New to this comic strip?  You can start from the beginning, or you can settle for a summary instead and start with the current semester.  I recommend reading all the archives, but you don't have to if you don't want to.  This comic strip updates five times a week, theoretically Monday through Friday, though in practice that's more like Tuesday through Saturday, since my definition of a "Monday update" tends to be "it goes up around 3 am on Tuesday."  Enjoy!

                              


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NEWS (October 1, 2009):

Those of you following my news posts over the last year may have noticed oblique references to "projects" I was working on.  I've been very, very vague about what's kept me so busy for the last two years, and I've been vague deliberately.  The reason was -- just like a plot twist -- that I love springing huge surprises when they're good and absolutely unexpected.

I am proud, pleased, and thrilled to finally be able to annouce this:

I am starting a second webcomic.  Its title is To Prevent World Peace.

It's a magical girl manga, from point of view of villains.  It will update every Friday (probably late Thursday night, for me) with a new page.

Now, you're probably wondering how this is going to affect my comic strip.

Short answer: "Not at all."

Long answer: "A little."  Specifically:

1) My comic strip's update schedule is not going to change.  I'll still be updating at the end of every weekday.  I'm sure you'll notice occasional days when I'm late (-_-'), but that's always been the case, unfortunately.  Anyway, I'm hoping to spend this next year focusing on making lateness much rarer than it has been -- "less than once a year," say, rather than "every five or six weeks" -- so you may even notice an improvement with the updates.

2) If you like my manga, this essentially gives you two stories to enjoy, and six updates per week.  :P

3) Given that I now spend double the time drawing every week, and am therefore getting much more practice, you will probably notice art improvements.  I won't be changing the art style or format (I decided from Day One that those weren't going to be changing -- consistency is very important to me), but you'll probably notice fewer glaring errors and slightly more interesting new character designs.  This is a process that's been happening over time since the beginning, but it may now happen a bit more quickly, given how much more practice I'm getting per week.

4) I have never had any desire to earn money from my comic strip.  Regardless of financial status, poor economy, or emergencies, it always seemed right for this story to be a gift, offered to the world free with no chance of monetary gain.  When I started my manga, however, I realized I needed to run it differently.  I'm certainly not doing it for money, but I need to make it possible for it to help support my family, given that the time I'm putting in is time I would otherwise spend working.  Of course, this is not intended to make anyone feel any pressure.  If you just want to read, please read it.  :)

If you do have any interest in donating or buying print editions of the chapters, I've tried very hard to make both options worth it.  Each chapter has bonus content only available in print, and I'm also printing chapters as soon as I finish backlog, so they're available early.  (I'll probably consistently be two chapters ahead in print, since I'm obsessive about backlog.)  As for donations, every $25 donated earns an extra update, which will be updated on time, on Tuesdays.  That amount is pretty much enough to justify me finishing an extra page instead of spending the time working.  If there are extra updates, I'd consider that a win-win situation, since I'd rather be working on a story I love than focusing on job-work, plus I could finish things faster.  (The manga has a definite beginning, middle, and end.  I know the entire story and am guessing it will take four to six years to complete.)

5) If you've visited the site, you may have noticed the URL . . . which is definitely not a free hosting service.  I've intended to buy that domain name for a decade, as soon as I got a book accepted by a publisher, figuring I'd use it to host my author website.  Well, yet another year has passed without an agent or editor biting, and I'm finally sick of it.  I saved up the money, psyched myself up, and finally started EmilyMarthaSorensen.com earlier this month.  Right now, that main site is nothing but a directory -- and it will probably stay that way.  But that "table of contents" (so to speak) ought to be increasingly more useful as I add other stories in the future.  I'll say nothing more about that now, but there will be more than two eventually.

Of course, because I now have my own domain name, I'm going to move this site there at some point.  I won't do it immediately -- I'm thinking January -- but I will do it pretty soon.  When I do, I'll probably update for a month on both sites and then replace the main page of this site with a very prominent link to the new one.  I know URL changes are a hassle for readers, and I apologize in advance for that.  Still, I've always intended my comic strip's final home to be on my own website, once I had one.  And I now have one.  So it would be silly not to move this to a permanent home.  ComicGenesis has treated me very well over the past six years, and I totally appreciate it.  I will not be leaving until I'm sure my new site will treat me just as courteously.  :)

It's been a year and a half since I first started working on this manga.  Videogames went out the window.  My stack of "books to read" kept piling higher.  I made the very difficult decision to put all of my cross-stitch and needlework away -- not permanently, but indefinitely.  I stopped drawing anything unnecessary: fanart, pictures for family, anything not related to the story.  I became terribly sluggish about answering my e-mail.  My sketchbook followed me everywhere.  I brainstormed in spare moments and worked on worldbuilding after going to bed.  I focused, focused, focused on three key things: drawing faster, drawing better, and tightening the script at every opportunity.

Now I finally get to share the fruits of my labors!  The site is launching with the first five pages of the full-length story, plus two completed short stories ("The Competition" and "To Prevent World Peace," which inspired the full-length version).  The second short story contains a few mild spoilers about the full-length version -- nothing major, but it does belong after chapter three in the continuity.  (Actually, it probably belongs between chapter four and five at the earliest, but it wouldn't contain any spoilers past the end of chapter three.)  I don't think it would be a big deal to read the short story before the rest, but consider yourself warned, in case you feel otherwise.  "The Competition" has completely different main characters and can easily be read first.

If you're planning to go to Anime Banzai this month, I'll be there October sixteenth and seventeenth.  I'll be sharing an Artist's Alley table with two friends (who are both better artists than me, incidentally :P), and I'll have the first three chapters of To Prevent World Peace and both short stories available for sale there.  If you're planning to go, and have any interest in the print issues, you could pick them up without postage costs that way.  If you're planning to go and don't care about any stuff we've got there, feel free to drop by and say "hi" anyway!  :)