So here we go — just one page left in this chapter, and then we can dig into my favorite chapter so far. Chapter 2 is full of danger and heartbreak and alarm. Our story starts to pick up speed just a bit.

What is Agnes’s cabin? What is this valley she keeps returning to? By now I think it’s clear there’s something more here than your average dreamspace. The cabin seems to have a life of its own. This place seems to serve some sort of spooky purpose, doesn’t it? That’s one reason I’m really excited to get on with Chapter 2. A little more about the nature of the valley, and about Eleanor’s own plummetous void (I just made up the word plummetous, could you tell?), is revealed. And why has Agnes’s pregnancy vanished when she returns to her valley?

Dun dun dunnnnnn.

So here’s a lot of cool news: right now, as we speak, Eleanor’s first three chapters are being prepared for publication in the iBooks and Kindle stores. (As well as the Nook and Kobo stores, plus Google Books, Android and Facebook.) I hope to announce the book’s arrival in all these places in the next week or so. Exciting, isn’t it? Well, for me, at least.

And the other thing: Chapter 2 is finished… which means when Eleanor shows up on your Kindle or in iBooks, you can read it in its entirety, long before it’s shared here on the web. It even comes with bonus sketchbook pages.

And in the meantime, I’ve begun working on Chapter 3. Want to see the first page?

Page 66 -- the beginning of Chapter 3!

It’s a nice page, isn’t it? And it’s spoiler-free, so don’t be afraid to click. Chapter 3′s working title is A Vast and Endless Sea.

Happy President’s Day!

Well, I made it to Monday. I’ll be honest, I was a little concerned that I’d keel over before the weekend was finished. Here’s what has happened since last week: I signed a new agreement with Graphicly to put Eleanor into the Apple iBooks store, the Amazon Kindle store, the B&N Nook store, the Android Marketplace, and a few other venues. This is kind of awesome, and gives me complete control over how my little book is being presented to new readers.

I quickly realized that my books are missing some key pages that make them feel like, you know, books. Like a copyright page — what was I thinking? Or a dedication. Or a letter from the author. Or some fun bonus content that isn’t available anyplace else. So I spent the weekend working through Friday night and Saturday night (I think I slept for about 45 minutes Sunday morning before going back to work) to create these missing pages and finishing Chapter 2.

Hear that? Chapter 2 is finished! And I have to confess that I’m extremely proud of it. It even comes with an honest-to-god cliffhanger. A cliffhanger!

After all that work, and my adventures in sleep deprivation, I suppose I could have gone to bed and slept the rest of Sunday away. But instead, I started Chapter 3.

So yes, a busy weekend. I also calculated that I’ll get to spend about another two years on Eleanor before she’s finished. This month marks one year since I started creating the graphic novel. In that time, I’ve finished three full chapters — about 65 pages of material. I anticipate there are at least six chapters remaining in Eleanor’s story, which means — do the math — two more years of content ahead of us!

And then I’ll start a new book. Something with a lonely astronaut, perhaps.

Today’s page, by the way, features my favorite illustration of Agnes and my least favorite illustration of Agnes. Can you guess which is which?

Happy Monday, and I wish you all a satisfying Valentine’s Day, however you choose to acknowledge (or not acknowledge) it!

Can you believe it? We’re almost finished with Chapter 1. There are only a few pages left… and then things get really strange.

Today’s page continues Agnes’s home recovery. She’s doing alright, but would you like to be carrying a baby beneath a few cracked ribs? Paul’s doing his best to take care of her, but with injuries like that, he’s better off focusing on her emotions, and making her feel — well, yes, safe.

Also, the book gets all racy-like today — boobs and back dimples. What? Next thing you know they’ll be dimming the lights, cranking up the Barry White… Okay, we’re not going here. It’s weird to think about my illustrations getting it on.

If you’re wondering how the next chapter is coming: There are just three pages left to color, and then it’s finished. It’ll be released here, of course, but you can also expect it on Graphicly and potentially now as an e-book in your favorite digital store.

Happy Monday to you!

Well, Agnes is okay. I mean, as okay as can be hoped for. But more importantly, Eleanor wasn’t injured by her mother’s fall, or this would have been a rather short book.

This has been a fantastic weekend. Emma has been delighting us with her attempts to communicate — no actual words yet, except for a couple accidental utterances that sounded like she was disputing everything we said to her. She got to enjoy her first jog with her parents, too.

Somewhere in there I managed to find time to keep working on chapter 2, and I’m happy to report it’s just three pages from completion. I’m also looking into Graphicly’s recent announcement — if you haven’t heard, they’ve just expanded their distribution offerings to include the iBooks store, the Kindle store, and more. If everything looks good, Eleanor may soon be available through more than just this web site and the Graphicly app. .

Have a great week! Be creative and make stuff.

Two stalks of asparagus, to be exact. And something that looks like it might, however implausibly, be steak. Do they serve steak in hospitals? Maybe they did in 1984. Did they have cars in 1984? Television? I vaguely remember that they might have.

I continue to make progress on Chapter 2, and as is my nature, I’ve been sharing so many sneak peeks of that progress that you’ve practically all had access to most of the chapter for the past few weeks. So I’m cutting myself off, as difficult as I know that will be for me to do.

Here’s the last preview I’ll share. This is page 56, and I’m pretty happy with that murky and rising flood.

Page 56, from the as-yet-unpublished Chapter 2

As a bit of an extra for those who care about this sort of thing, I’ve also put together a little walkthrough of how I made this page. Be sure to check it out!

Happy Monday as always, and thanks for reading!

Sharing a comic is the best way to enjoy it! Be sure to check out Eleanor on Facebook and share with your friends!

So let’s start with the big news of the week: my little comic book is now available on Graphicly, the premier comics app for iOS, Android and the web. I’m extremely excited about this. There’s nothing quite so frustrating as waiting for a single page to come out each week, is there? (I even get impatient to post new ones myself — but as a one-man-show, I’ve got to maintain a schedule I can actually live up to. And one page per week is it.) The cool thing is, though, that all of the pages you’re waiting for… are already done. They’ve been done for awhile, actually. If you follow me on Twitter or you’re a fan on Facebook, then you have probably even noticed that I’m sharing lots of sneak peeks from Chapter 2… which is closer to being finished every day. Hell, I’ve already started inking Chapter 3. (Okay, just one page of Chapter 3, but it’s a great start. It’s a gorgeous page.)

Anyway, now that Eleanor’s on Graphicly, you can read entire chapters in a sitting. Swipe and zoom and there you go. And while you mainline my little comic, be sure to poke around the Graphicly shop, because there are tons of amazing comics in there — from independent creators like me to The Walking Dead and Witchblade and more.

Oh, and yes, these Eleanor issues cost money. Ninety-nine cents per issue. And that’s the most I’ll charge for any of them, ever. Because you can always get them for free right here. But by supporting Eleanor and buying the comic, you make it easier to keep the comic alive and going. (It would, anyway, don’t get me wrong. But it’s nice to be able to present you with each issue as a complete package, not something spread out over twenty-two weeks.)

Beginning with Chapter 2 of Eleanor — which has the delicious title Haunted by Waters — each issue on Graphicly will come with bonus material. So hopefully that’s worth the ninety-nine cents as well. Also, you’ll probably always get to read a complete chapter before it’s ever published fully on the web. So there’s that, too. I’m not sure if anybody ever actually brags to their friends that they get to read something early, but if that’s you, then I’m here to fulfill that dream for you.

On to today’s page: I really don’t like it. Probably shouldn’t admit that, but when you’re writing and drawing a comic and learning as you go, there are naturally some things you’ll be unhappy with. In today’s page, I’m seriously unhappy with the rain. What was I thinking?

So since I’m working on Chapter 2, and Chapter 2 deals with Agnes’s storm in extremely awesome detail, I decided to take a different approach. Look at the page up above one more time… and now check out the stormy page 55, finished yesterday:

Check out the storm that's in store for Agnes in Chapter 2!

Oh, and one more thing to look forward to: A good friend of mine suggested I create a demo of how I create these pages. So while I work on page 56 — a page that I feel is pretty awesome — I’ll be putting together a little behind-the-scenes guide to how it’s done. Not how it’s done for everyone — just how I did it. (With the serious caveat that I’m a guy learning as he goes, so hopefully some comics pros can point out better ways to do it, and I can write a few updates and corrections.)

Tons of new readers this week — welcome, all, and happy Monday for everyone!

Want to read the rest of Chapter 1 before anybody else? Super awesome big news today means that you can! Details over here!

While Paul struggles with his crisis of disbelief, Agnes stands on the valley floor. The storm that will end all storms begins with a single drop. What begins on this page in Chapter 1 will lead towards the book’s most climactic moment yet, in Chapter 2. This isn’t the slowest build in comics history, but it’s definitely a measured one.

Speaking of Chapter 2: If you follow me on Twitter or Tumblr, or you’re a fan of Eleanor on Facebook, then you may have noticed the large Chapter 2 preview that I posted about a week ago. If you don’t or you aren’t, then let me share it with you here! These are the first eight pages of Chapter 2 (nine if you include the cover, of course) — the first of two story arcs that will swell up and collide by the end of that chapter. There are big, big things coming!

Preview of the first story arc in Chapter 2!

Also, some of these pages are now available as prints in my gallery. I’ll be adding new ones indefinitely, and if there’s a certain page you would like a print of, just let me know and I’ll make it happen. (I know the artist.)

Prints of Eleanor and other pieces are available in my gallery!

As always, thank you for reading and sharing with your friends!

Today’s page finds Paul at a bit of a crossroads. His predicament is not altogether unlike my own when I began writing Eleanor eleven years ago. (It’s incredibly hard to believe that it’s been so long. I have clear memories of every single room I’ve written this story in, and after so long, there are so very many that I could build a few houses out of them.)

As a bit of a holiday bonus, I thought I’d also share a bit of the novel that started it all. I don’t think it’s half-bad. (Wordy, but that’s really just me.) Click here to enjoy an excerpt from the beginning (PDF).

Happy 2012 to you! Thanks for reading in 2011.

So it’s Christmas and stuff. I hope you’ve all had a magnificent holiday, if you happen to celebrate it, and if you don’t, that you had a lovely day being a lovely human being on this planet.

I’m writing this while wearing a baby backpack — well, a frontpack, I suppose — what do you call these things? — a baby carrier. I’m wearing a baby carrier with a sleeping baby in it. One thing I’ve discovered in just two weeks of fatherhood: I am no longer capable of standing in one place without moving. I’m constantly doing the daddy sway, rocking from side to side like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.

On to today’s update!

During her absences, Agnes’s dark valley, she has discovered, does not wait for her. Time marches on, sometimes predictably, sometimes quite fast. And while Paul races her to the hospital in Anchor Bend, she slips into her other world to find that the storm has drawn closer, and grown more threatening. When she wakes, this world doesn’t pause like a cassette tape. It loops onward. It’s not waiting for Aggie to keep up.

I like to refer back to the manuscript as I script the pages of the graphic novel. One of the great difficulties I have is determining which words stay in, and which words get cut. When the cut words are ones I’m a little too in love with, I like to try to make sure the artwork communicates what was removed. But I’m not always sure the artwork quite measures up.

Here, for example, is a snippet about Agnes’s valley, from the novel:

The mouth of the valley has tightened as if drawn shut, trapping the sinister thunderheads within. The heavy clouds sludge slowly over the shelf of mountains like inky black gelatin. The mountain peaks like teeth snag the clouds and tear them open like zeppelins. From her tiny cabin, many miles distant, the rain rushing from these wounds appears as a slow-dancing mist. She knows it must actually be a great torrent if she can see it at all from here.

I hope one day my sleepy daughter will enjoy reading this book her dad’s been working on for so long. I certainly hope it’s finished by the time she’s old enough.

Happy holidays to all of my readers! Enjoy your families and loved ones, and thanks for your continued gift to me by reading.

And here I am, settling in for a late-evening update instead of the usual early-morning update. My wife and daughter are fast asleep after another wonderful new-baby-is-here kind of day. And I’ll be stumbling down shortly to join them, but first: the day’s Eleanor, in which Paul demonstrates the style and handling of the luxurious Average Station Wagon, in colors rich enough for a 1970s National Geographic reverse cover.

For the last two weeks we’ve watched in slow motion as Agnes, startled from a nap by an autumn storm, slipped and fell while alone in the house. Paul’s inability to not call home every half-hour to see how his very pregnant wife is doing has actually come in handy.

It is slowly becoming apparent — and next week’s page will certainly unfold this mystery a bit more — that Agnes and Eleanor each have special access to another Where. Eleanor was granted access to hers via her horrible accident… and Agnes seems to have been granted access via Eleanor’s conception. But do they share the same opposite reality?

Stay tuned as I continue to deftly and subtly tie these strings into a fine and lovely little web. Wink.

P.S. Big news coming soon, but hopefully Eleanor will find a much larger audience because of it. Thanks for continuing to share and tweet!