UPDATE: New Page, Friday 20th October 2017
And that’s all she wrote for this Chapter, I hope you enjoyed it.
As previously mentioned, I’m afraid I can’t schedule a startup for the next chapter yet. This is both due to bad and good reasons.
The bad reasons: Summer was far more hectic than I reckoned it would be. Usually the summer months give me a chance to beef up the page buffers, but that didn’t happen this time. Much like Back Office, Bata Neart has no available buffer that I can use to schedule a restart date.. That is entirely my fault and I am sorry about that.
The good reason? Well…
Yet again this year I’m joining Nao Yazawa and the rest of the Coffee Party collective in creating the 6th manga of the series. In addition, this year I have the honor of actually co-writing the main story with Nao(!). I’ve been busy as hell since, resulting in me designing a whole load of stuff like this:
I bet you can guess this year’s theme 😀
The result of all this is that I’ll be out of action for Back Office and Bata Neart production for the next 4-6 weeks while I draw my half of the main story. After that, I’m back in full force. Thus please watch this space, and I promise to be back ASAP.
As always thank you so much for your unending patience.
In the meantime, please join in on the Back Office competition to win a copy of Coffee Party 6!
You come too, Claire. Don’t let the creepy Fomorian, or whatever the frig that was, eat you.
Good luck with the “Coffee Party” this year, Rawr. See you when you get back. 🙂
@Azrael: I thought the Fomorians were giants?
@Rawr: So is Aine the only one who sees Claire and the beastie?
@Kessy: Early on the Fomorians seem to have been gods who represent the harmful or destructive powers of nature; personifications of chaos, darkness, death, blight and drought. Old god rivals to the new god Tuatha Dé Danann. Parallels have been drawn by some mythologists to the Titans and the Olympians of Greco-Roman myth. Only later were they portrayed as giants and sea raiders. I’m not categorically saying that the boogedy after Claire is a Fomorian, but it seems like as good a guess as any at this point.
Sorry for being AFK for so long folks, but it’s been busy 😀
Short update:
Coffee Party work is going well, I’m half way through inking the pages I needed to do and over the next week or so I’ll be finishing that work and then putting production of my usual comics back into full swing.
Back Office will get my focus initially since I screwed up and didn’t finish that chapter properly. Once I get the Back Office pages out of the way I will then start up Chapter 9. There will be a period of a couple of weeks where Back Office will run, but Bata Neart will not. This will be down to me trying to ‘Re-sync’ the two series (it’s alot easier to manage them when they run on the same schedule.) That said however, Bata Neart won’t be completely idle during that time. I have something *special* planned for those weeks. Watch this space 🙂
@Kessy: Correct, only Aine saw them. It’s possible that Ashling might have been able to see them if she was looking. Similarly Aoife has some sense of the spirit world and might have seen something as well if she had not been so distracted by Sharon’s Inquisition (No-one ever expects it! 😀 )
@Azreal: Hmm…is it a spoiler to confirm that guess? Nah, there’s still plenty of plot I haven’t revealed yet.
It’s sort of a combination of my imagined take of a tormented Fomorian ghost. Large, human-ish, but terrifying as all hell. Since they were powerful enough to wage war on and even enslave some of Tuatha Dé Danann (who were pretty damn powerful, with all kinds of magic), my bet was that even a dead one would be dangerous.
It’s the beginning of what I hope will be a series of weird, scary, and wonderful encounters for the girls…while I try my level-best to avoid a “monster of the week” formula 😀
Actually, in real life it’s not at all unusual that once someone has an experience that exposes them to the spirit realm that they go through a period where it seems like they’re running into these things all over the place. I once read one person who described it as feeling like you’re spiraling into some sort of alternate reality. I had a similar sort of experience. I think a lot of it has to do that once you take something seriously and know what to look for, it can suddenly seem like it’s everywhere. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Ashling were to have a serious of freaky experiences in a fairly short period of time. Although most people do not run into something as powerful and dangerous as the ghost of a Fomorian. The astral is kind of like other kinds of wildlife. Once you start paying attention you’ll see birds, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, deer, things like that all over the place where you might never noticed them before. But Aine just came nose to nose with a full grown tiger. Which is must rarer and more dangerous.
Although there is a theory that people who are strongly attuned to the astral may tend to attract more powerful and unusual spirit beings. I don’t know how seriously I take that idea – I don’t have enough data to really draw any conclusions. But it works well in fiction, and the Bata Neart definitely seems like it could attract all sorts of beasties. Especially in the hands of an inexperienced user.