Coheed and Cambria Dragonfly Plush Toy

I made a thing with Coheed and Cambria! It's pretty exciting to finally be able to properly announce this. A little under a year ago, a representative of the Evil Ink, Coheed's label/comic company, reached out to me asking if I'd be interested in working on a project with them. Just coming off my successful Kickstarter campaign for the Elements toys, I was on a high for making more toys and exploring new challenges. So, obviously I said yes. When I first received the email, I was in a friend's car driving to get dinner, or something like that, out in Portland. It was only about a day after finishing Emerald City Comicon, and I was feeling pretty exhausted from the con, and everything really. It had only been a few months into the year and I was already busier than I had been in a long time. So when the email popped up on my phone, I pretty much had a triple take. I even showed my friend and was like "um... you see this too right?" Once I realized that my mind wasn't playing tricks on me, in state of an absolutely delirium, I replied and the conceptualization of this toy began!

Original concept design by Denis Caron

Original concept design by Denis Caron

I mentioned the "exploring new challenges" in reference to this toy, because this was my first toy in which I was "breaking the mold." In fact, it was my factory's first time too. We had a very specific idea in mind, and it wasn't particularly an industry standard. They had a hard time understanding what it was we wanted to do, as most plush toys are plump and squishy. To them, they've done toy making one way for a very long time, and were convinced I wasn't sure of what I wanted to do with this. I was, so I pushed them to try. I have to say, I'm proud of the factory I work with, particularly my primary contact for championing the idea for me, because only after a few revisions we nailed it. We made a toy that looked pretty damn spot on to my design.

The band, their management, the factory, and every moving piece that made this thing come together, did so, so fantastically well, that I have to say this experience has been nothing short of amazing. Music is my heart, it's the one constant in my life that has always lead me in the right direction, so it's been an honor to work with rock legends like Coheed and Cambria as a part of my journey to continue doing what I love so much, creating.

The toy is available at the band's official merch store, and at the merch booths on their tour! 

Destined Legends: The Fulfillment

The Decobot Office is literally Ali's apartment living room.

Now that we've discussed my involvement in the birth, the development, and the art of the game we can finally we talk about one of the most stressful and time consuming sections of the launch of Destined Legends. I feel it's important to take the time to acknowledge this, not only give everyone reading this an overview of what this involves but to possibly demystify the conception that Decobot is a large company. Our team is very small: Ali, Shawn and I are core team, we alone dealt with the development and production of the game and were the only ones handling any of the orders received during or after the Kickstarter campaign.

Little did Ali know that this human sized bag of peanuts still wasn't enough to pack all the orders.

After a grueling few months in production (of which Ali took full lead), the game arrived in Long Beach, California one day into San Diego Comic Con. As if stress wasn't high enough getting ready for the con, Ali was forced to leave the convention center and rush 2 1/2 hours north to receive the game before the port closed for the day. Then he had to bring 1000 copies each of the game, sidebars, and playboards on another journey to Northern Los Angeles approximately 1 from there and finally drive a car full of everything back to San Diego in time for day 2 of the con. I still remember vividly how physically drained Ali was for the remainder of the con. If it wasn't for his brother helping at the Decobot booth (I was too busy manning my own booth), Ali would have likely collapsed. On top of still having a full time job at Apple, he was the one fully in charge of paying our artists, finding and communicating our products vision to the production company in China, and coordinating our affairs with customs. Ali truly is the unsung hero of making this game happen.

Hand assembled Manticore Correction Cards packs

With San Diego Comic Con over, the hope was that we could breath for even a day, but that was not the case. The games were in our hands and it was time to get it out to 303 backers and over 200 pre-orders (both online and from Anime Expo). As we were getting ready to ship these out it had been called to our attention an error had slipped past our tired eyes and made it into the final production of one of the creatures cards, the Manticore. We quickly placed an order for 4,000 new cards to be printed (4 of this card shows up on each Battle Set) and had to wait for them to come in before we could ship a single game. This however did not mean that we twiddled our thumbs in anticipation, instead we began pre-packing and labeling boxes, sorting orders and preparing for the thunderstorm of shipments, order tickets and other unexpected events that would follow. 

Me on a supply run.

It's a known fact that we raised $23,000 dollars for our Kickstarter, that sounds quite amazing doesn't it? We were so excited about the fact that we were going to likely have some extra cash to be able to pay for conventions, advertising and use this money other essential things to try to build a business as a result of our successful funding of the game. This however was not the case, and here in lies one of the hardest lessons we had to learn. Things never go as planned and even if you set a sensible budget, when doing something as big as this, you can not plan every aspect of who or what will need money from you at any given time. With a few backers bailing out, taxes removed from our initial earnings, the printing of the Manticore correction card and apology cards explaining how and why we amended a new card, errors in art prints that needed reprinting, miscalculating supplies, and the worst of all the Post Office raising their shipping prices for international shipping rate ( 1/3 of our orders), we exceeded our budget. 

We spent many late nights like this. [Pictured: Shawn Showkati]

I really can not stress how much the shipment of these games really affected our budget. My first book L.A.W.L.S. Vol. 1 weighs between 1-2lb (depending on which edition), and on average and cost between $3-6 dollars to ship domestically. It also cost no more than $10 or so to be shipped internationally. Considering that, plus our calculated research from the Post Offices website we decide on reasonable prices for the games shipment. This however was before two key factors changed. Firstly, we weren't able to get accurate weights of things from china because the game had yet to be assembled. The actual weight per item ended up being much more than we expected. The second factor is what I mentioned before, the Post Office considerably upped their prices to ship all orders, particularly international orders. Just to give you an idea of what it cost to ship out a Genesis Collectors Set (our highest ordered product) here are some numbers:  It cost somewhere around $12 to ship domestically and international orders can range anywhere from $25-45. This means that after every 3-5 games we ship we've already spent around $100. It doesn't take long for a couple of those to add up to a grand, and so on. You can see now how we burned through a lot more money than we had expected. 

This is just one of many shipments that went out into the world over the duration of fulfillment.

After weighing our options, Ali reluctantly had to take out a business lone to make sure that the remaining orders would be shipped to everyone who had paid for the game. Fortunately this also allows Ali the opportunities to cover other emerging expenses as well as begin the process of developing new projects under the Decobot name! Luckily we can now say that all the games have been shipped and that we've finally been able to breath before what is coming next! I can't talk too much about what we are working on at this moment, but one thing that is actively in the works is the next set of cards for the game! The next series will have original artwork by me and other fantastic artists. With being part of this game from the beginning and now watching the growth of Decobot success, I must say, I can't wait to see where this game and all Ali's future projects go!

Destined Legends: The Art & Design

Sketch by Cari Corene for Beta Release

Now that we've explored some of what it took to get Destined Legends through alpha and beta testing, I'd like to move on to my involvement in the art and design of the overall game. By the time we entered the beta testing stages of development we had already hired on two of my personal friends, Scott Ferguson and Cari Corene, to do art for the game. Up until this point nothing about the game had any sort of risks, we were merely having fun and hoping we could make something real from it. With our first Kickstarter for the Destined Legends Battle Set on the way, we knew that we needed some nice artwork to relay our artistic vision for the game. So our first risk began, paying for some art pieces before we were even funded. 

Initial Roslynn Sketch Concept by Scott Ferguson.

Art Planning

Fortunately since Scott and Cari are close friends of ours they gave us decent rates but all the same, we paid them very well over the duration of the project and the art was not cheap. If you're curious as to why I didn't step in at this point and do some art myself, I discuss that, our choice of artists, and a bit about the individual artists backgrounds in a previous blog about the birth of Destined Legends. Since we were limited in the amount of money we could spend, we had to sit and make choices on what pieces we should pay for up front and what exactly were wanted to reveal early on. We decided to pay for 1 Dragon (from Cari), 1 Legend (from Scott) and preliminary sketches of the remaining Dragons and Legends. As you can see from the image above, working with friends in an environment like this leads to silly things that will never show up in the final production, such as Scott's "the money $hot" joke or other childish musings we've written into character descriptions or future comic scripts. 

Art place holders featuring art from L.A.W.L.S. and Scout Crossing

Card Design

Being that I stepped aside from doing illustrations for this release of the game, what I spent most of my time artistically (at this stage) being involved in was focusing on the design of the cards with Ali. The card's actual layout went through 10 revisions, each refinement being a direct reflection of things discovered during play testing. One thing that we realized and struggled with a lot was something I believe all artists have issues with: refusing to let go of initial concepts merely because they look nice. For any aspiring artists or anyone seeking to create something like this remember one thing, just because something is visually pleasing and presentable that doesn't mean it is the right way to go. In real world production, understanding ergonomics (or human factors) is a key factor in the success of a product because it involves the understanding of interactions between a human and different elements of a working system; Just because it works in theory or simply looks really good does not mean that the person using the item will understand how to use it. The location of things on the card became a huge point of development and were altered all the way until the closed beta was printed and shipping out to Kickstarter backers.

Artistic Work on Cards

Punisher (Rare Card) - Art by Denis Caron

Though I said I had to stepped aside on doing illustrations for the cards themselves that's not entirely true. I was doing two things before the game went into production: Art touchups and illustration for one card.

It's not uncommon in the artistic field, especially in animation and comics, to have one artist fully draw something out and another to take the submitted piece to clean up certain lines or modify the art slightly to work better for production. For example, on a few of Scott's designs we decided to make certain elements of the art, like a sword popping out of the appointed art space and overlay parts the frame of the card (the card above is an example of what I'm talking about). Since I've worked closely with Scott through out the years we've shared a lot of techniques, which led to me being able make alterations to his pieces without it looking any different than if he had done it himself.  Also, due to how heavy Scott's workload was near the end of development, he wasn't able to complete one of cards; time constraints on being able to get the game into production and receive it in time for both San Diego Comic Con and Kickstarter reward shipments became a pressing matter. The "Punisher" sword featured on the Daxtes card that Scott illustrated did not have it's own card. Since we very much wanted to have it as part of the 5 rare cards we were releasing in the initial run of product, we had to figure out fast how to go about this. We toyed with the idea of having Scott crop out the sword directly from his original drawing (his suggestion) and I touch up the art, but the sword would have ended up looking dull and not unique enough to be considered a rare card. At this point I decided to go ahead and redraw the sword using Scott's design as a reference. The card above is the version that was delivered in the final production of the game!

Mark of the Dragon Design by Denis Caron

The Mark of The Dragon

The last artistic thing that I wanted to discuss was the "Mark of the Dragon" design I did for the project. During the last leg of our Kickstarter the possibility that one of our stretch goals, a official Destined Legends shirt, was gonna be unlocked. The second it seemed as if it was going to be a possibility Ali gave me the green light to design it. Though the stretch goal was not met, we were so enthused about the design that I created that we decided that we should print a limited run of the design (only 72 units). Ali pretty much gave me free reign to do whatever I wanted with concept, which was excellent for me. My initial concept for the design started with a style of drawing I've done all my life. I'm not quite sure how to explain it but it's basically a combination of very sharp and round shapes. While drawing Autumn's magic effects in L.A.W.L.S., I used the same style but over the duration of working on the comic, I changed my technique from adding to subtracting shapes. Basically this means I would draw the over all shape I was looking for and use the erase tool to make different parts of that shape more unique. This is precisely what I did with the dragon above. A little secret, I erased my initials into the bottom half of the dragon's torso! Do you see it? 

After running through a few concepts and discussing the idea of exact what Ali would want this design to signify, we decided I should go with something that looked a bit more like a tribal like design. Reject ideas including blood spatters from an epic war (too much like Dragon Age II) and gold that had fallen from a mixing pot that a smith would have had while crafting weapons. We went with the tribal design because it fits well with the lore we've been developing. This mark would be something you would see inscribed on a building, painted on a rock, or embroidered on a flag to indicate that a traveler is about to enter a place blessed by the spirits of the dragons. I can't go too much into this at this time, but there is a particular location that Ali and I had in mind on our world map that has a strong connection to the spirit realm, where the dragons reside. This emblem would be found there.

Unfortunately we are out of most sizes of the shirts unless you wear 3XL or 4XL, but if you like this design you can buy "The Mark of the Dragon Print" in my store now! The my next segment on Destined Legends will discuss fulfillment.

Destined Legends: The Development

This last year I've been so swamped by the various projects that I've been working on behind the scenes, that I've almost forgotten to clue everyone in on exactly what it is that I've been doing! Now that you've read my previous blog on a bit of the story on how Destined Legends begun, I thought I'd take some time to expand upon my actual involvement in the development and what it took to get this thing made. 

Alpha Testing

Early Version of the Destined Legends Playboard

Before we even started looking for artists, we had to make sure we had a pretty solid concept worth our time. I'll tell you one thing, when Ali and Shawn (the games creators) first approached me about this game, I was super intrigued and I couldn't wait to try it. The first play through of the game though was rough. The concepts were definitely there but coming from years of playing JRPGs, MMORPGS, Adventure Games, and so on, the amount of influence we could pull from was enormous! The original version of the game had Boss battles, armor, accessories, high level HP and so on. In a video game this is ok, you slowly learn and find new things as you explore the vast world you've entered into and can spend over 20+ hours of game play to figure it all out. This, in a card game however, is a huge barrier of entry for most people and can quickly turn a new player off before they even give the game a chance; me included. It can be daunting if you are expected to understand everything before you even get a chance to play and we quickly learned what things were over complicating the game. For example, using hit points that equal 1, 5, and 20 is much easier to manage of than numbers above 1000 (it's over 9000!). It's not that the math was overly difficult, but when you are expect to also keep track of maintaining magic points and remembering what accessories have what skill for certain attacks, the game becomes more like dealing with your accounting books before tax time than an enjoyable way to relax with friends.

First play test with people outside of development.

Even after taking out some of the extraneous mechanics, we learned the hard way that not everyone has the same learning curve or understanding of what you assume to be common gaming concepts. After several months of "in house" alpha testing we began to introduce the game to our first round of people outside of development. When we hosted our first play test and focus group, we were rather surprised by results. As pictured above, the first two people who tried out our game had never played a card game like this, let alone RPGs before. What was really interesting for us as developers was to watch people who didn't know any gamer jargon what-so-ever start to not only understand phrases like "you take 10 HP" but use them and even get excited when they get to say it! This first test went surprisingly well, not because the game was in any way perfected, but more so because the two people were genuinely having fun! The downfall however was the time it took for them to learn the games core rules and be able to complete the game in a reasonable time. If I remember correctly this particular play test exceeded 3 hours! 3 HOURS! Thank God for good beers and great company. 

Early Destined Legends play test before any final art was added.

Mind you, our goal was to make this game playable in under an hour, not a several hour endeavor. We understood that the above case was based on the players lack previous knowledge of these types of games, but from the notes we took we were able to re-evaluate why certain aspects of the game took so long, even when we played it between the development team. I think in these first 6 or so months of development we scrapped, added and refined so many aspects of the game that by the time we were ready to enter Beta Testing the game was barely recognizable from the original conception.

Beta Testing 

Testing without a playboard, making sure it wasn't needed for basic play.

The way we went about introducing the game to focus groups was sort of interesting to me.  Instead of starting with "mega gamers" who would no doubt understand the game with out a problem, we started in reverse. The group above consisted of my girlfriend at the time and a good friend from college, neither of which played games often (if they did it wasn't the hard stuff). We then expanded to groups of intermediate/casual players and then people who considered themselves gaming experts. I'm not sure this was intentional for any of us. It may have been an unconscious comfort thing to make sure we wouldn't embarrass ourselves or perhaps we just wanted to challenge the mechanical skills of the game as we got more confident in it. It was likely both reasons, but either way, it worked out to our advantage. This fact forced us to immediately cut out the fat that made the game way too hefty of an idea for the casual player, finding the essence of what was important to the core game then rebuilt it from the bottom up, challenging and improving it each step of the way.

Our core Beta Testing Group near the end of development.

Our core Beta Testing Group near the end of development.

Once we got to a stage that we felt the game had all the elements we wanted in it and that the game was getting close to production we began our most intensive section of testing! At this point we started having multiple games going at once with people who really understood all the rules and asked them to do everything possible to essentially break the game. When we said this, the true creativity of some of our more advanced players came out. They would try layers of different strategies, things that we probably would have never came up with on our own and really challenged us to make sure every rule made sense. I'm really glad that we requested this from our testers because it helped us weed out some really odd ball loop holes from that came from the particular phrases of our rules and little mechanical glitches that worked well in most situations but wouldn't in the very specific situations they would discover.

Open Beta Test Deck [Kickstarter Collector's Release Only]

One thing I must stay that I'm incredibly proud of about this game was how diligently Ali worked on the game's core structure as a whole. He would show me algorithms he developed to keep game play balanced as a player would level up, probabilities that certain attacks would succeed and ratios to insure that cards would be pulled out of the deck at decent rate. I'm not sure that I would have the know how or even have the patience to come up with these things on my own. Ali however had a dream and was determined to make it work. I wasn't there for all the building of the game's mechanics (that was made from Shawn and Ali expertise) but I know seeing how important this endeavor was to them keep myself and all the people who volunteered their time testing this thing, motivated.

In the next blog I will discuss the artistic development and overall creation of the game's design.

Destined Legends: The Birth of a New Idea

Recently I’ve been posting quite a bit on Twitter about and reblogging post from a mysterious entity called “Destined Legends.” At this point, I’m sure some of you have noticed, and many of you may have even followed the links and looked into it a bit, that DL is a Trading Card Game. Once you get there though, I’m sure some of you are confused as to why I keep talking about it. I know there is no readily apparently explanation as to what my involvement in it is, so, I thought that now would be as good of a time as any to sit down and explain both what this project is and what it is that I am doing with it.

WHAT IS DESTINED LEGENDS?

As I stated, Destined Legends is a Trading Card Came, a bit like Magic the Gathering but much more like those old school turn based J-RPGs from the 1990 to early 2000s (example include Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, and even Pokemon). As long as I can remember my buddy Ali Showkati (the creator of the game) has always talked about making an RPG. When him and I were in Highschool he often spoke about making a video game with the same title and how he wanted ME to do the art for it. As time passed though, we both moved away for college and started working on different individual projects. I had almost forgotten that he even had this idea in his mind until recently when he re-approached me with the concept; now as a card game that him and his brother had been secretly working on. I was blown away by how far along they had come with the concept already and decided, about a year ago, that I was gonna do my best to help them make this project happen! 

In the past year, that I’ve actively been a part of the games development, this game has come a long way. We’ve developed plenty of really unique and fun mechanics that I haven’t seen in card form before. We’ve done everything we could to make sure, though we wanted it to have the same feel, that it was nothing like Magic the Gathering. After month and months of Alpha and now Beta testing, I can say, we have definitely accomplished making something rather unique that I think anyone who was a fan of J-RPGs would appreciate. 

When Ali first re-posed this idea to me as a Trading Card Game, one of the first things that he had asked me was if I’d like to do the artwork for it. As much as I would love to be the lead artist on a project such as this, I told him that I honestly did not have the time to draw something sophisticated enough to be able to pull in a good audience. Not to mention, at the time, I was posting L.A.W.L.S., ALT and WOI attempting to kill my brain by over working it. Besides, I felt like there possibly was an artist more suited for such a project; someone who could pull off fantasy art better than myself. As those of you who have followed me for some time now, you know I draw “scene” girls better than anything else; Wouldn’t really work well for a fantasy project. It didn’t take long for us to realize that we have friends who do AMAZING work who we should approach about the project; Cari Corene of Toilet Genie: Story of the Door and Scott Ferguson of Nerf This & Scout Crossing, were the first we asked, and were on board immediately!

At this point I’m not really able to discuss much more about mechanics of the game or reveal much of anything in terms of art, but here are a few sample sketches by Scott: 

WHAT DOES CORVINK HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

So that is pretty much the history of the game, but that doesn’t answer the question of what it is that I’m doing as part of this game, really. I hinted at the fact that, yes, I am one of three of the primary game developers along side Ali and his brother Shawn, but haven’t really said much as to what I will be doing long term with this project. Because of the level of work required from me in Graduate School, I won’t be doing much on the visual side of this game (ie. Art). What I will be doing however is continuing to develop and finalize the game mechanics in the next month or so (we are damn close to this already) AND helping them with the behind the scenes business end responsibilities: Marketing, Distribution, and Promotion (namely that of the upcoming Kickstarter campaign which I will have more info on soon because this is going to be one of the most important part of making this game actually happen). Out side of that, I will actually be doing some art! I know I stated that Cari and Scott will be doing the art, and that they are the best suited for the project, but, because of their work loads and such, we discussed and found certain cards that I am very well suited towards doing, and will be doing soon. I will be revealing small elements of what I’m working on here on this page and on my Instagram account.

Hopefully you guys now have a good understanding of what it is that I’ve been doing these past weeks and plan on doing in the months to come! Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean that I’m stopping Corvink or any of my other projects by any means! This is just the project that has to be worked on at the moment, not only because I’m passionate about the idea, but because I believe in my friend’s concept and think that you guys will enjoy it! That being said, make sure to follow their Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook accounts to keep updated on their progress!

Q&A: L.A.W.L.S. Vol. 1 Production F.A.Q.

When will I receive my Hardcover copy?

I actually spoke briefly with my printers on this topic today. The books themselves (all 1900 of them, including soft and hardcovers) are approaching the coast as we speak. Unfortunately the guy I spoke to wasn’t able to give me an ETA on exactly when I could expect them, but they should be at the Long Beach port soon. Once they arrive, Jefbot and I will be renting a U-Haul and picking up both his and my books at the same time. One possible complication my arise, depending on if they arrive next week or not, where I may possibly be out of town. If this happens, I will attempt to arrange something with Jeff to pick them up OR we will just get them when I get back, the first week of September. Once they are in my hands, give me about a week to package, finish any last sketches I owe to you guys, and ship them to you. Basically, this whole thing is based on whenever the boat decides to float on over to California!

I upgraded to a Hardcover Edition and received a Softcover, WHAT DO I DO?

I’m aware of this issue and I apologize for this mishap. Fortunately this only happened to a very small handful of you. I checked my records and a majority of the upgrades had not been shipped just yet. If you were one of the few you received a soft cover, please contact me directly. I have come up with a few different ways to resolve this issue with you. Regardless of which choice you choose, I will be offering anyone effected by this a discount coupon for your next Corvink purchase on top of whatever it is that we discuss as a solution.

If other people have received their Softcover Edition of L.A.W.L.S. Vol.1, why haven’t I?

This is completely my fault. In the sea of shit that hit the fan this past few months, I completely miscalculated the amount and sizes of shipping materials I was going to need to get the number of books/prints/sketches all out to you guys. I’m sorry for the delay, but I’m just waiting for new materials to arrive. Once they come in, I will finish the rest of the orders and send them out to you. Remember though that next week I will be on a much needed vacation, and wont be able to fill orders til I return. I appreciate your patience, this whole ordeal has been quite the learning experience for me and I apologize that you’ve all had to deal with my learning curve. Luckily Vol.2 or any other books that I produce in the next years, I will know how to better get them to you in a timely matter!

When will I receive my Canvas Printing of the L.A.W.L.S. Vol.1 Cover?

Due to the fact that these are limited edition, special orders, I’ve had to deal with these separately from the production of the books. Not only do they need their own production times, they have to be shipped as “over-sized” packages. Because of this, they will take a bit of time to arrive to your houses. I will be having them shipped directly from the printers that I’ve found, to you, so I will at no point handle them. I believe for the most part they should be getting to you by the end of September, unless you are International (which I know some of you are). In the case of International shipment, please be patient. Due to customs and other things I’m probably not aware of, they may take some time to get to you.

When will you be resuming your comics? 

This is the question I have been getting the most from you guys. It definitely makes me happy to see that you guys are still enthusiastic about my work and nothing would make me happier to get them back out to you ASAP, but this is the one problem that will have the longest solution, unfortunately. These last few months I’ve been in a rather deep form of self-exploration/understanding, planning, and re-evaluation. As much as it saddens me to say this, I’m coming to realize that the comic (the way that I was going about it anyway) had become a form of poison that was slowly seeping into all parts of life. I had at some point become so focused on making sure that I was able to get a post up 3 times a week (with the ambition to get them to 5 times a week) that I started ignoring my future plans (ie. Grad School), my girlfriend, my friends, my dog, and my health. For some reason, I weighed the importance of the comic itself as #1 and it took up nearly 90% of my time… only leaving me 10% to try to make time for all those other things that in all honestly, I’m finding are far more important to me in the long run. I don’t want to wake up 20 years from now looking back at all the life that I missed out on because I took a foolish risk on something that I may or may not have turned into something successful by that time. Now, don’t miss understand me here. It almost sounds like I’m saying “COMIC DONE, NO MORE WILL EVER BE MADE.” This is not the case. I’ve just had to find and figure out a different approach on how to release them on a regular basis with out sacrificing the rest of my life to do so. My main focus at the moment is myself; namely, I need to focus on my future. How do I not only balance the creations I love to create with my personal life AND make them successful? To answer that question, truly is gonna take some time. I’ve now been accepted to Grad School in Business and plan to use the information to better understand how to make my art an actual working and functioning business WHILE at the same time creating a back up plan for another job if I by chance find that art will not get me the life that I need to live. This is the thing I lost focus on. What is it that I NEED out of my life? I’m not looking for fame and fortune… but I am however looking to better myself as a person, a person who can be a valuable part of society, friendships, family, and most importantly… be able to be emotionally and physically available in a loving relationship. It saddens me deeply that I lost sight of this. That being said, I have been able to figure out quite a number of things in the past 2 months. I’ve started to develop a plan on how to go about the comics, but I really need to start Grad School full time, get into the meat of what it meats to be a Grad Student… and THEN see if the plan I have in mind will be able to balance into that. I feel like it will, but until I’m sure, I don’t want to give you guys a final answer and disappoint you if that particular plan falls through. Anyway, rest assured, I am working on a plan. I’d like to complete L.A.W.L.S. and Anhedonia Blue and continue ALT. and Words of Interest, just please, continue to be patient with me. I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason, but to truly understand why all this had to happen, the way that it did, only time will reveal the answers. And if I take my time to resume my work, find myself in a better state of mind and life, I think the quality of work I give out to you guys will show and it will all be worth the wait.