I did say I wasn't going to post until I finished the assistant package, but at this rate, I might as well have just disappeared lol. So to break up the silence and make things clearer:

I'm going to be working on something else for the next two months. But just the next two months! Will be back afterwards!

The reasoning

For full transparency, I'm going to be working on an entry for a contest that ends at the end of September. Theoretically, it's short...and of course I thought I had all the time in the world to juggle that along with the site's comic, back when I found out about it mid May, but yeah lol the schedule just got pushed back and back and back. What a surprise!

A bit over a week ago, I realized that it was impossible to work on both things at once—something that should have been extremely obvious, given that I can barely work on one thing at once—and thus decided to concentrate on the thing with a close-by time limit. I honestly don't know if I'll succeed in finishing even this short contest entry, but because it is comic-related, I do think that there's value in experiencing how to pace and schedule myself under a situation that requires me to not stall.

Not that I've been diligent about this at all for the past month lol, but!! BUT!!!💥 It will happen, and the time I spent on it will be worth it.

Why did you decide to enter a contest whilst trying to get this comic started you absolute moron

<_<   >_>   <_>

To be fair, it at least started with pretty legit reasoning; I was first enticed by Webtoons' Call to Action contest, which I did mull over for a good while, wondering if I should even try when I was busy with this. But then I had this thought process:

1. Enter the contest with a spin-off setting of this comic that I already had the outline and part of the script for
2. Possibly gain an audience
3. Get people pre-interested in this comic via association
4. Profit?

So after a week of finishing up the script, rearranging it to work as a standalone thing with no previous character context, then trying my very best to keep it within a humanly doable panel limit, I realized:

It's literally impossible to post it due to the per-episode file size limit on Webtoons!

✨💥FUCK💥✨

So I gave up, feeling lost and a bit salty but not dissatisfied that I ended up making a pretty damn good script—look forward to it as the bonus strip it was intended to be whenever this comic is over!. I then immediately started looking for other contests in order to fill the void that Webtoons left me with...and (un)fortunately found this new one, which had a prize that I really wanted, and a theme and time constraint that felt very doable. So here we are! Doing extra to satiate the feelings that had been played with!

In other news

In comic-related news, I made a public forum post a short while ago in hopes that I would get replies but lol that covers why the assistant package has been taking so ridiculously long, and if I was just over-preparing or if it's normal. If you've ever hired assistants for your comic, or if you are or have been an assistant for a comic, please give at least the questions in that post a read and tell me about your experiences!

Lastly, from now on I'm going to try using twitter for tiny updates, so please look over there if you're interested. Currently just contains self-directed complaints lol, but will probably remove those soon and replace with actually useful things.