Red in Tooth and Flame 3

Yet Mother's lessons teach her far more. She is told it will take at least a few years before she can learn to sense the subtle energies surrounding her, but it takes less than a week. The focused meditation to draw the power of the world into her body comes easily, as does channeling it to purify water, reverse rot from food, mend broken things, find north and other such handy tricks. Aseka finds herself for some reason gesturing like a magician, the tip of the middle finger on her right hand pushed over the ring finger and the index finger pointing delicately at her target, and Mother makes her practice all her spells in this way until she does it without thinking, a simple concentration aid.

And she learns the secret language of the Druids and to listen to the earth and to understand the plants animals and speak to them in terms they understand, and even pull them to her through the space underneath the world. With Beatrix she builds a constant, effortless empathic link, and she learns to understand her quiet friend's strange octopus feelings. And she learns to push and pull at wind and rain and make crops grow, and more than anything she learns to enjoy the work of learning these things and mastering the limits of her abilities and pushing against them. And when Mother exhausts herself and can teach no more, far too early in the day in Aseka's opinion, every day she goes out to continue figuring it out on her own.

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Concerning concern - Of Dragon and woman page 20

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Several things:

It's ten o clock in the Goddamn morning as I write this. Which is nice because I haven't seen this much daylight since Saturday.

Yes, that's supposed to say "picked potatoes", not pickled. What would the smell of pickled potatoes be doing here? Jenny enjoys the fragrance of dirt sans potatoes; earth which has been used up, plundered and left with gaping holes. Even though it smells gross. Which actually opens the field up for questions to my dear reader: What's your favorite weird smell? And have you had any weird sensory reactions to shock?

Also, a large part of the process of drawing this page consisted of pacing around my apartment obsessively going over the events in my head before remembering I was supposed to draw them. Those poor girls.

The main reason it's taken eighteen hours to get this page done, however, is not the emotional burden, nor the many difficult to draw poses and exacting facial expressions. It's because the comic is drawn on a 1:2 page, that is, twice as tall as it's wide, or roughly 20% taller than you expect a sheet of paper to be. I decided on this solely to make the comic stand out - if it's published on paper, it could be either an unusually rectangular book or one with really wide margins I could fill with notes. But I didn't expect me to suddenly figure out how to use that space efficiently. This page was supposed to be two pages, I crap you not. Only when I started drawing it did I see how much room I had, and the scene went on and on, more and more decompressed, panels multiplying and still there was no end to the page. The last (and biggest) panel wasn't even scripted, it just came out of a desperate need to not leave the bottom of the page empty. Serendipitous, really, cause I think it adds a nice little bit of mood and also orientation to the scene.

In conclusion it's been a magnificent day for me, with not entirely unwelcome results, though I fear the next page may take even longer. It's even more emotionally involving, and I probably need to sleep sometime this week too.