Heads Up For March

Hey guys!

I wanted to give you a little heads up about March. The Ides, you gotta watch out for ‘em.

Other than that…

[TL;DR - Posting two pages in March, plus some WIPS, normal schedule resumes in April]

March is always a funny month for my schedule as I volunteer doing remote communication work for a dogsled race. In short, I get dropped off by bush plane into the Alaskan woods for a couple weeks and relay info such as when teams come and go (there’s a more to it than that, but that's the gist). The way the schedule worked out, I’m going to be up for pretty much all of March.

I’ve been doing this specific race since 2015 (though I took off a couple years during the start of the pandemic.) I’ve always been a little cagey about it, not for any specific reason, I guess - there’s a media blackout during the event and I just got in the habit of never talking about it publicly.

The work I’ll be doing is inherently a little dangerous due to the environment (I go a few places during the race--where I’ll be on the river, -20° to -50° degree windchill is pretty normal, and last year on the coast, the wind gusts were bad enough to be flipping snowmobiles.) Whole thing is a physically and mentally and emotionally taxing experience with a lot of hurry-up-and-wait coupled with frenzied, physical stretches without sleep. There’s no heat, no running water, and its dark most of the time, but I love it.

(The Bering Sea from one of the race hubs, lookin' nice and not windy af)

I’ve been trying to stay caught up and build back a buffer of comic pages to post while I’m gone (I had to burn through a lot of my page buffer over the holidays/new year.) I wish I could have gotten more done, but I’m at a part of the story where the pages are complicated and every panel has either a big background or a million characters in it, and both take considerably more time.

I am anticipating coming home from the wilderness absolutely dead tired, best case scenario. So, in an effort to avoid burn out later, I’m just going to bite the bullet and take two weeks off in March. I’ll post some extra WIPS, tho!

Anyhow, April will resume as normal!

Thank you guys!