Decembeard

First of, I’m going to rattle through what we’ve been up to for the past few months.

Editing.
Constantly. Sometimes it’s joyful, sometimes sorrowful. Lately, it’s been more of the former.
When I first began writing The Seven Stars, it had been years since I had written anything of substance. The first draft took a year to complete, and while I was happy with parts of it, there was a lot that needed to change. I was unused to the economy of language that is demanded in comic scripts. In fact, I was not a reader of comics in the slightest. But, I’m happy to say, things do change, and each revision further refines what did indeed start out as a literary lump of coal.
The War of All, the lead-in story to The Seven Stars, has been our focus of late. It, too, is being refined; while we’re keeping the main plot thrusts, we’re trimming down the fringes. A one hundred page comic isn’t the best medium for an overly convoluted plot, as Dave so often reminds me.


Executive Decisions

It has been nearly a full year since we have had the Wacom Cintiq, and it has allowed us to make more progress than I think Dave and I even realize at this point. Dave had completed about ten pages done in full colour (page one, below) when he decided to alter and simplify and visual style, and started over.

It’s worth mentioning that we both quite liked the way that the colour images looked, but as the sole artist, it would be difficult to balance that level of colour and detail with being able to make decent progress.
Recently, he has honed a new shading technique that lends the images a surprising amount of depth. Hopefully I can twist his arm enough to get him to post one of the more recent pages, but at this point we’re going to continue in black and white only. This means (fingers crossed) we’ll have a finished product that much sooner.

Sidenotes

Dave has done some colouring for fellow artist, supreme nice guy and bearded champion Mike Rooth. I highly recommend checking out Mike’s Facebook page to see Dave’s handiwork as well as Mike’s own amazing artwork. I have been working on my own novel’s first draft (82,000 words, still not done) as well as a multi-part superhero story for my overseas friends at Artifice Comics. Part one of "Horizon" can be found here among worthier tales. It’s totally free, as are all the other editions of Bento.

NEWS!
KW Tri-Con is on January 18/19. We are hoping to have our own table where we’ll be selling prints for The Seven Stars as well as Dave’s own fantasy/abstract artwork. More on that to come! Also, I've been catching up on my reading lately and wanted to start posting some semi-regular critiques. First up: Wool, by Hugh Howey.

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Balancing Acts

Tim here.

It’s almost the end of September, and the past couple of months have been a blur. Dave and I have both been busy with the Seven Stars as well as many non-Seven Stars related things.

Dave celebrated a birthday and a housewarming. Thankfully, I had great excuse that was probably legit for not helping him move the heavy stuff.
It was a great celebration, replete with a backyard campfire, gratuitous amounts of alcohol, and Cards Against Humanity (what’s a girl’s best friend? A squadron of moles wearing aviator goggles).

I’ve been keeping busy with several writing projects, The Seven Stars, of course, being one of them.
I’ve been trying to come up with an atypical hero story for my friends at Artifice Comics, which is proving to be a venture in uncharted grounds for me.

Lastly, I’ve been plugging away at a novel since April of this year, and it’s genesis came from the image below.

Dave and I brainstormed an idea about a group of divinely blessed warriors that were eternally bound for war, and what would happen when their battle was finally over.

The plot that came from that bears little in the way of the same story, but the DNA of the world is there, specifically in the way the warriors receiving their “blessings”. I hope to have the first draft finished by the end of November. Currently it’s sitting at 66,000 words.

In other news, Dave and I are playing Dungeons & Dragons again for the first time in about thirteen years. We have one session under our belts and, as the DM, I can't wait to lay down the hurt on my group.

In the coming weeks, we’ll hopefully have some new artwork to share. Dave has been working on simplifying the art style to make the process less time consuming while still keeping it up to his usual level of awesomeness.

But we want to hear more from you! What would you like to see next? A fight scene? List of characters? A few pages of dialogue? Let us know!

The June Challenge - 28 Days Later

I couldn't resist the reference in the title...

Well, here we are at the end of June, and for 28 straight days I have written at least 750 words. It's been fun overall, and challenging at times. I'll explain.

I'm not a professional writer. I write, but like so many other aspiring writers, I work a day job that I'd rather not. But everyone has to start somewhere, and I don't really regret having the job that I do because it's afforded me the ability to a) live, and b) buy the Wacom Cintiq, which cost the equivalent of many, many, many cases of beer.

So, the writing challenge has put me into the habit of writing every day, and I'm coming to the realization that, if I'm going to consider writing as a job, which I should indeed, then I need to be able to write everday.

No. Matter. What.



Mr. Neil Gaiman lends a hand

                                           

There are days when I've burned through words and blown past the seven-fifty mark. There have been days this month when I really haven't felt the spark, and I'm sure there will always be those days, but if I twiddle my thumbs whilst awaiting the muse, I'm not going to get much done. A creative professional needs to be able to create every day, no excuses, and it's way more of a challenge to do it well than I thought it would be.

I've also discovered that I have a very short attention span. I feel compelled to open a new web browser every five minutes and see what's going on in the world. And so I'm getting into the habit of taking out my wifi adapter when I'm sitting down to write. Sorry, mulititudes of Facebook fans, you'll have to wait.

So, I have two days to go, and barring any extraordinary occurrences or misfortunes, I should succesfully complete the June challenge of writing 750 words every day.

But why stop at 750? is what I asked myself, and downloaded 2K To 10K to get some tips on the best ways to write, well, more. I'm about halfway through so far, so perhaps at the end of July, I can give all you lovely people another update on whether or not I've been able to increase my productivity.

In the meantime, I've submitted a short story to a pretty cool writing contest at The Cult of Me, which was brought to my attention through my friends at Pyschopomp and Artifice Comics. Perhaps I'll share the story if I don't win, which is highly likely that I will not, considering the level of creativity out there, versus my chowder-headedness.

Check out the links, as there's some really cool stuff all around.

Until next time.
Tim.