May Roadmap + a massive ramble LOL (Patreon)

HELLO MY GEMLINS 💜

I have returned from my travels and had a very nice time~ this was the first actual real vacation I've been on in a decade or so, and I think it was much needed to just really get away from everything I'm surrounded by daily for a little while.

I'll share some pictures at the end of this post!

I ended up being away for a bit longer because my brother, who I only get to see like once every two years, also suddenly showed up and when we're together things tend to escalate quite quickly after a beer or two so we decided, after our return from the vacation, we'd go visit some family we hadn't seen in over 20 years, which required some more traveling 🤣It was really nice seeing my favourite uncle from my childhood again after so many years, the man is over 90 years old at this point ; _;) I think he was very happy to see us too and I hope this won't have been the last time. I also met one of my cousins for the first time ?? And hung out with my great-cousin who I pretty much only knew from old photos?? Families are wild.Since I'm the youngest and was born so many years later than my siblings, I missed out on a lot of connections that they got to make in their childhood and youth, I'm forever playing catch-up haha.

ANYWAY, it took a minute for me to get my bearings when I got back home. It's funny how you only really realise how stressed you are until you're removed from the stressful environment for a bit. My first day back I spent only working on Shallow Sleep, ignoring everything else, and I had a great time and was really happy to be back. I love love love working on my comics, and it was wonderful to really be aware of that feeling again.

The next day, however, it was time to face the music again, look at emails, messages, invoices, statistics etc and my stress levels went up to before-vacation levels immediately. I noticed the shift right away in my behaviour at home, while I was still taking things at a regular pace the day before, I was back into frantically trying to minmax my time, and restless with a permanent sinking feeling in my stomach. The existential dread returned in record time 💀I'm not really sure what to do about it, except being aware of it and consciously trying to remind myself that I just gotta keep things rolling and try to not freak out. There's a lot of things going on that require me to rely on other people, and that always makes me nervous, hopefully once more of that is in order, my brain can relax a little bit again 🥸I don't wanna whine tho, things aren't bad, I just found it interesting to notice these changes after getting out and back into my routine! Being aware of these things can only help 💪

Me taking some time to get back into the groove is also why I haven't posted here earlier, but rest assured that I have been working on Shallow Sleep a lot! I finished inking the last few missing panels (except one, future Kan can deal with that), flat colours are done and I wanna get some rough shading done for a few panels before I can call it a day 😤 Lettering is also mostly done for half of the pages, I feel good about the progress!

Now, for this month's schedule:

May 9th - Shallow Sleep chapter 03 update

May 23rd - Shallow Sleep chapter 03 update

illustration for the next goodie for the 20 EUR tier

any WIPs and sketches I have to show will end up here too

finish Shallow Sleep chapter 04

Shallow Sleep chapter 04 cover illustration

fix writing for Shallow Sleep chapter 05

The print re-release for #MUTED volume 1 is also in the works now, I will stop telling y'all that the books will be back "soon" because I feel bad for always making false promises, but please know that things are moving forward, and I've been pushing for a bit of a faster schedule, so hopefully the complete collection of books should be out early(ish) next year!

And now, some impressions from the vacation, featuring the one and only Fynni!

And, my favourite picture:

Thank you for reading & thank you for being here, have a wonderful day and I'll see you tomorrow with new Shallow Sleep pages! 💜