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.