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