Life and things

Hey guys.

First of all, thanks for all your patience with the pages and sporadic updates. This time of year is seeing us showered with freelance work, which, while amazing and making sure we have enough to survive on for the next few months, also interferes with the time we normally use to work on Cottonstar. In fact, we pushed so hard that my drawing hand/wrist is now strapped up and in a brace, and I am spending quite a bit on physiotherapy (which, once again, your Patreon donations are helping with tremendously. So THANK YOU!). The bad news is that part of it is genetic and that I’ll always be susceptible to injury. The good news is that I can take some measures to take better care of my body. It’ll get better sometime, but for now I need to rest my drawing hand as much as possible inbetween contracts. This means that apart from his day job, Ben is now going to be stuck both doing lines AND colouring the pages, which makes them take twice as long to complete.

Right now we’re juggling multiple projects which will hopefully see some amazing life upgrades happening in the not too distant future. We’ll tell you all about it when the time comes! :3 But we can say for now that it will probably impact the comic positively.

We will really do our best to still get out a page a week. This is just a heads up that we might be taking more breaks than usual. After this we are definitely going to try extra hard to build up a buffer. This is easier said than done. Every time we think we’ll have some time off to start making the buffer happen, life just gets in the way.

Things aren’t all bad though. This freelance work has allowed us to upgrade our current office situation – a better monitor for Ben, which we can double team with mine to record livestreams and make timelapse videos for you guys, and a very much-needed hardware upgrade for his PC too, so he can be more productive with it.

We simply could not have done all this without your generosity. Patreon has carried us through some very difficult times and we are so super grateful to all our patrons for investing your money into our lives. I know we say thank you for that a lot, but in all honesty, we can’t get over how much it’s helping us out. If you are unable to donate, we appreciate shares and links to our page as well. Everything helps! If you are interested in helping us financially, you can make a direct donation through the “donate” button on the right hand side of our site, or go to our Patreon page and make a contribution there. You can also help us be seen by voting for us on Top Webcomics. You don’t even need to register, you just need to complete a Captcha type thing.

We’re also happy to get comments on our comics and blog posts. It seems that the internet likes pointing traffic in our direction if there is interaction on our page. So don’t be shy, we’d love to hear from you! It makes us happy to see your comments on our work. It’s always a pleasant surprise in our inboxes. 🙂

So, yeah. In a nutshell, the updates might go wonky until about January-ish, but we hope that things will return to normal in February. We’ll post more if there are any developments worth mentioning.

In the meantime, please have a look at our snazzy website which our coder and friend John has helped us set up! It is called Malhuys, which is a silly play on words, combining mine and Ben’s surnames (Malan + Geldenhuys), but which is also a homophone for the word “malhuis,” which in Afrikaans translates quite literally to “madhouse.” Corny but fun. :p Please share it with anyone who you think might be interested in commissioning some freelance work. We’ll populate our portfolio with some more work soon, but for now there is a fair idea of the kind of thing we do.

As always, thank you. We wouldn’t be where we are without you guys.

Much love

Danelle & Ben

 

Cottonstar on Patreon

4 Comments

  1. Danelle,

    Communication is the key to happiness, thanks for keeping us posted, we’ll get the updates as Ben and you can get to them. May your malhuis come with a smile.

    NICE! http://malhuys.com/

    I didn’t get treatment for my arm for years till one day, shooting pains and a loss of 80% use of my right arm. I did both construction and play music. Western medicine gave up on me, though they wanted to cut and drug to no end. Massage therapy, specifically Tuina or Shiatsu, get my arm working again in a few years. But… I sent several other musician friends, other massage therapists, and workers with their hands to the same people and a few treatments got them like new. This is something you could add to what ever your already doing. Also, anything that helps fight inflammation like Zyflamend, helps circulation, will hep healing.

    Wishing you both the greatest wellness and prosperity!

    • The thing with my arm is that it’s not stiff – all my joints are hypermobile, which means they are too “loose” and move around more than is normal. That means they aren’t secure and supported like they should be, and that makes it very easy to overexert them. The tendons and nerves in my arm and hand have basically worked too hard and have become irritated, as well as the tendons being unhappy.

      The physiotherapist also said it would be much easier to treat if the only problem was stiffness. As it is, I have a specific set of muscles in my neck, shoulders, arms and back that are extremely weak. I need to work on those so the instability decreases, and so that I get less tension headaches 24/7. She’s strapped my hand to decrease movement and there’s the brace that I’m wearing for that too. She did loosen up one nerve in my forearm which hurt a lot, but for the rest it’s mostly just resting the injured parts and strengthening the weak parts.

      I take Dicloflam and Spasmend for pain, and use Transact patches when it gets unbearable.

      Thanks for your well wishes. I hope to be back in the saddle very soon.

  2. I’m glad to hear the work is flowing in at the moment but sorry about your arm 🙁

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