I got back from my trip, recovered a bit (A 2000+ mile drive is surprisingly exhausting!), celebrated my birthday, worked on my house site, worked on another special thing you’ll hear about eventually, and now I’m ready to resume Joyride.

However, there is the small matter of the broken site to attend to first. I haven’t been able to fully fix that because it’s more the software and web host’s issue than my own :C (I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but it was basically: my webhost changed some stuff, then Comicpress changed some stuff in their latest upgrade, and that killer combo exploded things on Joyride).

So I have to resort to the good old fashioned “delete the system completely and then re-install everything” method. Which… is going to suck. At least for me it will. For you guys, no content, posts, or pages will be lost. For me, though, I’ll have to migrate all of that stuff onto the freshly installed system. So here’s what’s gonna happen.

• Soon, the entire site will disappear completely for a short while.
• When it comes back, it might look weird before I migrate stuff.
• Then I will begin migrating all the content. This has to be done by hand and may take a while.
• After that things will be back to normal!

So, the site may disappear for a bit, but don’t worry, I’ll be back~

Thoughts at the completion of this stage

Act 1 has completed. On average, I was able to update every 6.9 days. Since my entire setup broke at some time during this Act — monitor failure, tablet failure, two separate massive hard drive corruptions complete with data loss, and then my entire computer breaking — AND I had a surgery, I think I still kept to a pretty good beat.

I definitely found my pace in this Act. Actually, it’s probably better to say that my pace found me.

When I restarted Joyride last year, I was right in the middle of a stupid, painful sort of artistic “rebirth” where I was reevaluating everything I knew. It’s hard to explain what my thoughts were at the time, but in retrospect I guess I was just insecure. Where do I want to go with my art? What technique should I use to get there? Is my technique sufficient? Is it possible to become a truly good artist while still drawing in the manga style? While making comic pages? Is it even a valid art form? I thought I knew the answers to all those questions, but suddenly, then, they slipped away.

This is the reason it took me so long to begin Act 1: I didn’t know my own art anymore. At one point, my little brother saw the first pages I was working on and said something to the effect of “that’s nice… but it’s not your style. It doesn’t look like it was drawn by you.”

Well, I continued to be confused about what I should do right up until I was facing the first deadline for Joyride, a few pages into the Act. The first time pressure was applied to me, guess what happened? Without even thinking about it, I automatically reverted to my old way of doing things. I literally rediscovered my own technique.

It looked better than the pages before it. It felt better to create than the pages before it. And I realized what a huge mistake I had been making.

Stop worrying objectively about your skill, your method, what kind of artist you’re labeled as or what category your art is supposed to fit into. Just draw. Whatever comes out then is “you.”

By the time I truly realized that, I had come to the second big point of this Act: always design things properly. In the rush of getting my style back, I fell into my old, bad habit of designing things as I draw them on the page for the first time. This has only left me with a bunch of things I now have to tweak because I didn’t get them right the first time I drew them. _{There’s probably a person out there who gets things right the first time they do them, but that person is not me.}

Now, I have resolved to fix these problems and design everything properly from now on so that I can continue with full confidence.

Before I even began Joyride, I decided I’d take a few weeks off after every Act to make sure I have the next Act in order. I almost decided not to do that for this Act, because, as noted, I already had to take time off due to all the technical problems. But I realized I really should take this break in order to set myself straight; I’m going to use the next few weeks to practice intensely, and solidify the final phase of this strange artistic metamorphosis I got caught up in.

When I next see you in Act 2, my transformation will finally be complete. I’m pleased that it was mainly working on Joyride that showed me the right way through this phase. To that end, it’s the readers who have showed me the way, since I wouldn’t be working on Joyride without them.

Thank you 100% for reading. <3

Thanks for hanging around while I was recovering from the surgery. I’m putting this page up a bit early for you. See you again on Monday with a bonus page!