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

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

My next book is nearly finished – for real this time

I can’t believe it was all the way back in May when I said I was nearing the finish line with my next book. Here I am in early August, and that statement is finally true. Sarah’s Journal is a mere 15,000 words long, and, though it depends on your reading speed, the average person could comfortably finish it cover-to-cover within an hour or two. It’s not even long enough to be a novella. But if I start counting from when I wrote the first rough outline, it’s been 14 months and one day since I started this project. In that time I went through 9 drafts of proofreading and editing and had the story looked over by 3 other people.

My first book, Rava’s Awful, Amazing Day was half as long, had only three drafts, and never had a beta reader before it was released. But it taught me that I was capable of finishing a book, even if it’s a very small one. With Sarah’s Journal I went all out, taking what I’d learned from Rava’s Day and building on it by adding illustrations and doing the layout entirely by hand in Affinity Publisher rather than tweaking Scrivener’s compile settings until I liked the end result. Despite its short length, this has taken a massive amount of time and effort, but I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. This will be a far more polished story, and I can’t wait to release it.

Sarah’s Journal will also be professionally printed as a perfect-bound paperback (meaning it has spine and is held together by glue – as opposed to saddle-stitched, which is a stapled floppy) rather than as a homemade zine (I honestly do love the rough charm of homemade zines, but Sarah’s Journal was both too long and too aesthetically ambitious to work as one). I’ll be receiving the physical proof sometime in the next week or so, as well as the bookmarks I made to match it.

The base art for the bookmarks, sans text

It’s really exciting to see this project coming to fruition. After months of agonising over the digital files as I fixed and polished and perfected everything, soon I’ll be able to hold a physical item in my hands. And if all goes well, in a few months, I’ll be able to put them up for sale so all of my readers can, too. Feedback from the beta readers has been really positive, with all three of them stating that they got so sucked into the story, they had to go back and consciously look for any mistakes. And all of us have worked really hard to identify and correct all those mistakes (though of course, because things couldn’t be too perfect, as soon as I finalised everything with the printer, I spotted a small typo I’d missed in all of my 9 passes. Since I’m hoping no one will spot it, I’m not going to say what it is. :P)

I also have something exciting to announce soon, about a collaborative zine in which I contributed a short prose story. I can’t say anything about it quite yet, but it shouldn’t be much longer.

I also have several more WIPs of varying lengths that I’m working on. One I hope to release before the end of 2021 is a short story that, like Sarah’s Journal, also takes place right after Eryl’s prologue. It’s estimated to be around 2.5-3K words and is titled The Trail of Orphans. It will provide a small glimpse into elven biology – and society – within the world of Dark Wings. I also have a novella for Kira’s backstory I hope to pick up again sometime this year that’s 2/3 written and has been sitting unfinished on my computer since 2016. That one will be a long time before it’s ready to share, but I think my readers are really going to enjoy it once it’s done. The other prose WIPs waiting in my Dark Wings folder are less far along, and in my ‘someday I’ll get back to this’ pile.

With each book and short story I finish, my confidence grows a little more. Whether I will ever be a best-selling author, or even find a publishing house, is anyone’s guess. But the point isn’t to become rich or famous. It’s to build myself up a little more with each project, to show myself that yes, I can finish a story. I can get all these ideas in my head down on paper. And I can do it with a certain level of competency and show improvement every time I label a draft ‘finished’.

Posted on by Lee

Nearing the Finish Line With My Next Book

For being a comic artist, I haven’t been so good at actually making comic pages lately. I’ve been in a state of pretty bad burnout for a while, and everything that was 2020 certainly didn’t help. I’ve been post-surgery for five months now. Yet, my body is still adjusting to its new normal, which hasn’t helped my general exhaustion surrounding art (it may, in fact, take several years to fully adjust due to the nature of the surgery; it’s made a lot of changes to my entire system).

I haven’t been sitting on my hands, however, and because of many different factors that have made me feel unfulfilled by comics lately, I have been focusing more and more on writing prose. I wanted to be a novelist and illustrator long before I wanted to be a comic artist. In my late teens, my art and scripting abilities far exceeded my prose, so I chose to tell stories in the only way I was capable at the time. Fifteen years later, my prose has reached an acceptable level of competency, and so for the past six months, I’ve been practising and polishing and studying and practising some more. I’ve completed one novelette, one short story and have numerous works-in-progress.

One such WIP is very near completion and has been my primary focus for months now. Titled Sarah’s Journal (very exciting, I know), it takes place right after the prologue of my comic, Dark Wings: Eryl, and bridges a narrative gap my readers have been asking me to fill for many years now. I have been finding it easier to write side-stories for practise since I already have an established world, cast, and plot to work with. That allows me to concentrate on the nuts and bolts of writing rather than using my time and energy to conceptualise. Writing short asides also lets me play with different writing styles and formats without a significant commitment.

This particular book, Sarah’s Journal, has been an uphill battle from start to finish. It’s written in diary format, which ended up being far more challenging than I thought. I outlined it in June, began writing it in July — where I got about halfway through my outline — and put it away in disgust at the end of the month. I spent November writing Rava’s Awful, Amazing Day, which is about half as long and in a much more comfortable style. I then picked Sarah’s Journal up again in December and pushed out the second half of the first draft. I let it sit during January to get some distance and started the editing process in February. In April, I wrote another (very) short story for a collaborative zine while also rewriting sections of Sarah’s Journal. It’s now the first of May, and I’m on the home stretch. It’s been proofread, edited, illustrated, laid out in Affinity Publisher, and I’m researching a promising printer. The last step is having some trusted writing friends read through the latest version and make sure everything is in good shape before I send a few questions to the printer. It was a long journey for a book that is just under 15K words – a count that most of my writing friends could knock out in a week or less. I may work slowly, but I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished, and I eagerly await being able to hold the finished book in my hands.