Part Six goes live today, which starts here. That wraps up book one!

I’m letting myself spend most of my time on writing/thumbnailing for now, but I’m optimistic about ramping up to getting a page done a week. Here’s a bit of inking I did for an Actual Panel:

Part Four starts here. Teneia gets introduced! Also I make a ton of horrible writing decisions lmao.

I’m happy with my progress on actual pages lately, but one thing I’m hoping to get done soon is the cover for book 2. I never did finish any extra content for it but maybe I should release the print version with just the comic? I still don’t think it will be ready super soon so I have time to think about it.

Not a huge update this week, but I’ll keep the posts going!

Start reading part three here! Maybe this week I’ll add chapter navigation so I don’t feel like I need to manually insert the link every week, lol.

I had a bunch of this post written up but WordPress ate it! >:( I guess I need to learn to write my drafts in notepad or something.

I’m making a bunch of headway deciding on the direction of Part Nineteen. I’m not quite done with the script yet but I’m optimistic about my momentum just sketching rough pages. I’ll keep working on relearning how to ink, letter, and tone, but I’m not quite there yet haha.

I’m starting to remember what some of these characters are like. Writing their dialogue and drawing their expressions and poses and stuff is slowly coming back to me. I’m hoping these transitional pages don’t come off as too unnatural when I finally post the pages, but if they have to I at least hope it doesn’t take too long to get my comfort level back.

Reading old pages as I post them is crazy!! I remembered how much I hated the first few chapters but I’m pleasantly surprised at some panels I forgot about. Trying not to beat up Past Me too hard. She was just a kid ;__;

Posted Part Two this week. Start reading here!

The more I work on this site, the more little things I want to tinker with, lol. I spent a good amount of time this week putting together a tool that will auto-generate a chapter worth of posts for me so I don’t have to manually go in and set the page image, timestamp, title, etc. It’ll only be of use as long as I have batches of pages to upload, but maybe it’ll come in handy if I decide to post other stuff in batches someday?

The actual drawing part is still proving to be a struggle, and the actual drawings I’m working on are sorta spoilery so I’m not sure when I’ll post them (or draw other stuff to post). I might ask around for ideas if I have trouble thinking of stuff.

Let me know if you’d like any site features! Things on my radar for the near future are arrow key navigation and previous chapter/next chapter buttons. Also that RSS icon at the top of the screen goes to the feed for comic pages now, but I’m not sure what other integrations would make it easy to follow. Twitter?

For convenience, you can start reading this week’s chapter here.

I’m just barely starting to dip my toes back into drawing comic pages, but I’m optimistic about having stuff to post on the old sketch blog soon. Who knows if I’ll ever get back to posting every single day, but I’ll be excited to have art to share even if progress is slow.

At one point I was considering starting over Part Nineteen rather than having to pick back up in the middle of an unfinished chapter, but I have managed to talk myself down from that. After all, last time I took a long break, I completely changed my process mid-chapter and I don’t think I regret that. This transition should be a bit less jarring at least. But we still have eighteen weeks left to go before you’ll see any of that, so maybe I’ll keep flip flopping.

See y’all next week!

It’s a strange feeling trying to reintroduce this comic.

Celestial Mirror wasn’t my first webcomic, but it is the final iteration of what I consider my first story idea, so I’ve had a pattern of working on it and revisiting it for basically my entire life. My dedication to it hasn’t been strong enough to avoid long breaks whenever life gets a little in the way… school or work being too busy, difficulties in my personal life, web hosts going down, etc. But I seem to always come back to it.

Old readers will recognize most of the elements of this website from how it looked on Smackjeeves up until it died. I’m toying with the idea of doing another site overhaul, but I’ll save that for after I’ve gotten in the groove of drawing again. As you can tell from my sketch blog, I’ve allowed myself to get quite rusty.

I still can’t promise I won’t silently miss a few (or many) updates, but I think a schedule will help motivate me to build some momentum. For right now the plan is:

• Start over posting old pages. I’ll post a chapter a week, on Saturdays, until we catch up to the last in-progress chapter that was posted on Smackjeeves.
• Build up a buffer, draw some more site assets, work on the print version of volume 2…
• Start posting a page a week after old chapters run out.

I’ll try to post some blog posts, and maybe ramble about some decisions about the site and the comic and my art in general. Feel free to comment or reach out if you see any bugs or weirdness in the site. Or just drop me a line just because. 🙂