Phase 1, Done.

Yeah, not so much to say this week. I mean, other than the Salem book is so underway that it isn’t even funny. Not that a book about Puritans can’t be funny… but it’s rather unlikely to be funny. With my dark sense of humor, I find Puritans hanging one another so they can acquire land kind of funny, but that’s the sort of thing that only works in context…

Where was I going with this? No where. Um…  But the layout of the text is complete. It’s actually not hard once you know the parameters of the problem. It’s sort of like figuring out the length of a side of a triangle if you know the lengths of the other two sides. You have X amount of text to fit into Y amount of pages and you need Z amount of drawings. Well, once you put X and Y on paper, you can see quite clearly how much Z there is to play with.

And that’s where things are with the Salem book. On to Phase 2, the rough pencil draft. That phase is the most fun. It’s where the real drawing happens. At this point, I know what words need to go on what page, but now it’s time to put them into the mouths of the characters or set the scene. It’s when I get to show something entirely different from what the words say, thus augmenting the story, which is why picture books and graphic novels are cool.

Considering that I draw fast and I have months’ worth of ideas, the pencil draft shouldn’t take too long. Once that gets approval from everyone else on team Salem, it’s on to the long and painful inking process. But there’s no reason to talk about that right now.

On top of the progress on all things witchy, I’ve also managed to dump some serious work into the novel. My three month project has ballooned into a nine month monster. And now, I want it done. The only way to finish it is to finish it. That means a lot of late night writing, when those pesky distractions of life, like other people or other projects are asleep, leaving me alone in that calm world that I love so much. At this point, I’m just hoping to pull it together around 400 pages. I keep dreaming that I can edit it a bit, but really, I’m such a vicious editor when I write, that there’s not a lot of fluff. It’s just that dense a story. Which is weird for me.

Next time, I’m going to stick to my guns and write something slim and wispy.

Or huge… I mean, what do I know? Every book I write or work on goes in an entirely new direction and all my previous experience isn’t worth crap, with the notable exception that I know how to get things done, even if I don’t know what it is I’m making. A ridiculously small hint of confidence goes a long way.

Oh, The Punk Ethic is The Punk Ethic... Duh.

Progress on all fronts. I know, it’s weird, right? I think we’re all a little too used to reading something akin to “blah blah blah new project with new materials… a new beginning to blah blah… no wait, it was all a failed experiment but this time I’m going to… blah blah… another wrong turn… blah.” Yeah, so done with that.

What with the Salem Witch book on the table and nothing but pen & ink supplies at my fingertips, everything is moving like clockwork. It’s been a while since that was the case and I’d forgotten just how nice it was. Make fun of me all your want for my ruthless and iron-willed stance on art materials, but it works. ‘Less is more’ is me.

At this point, in all things witchy, it’s all on my shoulders. The text is written and edited. Now, I have to make sense of it over the course of 124-ish pages. As much as I often say it’s like watching a movie in my head, stopping only to take a scene and put it on paper, the truth is that it’s actually a bit more like directing a play. Novels, as it turn out, are more like movies because there are far fewer limitations. But with graphic novels, like picture books, there are very strict limitations, sort of like working on a stage, and you can only do things that fit that space. Sure, there’s a lot of ‘you stand there and say this’ because that’s what characters in a dialogue in a graphic novel do, but then there’s a lot of the fun of theater as well, like implying what the background is or isn’t or overly dramatic use of lighting. At this point, I can say that the Salem layout is in rehearsal but still on book. By the end of the month, I hope to have it up to the full dress rehearsal.

The surprising benefit to blazing away at the Salem book is that I’ve found myself doing more work on the novel and other incidental writing than I expected. I think I had a sort of mini-realization.

I was ironing shirts and listening to the first disc of The Police box set and not thinking about much of anything because who really likes to iron, when it hit me. See, I keep trying to conjure this angsty spirit, the punk ethic if you will, in my work because it speaks to me so clearly. But you’ve seen my drawings, there’s nothing punk about them, which I attribute to knowing too damn much about art and illustration. All that stuff I learned in various schools and wherever cluttered my brain with rules. It can be, at times, quite stifling to my creativity, to know too much. Add to that the fact that the medium that my talent seems to love best is pen & ink, which is a demanding, detail oriented bit of nonsense that requires patience and skill out the butt. It’s not powering through two-finger chords. Not at all.

Nor does my punk ethic sensibility come out through my attempts to be an half-assed guitarist. After twenty years of playing, I’m better than a half-assed guitarist. Plus, unfortunately (?), I sort of have a thing for melody and counterpoint. I’m sure it has to do with, again, knowing a little too much for my own good, like knowing what counterpoint is in the first place. So, sure I can knock out power chords like a champ and I love my distortion, but the second that I can start to add little things, like blues riffs or jazzy chord progressions, things get complicated. Which isn’t too punk.

I even screwed myself with photography, the easiest of all the arts, because I couldn’t be happy with just any crappy camera taking any crappy photos… Oh no. I had to buy an 8x10 view camera, the kind with all the weird pieces that you have to level and keep parallel before throwing a huge cloth over your head and doing all kinds of mystical things with giant sheets of expensive film all in the hope of making a downright flawless print. Ugh.

So, I’ve sort of been frustrated, feeling like I needed a creative outlet that tapped my fiery grr-ness, but finding only these complicated and tedious tools at my disposal. And then it dawned on me. The answer was right in front of my face and had been all along. Writing.

That’s why I keep bringing it up and wondering what I’m ‘supposed’ to be doing with it. Writing is what I do that fulfills the punk ethic. I don’t care about grammar or syntax or at times spelling. I don’t care about literary criticism or academic BS. And I really don’t care about much that was written in the past… and I care even less about what people are writing now. Which means that when it comes to writing, I’m completely free to just power through it. And I do. I work fast and angry, all the time, everywhere.

And that’s before I get into things like writing being the cheapest and most portable art form, which is it is, which again, plays into my punk ethic. Plus I have this whole thing about pens being like guitars, but I’ll save you from reading that drawn out metaphor.

The point I’m making is that for the first time since, I would say I was fifteen and making painting from whatever was handy on whatever I could because I didn’t know any better, I feel sort of free. Like I found my thing, untainted by the rest of the stupid world, and it feels right.

The byproduct of of this mini-realization is that I’m writing like a fiend as well as drawing like a pro.

Finally, everything is coming up Milhouse.

But They’ll See the Big Board!?

Or

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Graphic Novel Format.

I’ve a lot of unrelated thoughts, so I’ll try to keep things short and concise. We’ll see how that goes. Every time I think I can pull that off, I end up waxing philosophical for page after endless page.

First up, the Salem Witch book. We’re still working on touching up a chapter or two, but for the most part, the text is ready to go. It’s time for me to step up to the plate and do my thing.

The month of May will have two phases, Phase One, design and layout, Phase Two, the rough pencil sketch. These are the fun phases, as opposed to Phase Three, which is me inking for hour after hour, week after week, month after month. That’s really kind of boring, mostly because all of the problem solving, otherwise called the cool stuff that artists get to do, is done in the layout and rough sketches. Phase Three inking is just me listening to a gross amount of music, movies and audio books. And grumbling. Perhaps some singing. Certainly swearing.

But we’re still at the beginning of this mess, which means Phase One. What I need to do, this week, is to take stuff that looks like this (a small mountain of illegible notes):

… and combine them with this (the text in boring form):

… on to this wall, covered in paper with boxes which are the exact proportion of my image space:

Then I can see the entire book in one glance. It’s a finite space into which I get to cram as much cool stuff as possible along with the text from the manuscript. This is when I can see how the whole story works. Does it seem too crowded here, does it breath enough when it needs to, can I heighten the emotions of this scene by moving this page to where that page is and vice versa? Like I said, this is the fun part. It’s my own personal, silent movie, unfolding on the wall. I can change any part of it that I want. I can try any idea that I think will work. Most won’t do what I want them to and will be replaced by better ideas.

Nothing about this phase is pretty. It’s a lot of straight lines and angry stickmen speaking in bubbles of printed text held in place by artist’s tape. But nothing needs to be pretty. It just needs to flow, to unfurl the narrative like a banner in the wind. Once that happens, I’ll jump to Phase Two, which is taking the ugly but vital layout information from Phase One and drawing the pretty, pencil version. By the end of Phase Two, everything should be crystal clear to anyone who sees it.

But that’s a blog post discussion for the future.

Whilst firing up the Witch Drawing Machine, I’m still pondering dumb crap. I spent two weeks trying to figure out how to get back into film photography because, for the life of me, I can’t get around the non-archival nature of digital photography. I know, it’s me thinking about stuff that is a waste of time. Like who cares how long a snapshot will last? And as I often think, occasionally say, for anyone who truly understands geological deep-time the archival nature of any human endeavor is laughable. Yet it was so engrained in my college education, where being a diligent artist would lead to a higher price tag in the gallery market, that I have a hard time shaking it. Which is silly because I’m not in the gallery game.

And then there’s the whole writing thing. I’m still pounding away at the novel but at a slower pace because my world is finally going all witchy.

In recent conversations with other writers, I’ve been struck by how often the notion of ritual comes into play. The word ritual might not be directly said, but the idea is there, to follow a behavior that makes the very mundane experience of grabbing a pen and paper and writing something down into a mystical literary journey. I mean, we all write stuff down everyday, from grocery lists to phone numbers to crap for work or school. So much so that I think to take writing to an artistic level requires a conscious effort. The creation of new behaviors far from the norm. To ritualize.

Most of the professionals I know barely think of this because they learned this lesson long ago and it’s now second nature. Maybe they have to work with a fountain pen, maybe they need to type at their friend’s coffee table. Whatever the ritual is, they’ve already figured it out and accept it as dogma without thought or care. It’s the people who haven’t figured out how to create the physical and or mental space to switch gears from the normal state of mind to a creative one, who might want to think about how they go about getting some magic into their process.

Some of my ritualistic behavior is based on function. I’ve used the same paper, ink and pen points since I started making books, not because they are the best or most expensive, but because they do exactly what I want them to. At this point, I don’t even wonder what I’m going to use, that question was settled years ago. But I do take it a step further with personal things that are idiosyncratic and only exist to create the environment I need to get things done. For instance, my tiny collection of art supplies fit in a wooden box, painted a drab green, that my dad made for me when I was a child to hold my Star Wars figures. When I stopped playing with them, I used the same box to store my first collection of oil paints. Somehow or other, this box ends up holding the most important stuff, which is why it’s now on my desk. Then there’s my Darth Vader pencil case. It literally holds all the pens and pencil (yes, singular) that I use. The pencil case is worth ten times more than anything inside of it, which somehow makes opening it, taking out a pen and getting to work, an event. Just sitting down to work, opening my pencil case, opening my green box and arranging my materials before me, puts me into a state that is conducive to making illustrations.

It’s weird that such simple things are so effective. But I’ve noticed when I, for no good reason or at times when I think I’m far more clever than I actually am, forgo my little rituals, things just don’t feel right and I’m less productive. Go figure.

A Not-So-Whiny Post

(But first, yeah, that's me holding a piece of the Andes mountains. How cool is that?)

Yeah, so I wrote a whole thing that was just me whining about dumb crap. Who cares? Not you, not me. Moving on, take two.

Progress on the Salem Witch front. And by that, I mean real progress. We have an image size and the text is pretty much done. So, it’s time to hit the hell out of something. Of course, that something is me drawing a 120-ish page rough draft.

The timing couldn’t be better. I have the paper ready to go, the new desk all prepped, I’ve locked anything distracting in a trunk and the month of May is completely set aside for drawing witches, 24/7. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever been in such an ideal position for working on any of my previous books. I’m quite optimistic about this project, so long as I can survive not sleeping or eating or thinking about anything other than 1692.

Let’s see how long I can keep that feeling alive. My guess is that it shouldn’t be too difficult to stay focused. Real deadlines, as opposed to my self imposed deadlines, tend to enhance my ability to focus. As does the thought that in the not too distant future, I’ll be able to show you a finished book and we’ll all be excited and I move on to the next bit of business. E-book, printed book, whatever, it's just nice to know that the work is out there, somewhere, being read, by someone... perhaps even someone that I would like to hang out with... though probably not... well maybe if they play a CBG... but that's such a long shot that it's hardly a thought worth entertaining...

So yeah, progress. By next week, I’ll be back to posting scans and shots of drawings in the works and then I can pretend I’m a real illustrator for a little while. That would be a nice change.

Alright.

On to Lemieuxgirl66’s comment from my last post… see, we can have a dialogue… told you that you were my feedback loop.

Yeah, I know, I’m an idiot. The idea of fitting neatly into any sort of label does fill me with profound dread.

That said, my real issue is this: if I lose the emotional energy that initiates my whole storytelling process for a given project, I’m screwed because I’ll stall and never finish it. Which means, I’m always trying to find the fastest method to convey the best story possible. If I could just plug something into my brain and copy the whole book into Word or a magical drawing machine and have it done in three seconds, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But I can’t. These things take forever to produce, which drives me nuts. That leads to me wondering what’s the best course of action. Maybe I would be happier and or more commercially successful if I dumped drawing from my professional skill set. Then again, maybe that would happen if I dumped writing. And there are times when I think life would be considerably easier if I dropped everything and got a grown up job and started wearing khaki pants.

I know that if I spend too much time thinking about this nonsense, I grow despondent and unproductive. But occasionally, I do figure out something new. Like saying yes to things, most of my ideas lead nowhere, but if I don’t entertain them, I screw myself out of the possibility of stumbling onto something which might prove insightful.

At this point, professionally speaking, neither my writing or drawing seems to hinder my career, which means that it doesn’t make sense to junk either of them. As Mandy says, quite often after one of my long soliloquies about something very stupid that I could do with my creative life…“they only pay you to write and draw books… so, like, do that.” Of course, she’s not being mercenary about things, it’s just she knows, like everyone reading this, that I can talk a lot of crap but in the end, the only thing I’ve ever excelled at was making books.

I guess it’s time to go do that or something…

Writing v. Drawing

I had about a billion things that I thought were blog worthy, but really, I can’t think of a single one at the moment. Which either means that they were not blog worthy at all or not blog worthy yet.

One professional thought I've pondered lately is what to do with this career of mine. As I approach a decade of effort, it’s not the worst idea to put it all in perspective and see where I’ve come and, more importantly, plot a course for where I may go in the future.

So, this thought of mine… it’s all about the writing. See, before I envisioned, wrote and illustrated the WWI book, I hadn’t drawn anything for about five years. I know, it's shocking... Anyway, I left college with my newly printed degree in fine arts as a drawer and then promptly fell, headfirst, into the world of photography (the cool kind with film and darkrooms not that other kind). And as cool as that was, it didn’t satisfy me. Not that I knew what I was doing or what I wanted to do, I just knew I was spinning my wheels. I spent years like that.

Then there was all that globe trotting and romantic whatnot, which I sort of hope everyone can relate to as travel and romance are really kind of important to being a healthy, well-rounded person. But whatever. Eventually, I found myself in debt and working at a bookstore, going nowhere in a hellish hurry. It was then that I started writing. Sure, I’d always written little things, here or there, but this was on a whole different scale. I went from the occasional bit of poetry or lyrics to intense fictional output. Over the course of five years, I pretty much completely stopped dabbling in the visual arts and wrote like a crazy person. It was a total change and so complete that when I met Mandy and started dating her, when she asked what I did or what I wanted to do with my life, I told her I wanted to be a writer. The idea of being an illustrator never crossed my conscious mind and I'd given up drawing and photography.

But I wasn’t confident. That was my biggest issue. Not that I didn’t think I was a good writer or that I didn’t have something worthwhile to say, I’ve never lacked confidence in those departments. I was deeply concerned that no one in the publishing industry would take me seriously because there was nothing in my background that would support my claim to be a talented writer. I was as much of a nobody as a nobody can be.

Which is why I decided to take a gamble on the picture book. I knew I could write and draw, but the only street cred I had was in the fine arts area, so I figured I would stand a better chance of getting something published if I used my drawing skilz to open doors. And I was right... or maybe... who knows… My drawings and writing worked well together. You've seen the fruits of that labor.

Now, back to the present. After working diligently for the last 8.5 years, I have a little bit of credibility as a writer. Well, true, I have a credibility as a writer and an illustrator, but if you think about my previous lack of confidence, I’m finally at a place where I can see myself taking the gamble as a writer, sans images.

Not that I know what that means. Does that mean that I wrap up this Salem book and then take a year just to write, letting the inkpot collect dust? Do I commit to five more years of intensive crazy writing, cranking out as much stuff as possible? Do I hang my shingle, as it were, as an illustrator for hire, drawing stuff for other people and spending my valuable/personal time writing novels? I have all kinds of questions and there are all kinds of options.

The reality is that I have two talents. But I have one life. And at this point, I don’t know what is the best path to follow in order to get my work out there in the way that I want so that I feel as though my time is well spent and that I am successful. I’m in a bit of a gray area. I don’t feel like the searching, grasping guy descending into infinite failure like I used to, but I don’t feel like a guy who’s figured out the best way to do things either. And as most of us know, there’s wasting time over-thinking things and there’s taking a calculated risk.

Right now, the risk is whether it’s worth my effort to keep drawing or if I would be better served by writing more. At this point, I’m not sure. I know drawing is rewarding, but it’s also extremely time consuming and costly, well, compared to writing everything is costly. And if I’m still the guy who wants to work fast and get as many things done as humanly possible, then words like “time consuming” and “costly” need to be taken into account.

So… that’s what I’m thinking about as I prepare for months of drawing, drawing, drawing. Needless to say, I have a lot of time to ponder this particular, calculated risk.