Happy 7th Anniversary to The Rabbit and the Moon!

On September 5, 2013 I began to serialize my webcomic The Rabbit and the Moon.

And here we are 7 years later.

I finished The Rabbit and the Moon on May 17, 2016.

This was "the great project." I could combine and grow my art and writing skills and grow my programming knowledge building the comic reader and website.

I learned a lot of things in that time:

• I self-published a 128 page graphic novel of The Rabbit and the Moon at the end, and I sold books at a convention! And I made some money too!
• I created the Lolita Fashion Coloring Book, which still sells copies today on Amazon
• I wrote a GIMP python script to help me animate layer groups using a spreadsheet
• I animated "The Miracle" -- the climax of the story
• I learned how to use Blender for animation, particles, modeling
• I got better at lettering and picking fonts
• I got better at Wordpress, SEO, and understanding web/Google analytics
• I learned how to use social media better (maybe)
• I build the Shrine, an online virtual place/visual novel
• I put Kamiko on Twitter
• I feel like I grew as a producer. I understood how to use my time better, scope projects, and why we cut work and where to do the actual hard work

Doing this project taught me a lot. These are still skills I use today, and skills I continue to build as I work in indie games and my new projects.

The Rabbit and the Moon may be finished, but This Mortal Coil isn't over.

The Future of This Mortal Coil

Currently there's a new serial running: Magical Girl Kamiko.

It's not quite the same as The Rabbit and the Moon. It's not as orchestrated and organized. There's no overarching story, no script. While that was Rabbit's main feature was that it was a big story -- kinda like a movie -- the problem was, I wrote that story in 2012 and it meant for the next 4 years I had to stick to it. If I learned something new about Kamiko, I couldn't incorporate it. If I wanted to tell a different story, I couldn't. I had to finish what I began.

Magical Girl Kamiko is the opposite of that. It's a leap of faith in a sense. There's no script, no storyboards, and no overarching plot. The stories are more improvised. The style way less finished. Everything depends on my ability to craft the art and story. It's more fluid moving. Tell smaller, improvised stories. In a sense, make art, stories, and mistakes faster. Try out ideas faster -- at least faster than 4 years of concerted effort for a singular story.

I feel like it can allow me to go further.

And that's also not the only iron in the fire.

I'm exploring Kamiko and the ideas of This Mortal Coil as pure text. There are novellas in the works that I intend to sell on Amazon as eBooks. That's a departure from authoring content that lives primarily on this site, but I'm curious to explore it more.

In the years after The Rabbit and the Moon I had begun writing more and trying my hand at publishing on Amazon with a series called The Mechanical Bird.

There actually even exists one novella for This Mortal Coil called The Shinigami.

It was an experiment. (But, it's legit apart of the canon.)

From 2017 to present I did a lot of feeling around and understanding how eBooks work, eCommerce and making digital content. I've batted around ideas for new stories and concepts related to This Mortal Coil. I've had starts and stops, failures, and more failures. I'm learning, and I hope once again there will be come kind of critical mass for a new project.

I'm also taking things slow. Work takes up time. Living takes up more time. I want to go with the flow and enjoy myself, and yes, when the time comes I want to work hard at my art and continue to grow.

But, life in balance and all that.

Anyhow, here's to seven years of This Mortal Coil: The Rabbit and the Moon, and may there be many more artistic projects from me to you.