Fanelorn.net

Well *someone* is certainly smug about the contents of this article.

Hello there! If you ended up in this page, it probably means you are still hoping for updates on one of my comics, either Sinful or God of Destruction.

I owe you a massive apology, and a thorough explanation, if you are willing to sit through it.


The truth is, at the point my lengthy hiatus began, I was juuuuuust at the beginning of a slow and steady spiral into depression. I had no idea, of course. Didn't really notice until 2016, when I became a complete wreck and a shrink paraded out words such as "anhedonia" and "dysthymia" at me. Most of those years I was merely dealing with anhedonia-- the feeling that everything you do is kind of mediocre and everything around you is kind of uninteresting, and petting your dog makes her happy, which is good, but is kind of a chore, and tires your arm, so you just do it because you like your dog and not because it brings you any particular joy. Your emotions start feeling kind of watered down. Except anger and sadness, which for whatever reason just cling to you.

Anhedonia sucks, guys, and dysthymia even more. If any of the above sounds even the littlest bit familiar to you, don't be a dope and wait around for it to get worse. Get thee to a shrink. It'll change your life.

Anyway; often during that time I'd marshal my strength and say "I will draw a bunch of pages and do a massive update and surprise everyone!" and I actually did draw several pages for both comics, and some of them were even colored. But then I'd check back on the comic site to find wordpress had fucked something up and the entire layout was jumbled, or that a plugin had stopped working months ago and needed replacing/deleting/whatever-- small and petty things that nevertheless just... seemed to suck the resolution out of me. I couldn't do my big triumphant return to a broken site! I had to fix it! So I would try and sometimes even succeed in fixing it, but then uploading what few pages were done would seem like a heavy and unattainable chore, almost like I was doing something wrong somehow. And something was wrong-- not just depression-wise, although that was definitely the biggest factor in my hesitation.

Eventually I had a sudden burst of energy and sat down to really write everything. All the things. I bought Scrivener and set out to lay down a proper timeline and plotline and write down synopses for every future chapter. And I did! For Sinful at least. I diligently wrote down my previously vague and scattered visions of how the story was supposed to go, and noticed Something. Then I went on to try and do the same for God of Destruction, and halfway through I noticed a different Something.

☙ Something #1: Sinful works much better as a written story. It just does! The pacing, the plot, everything. I could certainly make it work as a comic, I had already planned how for the trickier parts, but it wouldn't be pleasant. Not in its producing, nor in its slow, update-by-update reading. As a test I rewrote the entire first chapter in text only, and not only was I able to express all the action with little loss, but I was able to add much and more-- inserting inner thoughts and comments and important characters and worldbuilding details I hadn't even come up with back when I first drew that initial chapter...

Armed now with a complete timeline and synopsis it seems much simpler to write a book with some illustrations, instead of struggling with a slow-paced, non-action comic where you draw everything panel by panel and have to stress over not only making it look good, but making it read dynamically and effortlessly even when it's an entire chapter of two people talking in one single room *cough*chapter5*cough*.

☙ Something #2: God of Destruction is broken. Irretrievably so? Perhaps not. But not in a way that seems worth the effort of fixing. The problem is that it was, from the start, a seat-of-my-pants project with nothing but a premise to hold it together. And the premise had no resolution-- as I drew the first chapter I didn't even know what would happen in the second, much less in the final one. Oh, the premise was very clever if I do say so myself, but clever does not a good story make, and I found that I kept inserting side characters in order to patch up holes in a story I was still halfway through building, as I built it. And that meant the story kept inflating at an unreasonable pace. I came up with a half-baked plan for the "resolution" and even had a final confrontation sort of storyboarded in my head, and therein lay the mistake that put a crack through the whole tale: I knew a lot less about life in 2008 than I know now. A fundamental midway point, one I had already even laid foreshadowing for, turned out to be a lot more objectionable in hindsight than back when I first thought of it.

I'm not squeamish when it comes to telling stories, and this particular moment wasn't even violent or gory or bad in any way... it was simply that the context in which it would inevitably be inserted made the whole thing something I did not feel like going into. And that was when the story shriveled and died; when I found I was not willing to write it, or even to write around it. Thus, I pronounce God of Destruction officially dead. For the fans still somehow out there, I am truly sorry, and willing to give out a synopsis of the original plans if asked, but more than this I will not do.


In sum: Sinful fans can look forward to a written and improved form of the story, published either in AO3 or this website depending on how much special formatting I'll require, but God of Destruction fans will sadly be left empty-handed. But.

I'm not done with comics.

I've learned my lessons now; I'm plotting and planning everything beforehand, from the number of chapters to the characters' wardrobes. There shall be model sheets galore.

And it's not gonna be in Wordpress. Fuck Wordpress.