It’s been a couple of months since I blogged – fortunately, that time was spent on work and pages, then sobering up and producing a lot more pages. Drying out has made me a bit terse, here and elsewhere. Comic metadata has backed down from epic Giant Walls Of Text to the old fashioned A Few Relevant Paragraphs, Facebook is back to being nearly useless, and clicking on the hashtags I’ve been adding to the twitter updates has been like people-watching at the mall – a massive boost to my self esteem.

Sorta.

First thing in the morning I check IRC scrollback and email instead of razing facebook entries and wiping malformed tweets. My SMS log is no longer an embarassing mess and is starting to gather dust.

This is a very good thing.

Intellectually I’m aware that I need to get out and socialize a bit more. Emotionally, sobriety has dried out the plaintive reedy whine of “But I gotta meeeeeeet people!!!!” and replaced it with a cold crisp husk of Fuck That Noise. Week Six on the wagon and I’ll be going out again – hopefully I’ll have a better time of it tonight. My last outing was a social misfire but good for the chapter four script – I’ve made a couple of revisions to it since then and need to start filling in the gaps and tightening the screws.

At this point I don’t care who’s eyefucking me or shouldering me out of the way or yelling idiocy into my ear – clubs are no fun at all sober. They still put my head in a creative place that’s hard to find elsewhere, and the script needs that more than I need to not be listening to mouthbreathers bellow about Dat Ass.

That I’m doing this on walks, in the laundromat and sober is pretty awesome, honestly. While the entirety of DCR (and The Dualist) was outlined and developed as a DWI, this is the first block of script that’s made meaningful progress under the watchful gaze of a recovering liver. For chapter four to get rolling conveniently, I’ll need to further develop the script while working on the rest of chapter three. While only twelve pages remain, I expect them to take another six to eight weeks to produce, at best – several environments need to be modeled, rendering time needs to be tanked, work will be picking up and there’s a good chance I may wind up juggling multiple clients.

In other words, I’m coming up on a gear change and after 3.25 – which I plan to produce on the 10th – DCR will be dropping out of update supercruise for awhile. As per usual I’ll be working on the comic, just not updating it. The real change here is “working on the comic” actually means “working on the comic,” not “nursing a hangover and playing EVE.”

I’d like to hit 500 pages by the end of the year. Given that ATC is currently somewhere in the 470s you’d think this would be a slam dunk – if I can keep my shit together, hopefully it will be.