I dreaded posting this page. Mostly because I know what it feels like to wait for a weekly comic, and you anticipate and anticipate and then the author lets you down by publishing a page that’s solid, inky black, full of just … words.
Not that anybody’s built up that level of anticipation for Eleanor, or anything. But still, you know? It’s not even a real page.
Except it is. And it’s actually one of my favorites. I spent more than a decade writing Eleanor’s story, chapter by chapter, and I’m fairly sure I wrote the opening scene — the same one you’re reading now — about nine times. (And in manuscript form, that scene was about 9,500 words long. If I’d taken the effort of rewriting and applied it to telling the rest of her story, the book would have been done years ago.)
Anyway, all of those words mean an awful lot to me, because I worked hard on them. So it’s nice to give them a page all their own, just every once in awhile, to let them do a little dance.
I think the words are beautiful.
Really.
And the fact that they’re on solid black makes them more powerful, somehow.
Thank you!