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I finished my book 🎉

I finished my book 🎉

26 Feb • This will only take you 7 minutes

After 4 years, How Could You is complete!

It took all of 2020 for me to create the pitch packet for this book. Understandably, that year was hard. You were there. You remember. My book found a home with Oni Press in 2021, where it sat in contract limbo for a very, very long time. I finally began to work on my book towards the end of 2022.

This book was my whole life last year, with a couple months of extreme crunch towards the end, and now it’s done! Well, mostly done. I’m just putting the finishing touches and flourishes before it goes into production, and my lovely letterer is hard at work making it look nice. Stay tuned for December 2024, when How Could You comes to stores everywhere~

How Could You tells the story of college junior Molly Song as she navigates getting dumped by her first ever college gf and finds conflicting solace in her best friend. It’s a romance drama for everyone who was kind of mean and self absorbed and scared and insecure as a brand new adult. I hope you buy a lot of copies so that I can make another book, because hey, I really liked making a graphic novel. I’d love to do it again :^)

About The Shepherd’s Sword

I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I last worked on The Shepherd’s Sword. I feel weird coming back to it, like, I went on the Hero’s Journey and came home forever changed. I’m not the same person I was when I started it. It’ll be interesting to see how it changes trajectory now. That’s kind of the beauty of webcomics, I think. I value the documentation of slow, inevitable change.

I’ll be working on it throughout March, with a return scheduled for April! When I finally sit down to write, I wonder what will happen. Maybe there will be more sexy babes.

Cool Girl Winter (Autostraddle Comic)

This month I borrowed my friends’ OC’s likenesses for this comic. Read the full thing over here!

Mail Club & 18+ for February 2024

Alive! For the first and only time! You are alive for the first time, so be easy on yourself. You’re alive for the only time, so make it count. I’ll send these at the end of March! There’s still time to join to receive these rewards, which are both printed locally in Portland OR 🌲

The reward for February’s 18+ tiers is a handful of color pages for Invasive Species, my collaboration comic with Mel Gillman for an upcoming anthology. Enjoy this sneak peek! (Drawing this comic was SO fun. It’s maybe my fave thing I’ve ever drawn, thanks to Mel’s excellent script.)

You can check out my tiers and join the mail club here ❤️‍🔥

What else did I do this month, hmm…

Now I can finally play video games again and turn my attention back to my webcomic (The Shepherd’s Sword) and all the zines I planned on making. I can give myself a weekend. I can dream up marketing strategies for my book. I currently don’t have any long projects with external deadlines! Everything I work on for the next few months is entirely within my timeframe, set at my pace. This luxury is something I will never take for granted.

I had a wee little menty B early this month because I had been going nonstop without giving myself a weekend, so when the slightest inconvenience hit me, I had to put myself to bed for the whole day. This pitfall of being self employed doing something you love is very common. Like, of course I want to spend each and every day drawing. But I cannot! I should not! I must read a book, go on a hike, go to a party, and not immediately sit back down at my desk after doing those things. So I’ll be incorporating that “it’s the freakin weekend” mentality going forward.

This month I mostly kept my head down and worked on my book. I helped my friend Tay with designing the cover for her webcomic. We went in circles and various iterations before deciding the first version slapped the most. En and I have been helping friends who just bought a house do some demolition on their kitchen and bathroom almost every weekend. It’s kinda cool and sexy of us all, I think. A friend of ours also moved to the area for school, so we’ve been hanging out!

I’m trying really hard to be more present in my physical space, my real life world. I removed Tumblr from my phone, and now I don’t really have any doomscroll apps at all. It’s peaceful.

Oh, and I’ll see you at ECCC this weekend! If I don’t catch you there, En and I will also be at Squatchcon not long after towards the end of March. We’ll also be at the Reed Zine Fest on March 30! Lots of events!!

Here’s some sweet treats for you to check out:

My friend Dax made her comic, Fruit Salad Days!!!!! WOW! The website is so fucking cool.
My friend Sage wrote about Pacific Drive. I haven’t read this blog post yet, because I really want to play PD without spoilers, but I trust her opinions.
After a winter of mall pop-up, the cool folks at Secret Room Press are opening up a shop, a real shop-shop, brick and mortar! I’m so happy for them, and I can’t wait to check out the place.
A cool Etsy alternative: artisans.coop
Cool local zinester Maya made a tool that can turn your PDF into print-order pages. I think Maya should earn a million trillion billion dollars for this. If you use this program, give her a shoutout! (Maya, if you’re seeing this, what is your venmo)
I started listening to The Terrible Anvil podcast. I liked episode 1 pretty okay! I’ll be interested in listening more.
Carey Pietsch shared this comic deadline formula on Bluesky. Here’s the link to it on Carey’s Patreon.
This month, we hiked Vedanta Retreat. It was extremely foggy that day, which added to the effect of seeing all these 1970’s shrines in the woods. It made me think of a former coworker I had from ages and ages ago. I think she’s in Nepal now. I hope she’s well!

Cheers!

Ren

PS: If you want more content that isn’t in this newsletter, I recommend joining my Patreon for some exclusive work every month like comics, sketchbook pages, spicy drawings, and some mail rewards!