Letters to Holly

Thursday, March 17

Cold Busted

All three non-furry members of Chez Debacle have colds, making us a clanging household of head-gunk noise. How welcoming we can be to three people over the weekend remains to be seen. I am downing orange juice and various cold medicine, including Cepacol lozenges that should be labeled as Pickled Anesthesia.

I lettered five pages of the comic now and hope to have another five finished before the guests arrive. I assume I will get no comic work done while we host them. That's not so bad. I could use a break, and I'm in a good spot to halt; I have mostly fight scenes ahead of me. Those are easier to work than panels with lots of talking heads and backgrounds.

Picture of the Day
Ring up my sick candy, good sir. And hand me a pack of your finest medicinal tobacco.


Wednesday, March 16

Picture of the Day

From Bill Rhodes, the photographer of the Blue Ride Rollergirls, comes this shot showing off the official jersey logo based on my submission. More can be seen here.


I'm very tempted o pint up my own shirt with the original logo and put my Jeff Leppard name on the back. And maybe the number 19 to represent the band's number of arms and legs.

Tuesday, March 15

Feeling the Crunch

Thursday was an odd night for the boy. He had a late nap that afternoon and hadn't eaten for hours. I thought he'd have his milk and immediately conk out. But no. He was wired and/or cranky. Orajel did nothing. It took much, much longer to put him down than usual, and we had to trade him off to keep our tempers steady. We tried cooling him down and giving more milk and leaving him in his crib to wind down on his own. It took almost three hours before he finally slept, and only today did we learn the reason: He's now teething four upper teeth, not just two.

I learned this while holding him upside down in the daycare parking lot. I took a lunch break and met Your Sister and My Mom there for a tour. It seems solid. It's a clutch of classrooms around a large common from. Each class is broken into development levels, and the classes are small. If he were to go into the daycare now, he'd be one of eight in his class. We put down a deposit today, and he'll start in July. We'll take him for a few hours that first week to get him adjusted to our absence.

Speaking of which, we got a sitter and attended the roller derby season opener Saturday. Between the jerseys, the program, the scoreboard, and the season passes, my team displayed three variations of the logo I created. But still, I got to see my typeface and design (that logo is 80% my work) zoom around the track. It also just happened to be the most competitive bout yet seen in Asheville, and Your Sister got to watch. We sat with some ECU alums and left right after the second bout began.

I stayed home yesterday to mind the boy and moved from office stuff to comic stuff to household chores. I am on page 13 now, inking and scanning as I go. I can work on lettering when I can't put pen to paper, and I feel the crunch to get this comic done. My breath quickens. I try to prevent myself from redrawing panels, but in some cases it must be done. For instance, page five was planned to have a schematic of the typical robot fighter. I even drew it on the page, but just as I was to ink it, it looked flat and thoughtless. I quickly changed the image but kept the idea of the panel.

The sketch.
The limp pencils. 

The salvage job.

I can't do this for every page or even every other page. I had my chance to draw, and now I have to ink. Things need doing.

Your Sister was diagnosed with severe tendinitis in her left wrist and told this is common in nursing mothers. She's relieved to hear it. She took a cortisone shot.

We might be hosting one of her longtime friends and her two daughters this weekend. I wonder who will be exhausted the most at the end of each day: them or our boy.