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Snow. Snow has covered everything. And then been plowed. And then it covered everything again. And we're supposed to get more snow soon.

Someday I'll look back on this and think, "Man, that was a lot of snow." But in the meantime, I'm simply exhausted. The week of vacation I took from work was filled with car trouble and bad weather - and that was before the worst of it. When I'm snowed in for day after day, I start to wonder if it'll ever clear up. I have a hard time imagining what it's like for people where snow this heavy is a regular thing.

Comic? Right, right. I did some of that. The editing of chapter 7 continues. I've kept it 2 months ahead of the updates, but I still feel like I'm falling behind one way or another. I think it's because I have such a hard time deciding on when to use color, and when I use it, it takes so long to color a full page.

Chapter 9 is sketched in full, and I've finished the drawings on a quarter of it. They're coming out beautifully, which is a relief since (as usual) I'm drawing some things I've never drawn before. The planning has begun on chapter 10. At the moment I'm strongly leaning toward a black-and-white manga style, both for the tone of the chapter and the consideration that, if I don't start doing black-and-white deliberately, I'm going to want to go back and color the whole thing.

Statistics!

Time elapsed since comic debut (1/1/2009): 406 days.
Pages posted: 161.
Average days per page: 2.52.

Time elapsed since start of work (10/26/2008): 473 days.
Pages planned: 389 (53.1%) (1.22 days per page)
Pages sketched: 255 (34.8%) (1.85)
Pages drawn: 235 (32.1%) (2.01)
Pages complete: 188 (25.7%) (2.52)
Pages posted: 161 (22.0%)

My rate of completing pages has exactly kept pace with my updates, which makes sense since I'm exactly 2 months ahead. 54 units completed this month corresponds roughly to the 13 pages that have gone up in that time. At this point the work is 36% complete, which puts the total time at about 42 months, of which 27 remain. That gives me an average of 40 days to complete each chapter.

Will I make it? Stay tuned!