If you vote over at Top Web Comics, I put up a panel from tomorrow's page for the incentive :). Maybe one day I'll break the top ten! I will dream. We have the continued mental breakdown of a lady who's kept her werewolf issues shooooooved deep down, pushed by the wayside for her entire life. So, if you're wondering, "hey, why is she freaking out so much?"...well, because that's what happens when your anxiety has a very real trigger that you're having to push through in order to save your brother and your weird tall friend. It's fun! I'm going to assume that not all anxiety attacks are created equal, but I'm basing Malaya's issues here on how mine usually progress. Oh hey! I had one last night in response to a fucked up nightmare where someone was going to shoot me...then I woke up. Then I had to review the dream and imagine how I would have escaped that situation, because that's how I deal with nightmares. I'm very small, so usually it involves me hiding in a cabinet or something. I didn't sleep well, so look forward to this blog post being rather disjointed. But hey, you guys get three pages this week! THREE PAGES. Why? Um, because. Because I intend to publish this stuff down the line, I try to make sure that the pacing is reasonable for if you were reading it in book format, which doesn't always line up with how the pages would feel as a webcomic. A lot of times in comics, when you want those really dramatic moments, you're pages will be pretty sparse. You want people to linger a little longer on big panels and not a lot of words or dialog. Think of the classic two-page spread, filled with...like a fuck ton of superheroes or whatever. DRAMA. (I kind of hate those two pages spreads with every damn hero imaginable because they seem overly busy and visually too chaotic to really convey what I know they want to convey, which is the sheer power and numbers going into this battle, but still.) So, what I'm trying to say is that the next two pages are fairly sparse in terms of art, but they're spaced out on purpose. I figured those two pages were about the same amount of work one page usually takes, so I might as well post them both this week! Yay! I'm also going to try and post an entry on Patreon on building a plot. Admittedly, it's one of the hardest aspects of writing for me to actually explain, but I'll try! So if you have any specific questions about how plots work or how to plan one or just sort of...organically fall into one (like me), let me know! After it's posted on Patreon, I'll try and post it up on tumblr down the line too, so everyone can eventually read it. In totally unrelated news, I stayed up too late last night using Duolingo to learn Spanish. Like most early-90s anime nerds (the proto-weeb, perhaps), I took Japanese in school because...I could. And in college. So I officially learned Japanese for like, seven years or something. I remember some of it. I actually kind of hope Duolingo comes out with a Japanese lesson, because I'd really like to review what I do know. But anyway, I've used Duolingo off and on to try and learn Spanish. It's not hard, certainly easier than learning Japanese because there's no separate writing system, but I was having such a hard time with using the app. There wasn't any external resources to help me nail down the various conjugations, you just had to...figure them out. And conjugations and I don't get along well. (Japanese conjugations are actually fairly easy and orderly, so that at least wasn't difficult.) Even in English, diagramming sentences was always where my natural abilities collided with the part of my brain that doesn't make those connections. If you put a label on it, I'm kind of screwed. (Participles and shit...I don't remember any of it.) I realized that the desktop version of Duolingo actually has quite a few extra resources, and that's been much easier to learn with. I still can't remember how to conjugate stuff properly with the subject if I'm just repeating sentences to myself, but I get everything right in the program, so I assume one day it'll all click. I was thinking of learning Polish after I finish the Spanish lessons, because that would be useful where I live. There's a huge Polish population in and around Chicago, and my family has a lot of Polish heritage from my great grandmother. Granted, none of us really held onto it, but it would be cool to know. Okay, back to watching Futurama and finishing the next couple pages. I'm running out of TV. The new fall season needs to get its ass in gear.