Just a heads-up–Michael is traipsing across the countryside right now, helping family with a big move, so this week’s page will be delayed until the early part of next week. After that we’ll do our darnedest to get another one up on the Saturday following. So that should be interesting speed-practice. :)

Thanks for your patience! We’ll pop up the new page on facebook as soon as it hits!

~ Rachel

How was the rest of your 2011? As promised, we here at RWA are BACK IN ACTION! …And we will be releasing our first page of 2012 on the first Saturday of 2012–that’s the 7th–so come back then to party with us as the story continues! WOO HOO!!

Both Michael and I are utterly stoked to be able to do this again. We’ve been having some awesome planning meetings, and have set up an official time for Office Hours every week where we get to work without interruption. We’re starting off carefully, but our immediate goal is to try and streamline things enough to be able to produce two pages a week.

The complication, as before, is that one page of the comic generally takes about ten hours to create, which is a lot in Starving Artist Time. So one of the biggest things we want to get better at is advertising ourselves, getting a bigger audience, getting more page hits, and generally making it so that Michael can financially justify treating this as a part-time job. (Which has been his dream as far back as I can remember.)

We’re thinking about running a Kickstarter fundraiser to allow us to spend more time working. As part of that, we would be selling a low-price ($8-$10) booklet of the first three chapters (75 pages) of the comic. Keep an eye out for a Facebook poll about that possibility in the next few days! If there’s enough interest, we’ll definitely do it.

So! Lots of hard work for us. Lots of fun reading for you! We hope you’ll enjoy the rest of this chapter as much as we do. If you do, please tell your friends and keep coming around! :)

Again, happy new year! High fives all around! We’re thrilled to be back. <3

See you next week!

~ Rachel

First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of news on what was going on behind the scenes over here. We saw this coming, too, but we’ve been doing our best to fight it, and that meant not wanting to admit it. But now we figure it’s time to cut back on the stress on ourselves, be honest with our amazing and wonderful readers, and plan for the future.

Runewood Abbey will be going on official hiatus for the remainder of 2011. The reasons are about what you’d expect–a toddler for me, new wife and career for Michael, and blah blah blah about the economy for all of us. We need to regroup and to change our strategy, because the current method of producing pages takes way too friggin’ long and is incompatible with also eating and sleeping and earning money.

The plan is, we’re going to experiment with drawing comics directly via a tablet (which we already use for the Photoshopping phase, so we may as well save some time, eh?). Meanwhile I want to flesh out a lot of the script for the future. When we come back, we hope to be producing pages much more efficiently, and more frequently. There may even be a Kickstarter campaign to help us devote more time to the project, and to work toward publishing. Despite the downtime, we’re excited!

This story is really important to us, and we’re determined to keep telling it. We still have the itch! We just want to do it in a way that’s faster and smoother for both of us and for all of you, and we want to take care of our families at the same time. Words can’t express how grateful we are for all your continued patience and your fantastic comments. This has been an amazing experience. It’s not over yet.

Check back on January 1, 2012 to see what our new plans are going to be. In the meantime, please feel free to “like” us on facebook or subscribe to our RSS feed, so we can update everyone right away as soon as things are up and rolling again.

There will be minor updates during the hiatus, too–these last two pages will be finalized, and one more drawn to at least finish the current conversation. Michael is planning to do a profile image for Ferryn. I’m vaguely daydreaming about starting another webcomic I’ve had in mind for a while, which I would draw myself, meaning it would have much lower visual standards and be publishable on a daily basis. I still have to consider the details, but it could be fun. Meanwhile, whenever a minor or major update happens, you can hear about it by either RSS or facebook, as mentioned above.

Thank you again! We love your guts! We’re excited to kick things back into gear once the new year hits. Send us an email any time you like. ♥

~ Rachel

Michael has a drawing up over at Skin Horse, one of our favorite comics by one of our favorite artists! See his drawing of Tip right here, and then go back to the beginning and read it all. We love this strip’s guts, and it’s completely insane to see our names anywhere near it.

While you’re at it, I hope everyone has seen Shaenon’s earlier comic, Narbonic, which is one of the best things I’ve ever read in any medium (and a humongous inspiration to me as a writer and artist). Thanks for featuring us, Shaenon and Jeff! Yay!

The timing is good in providing something for us all to look at this weekend. Keep an eye on your facebook and RSS feeds for the latest page, and a paradigm-shifting blog entry, in the next few days.

Thanks for reading, everyone!

~ Rachel

Hee hee hee hee hee.

~ Rachel

Michael: mm?

Rachel: Let’s just name EVERYBODY Biscuit.

Michael: …no

Rachel: I am Sergeant Biscuit, and this is Lieutenant Biscuit.

Michael: Get a new artist XD

My planned post for today has been borked by technology, so instead, I’m posting the incentive comic from fall 2009. Did you miss out on them, way back when? Well, here they are once more. :) Ahh, such memories. I was in my first trimester of pregnancy when I made these, and living in a desert wasteland of nausea. I hope to do more of these little comics sometime–hopefully with all my body cooperating. What a thought!

To thank you all for your continued patience and good cheer, I’ll be running these on Tuesday and Thursday for the next two weeks, plus posting something else next Saturday. That’ll get us through all five incentive comics and the new year, and we’ll look and see where we’re at with starting Chapter Four! I’m having fun writing it and look forward to seeing how it turns out. :)

So, see you again Tuesday! This’ll be fun!

~ Rachel

Not too surprisingly, the comic will be delayed again this weekend, but we’re making plans for how to cause the least possible amount of annoyance with all this. Basically, the current chapter is almost over. We’re gonna finish it out as quickly as we can, and then take a break from the story to serve up some special bonus material for the remainder of 2010 (which will be a month or so). That’ll give Michael a chance to get stupid, get married, and get smart again as nature requires, and meanwhile I’ll hang out with you guys here. :)

So, what kind of bonus material, you ask? Lots of kinds. We have some pretty awesome developmental stuff from when we were first getting all our character designs worked out, including not only Michael’s first sketches but mine as well. And yes, if a character you haven’t yet met happens to appear there, we will be including her! So be ready for sneak peek or two. We’ll also have a special sketch post announcing the winners of the naming contest, since it’s obviously not feasible to use the comic itself for that announcement at the moment.

When the new year starts, we’ll roll right into posting Chapter Four. Can’t wait to see you all there. :) Thanks again for your comments and support! You guys are fantastic!

~ Rachel

PS. Keep an eye on the RSS feeds and facebook for the next update!

As you can imagine, theres a LOT of stuff to prepare. But worry not! Comicking will resume this saturday! =) Thanks for all the support! We love yoooouuu!

- Michael

I’m afraid we’re gonna have another late comic this week. We’ve been struggling a lot with it lately, as you’ve probably noticed, so I just want to acknowledge it out loud. That way, you know that Michael and I know it too. We are going to keep working on this, and I expect we’ll pull out of this before too long. But yes.

Without going into boring details, I’ve been really sick lately, and Michael’s been crazy-busy with new (awesome) events in his life. We’ve been able to manage okay in the past when just one of us was overloaded, but with both of us out, it’s been much more difficult. It’s a good learning experience, though–hopefully next time life gets crazy we’ll have a better idea of how to deal with it!

Anyway. There should be at least a rough draft up by Saturday night, with the completed version as early next week as possible. Heaven willing, I’ll be feeling better soon and have more of a brain, and maybe Mike and I can do a few of our boot camp sessions where we hang out in person and get way more done. YES

Also, I never got around to posting the winners of the naming contest! I will do that halfway through next week. :) Stay tuned!

Thanks again a billion times for your patience and support and awesome comments! We love you guys!

~ Rachel

UPDATE: Due to further awesomeness in Michael’s life (more on which anon) and also a driving mishap, we won’t have lineart today, but expect the full page on Monday. Thanks for understanding! Aiieee!