Elf Blood

Whew! Well, that was a bit of a close call, RIGHT there!

See, the problem I have with my computer (my ONLY computer, excluding the netbook) is that the main case fan makes this kind of rattling noise when it’s cold. To combat this rattling, I usually performed percussive maintenance on the case until it span itself into a more stable rotation. (I hit the damn thing, if the phrase is not familiar to you).

Unfortunately, this seemed to cause a small PLAGUE of driver errors in the last couple of days. And thus, my Saturday morning/early afternoon was spent mostly trying to fix the mess I’d made. It seems to have settled down, now – I’ve been running my machine for several hours at a time without incident, although I must confess a certain reluctance to attempt playing any graphically-intensive games in case I somehow bugger it up again.

I can live without the games. What I CAN’T live with is the thought of letting you guys down. Right now, since it’s shortly after Christmas, I haven’t had the chance to build my comic buffer back up, so I’m illustrating stuff right down to the wire most days. If my machine goes, I lose the ability to render the comic pages, and I have no machine capable of taking the task on. Thus, I have the need for a backup machine, preferably a laptop that’s capable of handling Creative Suite.

As with such things, my main limitation is funding – I’m abjectly paranoid of skipping my monthly contribution to the Buy Myself A House In 2020 fund, and as I’ve not yet managed to secure some sort of fabulous movie-writing deal, I have to be careful with how I spend my money. So, I’ve been thinking of some alternatives.

Initially, I thought of running some sort of donation drive like you sometimes see on webcomics, just over a limited-time and focussed to a very specific goal. That struck me as utterly selfish, though – Yeah, it lets me carry one entertaining you, but to outright say ‘THOU SHALT PAY FOR THIS” seems incredibly self-centred and rather cheeky to boot. Then it hit me – What about offering a service?

And so, I’m now contemplating offering commissions. I’ll work on a pricing model and production format, but first I’d like to sound out what interest there is among you guys! Is it going to be viable, even if it only pays for a fraction of the cost? Let me know if it’s something you’d be interested in!

Oh, and the ultimate fallback so far as I see it is that if my machine completely dies with no hope of recovery, I’d just carry on the comic by doing it the traditional way – Ink and paper!

Until next time!

M.