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.

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?

It may be shown in some sort of flashback but I don’t know that I will ever get to that part of the story so I will explain some things here. Kay initially had a  completely different boat, and Tam effectively came to life for Kay on that boat (A Columbia 40). The one time Tam was not on either boat was when she was being transferred, but she had no awareness at the time so her argument that it didn’t count is pretty valid. I would have loved to put all that in the comic, but I am really trying to avoid long stretches of time where essentially nothing happens.

For those who want to know ALL the details, you can read these posts.

Of course this leaves me in a bit of a long-term quandary. My whole format is very strongly created with the intention of at least being able to create a hard copy version of this story. If I put too much in the special notes for those who are willing to read extra online, where am I going to put all that stuff in the printed version? Also, am I leaving out too much for those who buy the PDF book in advance? Those people are not just jumping the gun on the story, they are actively supporting me, and I shouldn’t be giving them a product that is defective in any way.

Maybe it’s enough if the information down here isn’t critical.