Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s something there to be molded. I’m not returning to some document that I must brute-force til the end. I’m reading some of my own writing and actually seeing what to do next, if not a clear trail marker then little bits and pieces, acorns and feathers.
I’m not sure how well my pacing is going this draft. I could be writing too much. However, snipping and adjusting also feels easy when I get to do it. Writing too much is better than not writing at all. So, I think it may be best to reserve pacing judgement for Round Two. The reason I feel confident leaving the pacing in the scenes alone right now is because I workshopped an outline which I am largely sticking to! The outline still makes sense to me and it’s very helpful that it wasn’t rushed. The writing I’m doing sticks to that outline. Therefore I don’t have to worry.
I’ve had a few people insist that I am much too hard on myself and it’s preventing projects from coming out — which is true — but I don’t actually think I’m too hard on myself. I think I’m lacking the sort of environment that can churn out a lovely polished story every few months (like a writer’s room for a TV show).The projects not coming out or not being finished is still a problem, just not in the context of my quest to become someone who can wrangle a decent set of words. Like, no. People have to learn how to do things. Learning takes time. I’m not going to let anyone convince me to sit on my stuff as if it’s all right, when I myself am not totally satisfied with it. That’s actually really bad for my mental health!
We’ve been watching Only Murders in the Building and I have to say, the main trio of podcasting detectives has great charisma. Maybe the show is more of a comedy than a mystery, or maybe I’ve been looking at the sausage factory too intently and know too much about how the sausage is made, but I don’t feel any suspense or sense of gears turning as the plot progresses. Mystery writing used to have that feeling to me, like the author was logically laying things out.
But, maybe I should feel more free to view the mystery genre as a storytelling device. Characters, settings, and plot twists are vehicles for making something clear about a story being told backwards. Maybe the genre is also about setting expectations to an audience. In a fantasy story you generally expect the Hero’s Journey, so you have to do a fresh take on that and no amount of replacing horses with birds can do that for you. In a mystery, a relatively simple happening becomes complex with misdirections, mostly carried out through dialogue.
What I would hope for with Warlock’d is a simple murder story, but characters simultaneously progress and sidetrack that story. This all leads into a moment of fantastical wonder, with implications for the real world. But I don’t know how to do this, other than have a ton of dialogue and anecdotes towards the beginning, flashback abuse, and then plod towards the magical scene that reveals the tone of the whole thing.
Anyway. This would be so much easier with my own personal writer’s room. I think anyone would agree with that! But hey, I’ve never claimed to write literature here.
Full Steam Ahead Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s...
The Joy of Revision These last two weeks have been quite busy with freelance work. In between I squeak in writing. I finally came up with a full-ish script, bar the first scene and a court scene for later in the book. Now, I am reading through the script from front...
The Final 10% is 90% of the Work Well, I’ve done it. I wrote through each of the scenes in my new, concise and focused outline. I didn’t ‘believe’ anything that was happening as I was writing it, but on cursory glance-over, a lot of the characters feel visceral, real,...
These last two weeks have been quite busy with freelance work. In between I squeak in writing. I finally came up with a full-ish script, bar the first scene and a court scene for later in the book. Now, I am reading through the script from front and editing as I read.
This already feels so much better than what I used to do, which was write Chapter 1 and revise it a million times since I had to start at the beginning to read the draft and figure out where I was. Then, give up at the enormity of it all, and write Different Chapter 1 of Different Book.
Another pleasant discovery is that dialogue doesn’t have to be accurate to character voice during the first or second drafts. All dialogue has to do is convey important information, enough to bridge to the next scene. Mostly it’s revealing character motivation or fleshing out the setting with character opinions and senses. I can always go back and edit in character voice and conversational cadence later. Never sure which one to go for first, but…that is Future Hannah’s problem.
Yes, I am very happy with the utterly messy — and complete! — state of this first draft. Everything is there, it just needs refinement and shuffling. Already I’ve simplified additional parts of the plot in favor of clear direction. It feels really, really good, much better than slopping something wordy out and hoping a random beta reader will help me make sense of it. There is just enough of the final product peeking through the mess, it’s like a guiding light. There is just enough mess to feel fun, like I’m making meaningful changes each time I return to the story. Best of all I do feel like I can do the rest of this by myself, outside of the occasional support from my spouse.
For instance I had a dead body that gets moved around by various characters, and I was trying to get the first ‘move’ to happen on top of introducing the inn and the murder suspects. It was really clumsy so I talked it over with my spouse and we both decided that an elephant really needed to be involved. But not really. Instead the body doesn’t get moved in the first chapter, which opened up so much room for introducing the various characters and how they all might be a little bit dirty.
I have to be careful, though. Sometimes in my head the script is already ‘complete’, so it can be hard for me to wheel back into writing mode. Drawing is still much more fun than writing, so I have to convince myself to continue abandoning one for the other. The free drawing workshop is coming back from hiatus so I’ll need to reserve Thursday mornings for that once more, and hope it doesn’t keep me from writing.
However, the weather has calmed down. It’s finally back to warm jammies and blankie mode — barring the odd heat wave here and there. My favorite months of the year are coming up. I really adore fall and all the energy it gives me. Walks are just so much better when it’s cloudy out and I can wear a cute jacket.
Now, what I really need to do is knuckle down on the last few freelance tasks to open my schedule back up. I’m hoping to hurtle into a complete, revised script by the end of the year. I’m trying so hard not to rush it, to just let it get written and polished and expanded.
But I want to draw so, SO badly. I want to be challenged by landscape design and characters at weird angles and readable expressions and legible storytelling. I want to color it all in with moody themes and artsy twists.Every time I’ve leaped into the art too early, I’ve regretted it. These days, though, I have such a hard time deciding ‘when’ to pull the trigger.
When, though?
Hopefully soon.
As a result of volunteering, I was very late writing my blog post here. I hope to include further Cocoon Year posts as part of my SAWgust progress. Already, I’m making a lovely amount of progress on my screenplay version of this story.
August is the worst month, but at least I have SAWgust!
Full Steam Ahead Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s...
The Joy of Revision These last two weeks have been quite busy with freelance work. In between I squeak in writing. I finally came up with a full-ish script, bar the first scene and a court scene for later in the book. Now, I am reading through the script from front...
The Final 10% is 90% of the Work Well, I’ve done it. I wrote through each of the scenes in my new, concise and focused outline. I didn’t ‘believe’ anything that was happening as I was writing it, but on cursory glance-over, a lot of the characters feel visceral, real,...
Well, I’ve done it. I wrote through each of the scenes in my new, concise and focused outline. I didn’t ‘believe’ anything that was happening as I was writing it, but on cursory glance-over, a lot of the characters feel visceral, real, and like they’re actively making decisions and speaking their mind.
The document, unformatted, is about sixty pages long. Screenplay formatting ought to at least double that. So it may be longer than necessary.
I have two scenes left to write: First is a court scene where Stone defends and exonerates all of the innocent folks in the inn, as well as explains what really happened to Margo, the murder victim.
The second scene is the intro scene to the whole catastrophe.
I’ve long had an idea of guiding the reader through the alleyways of Paris, until they get to the inn. I wonder if I can retrofit it to bring the reader into Paris, or if this is simply an undead darling that needs to die again. What I want to do is introduce the inn as:
A place where people can get away from being overseen by those in power, and be themselves.
Rough around the edges, but fine enough.
Perhaps a bit strained by outside forces.
A place that readers will care about, and will miss once it’s gone and the story’s over.
Additionally, I want to introduce the theme of friendly fire, collateral damage, and things done in the name of the ‘greater good’. There is a political movement in America that wholeheartedly believes the only ‘good’ things must happen at the cost of other’s joy. Pain is the only thing that makes something ‘real’. So, I want to address that, using the metaphor of how a king will order a farmer’s crops to be burned as the farmer retreats into the protection of his castle. The invaders must not get those crops. Therefore…no one gets them. The metaphor will extend to places of safety…ie, an inn. To ensure his people’s ‘safety’, a king would absolutely burn his own buildings.
I’m also uneasily juggling the idea of the hidden hero, who lets someone else take the stage as the driving force for half the book before calmly stepping in and being the only one actually capable of handling a demonic situation. I started out mocking these characters up as already knowing each other as rivals from University, but as I wrote it didn’t make that much sense. Stone needs to act as nothing more than a goldsmithery scribe until his real profession (necromancy) is revealed. It just seems more fun and interesting for everyone else to know Stone’s potential but this other guy does not. I need to figure out more details about how they’re supposed to interact.
Then, once new scenes are written, what remains is revision. I had wanted to do all that this month, but SAWgust wasn’t helpful this year. It seems to be only helpful when I have thumbnails and art ready to go. Otherwise I simply don’t get much feedback at all. Nobody really comments on writing progress.
In addition to that, I must respect freelance work. So, Warlock’d has slowed a bit, but I’m glad to get the chance to collect my thoughts on my progress because otherwise it would feel like I’d done no work on it at all. It turns out I’ve done plenty here and I should be happier with it.
But, I guess the anxiety comes creeping in as it always does. I’ve never felt like Warlock’d was completely welcome at the table. It’s not something people seek out to read. It’s sort of feeling like something I’m forcing. I’d like to be able to move past this but it’s hard with no one to chat it through with.
That said, I think I will finally complete it this year and be somewhat interested in my own writing. Hopefully interested enough to do the artwork for it.
As a result of volunteering, I was very late writing my blog post here. I hope to include further Cocoon Year posts as part of my SAWgust progress. Already, I’m making a lovely amount of progress on my screenplay version of this story.
August is the worst month, but at least I have SAWgust!
Full Steam Ahead Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s...
The Joy of Revision These last two weeks have been quite busy with freelance work. In between I squeak in writing. I finally came up with a full-ish script, bar the first scene and a court scene for later in the book. Now, I am reading through the script from front...
The Final 10% is 90% of the Work Well, I’ve done it. I wrote through each of the scenes in my new, concise and focused outline. I didn’t ‘believe’ anything that was happening as I was writing it, but on cursory glance-over, a lot of the characters feel visceral, real,...
Cocoon Year: When Accountability Gets in the Way of… Accountability?
As I continue my cocooning, I find that the act of blogging about it may in fact be getting in the way of actually working on the script. The cocoon artworks are only here to continue the theme, because I promised myself I’d see the whole thing through. As the heat waves rise and fall, it may just be the normal summer doldrums getting to me. I start longing for new projects, or at least to do anything but write.
Lately I’ve been a lot more social than normal, actually visiting friends in real life. Catching up on my past and all that. Everyone just kind of meandered from the Bay Area over to the Pacific Northwest for various reasons. We have been eating incredible donuts and terrible, no-good avocado toast. It really wasn’t worth forgoing a mortgage on a house.
As far as SAWgust goes, what’s eating most of my time there is supporting other people. I’m not getting an equal amount of support back on my project, so I will have to balance my time and attention spent there. Luckily people seem to like my prompts, which roll out automatically each day. I think that is going to have to be enough for me. I will have to continue to find my own lonely way through my project, per usual. It was unrealistic to expect otherwise.
Writing is still going well, easily even — suspiciously easy. As of writing here, I have about a third of the script drafted and ready for revision by the end of the month. It could be even longer if it had correct formatting. I am over halfway through the scenes that I had in mind. one scene in particular I glossed over and should be a lot longer than I originally plotted out. As I’m writing I’m trying to look for points of escalation, to extend the story and tease the reader in an entertaining way. This is instead of adding entirely new subplots or characters. I think this is a much better strategy for writing, to investigate little twists and turns and developments, rather than pull in new things. The story in general is also so small now, it needs twisty little details like that.
Warlock’d also has a new working subtitle now: NO VACANCY. The whole story takes place in a very full in. I also enjoy the wordplay hinting at the idea of the dead person still sticking around as a character in the story. They’re not gone. The body is not vacant. In general the idea of a spirit world being nothing and something at the same time also seems to fit ‘vacancy’ as a concept.
To Hell, with Love’ is still an incredible subtitle, in my opinion, but it might work better for a sequel. Perhaps this sequel involves a corrupt knight! Who knows! I love a good fall from grace. I also have the titles ‘The Crusades Marginalia’ and ‘Red Letter Days’ on lockdown, with very small ideas attached. It’s all mostly ripped up elements from previous drafts to go with each title.
And still, there is nary an actual warlock to be found in the story. Even though people work with demons, they’re often clerics instead. Or, you know, bucking the entire trend of being a gaming class at all, within a story.
It does feel like maybe I’m hitting on a formula that would work for multiple books. All I was ever interested in writing was cheeseball adventures. In general writing does feel a lot less weighty and hopefully the story is more fun as a result.
I’ve also allowed myself to explore a few new concepts via pitch format, and while I don’t have them ready to pitch here was what I was thinking about:
Psy High — A high school where being psychic is just something you do — so there’s sports with telekineses involved and stuff like that.
Cap’n Aye Aye and the Nope Rope — On a pirate ship full of animals, the captain must deal with hearing the word ‘no’ from their snake employee. Bonus creepy primate fingers. You know which ones I’m talking about!
Mx. Moxie’s Marvelous Museum of Mistakes — A nonfiction examination of notoriously bad reconstructions of animals, from this ancient Roman mosaic of a horsey wolf to theMadgdeburg Unicorn to Victorian dinosaurs — and with a takeaway that science evolves, so we should be kind to ourselves as we learn and grow each day. Something like that. (Mx. Moxie is literally the last living Neanderthal.)
And some more Amphiox might be nice someday. Tentatively the next story would be called ‘Idolon’ and introduce a larger aspect of the world. Right now that short story draft is in an awkward place where I’d have loved to explain why Amphiox eggs are important, but it feels so cluttered in conjunction with the Idolon concept.
Just wish I could start shearing ideas off the list instead of having it grow, though.
As for the way the caterpillar’s soft, old body scrunches up at the top, just to be thrown away in favor of a shiny new carapace — Yeah, buddy, that’s exactly how it feels.
As a result of volunteering, I was very late writing my blog post here. I hope to include further Cocoon Year posts as part of my SAWgust progress. Already, I’m making a lovely amount of progress on my screenplay version of this story.
August is the worst month, but at least I have SAWgust!
Full Steam Ahead Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s...
The Joy of Revision These last two weeks have been quite busy with freelance work. In between I squeak in writing. I finally came up with a full-ish script, bar the first scene and a court scene for later in the book. Now, I am reading through the script from front...
The Final 10% is 90% of the Work Well, I’ve done it. I wrote through each of the scenes in my new, concise and focused outline. I didn’t ‘believe’ anything that was happening as I was writing it, but on cursory glance-over, a lot of the characters feel visceral, real,...
Cocoon Year: A New Start I keep saying I’m not going to restart the outline, but I wasn’t having any fun writing my rough draft and I think that’s a sign. Re-simplifying the story should help get the finish line closer.
Cocoon Week 21
I wrote things. Mostly, I went deep into Stone’s relationship with a new character named Jean. From the most recent discarded draft, I rescued an opening sequence where clerics in 1191 AD discuss that Christians believed the world would end in 1000 AD. I want to portray medieval people as being capable of skepticism. Without knowing any better, I’d say pop cultural belief that they were all unerringly and unquestioningly religious has roots in Victorian misconceptions at best and fascist propaganda at worst. I don’t think there has ever been a time where all humans in a given area have stringently and similarly believed the same things. In other words, ‘everybody was good and Christian in medieval times’ is not really a thing. I know that clerics would often express skepticism although this is a creative process blog so I’m not obligated to cite a particular thing.
I’m trying a new technique where I’ve defined the finish line as 125 pages of script. Screenplays are a lot lighter than prose, and 125 pages is the given length for a 90-minute movie. Since graphic novels are a little bit like movies, and I err towards cinematography rather than literature in mine, the screenplay length makes sense to me. It’s also not something I’ve tried before so the novelty helps keep me focused for the time being. I went through and added pages and page breaks for specific scenes I have in mind. I am also checking a cozy mystery beat sheet and hoping that the connections I’m seeing aren’t just like, when someone randomly overlays a Fibonacci spiral on top of random images to ‘prove’ that spirals are everywhere in art and in nature.
Legend has it, if you stick a Fibonacci spiral on top of any image, the image becomes well-composed. (This is sarcasm.)
Maybe beat sheets are more like for beginners and once I have a better grasp on how to write well, I can remix them more effectively. That’s also how a lot of compositional rules work.
Already I’m seeing a lot more flexibility as I move chunks of script around. Trello should be more apt for this, right? Well, not really. Trello was probably just making the plots more detailed than they needed to be. Or, they just don’t work with my writing explorations, which are probably also part of my process as well. I’m sure plenty of writers have piles of pages they used to get to know the characters behind their stories. I know I am kind of annoyed when I see someone’s first draft and it’s clear that they haven’t explored anything outside of hitting outline beats. It’s also quite possible that my previous strategy of using Trello is no longer novel so now I’m grasping for reasons why I shouldn’t use it anymore. It’s still possible I might return to Trello or even real physical notecards but that technique would need some sharper rules to keep the scene count from ballooning out of control.
I started doing the final colors on my Troubled Histories anthology. This means taking flats and adding highlights and shadows. I’ve erred towards a lighter touch since these pages will be quite small, chapter-book sized. Overworking images or having too much shading and highlights can make otherwise simple imagery confusing. Having simplified my color selection and shading process helps make these a breeze, so long as I’ve flatted the panel correctly.
Lines. The color was actually added to the lines after I figured out the highlights and shadows, but I’m too lazy to show this in the image itself.
Flats, with some flats acting as highlights and shadows.
And now I get to define shapes and pull the panel out of ‘flat’ land.
Once coloring is done, the lettering finalization will take place. I am languishing on this project and would like to focus on other things (…Warlock’d…) so I am not feeling anything super fancy or experimental on the letters. This will be a completely normal comic which is fine.
One other thing about this week is that my spouse, in pursuit of mental health, popped open Unity and started doing some hobby-level game dev. I’ve been mildly obsessing over pixel art in my off time so I decided to give him little ‘treats’ in the form of pixel art that he can program to do silly things. We both enjoy games where characters change visually so I’m experimenting with a pixel ‘doll’ that can be dressed up as it goes on an adventure.
Nakey 32×32 adventures!
Cocoon Week 22
It’s complete! My Troubled Histories anthology entry, ‘We Need to Talk About Locks’ is done. I submitted it this week to remove it from my plate. It helped me refresh my experience with the gaudy Warlock’d palette and how to keep it under control, as well as where and when to expand it. I’m looking forward to seeing this in print although I do wish I’d had more passion for it.
This is the palette! It’s based on jewel tones used in medieval art. They liked colors. They weren’t sad gray people shuffling around dingy brown cities.
Warlock’d is going interestingly. I’m really slowing down on scenes and letting the writing chew the scenery. Readers can learn more than one thing about a character at a time. Not all of it is important. I can waste people’s time a little bit. I want to give them the sensation of hanging out with a character and really getting to know them, perhaps being fond of them. My points of escalation have also, for lack of a better term, de-escalated, into smaller steps that are more easily portrayed by this little setting. This isn’t an epic fantasy where you need to know a lot about the setting. I’m also trying to be less snarky and more earnest. The humor ought to come from characters remarking on their situations, not from me making fun of weird medieval things.
One thing I’m doing is porting around bits of writing to different sections helter-skelter. If something feels like it should be revealed earlier, then I move it up earlier. Scenes where I don’t quite know what’s going to happen yet become pages with page breaks for later. So far I am sitting at 28/125 pages in my count and hope to make every page count towards the whole. This story may feel ‘slow’ as a result — maybe that’s fine. If I can keep scenes mostly familiar and only introduce some esoteric thing every few scenes that might be better for readers.
I was reading a draft of Idolon, the next story in my Amphiox world, and really hated how many new things I onboarded and explained. I think there’s also something to be said for presenting something without explanation as a ‘well what’s that thing’ and then explaining it later when it’s actually important. But. I do need to write Warlock’d and not Idolon.
So far Margot is a lot funnier as a living character so I hope that her death (and subsequent resurrection as a lost soul) is more interesting as a result. Currently it feels like the antagonistic church forces act too quickly for Stone to work alongside them willingly.
I have also decided that Stone is a burgher whose wealth comes from the gold trade — both selling and crafting. In other stories his status was frequently up in the air — was he an official demonologist? Aligned with the church? Outcast? A random ‘lay cleric’? The way southern kingdoms interacted with northern kingdoms in Europe was through trade. I’ve settled on gold as something that people would immediately recognize as a special part of medieval culture, and that would lend itself to Stone’s background, wealth, and power.
Most people think of medieval caste society as two castes. Royals and not-royals. Looking into this via Wikipedia (bless all wikipedia historians), the society was more formally recognized as three different worlds, that of laborers, royalty, and clergy. Clergy sort of had a subdivision between noble clergy (from the royal world) and lay clergy (from the laborer world). Then, burghers and craftsmen were experiencing more privilege during a mini-renaissance than other times, so this seemed like a good spot for Stone. He only gets pulled into the religious esoterica on behalf of his friend, Jean. The story transforms Stone into a private detective who isn’t beholden to the crown or to the cross. This sounds good to me so far. Who knows if it will change later, but it’s nice to have specifics.
Concerning Lebeau…They’re gone. This poor knight is now sequel fodder. Rest well, my dear enby knight.
In their place is a quasi-love interest and plot macguffin of a character who currently goes by the name of ‘Jean’, pending a name change. Jean is Stone’s close friend. In my head they have an extremely romantic relationship full of physical and verbal affection. Stone, however, is a very private person and would likely not have much in the way of sexual impulses, much less act out on them. So yes, clearly and openly gay, but due to character personalities and situations and medieval people in general being quite affectionate with each other, not a typical romantic relationship concerning sex. I’m really hoping no one misinterprets this as being sex-negative because I’m not, I just find it easier to make Stone asexual. I can understand a lack of interest in sex for oneself. Happy Pride month next week, I guess.
Jean himself seems to be a lay scholar who aspires to the Benedictine order as a monk. He is able to afford a Parisian education, so something in his background out to align with that. He and Stone met as scholars and became friends. That’s all I know about Jean so far. I made an ill-fated foray into researching what people might find sexy about tonsures on Bluesky and found a whole lot of bald thirst. I get what I deserve.
I feel like I need to keep up writing the draft until it is done so that another random direction doesn’t pull me elsewhere. Perfection is a fascist’s tool for keeping control, after all.
Game dev with my spouse has continued. I am having fun chewing on the problem of how to make tiling textures with organic edges. I wish writing problems were this interesting to me. I guess the more I learn the more interesting those problems will seem.
To Do Next Week:
Writing!!!
Web design for Codex Apis (short comics collection) (Didn’t get around to this)
Or, web design for Warlock’d? Still haven’t gotten around to it. It still feels so far off!
Full Steam Ahead Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s...
The Joy of Revision These last two weeks have been quite busy with freelance work. In between I squeak in writing. I finally came up with a full-ish script, bar the first scene and a court scene for later in the book. Now, I am reading through the script from front...
The Final 10% is 90% of the Work Well, I’ve done it. I wrote through each of the scenes in my new, concise and focused outline. I didn’t ‘believe’ anything that was happening as I was writing it, but on cursory glance-over, a lot of the characters feel visceral, real,...
