It’s seven days from Christmas Day, and I gotta announce that “The Dreaming” vol. 3 is finally out, both on bookshelves and online! You can buy vol1, vol2 and vol3 here on Amazon.com!

IMPORTANT: Please look on the VERY LAST PAGE of volume 3. There’s a SECRET there, to be revealed on the TOKYOPOP site soon, hopefully January.

 

 

It’s been a long and busy three years, and so much has changed in that time. My art has also improved, though the results of that can probably only be seen in “Odd Thomas: In Odd We Trust”, the book I’m working on now.

 

 

• Along with “The Dreaming”, I was one of the first people to be published in TOKYOPOP’s OEL 3-book manga program, and judging from the changes in their publishing plans, probably one of the last.
• I started work on “The Dreaming” in October 2004, and finished the last of its pages in August 2007.
• Book 1 was 172 pages, book 2 was 181 pages, and book 3 was also 181 pages. Each had 7 chapters.
• This makes a total of 534 mostly greyscale-toned pages, including 21.5 black and white chapter pages.
• The average chapter length was 25.43 pages. The longest chapter was chapter 20, at 35 pages. The shortest was chapter 21, at 17 pages.
• I worked a total worktime of 22 months, which makes an average of 24.3 pages a month, 7.33 months for each book. That makes about a chapter a month.
• In a single month, this means 1 week for the pencils, 1.5 weeks for the inks, and another 1.5 weeks for the tones.
• My favourite chapter break is chapter 2 in book 1, and my favourite dress is the one the unconscious girl is wearing on the “To Be Continued…” page of book 1.

 

 

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• First, I’d like to thank all my wonderful fans for your interest and support in this series. I give special kudos to all the people who emailed me – I replied to most of your emails, and will continue doing so. I apologise if I haven’t replied to yours in particular (I get on average 1-2 fan mails a day), but I’ll try my best.
• Secondly, I want to thank all the editors who worked on this series, namely Jodi, Carol Fox and Paul Morrissey. Carol especially, because she spend the most time on it. Thanks to all the senior editors who kept an eye on things too, and also Stu Levy who greenlit this project.
• An apology and thanks to Katie Huang and Paul Aeria, who helped me with the toning for book 3, but unfortunately didn’t get their names in the credits because of a printing error. Nobody was at fault – there was some confusion with the 1 month delay in street date because of the SECRET on the last page. So I thank Paul and Katie here instead.
• A big thanks to TOKYOPOP Senior Editor Jenna Winterburg too, for telling me about the SECRET you’ll find at the end of volume 3. Thanks for the TOKYOPOP marketing folks who came up with that too.
• Thanks to Emily Shao, for maintaining “The Dreaming” Fanlisting, and also my Normal Fanlisting. I really appreciate it.
• Kudos to all the librarians who pushed this book, and recommended it to their enthusiastic little manga minions. Thanks to Scholastic for ordering 45,000 copies for their book club too. You’ve got to get them reading when they’re young…
• May I also thank all the reviewers who gave it a good review, and all the bloggers and journalists who interviewed me for their blogs and/or articles! You can see a full list of them on my site.
• Thanks to all the news sites I read for mentioning me and my book, including MangaBlog, Heidi at The Beat, ComiPress and the now defunct Love Manga (If a news site I don’t read mentioned my book too, then I thank you as well. Hopefully you were saying something nice, teehee.)
• Last of all, a big THANKYOU to TOKYOPOP for publishing this series, including every single person who worked on it. If you know anything about book publishing, there’s probably quite a few people whose names didn’t get mentioned because of the “behind the scenes” nature of their job. I want to say: your efforts are appreciated.

 

 

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I hope everyone (and my fans) continues to support me in the other works I do.
Merry Christmas everyone, and Happy 2008 New Year!!