And thus begins the long-awaited chapter: not with a bang, but with a faceplant onto the keyboard. 🤣

There are quite a few things I’d love to talk about in the commentary for the coming pages for this chapter, but for starters, let’s address the elephant in the room: This page officially comes out almost a year after the previous page. I never intended for the wait between updates to be so long!

I’ve learned that as a creator of content that is enjoyed by others, it’s easy to feel guilty when that content doesn’t come out as quickly as one would want. A small part of me feels like I’ve let my readers down if I let a week go by without posting a new comic. This was one motivation behind creating a few mini comics featuring myself and my family. (One reader referred to these strips as “furry family circus,” which I must admit delights me to no end!) I enjoyed drawing these comics, and it was a nice change of pace for a little while. My intention was to use them to fill the gap between chapters. True, time spent on these mini comics was time I could have been spending on the main comic, but I could finish one of those strips much faster than a new page of Aww, Feathers! So in theory, I could quickly crank out a few mini strips to build up a buffer, and then work on main comic pages while they ran.

Another change over the previous year however was that I started taking on many more art commissions. Don’t get me wrong; I really enjoy doing art commissions, and I’m so grateful to everyone who’s commissioned me! It lets me flex my artistic muscles by drawing characters and situations I wouldn’t normally have done. And there’s also the fact that they have helped me to cover some business expenses this year. Still, every commission once again took time away from comics.

Finally, I realized that this chapter needed to be rewritten. I’ll go into more details about why in a future post, but suffice to say, for continuity and character reasons, it needed some reworking. All these things, combined with my original goal to complete an entire chapter before beginning to post it, meant that even as I put some time into creating the new pages, the start date for the chapter kept getting pushed back. It wouldn’t be far off to say I felt a bit like Kraal in this page from time to time: burning out and treading water, in spite of all the hard work I was doing!

At long last, I decided enough was enough, and with some feedback from a few readers, I decided to start posting updates to Aww, Feathers! again, even if they weren’t coming out every week. They would start out somewhat slow, but they would at least be consistent. And the hope is that gradually, over time, I’ll build up a buffer once again and be able to post more frequently, and get into a rhythm that will allow me to accelerate my output.

The lesson learned is, don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good. I’m grateful to readers and patrons who have been so patient while I’ve been figuring that out! I’m going to keep moving forward with this new plan. I will continue taking art commissions as well, and may even have the occasional mini comic to share, but I’ll do my best to balance my time spent between each one. Here’s to the future of Aww, Feathers!