Waffle

Comics will resume as soon as I have enough new material. Sorry all… it’s just not coming together. I have got most of the end of Invasion drawn, and at last NaNoWriMo is giving me the confidence that I get to push the plot to Feral back on track - a few of the ideas that I started with turned out to be wrong, and I have to change the direction of the story a bit. For the longest time, I wasn’t sure how I was going to resolve the problems I had, but at least now I feel that they’re resolvable.

So… I hope some of you will enjoy reading the draft of King Groy on My DeviantArt site and I’ll have new comics as soon as I can manage!

NaNoWriMo has turned out to be very very addictive. I wrote over 4000 words today, and wrote more than 2000 words on all days after the first day, when I decided late at night that I would give it a shot. At last I have something I can really focus on again!

It’s affecting my day job too. At work, I crank out words for a living, and knowing that I can crank the mout much, much faster than I’ve done so far is very motivational.

It’s not so good for my physical fitness as I’m skipping gym time to work on it. It’s also costing me sleep.

I am learning a lot about my strengths and weakness as a writer. The tone and humour of my work in progress are derivative, and I need to work on description and characterization - one of which I never needed to learn for my comics as I could draw what I needed, and the other I didn’t always have as much space for in the panels as I now have in prose writing.

Drivel-in-progress is posted daily on my DeviantArt site. It’s bad - it’s a first draft that I’m cranking out in my spare time, working from a comic script that I never finished. But I hope it’s bad in interesting and illuminating ways, and that by the time I’m done, I’ll know what I need to know in order to make the second draft work properly as a novel.

Progress on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is slow as ever. A few more pages from the Invasion storyline are inching their way towards completion. Invasion will almost certainly end before Feral does, even though Invasion is later than Feral in the overall continuity.

At this rate, it’ll take me years to get around to doing the other storyline that I need to fill up the overall continuity. There’s a long story originally from 1996/1997 missing from the archives. I hate how that one turned out but have been meaning for the past few years to fill the gap with a re-written, re-drawn version of that story. Well, it seems like drawing is out of the question, but Aggie actually handed me the solution to this problem the other day when she started talking about her project for National Novel Writing Month which is a sequel to the comic American Gothic Daily. For me to write the new version of King Groy as a 50,000-word novel would be good writing practice and a good way to fulfill a years-old commitment that has always been at the back of my mind.

My Nanowrimo profile is here here and I’ll try to post word count updates daily. Updates of the first draft will appear on my DeviantArt account before they’ll appear on the ROCR website… so I can polish them up if they suck.

Aggie’s new novel is on her DeviantArt account. It’s rough, as mine will be, but that’s what you get when you just push out the words and post your first draft.

I didn’t get to work on Feral again this weekend, and it’s time I stopped kidding myself: I can’t keep up with a schedule, so I’m going to take another break and putting up some filler in the mean time, until I’ve built a buffer.

The filler I’ve picked is the two Courtly Manners stories from 2002 and 2005, respectively. The second one used to be on the old site when ROCR was primarily available as a subscription comic, but didn’t survive the transition to free and to WillowCMS. It’s been posted on the Chronicles of the Witch Queen site, though, but it never got the audiences there that Invasion and Feral did get. Courtly Manners 1 has been languishing there as well.

The comics will be posted at a frequency of 1 a day, every day. I’ve always thought that’d be the perfect schedule, and so it annoys me that right now, I can’t even swing one a week. A buffer will help.

Feral will be back at the beginning of November.

Aggie posted this lovely Invasion-based drawing on her blog as a birthday present to me:
Fay watches on as Kel cuts up a fish. By Aggie. Click to enlarge.
Thank you, sweetheart! I love you too!

Using uninked pencil art, like I’ve done on Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan for the past three weeks and on American Gothic before that, saves me some time, but not as much as you would think. The time savings don’t come from skipping the inking and colouring phases - all the effort that used to go into inking and colouring (keeping in mind that DFG has been doing the colour flats on my comics for almost two years now) now go into the final pencil line art and the grey pencil tones.

The time savings that I do get come from a) simplifying the process so there is no longer a separate Photoshop colouring stage after I get the colour flats back from DFG, and b) the elimination of wet media accidents, which I’m very prone to. The comic creation process still takes a whole afternoon even if I cut corners in drawing backgrounds - a page full of close-ups is easier for me to do than one with lots of scenery or action, so that’s the sort of pages I’ve been drawing. I am very envious of Aggie’s ability to just knock out an American Gothic page in a few hours.

Last long weekend (a local holiday), I didn’t get two pages of Feral done so there’s still no buffer. The buffer for Invasion is running out already. Next weekend, I may end up not having an afternoon of uninterrupted drawing time. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride, and it’s only three weeks into my resumption of art duties on Feral.

Invasion has updated again, with a sad end for the bulldog who drew the short straw.

Production of new pages has hit a snag, but there’s one more comic in the buffer.

Aggie’s facing a huge workload, and my schedule has stabilised a lot. I’m drawing two pages of Invasion a week even though that’s set after the end of Feral. So we’ve decided that it’s time for me to get back to drawing it myself, all the way to the finish, starting with the next update. The next update will be on Monday, August 18, because we’ve been unable to get the update done this weekend.

I’ll run some filler though… even if it’s just a re-run of an old story. There must be something I haven’t dug up yet from the old galleries. Sorry.

Not everyone liked Aggie’s work. I enjoyed her take on the story a great deal, and learned a lot from the six months she worked on it. Especially when it came to tightening up the scripts. I think you will see that reflected in the new pages I’ll be drawing.

Invasion will update again on Friday, August 8.

In fact, weekly updates will be pretty much assured for the next month or so. It will also update on the ROCR archives, though it won’t be shown on the front page there.

There’s a lot being added to the archives. Stealth updates are underway for The Lives of X!Gloop and once that’s done, for The Eye of the Underworld. I’ll unveil those as complete archives when they’re done. They’ve been milked more than enough over the past few years for me not to feel like I should run them on the front page, but I do want them under the WillowCMS umbrella now.

I’ve got some more character art for sale through my Comicspace galleries. This time it’s four nude character drawings, of Abui, Sash, Kel and Shireen, made in preparation for the Feral and Invasion storylines. Because they’re nudes, only members of Comicspace can see them, but signing up is easy and safe (and if you sign up, you can see all my other galleries, mark some as your favourites and join my friends list there, which is one good way for a reader to help raise my profile just a little bit).

Sizes range from A4 (210 x 297 mm) to A4+ (297 x 370 mm) and prices range from $20 to $40, depending on the size and my subjective assessment of what they’re worth - if you disagree with my assessment, you might get a bargain! As with all character art pieces, shipping is free if you also buy any item from the Invasion or Feral galleries!