Category: The Adventures Of Cynical Woman

At long last, episode 18 is here! This week you get to meet Patty, another one of the moms in my posse (I don’t do MOMMIES GROUPS!).  Patty is pretty practical and has a solution for everything.  While she never said this line to me (actual credit goes to Alessia Brio, I think), this is something she would have said.  Her solutions are great, it’s just me and my freak life that makes them impossible to use.

This week, I handled the pencils the old-fashioned way – with an actual pencil and paper!  I found a drawing pad that was 24” by 8”, which equals a long, skinny sheet of paper perfect for sketching out four panel comics.  I’m still experimenting with the inking.  Will it be quicker to ink in Manga Studio or to do it by hand as well and then import everything into Photoshop or Illustrator for lettering and word balloons?  I’d stick with Manga Studio because it’s so much easier to handle toning and the pen tool gives such a nice dark line, but honestly, Manga Studio Debut sucks at handling text.

Manga Studio 4.0 comes out sometime soon, so I’ll check that out and make a decision then.  But I think I’ll stick with actual paper and pencil for the initial sketching.  That happened much quicker.  I’ve already got next week’s strip pencilled and ready to scan.

Enjoy the cartoon!

Oh my freakin’ god!  I thought I’d never get this one done…

Notice that there are FOUR characters in this week’s episode.  Notice how they are all be-YOO-tifully drawn and inked.  Notice how late this week’s episode is.

*Sigh*.  I’m working on ways to get these done faster.  Really, I am.  Meanwhile, this week’s episode features Jarresh (the young hottie in the loin cloth), another character from my e-book Demon By Day (http://www.mojocastle.com/demon/byday.html).  Yes, it’s shameless self-promotion.  Self-pimping, even.  But this week’s ep is also very true to life.  I spent many a play date pondering what I was writing while chatting with my best friend.  What can I say?  Mary is a fellow freak.  She understands my need to write porn.

Anyway, enjoy this week’s episode.  Hopefully, the next one will arrive a little quicker.

This has happened to me far too often.  There’s nothing so frustrating as having the whole story in your head and not being able to capture it.  That’s my best friend Mary on the bench with me, by the way.  She knows about all my writing woes, and yet she still puts up with me.

This is the real reason why we need four hands and two sets of eyes.  Multi-tasking is very important to us writer-moms.

By the way, this one took forever to draw – four characters plus all those seat.  Ugh!  It was worth it though.  That hottie in the passenger’s seat? That’s Orziel, the main character from my e-book, Demon By Day.

(Insert shameless pimping here!)  Demon By Day is available from Mojocastle Press.

This is also a true story, although Pixie wasn’t able to blow up the ‘balloon’ herself.  She asked me to do it instead.

True story! My youngest, Pixie, gets into everything.  And the results are maddening, but funny.

This one stars my best friend Mary!  She’s the nurse, the one who will give you a colonoscopy if you look at her wrong… Just kidding.  She’s really nice.  She puts up with me.

Playing for Keeps is a super hero novel written by Mur Lafferty, who also produces the “I Should Be Writing” podcast.  Both her podcast and the book are cool, so check them out!

Sadly, this one is also true.  My poor husband.  He really is an angel.

Here we have it, the sad, sad truth about my life.  Not the glamorous cliche with whips and chains and lingerie, but a pre-dawn wake-up call and a blank page.  Still, I love my job.  Beats working at Micky-D’s.