Bonus Story and Margin Art
1 day ago
– Sat, Apr 04, 2026 at 12:05:54 PM
Greetings Backers!
We've got good progress to report.
TL;DR: Only one page left to complete the bonus story. Margin art is under way and the trade dress is nearly complete. Howard's shoulder is doing better. Your next update will be the week of April 27-March 1.
Details
Life has calmed down here at Tayler House. Howard saw an orthopedist for his frozen shoulder and that resulted in him getting a cortisone shot. The steroid injection has had some startlingly good effects on some of Howard's Long Covid symptoms. It likely isn't an easy solution button, but this definitely opens a new medical avenue for us to explore. We're happy about that.
Howard was almost done with the bonus story, but he kept getting stuck on last bonus story page, so he started working on marginalia and trade dress while his subconscious works on getting the final bonus story page unstuck. He's made significant progress on both!
About ten days ago all of the places that have green checks were red, so switching over is moving the needle forward significantly. Sandra's task after finishing writing this update is to put more of the finished art into the layout document and check them off in the "layout" column. You can also see the progress in our over-all project spreadsheet.
Completion seems like an ever-moving mirage, but we're now coming up on a hard deadline. If we don't send this book off to print by the end of April we won't have copies in time for Gen Con. That is something we truly want to avoid.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks you're likely to get an alert from Kickstarter that we've got a new project coming. (Launch page isn't quite ready.) This project is funding a fancy version of the Howard Tayler Retrospective Sketchbook Sandra tossed together a few projects back. It is also funding the reprint of Resident Mad Scientist. And it is funding the ongoing need to pay bills and buy groceries at Tayler House.
The project is deliberately designed to give work to Sandra, not Howard. The crowdfunding portion will have some impact as he'll need to write some text, but we're planning (hoping) on having A Function of Firepower off to print before that project launches. We don't want that project to delay delivery on this one and we believe we've arranged so that it won't. Hopefully when the project goes live you'll go check it out and see if you're interested in jumping on board for that project too.
That's our update for today! Your next update will be the week of April 27 - May 1.
Thank you for supporting our projects!
Howard and Sandra Tayler
As a reward for reading to the end of this update, here are a few of the margin art images that Howard has created this week:
Bonus Story Update
28 days ago
– Sun, Mar 08, 2026 at 09:41:27 AM
Greetings Backers!
Sorry this update is a few days late! Sandra is still scrambling to catch up on all of the things that got neglected during February. She is also attempting to rest and recover from being overworked in February. As you might imagine the efforts to catch up and the efforts to rest are in direct conflict so she's kind of failing at both of them. She's also talking about herself in the third person, so that's a thing too.
TL;DR: Bonus story is almost finished! Once it is done we hope to put the rest of the book to bed in a few weeks. We were on track to send it off to print by the end of March, but a shoulder injury for Howard may create a delay. Your next update will be the week of March 30- April 3.
Details
While Sandra was busy in February working enough hours for a full-time job and a half, Howard kept his schedule home-based and predictable so that he could be working on the bonus story for A Function of Firepower. As he frequently does, he made progress reports on Bluesky and our Discord server. We'll let Howard talk about process:
HOWARD'S REPORTING:
I'm working on a comic mini-story (13pp) that will be consumed almost exclusively by people reading it in a book. This means they'll be reading page spreads (left and right pages both visible at once,) which suggests that I should be *creating* it as page spreads. This is hard on the CPU.
I have written it "to the page-turn," so in terms of panel content and dialog the story does flow correctly for page spread layout, but now that I'm doing the inset panel colors, the backgrounds, and the highlight/shadow layers I really should have the full spread visible while I work.
NOTE: There are numerous professional comic-book-makin' folks in my feed, and I strongly suspect they all have their own solutions for this problem. With this caveat out of the way, here's how I'm handling it: I'm working on the tablet, with the navigator pane and a reference on a big screen.
Here's what my TV looks like right now: The left window is the Windows PNG image viewer showing my export of Page 4, which is done. The right window is the Navigator pane from Clip Studio, showing Page 5. When I pulled these up and positioned them I noticed some important things!
ALT: A widescreen TV screenshot with a nice Earth-from-orbit wallpaper and two windows, side-by-side, arranged to look like the left and right pages of an open book. The left page is done, the right page is maybe half-done. The dialog and narration is too small to be read, and is not important here.
Here, let me help you notice them. LEFT IMAGE: Big round things on the left page. There are panels on the right where roundness can be accented for symmetry. RIGHT IMAGE: Big lavender color patch on the left page. The TERAPORT SFX on the right can be lavender-ish for symmetry, maybe?
ALT The same page spread as the one in the previous skeet. Green circles have been drawn to show how "round things" on the left page might be echoed with round shapes on the right.
ALT The same page spread as the previous skeet, and the previous image. Now a lavender line has been drawn from a lavender object in the left page to a position on the right page where that color might fit well for symmetry.
These page symmetry things are, to my mind, much less important than simply making sure that the background colors and inset panel colors are consistent and/or complementary between the two pages. But the symmetry would be cool! I didn't even see it as an option until I pulled the pages together.
Another thing that jumps out: the yellow-orange inset panel (I call them "insets" when they have no background or prop data, just talking heads with a color that fits the emotional beat) on the left page will be too loud unless a similar inset panel color is on the right page.
I picked yellow-orange so the yellow of the barred-spiral galactic core would have a friend, and would pull the greens of the Earth hologram a bit forward, rather than letting them get muted by the huge amount of desaturated green in the location images.
So that triangle of yellow-white yellow-orange, and yellow-green demands some yellow-something symmetry across the page spread. Probably in panels 2 and 4 of the second row. Yellow-orange, and then a darker yellow-red. And the way my workspace is laid out, I can spitball it with flood fills.
And that, my fellow Blooskies, is the whole point of the thread. I've laid out my workspace so I can make good choices about color and shape. I suspect this can be generalized to other disciplines, but I'm not gonna test this by trying to stick pancakes to my TV.
END HOWARD REPORT
As of February 20, here was the state of Bonus Story pages:
Howard has made significant progress since then, as you can see in our Project Spreadsheet:
All of the progress is great. Unfortunately about four days ago Howard's left shoulder developed a stabbing pain in the joint. (No idea why, he didn't do anything, it just started hurting.) This is consistent with previous rotator cuff injuries that Howard has had, so we already know how to treat it and have plans to see a doctor. Mostly we just feel grouchy at anything which slows down progress on getting this book into your hands.
This week Sandra is going to wrap her head around all of the margin art spaces and will try to find art to go in them that has already been created, thus reducing the amount of work that Howard has left to do.
That's our update for today! Your next update will be the week of March 30 - April 3.
Thank you for supporting our projects!
Howard and Sandra Tayler
A Very Quick Update
2 months ago
– Wed, Feb 04, 2026 at 08:46:59 AM
Greetings Backers!
TL;DR: Howard continues to make steady progress on the bonus story. Structuring Life to Support Creativity is now available in paperback and eBook. Sandra is incredibly overworked at the moment, so this update is very short. Your next update will be the week of March 2-6.
Details
Sandra is the one who writes most of these updates. She has SLSC book release tasks, admin for the Schlock store, a convention where she's teaching a master class, and a convention where she is in charge of an exhibit hall of 150 exhibitors. There is so much administrivia floating loose in her brain that it is blocking out most of the words she'd use to write an entertaining and useful update.
But Howard is working. He's posting about it in our Discord and sometimes on Bluesky.
Thank you to the HESH backers who went in and answered the add-on question! I'm pushing the button to lock your orders and charge cards today. A reminder about charging cards for international backers:
Because of increased vigilance in banking and specifically about international transactions, there was a much higher percentage of declined payments than usual. If you are among those whose payment was declined, I apologize for the extra hassle. You can try contacting your bank and clearing the transaction. If that doesn't work, please feel free to email [email protected]. I will assist with an alternate way of getting payment made. Paypal doesn't seem to have the same challenge that Backerkit payment through Stripe currently has. Thank you for your assistance on this. We did get the largest bulk of payments processed in December, which will greatly help with our expected tax challenges this year and next.
And that is our very short update on this project. I'm sorry it isn't more detailed, but we'd rather give you a short and somewhat brain-scattered update than to fail to update you. Hopefully I will have more news for you the first week of March.
Thank you so much for backing our project!
Howard and Sandra Tayler
