Okay! So I FINALLY got my laptop working properly... My charger and battery short-circuited and things are a mess. My laptop runs very slowly and I'm gonna try to fix it up enough to keep working, while putting a bit of money aside to save up for a new one...
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! Good news: I'm adjusting to my new environment well and getting back into things. You can expect to see Chapter 7 starting... some point in mid-late March. I'll announce an official start date in another week or so.
I have Valentines pictures I wanted to post, but for some reason, I can't seem to upload any pictures on Tapas today. I'll try again later. In the mean time, I'll post these pictures on my instagram. :)
THIS IS WHY I SHOULD PROPERLY OUTLINE EVERYTHING BEFORE I START DRAWING!!!
Looking back over Chapter 5 so far, I should have cut it into two chapters. When I initially planned out the chapter my only planned plot points were:
Kouji and Hikari go on a "date"
Hikari comes up with her crackpot plan for catching her attacker.
Hikari vaguely tells Kouji about her past trauma...
Everything else that has happened just... kinda... happened as I drew. I'd constantly think about how to reach each plot point while keeping within the characters personalities and bolstering things with at least somewhat believable interactions. Next thing I knew, I was adding in all of Kouji's flustered thinking, and the small hint of his and Yuuna's backstory, the asthma attack to throw Hikari off of her footing and allow me to shoehorn in a bit of a PTSD symptom, the healing spell for her hands, to showcase the magic a bit more, and also, so I could stop drawing those bandages...
I should have stopped after page 68 and started the new chapter with that nightmare... but no. I kept going because I hadn't hit my third planned plot point for the chapter yet, and when I finally did after 86 pages, I suddenly looked at how I initially planned to start chapter 6 with Kouji taking in this horrifying news and somehow managing to hold in the need to address this in person until school the next day when he would pull Hikari aside to talk more.
I thought about it... What teenage boy, no matter how intelligent and strategic, is going to handle this THAT well? And with Hikari clearly distraught over the phone, how was I going to have him comfort her? It was unsatisfying this way, so I scrambled, once again thinking about their personalities, and tacked on another 30 pages of content!
THIS was two chapters worth of stuff!! So now I'm thinking... Should I go back and re-title each post to say that pages 69 on are actually Chapter 6 pages 1+? Or do I just let this go and let Chapter 5 be SUPER long?