A couple months ago I found out about this thing called The Sketchbook Project - a touring exhibition of themed sketchbooks, filled by diverse hands. The entry fee was essentially "cost of sketchbook + some S&H", so I signed up for it. The book arrived at the Seattle address well before I did, and then sat around for a couple weeks.Ever since getting my computer desk and monitor together, I've been occasionally pushing the keyboard out of the way and drawing. I'd been poking mostly at this sketchbook, as I let my brain ponder bigger stuff in its back.The deal is that each book is done with some theme in mind - there's a list of two dozen, plus "pick one at random". I chose 'In Flight' because, well, that seems to be a frequent enough theme in my doodles that it wouldn't be a stretch.Text, since the combination of my lazy quick scan and the too-reflective paper washed some of it out, and because you probably can't turn your monitor 360°:"If I wanted to be kind, I would provide a"But that would require being entirely sure myself.""So instead I'll pass on my confusion""And let you wonder which pages are self-portraits""And which pages are""something else."sadly, I forgot to rotate this scan before saving it. Oops.A lot of the curlicues on the dress were drawn in a gold pencil, but to be honest it doesn't really show up on the page, much less in the scan.I was really impressed with how this one followed the one above it. Quite by accident!If I was Ursula Vernon, I would have proceeded to write a two-page bit of story fragment about this mouse.tl,dr: "I should get off my ass and get back to Absinthe before twenty years of distractions pass."More stuff I forgot to rotate before posting, sorry!This one demanded it be in color.Apparently sometimes my inner voice for Absinthe is in French. Machine-translated, in this instance. If I find a publisher for the completed comic and get it published in multiple languages (not entirely impossible if I end up with a publisher in Europe) seeing the thing in idiomatic French will be one of the most squeetastic moments of my career as an artist.This one is upside-down in the actual sketchbook, too. I deliberately did not rotate it! The diagonal one following it was also upside-down - it's quite possible to reverse the narrative flow for a couple of pages here and have it make sense.I was listening to the debut album by Crystal Castles and some of the sounds in it made me start thinking of this c64 game called Wizardry (no relation to the seminal Apple ][ first-person dungeon crawler ) so this kinda happened. If I ever decide to do something for I Am 8Bit it would totally be this kind of thing; fuck all the Mario - that's not my particular nostalgia.end!Process on this was interesting. I wanted these to be more coherent than my usual sketchbook since this was for display, not just for personal use; every page needed to be a finished drawing. Knowing that, I stuck a piece of paper in the middle of each spread so that drawing on the subsequent pages wouldn't mar the finished stuff. It got more interesting when I started jumping around in the book; I ultimately ended up with a chart of which sketchbook spread was used, and by which sequenced spread - but not after managing to have two spreads numbered 8, 9, and 10. Oops.I left it open, in the beginning, whether or not I'd try to make the later pages try to link up the earlier ones they came in between. Ultimately I did mostly try to make this happen; this is when most of the diagonal pages happened, to guide the reader in turning the book around. The overall narrative is not exactly coherent in either possible sequence; I am kind of tempted to do something similar, with a set central character to stitch it all together a bit more, as some impromptu comics. That might be a good way to try doing a 24-hour comic!