Onwards, to 2014!

If you’re reading this, it means you’ve managed to survive the 2013 holiday season successfully. CONGRATULATIONS! Here is your prize… it is… a blog post. (Audience: “Awww boooo!”)

Yes, enough about 2013 though. Let’s talk about 2014.

FIRST UP

A few things about our update schedule, or lack thereof. We love Cottonstar, we love it very very much. It is our child. We love working on it and we love seeing it come to life, and we love to present it to you fine folks to read and enjoy. We never miss an update just because we went “eh, too much effort.” When we miss updates, it is because of one of the following reasons:

1. Ben and/or I had to work overtime, and needed sleep more than we needed to update on time. This happens far too often and we do what we can to prevent it as far as possible, but sometimes we just can’t help it. Sleep is vital to your health in a plethora of aspects, so it’s important that you get enough of it. It took us several years of being stubborn idiots to figure out that lack of sleep = more hours to work, but less productive use of time, while enough sleep = less hours to work but having WAY more constructive energy. So, while we do burn the midnight oil on occasion, we have our limits. All-nighters kill you physically and emotionally.*

2. Paying freelance projects eat up our comic-drawing time. This one is a sad necessity also. We’re really struggling financially and we take whatever freelance projects we can get our hands on just to stay afloat. Which brings us back to point 1. Hopefully soon things will get better, but until then, paying work just has to come first.

3. Technical problems…as is the case currently while I write this journal. Yep, among everything else in our house breaking and my car being broken into, my PC’s motherboard went belly-up. We were actually properly on schedule and then my machine started switching itself off without warning. I knew it meant trouble.  I took it over to a friend’s place, with the aim to clean it out and format… and then once we’d cleaned it out, it didn’t even stay on for longer than 3 seconds. RIP motherboard (2011-2014). So. Off to the repair centre it went. We’re still waiting to hear back from them. Other technical difficulties include computer crashes, corrupt file data, broken internet, and any of the other things the universe thought prudent to expose us to that day.

4. Familial obligations. They are unavoidable, like taxes. We love our families and sometimes we have to do what we gotta do for them.

Whenever we know we’re going to miss an update, we make a post about it on our facebook page, which you can find here. We also tweet about it on occasion (we’re @TheCottonStar on twitter) but we find most of our readers actively use facebook, so it’s easiest to announce things on there. If you are not a facebook user, please leave us a comment below to let us know what we can do to make things more accessible to you!

Right, now that the depressing stuff is out of the way, we’d like to announce that we have created a Patreon page for Cottonstar! Patreon is like kickstarter, but there are no funding goals or time limits.

Taken from the Patreon FAQ:

“Patreon lets fans become patrons of their favorite artists and creators. Unlike other fundraising services that raise for a single big event, Patreon is for creators who create a stream of smaller works, like YouTube musicians, bloggers, web comics, etc.”

We figured, why not? So if you’re feeling really generous, you can find our Patreon page here. And I’ll repeat what I’ve said before: Cottonstar will always be free to read online! This is in no way us turning the page into a paid service. It’s literally just in case people feel like donating. You can donate any amount you like, even $1, and you can also set a budget in case you’re worried about spending too much. For more info and better explanations, visit the Patreon site.

To everyone who has donated or will donate: THANK YOU. You’re awesome.

Also, May is coming up… and you know what that means, right? FREE COMIC BOOK DAY. We are so excited but also so stressed! It means we have to somehow complete and print Chapter 3 before then. We’re trying to speed up production and we have NO IDEA how we’re going to fund the printing as yet, but by golly we’re going to try. In the meantime, familiarise yourself with our most excellent hosts, Readers DenThe best part for you non-Capetonians? They have an extensive online shop and really good prices!

Okay, this turned into a really long journal. Sorry! The tl;dr version is we don’t miss updates if we can help it at all and that Free Comic Book Day is getting us super excited.

Have a great 2014, and as always, thanks for reading! 😀

-Danelle

 

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*Yes, it can literally kill you, especially if you pair it with energy drinks. Your endocrine system burns itself out and you can suffer heart failure, among a whole plethora of other awful things.

 

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