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: 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,...
Cocoon Year: March and April Summary There was some meandering and then I came to a conclusion by the second week. I will continue treating Warlock’d like it is a webcomic that I am developing in spite of being out on pitch. It’s a risk but I will be fine.
Cocoon Week 11
I heard nothing back on the Warlock’d pitch packet (not that I was expecting a quick response). I went ahead and put together a ‘blorp art’ draft of my Troubled Histories anthology. ‘Blorp Art’ looks like this. It’s for lettering and getting the layout to agree with the artwork. I draw it directly in InDesign with the pencil tool, on my Cintiq tablet.
I sent this draft in for editing but a friend also offered to read it for me. I sent it to my friend who pointed out a lot of clarity issues and things I needed to think about. Even though I value the editor’s feedback over at the Sequential Artist’s Workshop, I hadn’t heard back from them, so I decided to work on the artwork and get the drawings set in stone. The story has wound up with a little background story that goes on under my narration and it didn’t quite make sense, so I’ve been wrangling it and trying to get it as polished as my main message.
Here’s the rough of my ‘cover’ page for the anthology. I’ve well and truly fallen in love with this 12th century lock that used to be on a church — perfectly conveys the meaning of ‘security theatricality’. This lock would be simple to pick, but you don’t want to make the person who owns such a fancy lock angry, would you? There’s so many dragons guarding this place…
Cocoon Week 14
I made the executive decision to proceed with working on Warlock’d as if it is not out on pitch. I need a rough script anyway. Back to my usual hijinx with a Trello board and Google Docs links, then!
I like separating the story into arcs because I feel like, within a larger narrative, the reader looks for ups and downs, but they may not keep track of every single detail. ‘Oh yeah’ moments and other twists do need to be obvious but they can’t be hidden in flavor descriptions, small character interactions, or other unfair nooks in the story. Arcs set something up, bring the reader somewhere new, and resolve a setup so the reader no longer has to worry about that information as they read. After I make an outline and a detailed synopsis, I like to separate out arcs and then name them.
The arc labels could work as chapter names, but there’s only so much room in a graphic novel so I typically don’t like to separate longer stories into chapters. Separating them spends a page per chapter and every single page matters in such a visual medium.
Ideally, I want to have a rough draft of the whole graphic novel ready for whenever I secure an agent. I have several rough drafts in the past but this is the first draft that feels like it’s snapping and like I won’t regret adding detailed art to it. The writing gets riskier the closer to polished it becomes, because editors may want to have a say in what I’m writing. If it hits layout stage then it’s extra difficult to edit. However, I still think that treating this like a webcomic is my best bet moving forward. Nobody gets to dictate what I get done until they buy it!
I’ve been flipping between Warlock’d scriptwriting and more detailed roughs on my Troubled Histories project. I got notes back from the editors that matched my friend’s notes fairly closely, so I sent in a new version of my anthology submission that has more drawings on it.
To Do Next Week:
Do perspective guides on Troubled Histories pitch.
Clean up my 5-page synopsis for Warlock’d.
Try not to regret sending in my pitch ‘too early’.
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,...
