[holy dust] originated in early 2003. I was doodling a couple of guys for no reason at all and thought, hey, it'd be cute if these two had hair and eye colors that were inverse of one another. Let's do that. So I sketched them. My boyfriend at the time, voice actor Chris Patton, glanced over at my sketchbook and remarked, "Hey, that's pretty hot." So I thought, "Hmmm."

So I drew them a couple more times. I finally decided they were story-worthy. I attempted to write a chapter about a clever youth practically imprisoned by his bond to a wily, seductive creature of the night. Sadly, the story itself was absolute crap. So I poked Chris and said, hey, proofread this for me. An hour later I came back to see that he'd written almost three chapters.

And it totally. Ruled.

So I told him, you're writing this story now. And he seemed really stoked about the idea, so we started collaborating. We shaped their personalities, hobbies, their deepest darkest fears.

One day, a few months and a few chapters later, we came in to write and discovered that the computer had eaten the file.

We were devastated. Like an omen, the relationship started to go down the drain with the very piece we'd worked so hard to create. Thankfully, we're still good friends, but sometime early this year I started to miss Hiryuu and Raen, and wanted them back desperately. They were still hanging on to the life preservers in my head, begging me to let them out again. So I sat down and did some more sketches, but everything I was coming up with for a comic itself seemed lacking.

When tragedy struck my friendship circle this July, I became terribly afraid of the city. Desperate to get a grip on reality (or just to get away from it), I hightailed it to visit a couple of friends in Missouri. 'Cause nothing happens in Missouri. It's nice and safe and quiet. But it was so quiet that I had absolutely nothing to do—this turned out to be a good thing.

I bought a notebook and filled it with every little idea that popped into my head for [holy dust], and by the time I hit the plane home I'd shaped every little detail down to the letter. A month later I was ready to start on the comic, and today I'm working on the whole thing by myself, colors and backgrounds and all.

And I'm really, really happy.

I'm not sure what I want in life, but what I want most right now is for these two to be happy, too. I want to tell this story.  I want to share it. I feel that even the most insignificant details can end up shaping the world as we know it. And that's what this story is about—sacred things that seem small: holy dust.