Posted on by Lee

Lessons Learned From NaNo 2023

NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) just ended, and I came away with a great deal more knowledge about my process than I started with. Now, I should note that traditional NaNo, that is, writing 50,000 words in 30 days, is far beyond my reach. I simply cannot write that much, that fast, without ruining my health. Instead, I set a much more modest goal of 20,000 words for the month of November, which I just barely met thanks to a cavalcade of setbacks midway through the month. The 20K I finished this month in addition to the 15K I put to paper in October was still enough to see just how differently this book is progressing compared to the light novel I wrote last Spring.

The light novel came to be in a somewhat roundabout way. I won’t go into too much detail since it’s still technically in limbo right now, but it started out as a short, 10 page comic script that got expanded into a 50 page comic script which, after several emails and zoom meetings, became a light novel. Having to expand the story (for a second time!) to fill the pages of a novel was a challenge, however I already had a solid outline to work from: that 50 page comic script.

Writing is hard. Every single writer says this. It’s a very different challenge from making a comic. Drawing a comic takes a lot more time and energy to cover the same narrative ground a novel does, but it has more leeway when it comes to the writing. Character expressions, body language, and visual decisions can do a lot of the heavy lifting, and make awkward or unrealistic dialogue less noticeable. Writing prose is faster and more flexible, but requires much more precision. With art, I can zone out and let my muscle memory do the work. With writing, I need to stay laser-focused the entire time. I could easily draw for hours and hours on end. I absolutely cannot write for more than one or two hours a day. The entire writing process is about solving one tricky problem after another. How do I bring this conversation to where I need it while making it sound natural? How do I bridge these two scenes? How do I write action without making it cartoonish? How do I pace the exposition scenes so it doesn’t come across as a boring info-dump? Is this sentence grammatically correct? Is this even a word? Oh, God, do I even know my native language or have I been speaking gibberish my whole life? Oddly, none of these were problems when I wrote comic scripts — those flow out of me with comparable ease — so translating a comic script into prose took a lot of the stress out of the process. I had to change quite a few things, of course, but there was always this overwhelming sense of relief when I finished a new scene created just for the novel and moved on to a scene that was in the script. I didn’t have to think as hard, I just needed to copy over the dialogue and change the stage directions into descriptions and then add some more flavour and detail. Thanks to using my script as a base, I was able to draft the book in far less time than any of my previous, shorter, books.

This taught me that I am not a planster (a portmanteau of planner and panster for the uninitiated; i.e. those who plan out the broad strokes of a story but make up the rest up as they go). So, I reasoned, what I needed to do for my next novel was plan everything out carefully.

And I did. I spent a month writing a detailed outline for the first book of my Leprechaun Gold series. I spent several more months up to my eyeballs in research. I compiled everything into a reference notebook. I was damn fucking ready to knock out this manuscript. So I started drafting, knuckles cracking and filled with fierce determination.

And then… I struggled. I struggled hard. Over the past two months, I wrote 35K words for this book. So far, the total word count for the book is 25K. I lost 10K somewhere, in all the teeth-gnashing rewrites as every day I had to go back and delete half of what I’d written the day before. I kept straying from my outline, or forgetting how I originally want to lead the story from one bullet-point to the next, and coming up with the most ridiculous, convoluted ways to move the story to the next scene.

Clearly, something here isn’t working.

I’m going to continue on with this outline until the book is finished, to see how much more I learn about my process from this. Will I keep struggling and losing almost half of my word count to course-corrections? Or will things smooth out after I power through the early chapters? How much rewriting will happen when I edit later on?

The biggest lesson I learned is that scripting comics comes naturally to me, and writing from those scripts is much easier than following a traditional outline. When I go to outline my next book, I want to try writing the story as a comic script, and then writing my first draft from it. Like painting over a rough sketch.

While it’s been frustrating, this year’s efforts have been an invaluable insight into how my brain handles outlines. As I put down tens of thousands of words that get deleted shortly after, I remind myself of the mountains of wonky sketches mouldering in the dark corners of my closet that were the necessary collateral before I could draw well on command. Right now, every prose project is a wonky sketch that I learn something important from. And if I keep at it, maybe someday I’ll be able to write as effortlessly as I draw.

Posted on by Lee · 2 Comments

Flailing About Counts as “Productivity,” Right?

I’m at an interesting and uncertain place in my writing journey right now (though, the more I research the publishing industry, there doesn’t seem to be any stage of a writer’s journey that isn’t filled with uncertainty). For most of my adult life, and even a good chunk of my pre-adult life, there wasn’t much doubt about what I wanted to do or how I was going to go about it. I was going to be an artist, and I was going to use this hip new thing called the “internet” to get my work out there (oh god do I feel old). I had a promising start, but, well, that kind of fizzled out after the internet changed faster than I could keep up. And now I’ve made the switch to writing prose which has famously always been an industry that welcomes newcomers with open arms and doesn’t require absolutely soul-draining amounts of persistence and heartbreak, unlike art and comics.

Right?

Right?!?

I don’t like to get into my personal life online, so I will be maddeningly vague about what’s been going on. The answer is: I’ve not been in a great place for a very long time. Life has been stressful and unstable, and it’s very hard to build a creative career when I’m living in perpetual survival mode. This is precisely the reason my comics would constantly go on and off hiatus so unpredictably, and why I would just start being able to make traction and grow my audience only to have to disappear for several months and lose it all. There is, however, a big light at the end of the tunnel, and a promising future of, for the first time in my life, actual stability.

That stability is when I plan to barrel headlong into turning my writing hobby into something professional. Until then, my focus is research and building up a body of work.

In the early part of this year, I wrote a middle-grade cyberpunk/horror light novel. This was written at the request of a local indie publisher, however they’ve been very busy and completely incommunicado since last spring. I have no idea if this book is still happening, so in the eventuality they’ve decided they no longer want it in their line-up, I may have to shelve it indefinitely.

NaNoWriMo is just three days away. I’m more excited for this NaNo than I’ve been for any previous, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why – I suppose I’m just really in the mood this year. I’ll be working on the first volume of a series called Leprechaun Gold, an urban fantasy about a pair of shapeshifting unicorn boys who escape from a cult and go on a journey to find themselves. I originally planned for it to be a single novel with episodic chapters, but due to flow and pacing issues as I was outlining, that soon ballooned into a series of seven novellas of around 30-40K words each. Well, so far I’ve written 3/23 chapters in volume 1, and I’m already at 11K. So, er, looks like this will be a series of full-length novels.

For years I was a plantser, which worked well for scripting comics. Not so much for prose. Meet my reference bible, with all my brainstorming, the master outline, and research in one place.

Since I have to write slowly to avoid burnout, I won’t even attempt to draft the whole book in one month. Or even in two or three months. The Boy Who Shook the Earth (the kira backstory novella that I’ve been picking up and putting down since 2016) remains unfinished, burning a hole in my WIP pile, so after NaNo I plan on alternating between working on Leprechaun Gold and that until both are done. Then they’ll each sit on my shelf for a few months to stew so I can go back and edit with fresh eyes later. I want to finish both first drafts by next summer, but the best laid plans and all that.

I’ll also being taking a few breaks now and then to write some short stories and pitch them to anthologies. I just finished a horror short and will be editing and illustrating it in December before sending it out to anthologies. If there’s no takers after a year, I’ll post it up on my website. Likewise with any other shorts I write.

After I finish drafting The Boy Who Shook the Earth and Leprechaun Gold #1, I’m going to sit down and outline a whole bunch of novels. I’ve found I work best when I have a very detailed, blow-by-blow outline, and I want to get as many of my ideas into a workable state as possible so I can speed up my drafting, and so I don’t start forgetting plot points. A while ago I gave a breakdown of all my planned writing projects. The ones I plan to outline at this time are: Azrael Saves the World, Leprechaun Gold #2, The Children of Shadow Trilogy, and the untitled Dark Wings gay romance/comedy/murder mystery (at this rate I will have an entire universe of side-stories written for Dark Wings long before I get to the main novel trilogy).

The publishing world is big and unforgiving and massively confusing. As much research and planning as I’ve done, I feel like I’m running about with only the vaguest idea of what I’m doing. So right now, with my unstable living arrangement, I’m doing my best to concentrate on what I can get done, which is outline and write manuscripts.

Once things are stable, I can start to network with other writers and try out as many different publishing avenues as I can. Some books will get queried to agents, some will get pitched to indie pubs, and others I’ll throw onto online self-publishing spaces like Kindle Vella. The next few years are going to be spent experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully, this writing thing will go somewhere. Despite having no idea if my current publisher will work out, and being rejected from every anthology I’ve submitted to so far, I feel like I’ve already accomplished more in the last 3 years with prose than I did in 20 years of webcomics.

Or maybe I’m just flailing about, pretending that I’m being productive like I did for so long with comics.

We’ll see.

Posted on by Lee

How learning to draw taught me to write

Since I was old enough to read, I wanted to be an author. There was just one problem: I could rarely ever muster the energy to actually sit down and write. My drafts seemed to progress at a snail’s pace, to the point where the comic versions of my stories were outstripping my progress on their novel counterparts. To put that into perspective, a single comic page took over 10 hours to craft and had the equivalent story progress as two or three paragraphs of prose — if that.

It was hopeless, I thought. I will never be a novelist.

Comic scripts — those were easy. I could write a chapter in one or two afternoons and then not have to touch my keyboard again for months, maybe even years, until I’d finished drawing everything I’d written. No one needed to see my scripts, so they could be sloppy and vague as I let my art do all of the heavy lifting.

Unlike my scripts, people eventually would see the words I was putting down in a novel. With that hyper-awareness of how every single sentence sounded, I found myself grinding to a halt whenever my prose sounded even slightly awkward. Did I really just write a grammatically incorrect sentence? For shame! Did I use the wrong word for that context? How abhorrent! Did I repeat the same unique word too many times? Out, damned inkblot! Out, I say! I expected every sentence to be perfect before I moved on to the next, and if it wasn’t, I would cringe, mortified by my failure to grasp my native own language. My flow state ruined, I would close my word processor and obsess over my mistakes for months until the next time a rare bout of insatiable inspiration struck.

Oh no, my writing wasn’t perfect on the first pass? Time to throw my whole self in the trash.

My midlife crisis decided to blindside me while the pandemic was raging. After a miniature breakdown, I emerged with some new perspectives. I looked at my comics and how little they’d progressed in the nearly 20 years I’d been working on them. I realised if I didn’t get serious about being a novelist, I was never going to be able to write all the stories I wanted to. With new determination, I set about writing a short novelette, something I could finish in a couple of weeks to prove to myself that I could write prose. It took me over six months. But the important part was that I finished it. Unfortunately, the reason it took so long was same problem I’d always had with prose. Every time I wrote a bad sentence, I couldn’t move on until I’d gotten it just right.

I’m not sure exactly when the second change struck — the epiphany that would finally break me free of my obsessive perfectionism, but I think it was not long after I wrapped up work on my first novelette and started on my second. I was working on some of the illustrations to feel productive during one of those times I’d ground to a halt over a bad paragraph, when suddenly, I realised how foolish I’d been.

When I drew this sketch, I was unfazed by its sloppiness. After all, I knew the final painting would look nice.

Drawing is easy for me. I don’t need to enter a flow state for it because I’ve been doing it for so long. It’s just a task to be completed, and I can draw just as well when I’m not feeling it as when I am. By now I’m so familiar with my own capabilities and limitations that my art is going to look mostly how I expect it to. It wasn’t always that way, of course. When I was younger, there were mountains of discarded sketchbook sheets, crumpled and torn out of frustration because I couldn’t figure out how to get the picture in my head onto the paper. Every wrong line would be viciously erased, every splotchy shadow criss-crossed with dozens of layers of pencil as I futilely attempted to fix a mistake by adding more to it.

Eventually, over many years and many hundreds of attempts, I learned how to translate images onto paper. I knew how shadows fell, how light spilled over an object, how to layer colours and texture to add realism, how to make a subject look like they’re alive and moving, as if they could spring right off the page. I also knew that if one part came out wonky, I could just fix it. My armature sketches were sloppy, vague, ugly. But I was unbothered, because I knew that skeleton was just the first step of many, and by the time it was finished, I would have a beautiful piece of art.

I looked down at my rough illustration. That sloppy sketch with crooked appendages that barely resembled the thing I knew it was going to become. The thing I knew I was perfectly capable of turning it into. And I thought Why is it this doesn’t bother me, but a poorly worded paragraph does? Retyping a paragraph is a lot faster and easier than fixing a drawing. So what was my hang up? Why did I expect instant perfection and a fully realised novel on the first pass? My draft was a rough sketch. It didn’t need to be good the first time, it just needed to be good eventually. And that flow state I kept waiting for? I didn’t wait until I was brimming with inspiration to draw, I just sat down and did it. I did it every day until it came naturally.

See? It looks lovely once it’s done. You’d never know it used to be a scribbly mess.

Well, duh, you may be thinking. How could I miss something so simple? How could I master one art form and take so long to realise it applied to another? I blame my parents. They read me 19th century classics as a small child and it turned me into a literary snob. As a discerning reader, I wouldn’t be happy with my writing until it met my own sky-high expectations of what made a good book.

Tongue-in-cheek jokes (that are uncomfortably true) aside, it was tunnel-vision, and nothing less. I had to accept my amateurish writing and recognise that it would take time before I was capable of turning my sloppy word sketches into a finished prose painting. And just like with drawing, the more I forced myself to simply sit down and do it, the more I would know what the right words were, just as I knew what brushstrokes to make.

If I didn’t know how to draw, if I didn’t have the comparison of a rough sketch, I wonder how much longer it would have taken me to have this realisation. Since then, I’ve noticed how much easier it is for me to simply sit down and type words, even if they’re cringe-worthy. But now I know that’s okay, because I’ll just paint over that skeleton later.

Posted on by Lee

Another Book Down While NaNo Looms Close

I recently released my third book, The Trail of Orphans. Calling it a book may be a little over-kind for a 4K-word side-story, but lately I’m trying to be kind to myself. While I’m unable to work on comics, I’m trying my best to trickle out related content in the form of prose.

Truth is, I’ve been in a state of bad burnout for years. Last year after having a major surgery, I completely crashed, and I crashed hard. Webcomics are a demanding hobby even when in the best of health, and a combination of an unstable life, chronic pain and illness, and trying to pump out pages whilst battling my perfectionist tendencies led to massive artistic burnout. I needed a break. And as the months passed and my will to draw wasn’t returning, I realised I needed a long break. It’s actually been amazing. I don’t miss drawing, or feel distressed over my lack of inspiration. I feel confident it will return when it’s ready, and comfortable with spending my time on other things — a feeling I honestly never thought I’d have. I’ve always been so passionate about art and comics that spending longer than a week without doing them would cause me to become depressed. This time… I’m okay. There’s an inner peace that wasn’t there before, and I know when I’m ready, I’ll pick that pencil up again and resume Fawna and Andrea’s respective journeys.

Until that day comes, however, I’m practising and polishing my prose skills by telling some side-stories within my comic’s universes. Children of Shadow, being a character-driven story that’s more about the main cast’s inner journeys, doesn’t provide nearly as much fodder for exploring its world as the sprawling, Tolkien-esque epic that is Dark Wings. Children of Shadow is too compact, its narrative too all-encompassing. There’s just not a lot to tell that isn’t already part of the main storyline. But Dark Wings, with its extensive world-building, enormous cast, various cultures, and myriad species, is ripe for exploration. I could tell hundreds of tales in this world. For now, however, I’m limiting myself to short backstories about some of the central characters we’ve met so far. I get to show some of that world-building that, by necessity, can’t make it into the comic, while also giving more depth to its cast.

NaNo (National Novel Writing Month) is coming up fast, and I’ll be spending it finishing the first draft of a novella about Kira that’s been sitting 2/3 written on my computer since 2016. Being as old as it is, it’ll require a lot of editing before it’s ready to be released, but I think it’ll be worth the wait. I’m very excited about this story, and especially excited about some new characters it introduces, who will show up in main storyline in Eryl Book II.

I’ve always worked slowly compared to most content creators because my health limits how much I can get done. But I hope that these short prose stories will help tide readers over and remind them that I haven’t abandoned the comics. Until the day my art muse returns, there’s still something to read.

Posted on by Lee

Why Being Queer Means Having a Love/Hate Relationship with Mainstream Media

I’m drafting this post fresh off of finishing Netflix’ Norwegian show, Ragnarok. By all accounts it’s an amazing show. The writing is tight, the acting is excellent, the production values are fantastic. It’s a show loaded with social commentary about big corporations poisoning the planet and the young activists who stand against them, and at the same time is also a modern retelling of the old Norse myths as the titular Ragnarok — the apocalyptic final battle between the Æsir gods and the Jötunn giants — draws ever nearer. The story is a rollercoaster of emotions as the characters’ personal dramas become tangled together with their world-ending destinies. But as modern and progressive as the show tries to be, there’s one aspect in which it continually falls short: its queer representation and its use of every bad gay trope.

The very first queer character we meet is Isolde. Her sexuality is treated as a big reveal — not the worst trope in itself, though it does nicely highlight that being gay is ‘not normal’ and is therefore othering. This is, however, quickly followed by the much worse ‘bury your gays’ trope. She is killed off in a martyring event very shortly after her orientation is revealed; her entire role in the show boiled down to being a catalyst so that Magne (Thor), a cishet white man, could have a compelling reason to hate his enemies, the giants. The second queer character we meet is Laurits, who, even from season one, couldn’t have been anyone but Loki. He isn’t given much focus in season one, but is often depicted as sneaky, mischievous, and frankly, an asshole.

At the beginning of season 2, however, I naively hoped that things might change. Laurits is seen hitting it off with a male cashier right at the beginning and his character appeared to be getting both more screen time and more sympathy. Laurits plays with his gender throughout the season, whilst simultaneously being a constant victim and a person of dubious loyalties. He is consistently betrayed by everyone he cares about, he is beaten by his giant half of the family (who also try to murder and humiliate him numerous times), and he weasels out of every situation by pledging loyalty to whomever will give him the time of day in that moment. He’s lonely, hurt, and, in his own words, ‘a freak who looks more like a pretty girl than a man.’

Hoo boy. Is that a lot to unpack.

On top of that, we also see the bi woman Iman use her supernatural powers to mind-control her female principle into kissing her and giving her better grades (said principal also suggests Iman is using her status as a person of colour to manipulate her; ‘playing the minority card’ as it’s been not-so-kindly dubbed). Oh, and remember the cashier Laurits was flirting with? Yeah, he was just toying with Laurits — stringing him along while hooking up with someone else.

Every queer character in the show is depicted as either a martyr, a victim, manipulative, duplicitous, or a combination thereof. Women are constantly belittled and shown their place. People of colour aren’t depicted any better. And I wish that wasn’t something I was used to, but it’s a story that plays out in mainstream media again and again. I’m sadly accustomed to the same old, same old: queer-baiting, bury your gays, queer-coded villains. Every now and then, we’re thrown a side character who doesn’t have an unhappy ending, but only if they fit that over-the-top fashion-obsessed drag-queen stereotype that fits the comfortable mainstream narrative of what all gay men must be like. From the slap-in-the-face ending of Supernatural, to BBC Sherlock’s Johnlock tease, to Disney’s long history of totally not gay villains modelled after drag queens, it seems like every piece of mainstream film I love does not love me back. And that feeling is hardly unique to me; every queer person out there is constantly, sharply reminded that we’re not supposed to be happy, or simply, just to Be.

This is one of the reasons the indie scene has such a high proportion of queer creators. I’ve had a few people astutely ponder out loud to me over my 15 years in the world of webcomics: ‘I’ve noticed a lot of webcomic authors are female’ and ‘I wonder why gay webcomics are so popular’. The answer is achingly simple: the indie scene exists because those demographics are not welcome in the mainstream.

I love the indie world. I love the raw, indulgent, incredibly imaginative works that come out of individuals and small teams writing whatever the fuck they want. There’s a saying that gets passed around our communities fairly often: ‘write what you want to read.’ I want to read a story about queer teens with supernatural powers and talking wildlife, and so that’s what I’m writing. Children of Shadow is an off-the-wall concept and it was always going to be a niche interest. But the fact that even a handful of people are interested in it means it’s a story worth telling. It’s a bonkers mash-up of genres. The mainstream would never want it. That’s okay. That’s why it’s a webcomic instead.

Unfortunately, the indie scene also has its drawbacks. When you’re a one person team, often without any formal training or any financial backing, it takes a long time to produce a work. You don’t have the benefit of editors, or the wisdom of a professional. Most of the time, you’re making it up as you go, learning the hard way through practise and soliciting critique from your peers. You have to do everything yourself, including market and sell your work, which requires a completely different skillset from making something good. If you’re not social or charismatic or good with numbers, your hidden gem is going to remain hidden. It’s no surprise then, that both quality and quantity are issues if you’re a fan of indie works (side-eyes my own comics that have been updating for a decade and yet number only 186 pages and 208 pages, respectively), and that it’s really difficult to find the stories you want to read. If your perfect story exists out there, you might never discover it if the creator isn’t good at marketing. How many people out there might be looking for a gritty pencil-drawn webcomic about foxes and immortal teenagers? I may never know because I’m pretty damn bad at telling people I’m making it.

Desperate to read stories about people like me, I’ve consumed a fair number of indie books and comics. And I can tell you right now, it’s damn hard to find good ones, and damn harder to find finished ones, and even damn harder to find genre fiction where queer characters are allowed to exist without the focus of their character or the narrative being on their gender or sexuality. It’s little wonder then, that as much as I adore the rawness and grit of indie works, I also look to mainstream stories to get that fix of films and novels that have been polished until they gleam. It’s just too bad I don’t see myself reflected there, not unless I’m a broken character who is either evil, or tragic, or both.

It’s not only the queer community. The mainstream has an ongoing abusive relationship with women, with the disabled, the mentally ill, and people of colour, as well. We love flashy superhero movies and teen dramas as much as fully abled cishet white men, but our demographics are rarely acknowledged outside of how we look from their perspective. Producers and editors are content to throw us just enough scraps to get us to open our wallets, but will always remind us that we are Other, that they value bigots’ opinions over the real harm we face every day from how we are depicted. The Hays code ended in 1968, yet stereotypes and tropes from an era when LGBT characters weren’t allowed to be depicted positively still stubbornly pervade modern media, and continue to influence people’s perceptions of the LGBT community. Progress is being made, slowly, and frequently with with two steps back for every one step forward. Even so, that progress is tenuous, and could at any moment be snatched away by a reactionary political movement that gains enough ground.

The show Ragnarok isn’t over yet, providing Netflix renews it for a third season. There may yet be hope that Laurits gets a happy ending, that he subverts expectations and doesn’t side with the Jötunn at the final battle (as he does in the original myth), but considering how this show has handled its queer characters thus far, I’m not holding my breath. Will I watch the third season? Probably. I am, after all, a sucker for angsty supernatural dramas with high production values. Will I be reminded that people like me don’t deserve happy endings? Probably. I am, after all, in a love/hate relationship with mainstream media.