Graphic Novel

Those of you that know me probably also know that it's really hard for me to finish a project. Well, I never quit on something, I just set it aside for a while!

Take my current work in progress, for example. It is a graphic novel that I started originally working on in 2005. I have about 65000 words of notes and outlines, which is a full-length book in itself. I have been working feverishly for the past few days on expanding the script and I have over 75 pages of finalized material for the graphic novel.

I've been working with an artist on this for about a year, off and on. We have a cover almost set and will be working on the interior very soon. I will post pics and whatnot as they are available. I am also going to be creating a separate website for the graphic novel before the first digital issue is released in order to help create a little bit of buzz. It will probably be at least another year before the full length graphic novel is completed, but I am hoping to have issue #1 out by the end of the year! Stay posted and watch as this exciting project unfolds.

7 years in the making and I'm finally starting to see progress!

New Year's Resolutions

Inspired by Joe Konrath's blog, I have decided to put together a list of my own personal goals that I wish to accomplish in 2012. I am awful at setting goals for myself, and I hope that by writing these down for my millions of readers to see, I will be held accountable for each goal I set forth.

1. Publish Viral Empire. This is a 3 issue graphic novel that I am working on with the very talented Rainy Arealius. We have a working script in place as well as some idea of what we want the artwork to look like. There isn't much work left on my end, other than the formatting and printing, so this should be a pretty easy goal to accomplish.
2. Finish writing one novel. I have three started. Well, they used to be one novel, but now they are a trilogy, and I am not very far into any of them. Finishing one will be a major task, but I really need to do this just to prove to myself that I can start and finish a novel.
3. Read 35 books. I have read 28 books this year. 35 will be tough, but it is very possible.
4. Go to a convention. I don't care whether it's a mystery writers convention or a comic convention. I need to start networking and get my work more noticed. This will be made much easier if I can get funding through Kickstarter. I have applied and I am currently working on my final proposal. This would be a huge help to getting Viral Empire published.
5. Finally, I want to finish the short western I began a few years ago. It's not a novel, so I guess that makes it a short story or a novella. I see this as a western-thriller, complete with a serial killer and all, just set up in the wild, wild west.

I will keep you posted as far as my progress goes. This should be a very productive year, I have all the groundwork set to establish these goals, it's just a matter of focus.

Progress

The more forward progress we make on the graphic novel, the more exciting it is. We are currently working with a complete outline of the first three issues and have mockups of what the covers should look like. Rainy has begun work on the interior artwork and the ball seems to be rolling very smoothly.

Thanks to my friends at www.comicbooksnob.com, I have recently found a great resource as far as financing creative projects is concerned. It's called Kickstarter and it allows fellow artists and writers and directors/filmmakers to look over a summary of your project and decide if they want to contribute money to the completion of your project.

I am so excited to even submit my work there in the off chance that it gets accepted. We are still in the beginning stages of our project and having a resource like this could help us immensely in getting this comic series off the ground. The biggest problem with most independent artists is a lack of capital to get their work distributed. Kickstarter looks like it could be the bellows that will get these projects blazing.

I will keep everyone posted as to which direction we are thinking about going with this project, but right now Kickstarter is looking like our best option.

Forced Products

I read an interesting forum post this morning that editors and agents tend to stay away from joint-produced graphic narratives as they are usually a forced and contrived final product. This makes sense, but I wonder how skewed this viewpoint actually is? I am a horrible artist, and when I did do the illustrations for my own stories, I felt that they were extremely contrived.

Now, I don't want to take away from what these professionals do, but in my opinion, a good graphic narrative, novel, etc. starts with a good story. The art, of course, should not take away from that story. But for many, the art can make or break the end product. If you have a good story with a good artist backing you up, how can the product not be good? The art needs to complement the story, of course, but a quality artist can do this without problems.

So this brings me back to my original point. Good artwork is definitely a necessity, but do these professionals mean that the "forced" final product an issue with poor art or poor storytelling? If anything, I would think that a good writer, if they are not an extremely talented artist, needs to outsource this position since their own poor renditions of the characters would take away from the final product. Whether this is "forced" or not, it is an important part of putting together the best product possible.

Delicate Work

Anyone who has ever begun working on a novel knows that keeping the novel on course and alive is a very delicate balance. You need to grow the story, but you also need to make sure that it doesn't waver or falter. My thriller suddenly broke down into three separate stories. This was fine at first as it made for a very exciting read. But when the plots separate themselves too much, it just doesn't work to keep them all in the same novel. So now my thriller has been decimated. All of the 30,000 words I had written have been broken down into three different novels, none of which I have had the desire to work on since realizing that they are very separate stories.

I still think that at least two of the stories have novel potential, but after this schism, I began work on a bunch of little projects, one which, in the matter of two weeks, had become a 30,000 word manuscript itself. This was really exciting for me, it had taken months of work for my previous work in progress to get to that point. But this project soon became very clear that it was not novel material. Instead, I have decided to work on it as a graphic novel.

I have been privileged to know many great artists and I am really excited to be working with Rachel Eames on this. It's a science fiction piece, which is quite unusual for me as I typically have written fantasy when I deal with spec fiction. But this piece is extremely important to me and I am really looking forward to moving in a positive direction with this. Stay tuned for more updates.