Waffle

First off: follow my NaNoWriMo effort on My DeviantArt site. It’s a Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan story and actually fills in the big gap in the archives between The Stone of Contention and the stories that feature Jodoque as a character.

Second, here are my latest original scans for Invasion:

It’s slow going… it’s not so much a question of time as of motivation and priorities. For the weekends, my number one priority now is catching up on sleep. After that follow some time talking to Aggie online, grocery shopping, household and administrative chores, NaNoWrimo (during November only), and then working on ROCR if I still have time and energy. I find writing Feral particularly hard at that point so I work on Invasion first as that’s already scripted. The reason Feral is hard to write is because the original outline has been superceded by the shape the story ended up taking in execution. This means that I can’t end it on a cheap gag as originally planned and have to rethink in mid-story. This takes effort and concentration which I may not necessarily have in me. I do hope that the discipline of NaNoWriMo will help me improve in this area.

Because I sleep very little during the working week, I give my body as much time as it needs to catch up during the weekends. I turn off all external wake-up cues. So today I slept until half past one, PM! Admittedly, it had been a late night as I’d been up writing until past 2 AM, but that’s still a long time to spend in bed.

So for ROCR outside of the NaNoWriMO novel-in-progress, this weekend is once again a bust; I know I’ve been racking up a lot of busts in the past six months, and I do want readers to know that despite appearances to the contrary, I am still engaged in my work on the series as a whole, just at my own pace and in the media that I can work with the most easily, which right now is the written word.

What does this mean in practice?
One way or another, the King Groy story will make it to the ROCR website, resulting in a complete archive by the time I finish off the series. What I think will happen is that the second draft of the novel will go on the blog. The final draft will then be posted to the website proper, with illustrations. Historically, putting prose based stories into a webcomic archive has not been a successful move for those who have tried it, because readers tend to get stuck on their expectations and can’t get over the work not being a comic anymore. However, I’m willing to give it another shot, provided I am convinced that the finished product is really, really good. It’s going to take a lot of work to get from what is on the DeviantArt site to the quality I’m looking for. So it won’t be any time soon.

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.

The two pages from Invasion above (not shown on some feeds) are all I have to show for myself in terms of new comics work over the past few weeks. My motivation to do comics has been down a bit, in favour of individual illustrations and living my life, but at least with these pages that are already scripted all the way to the end, it’s easier to snatch some time here and there to execute what’s already planned. I don’t know if there’ll be any more ROCR after Invasion and Feral are both finished.

There were some plans for Aggie and me to work on the next episode of Feral together while I was with her last week, but we didn’t get around to working on our art much at all. The week just flew by. It would have been convenient, because the page in question as it floats around in my head involves horses, which I’m kind of wary of drawing. But it’ll be a while before we get around to it now. I think I’ll just wrap up Invasion first. It’ll all be in the right order in the archives anyway.

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!

Invasion has updated again, with Messenger Witch Agni getting back to work immediately, and Elspeth putting her plan into action.

This will be the last Invasion update in a while - I haven’t been able to produce any new pages. Heck, I’m struggling just to do one penciled page of Feral each week, and may end up having to skip a few weeks for that too, if I have to draw anything particularly complex.

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.

There’s a new update for Invasion in which Messenger Witch Agni suddenly finds that today’s daily “walkies” are taking her to an unexpected place!

Update: As of today, the comic has a two-week buffer. Hopefully, Calvin, DFG and I will be able to make good use of that.