I had a lot of fun drawing the details of the marina, but then found that when I colored everything in that the characters completely disappeared into the complexity. Thank goodness for layers. I use a bunch of layers for each drawing.

First I draw the blank lines for every subject. There is a layer for the content. Then there is a layer just behind that which holds opaque white so that you can’t see through what I just drew (why in a moment), and then the shading is a third layer between those two that use a cool little feature that Manga Studio has called “clip on layer below”. What this does is make it so that only those parts of the layer that are above a filled in part of the layer just below it will be seen. Why does that matter? This allows me to get smooth shading on an object and not worry about coloring over the edges. So three layers for content.

But Tam gets her own layer so that I can make her slightly transparent. She actually gets a set of three layers too. Since we can see the background through Tam, I have to draw the whole background behind her, and I almost always go ahead and draw the full background anyway so that I can arrange things after drawing if I want to, so the background gets its own set of three layers. Then sometimes the background gets split into two sets so that I can put the sky or the water behind everything. There is also the layer that contains the frames, and the layer that has the white page background.  Then we get to text layers. I put them all into a single folder that is above everything else, but there is a separate layer for every piece of text, and another layer for the speech bubbles. Not counting the text I usually have at least 14 layers, often 20 or more.

So the lower layer of the set of three is doing double duty in a pretty slick fashion. It both makes it so that the content layer is opaque, and determines where the shading of the set can be seen. It’s a Manga Studio feature that I feel like I can’t live without now.

And the point of all that is that when I thought that “Hey, that background is too busy, I can’t see the characters!” all I had to do was find the layer that had the background shading and make it invisible with one click. If I hadn’t liked the result I could have immediately brought the shading back, but I did like the result. I found that my line work had already implied enough shading that the grays were not missed, and now I could see the characters.

I do like working digitally.

Yay! The first book is done. By the time this text gets posted it will have been done for a month, but it feels good all the same. Hopefully by the time this is posted I’ll have book two done. I haven’t even started on that yet.  Posting a big buffer is occasionally disorienting. I am not sure I could do it at all without my family to provide me day-to-day feedback. Yay family!

This page is very much a continuation of the last update. They are really meant to be displayed as a spread in a book, but I could not figure out how to do that gracefully on the web page. Of course the rules of story telling demand that Tam’s estimate of their chances of getting caught will be completely wrong. I am sure I am not giving anything away when I say that.

Someone commented to me that among the changes to the site are the much longer and more complete comments below each comic, like the one your reading. It’s all the fault of Word Press, ComicPress, and Comic Easel. In particular, when I am posting I now have a lot more tools than I did on my little home made form. I have formatting tools, I have a nice large high contrast writing area. I have spell check, and even some grammar tools (yay!). Almost more important than any of that, WordPress also saves a draft of what I am typing every minute or so. This is critical because it was very common with my little home made form that I would write some long description and then it would all get lost due to some problem during the update process, and on the re-try rather than re-create everything I had before I would write the functional equivalent of ‘meh’. That happened enough times that it would discourage me from even trying to write something of consequence. Moving to WordPress would probably have been worth it for that alone.

But wait! There’s more! Now that I am using these tools, I found that I can use my programming ability to do even more customization than I could before. A good example is the like button that is on this post, and every other post. That wasn’t available in any of the Word Press tools that I found, so I wrote it into a function in a child theme and was  able to add it with a slick little snippet that Frumph gave me. Critically I was able to have it show up on every single post, and link to the actual post not to the page the post happened to be on, and I did it with about a grand total of 10 or 12 lines of code.

Now how much would you pay!

I couldn’t have done all that as simply on my old site. Sure it took me hours to figure out where to put that code in the huge  Castle Gormenghast that is the structure of WordPress, its Themes, and its plugins, but it would have almost certainly taken me longer to go ahead and program the feature from scratch. Moving to WordPress has definitely put me ahead of the game.

And there we go, five hundred more works (give or take) most of which I would not have written unless I had moved. Ok, its only four hundred and eighty-eight.

The drawing for this page and the next page is an excuse for me to do a big two page spread of Richardson Bay, the Marin and Tiburon peninsulas, and the Golden Gate bridge. The ‘action’ is just Kay and Tam walking back to Schoonmaker marina to get his dingy, and that didn’t feel like action at all. My initial write-up of this book had Kay meeting up with Alex and Rachael, characters from the old comic, but I found that I didn’t have room to re-introduce them and get all the information that I felt I had to get into this intro. That left a little extra space right here, and I wanted to go ahead and draw a big scene.

We will almost certainly run into Alex and Rachael again.

Oh, and for those who may not know, an ‘Order of magnitude’ means to be ten times as large, or one-tenth as large, while ‘Two orders of magnitude” means one hundred times as large, or one one-hundredth. So when Tam is tell Kay that she may be one or two orders of magnitude faster, she is really saying she could be about ten to a hundred times faster, and that is a pretty big range.

And yes, I can also hear that guy in the back saying, “Years for backup hardware and two weeks for a fusion reactor?”. Well, yeah. The fuser design is actually uncomplicated, while the quantum processors that Tam uses are much more complicated (an order of magnitude at least! maybe two! See you learned something!), and would take longer to create. A key point is that some people build fusers at home, but nobody builds modern day integrated circuits at home.

Another real location, the only gas station that most people consider to be in the town of Sausalito. There really isn’t room for another. On the other hand, there are several places where boats can get gas. It probably says something about the town that there are more places where boats can fuel up then cars. Of course the boats usually have to pay an extra dollar or more a gallon, so if your going to sell to a market, sell to the boats and actually make some money.

I’m totally with Kay on the amount of fuel question. Diesel fuel is about 7 pounds a gallon (its slightly lighter than water so the ‘pint a pound’ mantra doesn’t quite apply) and that makes each one of those can about 35 pounds when full. Sure, that’s nothing in the Gym, but carrying it at the end of your arm for a mile and your going to find that your joints aren’t fitting together  right anymore at the end of your walk. I mean he could carry a hundred pounds in each hand for a mile like Tam estimated last comic, but he wouldn’t be doing anything at all the next day, and maybe not the next week.

On the drawing, I initially had a more complete background in the lower panel, but I found that the characters were getting lost, so I just made most of it go away.

I always find it somewhat annoying when the characters I am following do actions that make no sense to me. Like female fantasy heroes going into battle with 10 percent of their body covered (or less!), or our sharp capable hero tackling the objective in the most complicated and difficult method imaginable with no explanation of why. I mean, cover up lady! you’re going to get hurt out there, and My god man, use the front door!

So in this panel I am trying to answer the question of why, if Tam needs power, isn’t she using the effectively limitless supply of Pacific Gas and Electric – though I guess Sausalito is using Marin Clean Power now. Either way, why build a reactor man?! Get an extension cord! But no, they are being looked for, or at least she is, and in the digital world odd power usage is not that hard to track down.

I find myself smiling slightly every time I read about Tam blithely saying “60% of your maximum load for the one mile distance”. People aren’t really that measurable. Sure, he could carry it, but want to?

Oh, and Kay went into Bridgeway Burgers for lunch. It’s the place to go. It’s the definition of hole-in-the-wall, I have seen closets with more floor space, but the burgers are really super good, and I don’t even like burgers. If you can’t read the address its 737 Bridgeway, Sausalito California, and yes I am really really solidly grounding my story in real locations.

A fuser is actually a fusion reactor that you can make at home. High school students have done it. Unfortunately it requires that you put in a lot more power then you get out, because most of the hydrogen that you heat up is wasted. It’s actually a really slick device, the ‘heat’ in this instance is just the hydrogen ion moving really fast as its accelerated in an electric field. The fusion is then kinetically contained, which is a fancy way of saying that the particles hit each-other.  My theory here is that if Tam creates the ions in quantum coupled pairs then even though she can’t be exactly certain where they are exactly, she can manipulate them so that they reach the same point at the same time with enough energy that they would probably fuse. Making quantum couple pairs of hydrogen ions would actually be fairly easy, as they tend to bond in pairs. Anyway, that’s my story and I am sticking with it, for now. There are some elements I will add later.

He is actually shopping for  a lot more than just magnets. However most of the shopping list consisted of materials that Tam could cannibalize for their constituent components, and I balked at the idea of illustrating that in depth. It would have led to a long digression of exactly what all that material was for, and I wanted to keep this first book fairly tight.

If you want to find out more about the fuser, Wikipedia is most certainly going to be your friend.

Tam would actually deconstruct the magnets. By doing some clever tricks with lasers she can actually vaporize the magnets and distill them into their chemical and atomic components. There are a lot of useful elements and compounds that can be found only in magnets, especially if you are making more carefully manufactured magnets. Of course in a long ocean voyage Kay and Tam would have discussed all of this, but illustrating those discussions would have been beyond boring, so I have them wandering around the streets of Sausalito while having this talk.

My proofreading team (ok, my kids) asked why, if Tam can make water perfectly invisible, does she not look solid? The reason is not because she has to be transparent, but because if she was perfectly realistic to Kay then he might forget that she wasn’t really there. At least if someone catches him talking to her, he can claim “It’s a new Bluetooth set of eyeglasses! Cool isn’t it?”, but if he starts holding doors open for invisible people he would start to stick out. It could even lead to accidents. Better if there is a constant reminder that she isn’t really there.

An almost calm page after the last one, which was a little tough to coordinate since the pages will be on the same spread when in book form. This one makes is a little clear that Tam’s understanding of money and time is a bit off from that of most people.

When I want to get some photos of a particular city the google street view is a wonderful tool for getting a feel of how building and the town looks. It does have a defect in that pictures are never taken from the sidewalk. (for obvious reasons) This means that I can’t get reference photos of Sausalito city streets from a pedestrians point of view. I also find it amazing how almost every tourist and photographer takes exactly the same photos as everyone else. Want various viewpoints of Clipper maria? Tough, you’re getting a view from the North with San Francisco in the background and you’re getting a dozen versions of it.

Thank goodness for google street view for taking the ‘boring’ photos that I can actually get some information out of.

And no, I can’t make it up. I like there to be a certain amount a reality and accuracy in my drawings which only comes from reference.

This is the most active page so far. A lot of drawing, text, simultaneous story threads. It was a challenge to arrange it all so that it at least has the chance of making sense. Tam of course wouldn’t have any problem viewing the feed of any security camera that is connected to the internet. Public wouldn’t really be an issue. However a lot of those things aren’t really maintained worth a darn, and a lot of them are the cheapo as seen on TV style that really need maintenance in order to work tolerably. Tam was used to the comparatively perfect resolution of cameras that were custom designed to provide her information.

However I have the ability to also add posts. I wanted to share this little image that I finished recently. It’s the background of one of the pages, and I realized that in the final product a lot of the image is going to be hidden by other graphics and text, which kind of hurt. I just like the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s the most photographed bridge in the world for good reason.

So here is a little drawing that I like and I hope you like, and a preview of some of what will be showing up in book 2.

Just a background?