One year online

Text-only version

So this is it. Today this blog is officially one year old. Time to see what I've accomplished. Time to see where I'm headed.

…Time to do an insufferably cute drawing … and explain it.

What I've accomplished

When I started, I of course had zero readers. And it stayed that way for a month and a half. But soon, reality caught up with me, and I had to abandon many of my plans for this blog. Ironically, it was then when it took off.

Jane's Debut. Of course, between the time I wrote that and the time I posted it, my "loyal" readership had increased from 5 to 20. Right now, probably 200 people visit this blog recurrently.

I showed my characters, I put them into absurd situations. I earned their respect (okay, their hate) and learned in the process.

I made my readers lives a little richer. And despite failing to make a buck with it, I'm a richer man for it.

Where we're going

Obviously, the first step is to close what I've started. I need to get my avatar out of the snow (which is still progress considering where he started –I really need to start referring to him as "I"). I need to finish telling how I drew my avatar. I have to posts those things I planned to say about college (exempli grata). In short, I need to keep my promises…



…as soon as real life stops getting in the way.

About the drawing

When I wrote It’s important to have traditions back in June, I pretty much locked myself into having to do something to celebrate the Blog's anniversary. It took me a while to decide just what I would do when these anniversaries came, when it dawned to me that the perfect way would be to show a character ageing with the blog.

Having decided what I wanted to do left me another problem: I still hadn't drawn child characters by then. Of course, right now I could've just copied the last one I drew, but the fact that I'd have to draw her again, older, every year, made me go for a character I already had in existence.

The character shown is called Sally Whiskerson. I created her in 2006 with the purpose of (ironically) having a secondary character I could watch grow up as I wrote Jane's story. Her first appearance in Jane's story is when she's the human equivalent of 7 years old, so I had the challenge of drawing her here younger than I'd ever seen her in my mind's eye.

Mice in the real world age very, very quickly; they die of old age before their second birthday. For Jane's story, I'm having mice age at the equivalent of four human years for each in-story year. Thus, showing Sally, at the age of 1 means drawing a four-year-old girl.

The result is still insufferably cute. Could it be any cuter? Actually yes: I had concieved her squueezing her doll and looking down to avert the camera's gaze – but that would make it harder to compare this drawing to whatever I draw next year.