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.

Posted on by Lee

I Only Bleed Ink

In my last post, I talked a bit about how I’ve always had a fascination with dark stories, even from a very early age (Watership Down was a firm favourite of mine at the tender age of 3). Dark stories can be incredibly therapeutic. When writing them they can expunge all kinds of negative feelings, creating a safe way to vent. When reading, there is a measure of relief and solace to be found in following characters who are having an even worse time than you. Or sometimes, when you are feeling alone and isolated in your struggles, finding a story that mirrors what you’re going through can be a life-raft; a way to feel less invisible — like there is someone out there who sees and acknowledges your pain. And in a life where almost nothing was within my control except for what I could get down on paper, a mantra began repeating itself in my thoughts: ‘I only bleed ink’.

I have created, thus far, three different versions of my comic Children of Shadow, each almost unrecognisable from the others. Every time I made it for a different reason, though none less important or personal than the last.

In the year 2001, when I was fourteen, I discovered webcomics. Full of inspiration, I decided to make my own. It was in a Sunday Funnies format with a loose, overarching plot split into episodes that were structured like a Saturday Morning Cartoon — similar to the kinds of stories I was consuming at the time. It was a fun and funny adventure story with lots of action, silly quips, and ridiculously over-the-top situational comedy. I titled it Fawna’s Quest, and never showed it to anybody. It was my personal secret, my escape from a troubled home life and an equally troubled school life. Since no one knew about it, no one could take it from me. It remained my oasis for several years until I’d grown past its themes and childish execution.

In 2006, I started over. Having recently recovered from a terrible illness that left me with temporary brain damage, I used this reboot as a way to reteach myself how to write and draw. This time it was a manga-style action/adventure story; again, similar to the content I was consuming at the time. I added the volume name Ashes after the title Fawna’s Quest and introduced the daemons to the cast along with antagonists called shadows — the precursors to the ombri. It was a great deal darker than the previous version with a much stronger overarching plot, though it still wasn’t afraid to be lighthearted and occasionally nonsensical. With everything I’d survived the previous year, the comic was meant to be indulgent and fun, so I haphazardly threw in whatever I felt like including, whether it actually worked for the narrative or not. After two years and two hundred pages, I had healed a great deal and my body had repaired the brain damage. I was now acutely embarassed by the early pages, which looked like they’d been made by a young child instead of an 18-year-old art major and trained essayist.

I made plans to only redraw the early pages, but then my illness then came back, and with a vengeance. The third and current version of the comic arose during this time. I spent the better part of a decade in and out of hospitals, more than a few times only barely clinging to life. This time, Fawna’s Quest was renamed Children of Shadow, and it became a full-blown dark fantasy/horror tale. On top of my illness, a great deal of turmoil was happening in my personal life and I was left without any outlet besides my art and writing. Every negative emotion, every fear, and even every hope for a better future was channelled into the comic.

Writing is my passion, whether it be in comic or prose form, and it grows and changes along with me. None of my works exemplifies this more than Children of Shadow, which keeps morphing between different genres, always taking the form of what I need most at the time. When I needed fun, it was funny. When I needed therapy, it was therapeutic. And when I needed to vent, it gave me a voice. It is my most personal and most important story, and I often wonder if it will change again sometime in the future. No matter what though, it will always be the story that contains the most of me, as I bleed ink over each page.

Posted on by Lee · 6 Comments

How I Accidentally Wrote a Horror Comic

If you asked me what my least favourite genre was five years ago, I would have vehemently answered, ‘Horror!’ I spent most of my life avoiding it like the plague; even the tamest ghost stories gave me nightmares, and my weak stomach could never handle gore.

And yet, I’ve always been attracted to dark stories. As a three year-old child, my favourite movie was Watership Down — a film that has traumatised countless children (and adults). My all-time favourite episode of the Simpsons was Bart Sells His Soul and I felt that Spongebob peaked with Nasty Patty. There is something about that eternal, internal struggle between light and dark that has always enraptured and fascinated me.

A few months after I turned thirteen, The Sixth Sense debuted in theatres, and it was one of the first PG-13 movies I went to see. I spent the entire run time with a white-knuckled grip on my armrests and after I had nightmares for weeks, but even so, I described it as ‘the one horror movie I liked’ because of that amazing twist at the end. It stuck with me for a long time, but it wasn’t until years and years later that I would dip my toes into the horror genre again with the TV show, Supernatural.

The interesting thing is, I had been creating my comic, Children of Shadow, for about eight years prior to watching Supernatural. It wasn’t until I began watching horror — formerly my least favourite genre — that I realised I had been writing it.

The irrational fears of things we don’t understand, the dark corners of our own thoughts that we are afraid to acknowledge, the struggles, misconceptions, and maltreatment we experience when our brains stop working the way they should — these are the mainstays of horror. The genre is inextricably linked with mental illness. And mental illness just so happens to be the main theme of Children of Shadow as well. By tapping into the same well of allegories and symbolisms that horror does, I had unintentionally created a horror story.

Once I realised this, and once Supernatural, with its often goofy and campy comedy relief that softened the scares, had started to desensitise me, I began seeking out more horror films. I loved The Haunting of Hill House, but I had to turn off Legion after half and hour because I was getting literal heart palpitations. I loved Maniac and the reboot of Unsolved Mysteries but had to stop watching Paranormal Witness partway through season 2. I discovered that I did like the genre, but only a particular flavour of it. Gorefest slasher flicks still turn my stomach, demonic possession still gives me nightmares, and I’m not keen on watching anything that involves clowns. I found my flavour of horror was similar to the first horror story that stuck with me: a methodical, carefully crafted plot rife with twists and turns, a gothic melancholy tone, an uneasy sense that everything isn’t all right.

Now that I’m armed with a better understanding of the genre, I want to continue to write more horror in the future. And who knows, perhaps in doing so I will accidentally write another genre I never thought I’d touch.

Posted on by Lee · 2 Comments

Swords Are Cool, But Pens Can Draw More Than Blood

Welcome to my new blog.
I’ve always felt reticent to blog on my main website. I tried in the past, but it felt incongruous to mix news posts about comic business with exhaustive ramblings that have little to do with anything. At the same time, maintaining multiple websites is time-consuming and messy — the primary reason why, years ago, I consolidated all of my seperate comic archives onto one mega-site. Having all my comics on one site makes sense, though: they’re all the same type of content. Trying to archive unrelated blogs is another story.

So at the risk of making my main website too bloated, I made this one. To keep maintenance as painless as possible, I installed a simple, no-frills theme.

My main goal is to write about my creative process, my inspirations, my advice, my frustrations, and whatever else I need to get off my chest. This is an experimental work-in-progress for putting down my thoughts, however rambling and incohesive. I make no promises to update it regularly, frequently, or coherently.