It's Been One Week...

The Golden Apple, the second issue of One Act, is one week late in development. This means:

1. Layouts and scripting are late

2. The final cover is late

Why is it late? Post-exam anxiety coming out of concurrent schoolwork. I spent all of the first week of February in an anxious state, trying to regain ground from the earth-shattering score I got on my first exam. I wasn't in any real great mental condition to work on script or layouts for a comic. As a result, The Nightmare Tree didn't get finished until... yesterday, and the cover art to The Golden Apple, that I did start on-time, is still not finished.

So for now, I'm catching up to where I should have been last week, meaning that this week will see pencils getting done and, if I get this done right, the start to inks. Let me just say that I like my process for developing my work. Just a full week on specific stages of each book? Yes, this works. What's hurting is my other commitments and how I didn't budget free-time into my schedule.

Literally, if you don't plan a day off, your body will pick one for you. I'm sure you've heard this before. I've certainly said it (to myself) before, and I watched it happen right after I saw that phrase again. I just couldn't go on. What I'm saying is that this book and the previous book are late because I work too much and don't know how to take a break, so the break I took pushed me back a whole week.

What I'll need to do now, is plan a break at the close of every project. I still have to go to work, and I still have homework to do. This won't change anytime soon. But I can save myself from burning out by establishing a boundary around my free time days so that I don't end up late on another project of mine. This is the most important lesson I've learned this month.

Ultimately, it's setbacks like this that are the reason I'm giving myself such huge production buffer in the first place. In the end, being a week behind schedule on a book that is in development in February and won't be published until June isn't the worst thing to happen.