreal mixture of answering emails, changing diapers, giving interviews, getting not enough sleep, sending out prints and getting even less sleep. The bottom line of all that is:
I'm thankful!
I'm thankful for your encouraging feedback and the strength and support that it gave to me. I'm thankful for your active help in spreading the word about the Wormworld Saga and I'm thankful for your contributions to the project - your donations, your print orders and your fan translations. I'm thankful for the opportunities your ethusiasm opened up for me. And I'm thankful to be a father.
The Wormworld Saga Online Graphic Novel has now nearly reached 400.000 reads and since it's already mid-February it's time to work on the next chapter.
The first step towards the second chapter will be to create the preliminary version in greyscales. This is the step in which I'm laying out the plot and where I roughly define the staging and lighting of each panel. I'll try to polish the storytelling at this stage as far as possible so that essentially, when the preliminary version is finished, you already would be able to read the second chapter. Of course I won't let you. No, you have to wait until everything is nice and colorful.
Well, and that brings me directly to the single question that was the hardest to bear for me in the last few weeks:
"when will we be able to read the second chapter?"
Let me show you my generic schedule. I have it hanging in a prominent place in my studio:
Here's a closeup:
This is the schedule of a typical week. Here you can see, what I'm doing all day throughout the year. Blue fields are sleep (thanks to little Lucas this visualisation is highly idealized...), yellow fields are eating and household times. The big fat red block is my day job framed by the orange commute. The pink fields depict family time. As you can see, I'm reserving the weekends for that. Well, and last but not least, there are the green fields which are Wormworld Saga time. 10 hours a week. That's my schedule for 2011.
I worked after this schedule the last year and as you all know, and as is documented on this blog, the first chapter took me the whole year to finish. Looking at the schedule there shouldn't be any questions left why that was the case. It's only a fraction of my time that I can actually spend on the project and you can imagine that it's not easy for me to return to this schedule now that I know that so many of you are longing for the next chapter. But for the moment that's what it's going to be - another year of waiting for the second chapter.
However, I set myself a goal for this year. It's a high goal but I'm going to stick to it and do anything to make it happen:
This shall be the last time you'll have to wait a whole year for a new chapter!
I want to get this huge red block out of my schedule. Just imagine what it would mean for the Wormworld Saga if I could use all that time for its creation! I mentioned it on many occasions - if I'm able to generate my income through the Wormword Saga I would be able to create at least 4 chapters every year. That would mean that you would have to wait only three months for each new chapter. You wouldn't get a milestone update every one and a half months but every week!
To reach that point is my biggest dream right now. I have already taken the first steps to make this dream come true. When the time comes I will need your help. But after the last 7 weeks I have no fear that you will let me hanging. I strongly believe that together we can make it work!
