If you're a Tuesday-Thursday visitor, you probably think "what the heck is going on". Don't worry. You missed the Wednesday update. Click back two, you'll find it.

It's messy, though.

Lucy has a couple of very good reasons to "hate this part", as she puts it--as the narrator, she already knows how it ends--but you're going to have to wait a while to find out what they are.

She's also speaking for me, in a way. I HATED doing this scene. I had planned it, looked forward to it, rushed my way through the last several pages to get to it...and realized I did not like it at all. It might be good storytelling (i have no idea whether or not it is) but it's a HORRIBLE thing to have happen to a person, and for some reason the impact of actually DRAWING it was worse than writing it. Writing it, you don't have to do blood.

Sometimes people, usually family, ask me how I can write such awful things...and if their particularly ruthless or idiotic, ask me how I can write/draw such awful things and still call myself a Christian. The answer is...it happened this way. If I didn't write this scene in here, none of the rest of it would make any sense (if it is making any sense right now, that is). Stephen King calls stories "Found things", meaning you don't make it up, but you find it somewhere in the psychic primordial ooze, and I'm beginning to agree with him. I did NOT want to do this scene, and by the time I was halfway through it, I would have given my left arm to get out of it...but I HAD to do it this way because THIS IS THE WAY THE STORY IS. Lucy is Lucy because she isn't anybody else, and that makes her a cast-iron bitch with impulse-control problems. Jeff is Jeff, which means he's a womanizer. If they weren't this way, I couldn't tell the story. The good stories don't come with good people--usually, they come with utter dirt-bags, and if you're lucky, the dirt-bags aren't the protagonists.

The same goes with writing things that make you squirm. If I had my way, there would be no swearing in this comic. Or blood.

...guess what? I don't get my way. And if that sounds like schitzophernia to you...you're not a writer. ;)

- Chelsea Gaither