Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! But I’m excited about this. :) There isn’t a lot of action/movement in the first chapter, but I tried to keep it dynamic through expressive backgrounds and really pushing the camera so that the “talking head” scenes don’t become static. Actually, I’m really partial to the scenes between Jane and her father. She hasn’t seen him in about six years, and she doesn’t know how to act around him, so she spends a lot of time trying NOT to look at him … so when she does, it’s always a bit of a shock. I’m particularly fond of the fourth panel on that second page when she’s startled into looking up at him, and just the vulnerability in her eyes … <3 I sort of choke up whenever I’m going through these pages and see that panel. I feel so sad for Jane; she wants to connect with her dad, but she doesn’t know the right moves to make. Like any middle-schooler, she’s trying desperately to find her place in the world without looking like she’s as lost or confused as she really feels. And she’s not doing a very good job at it!

I also finished the thumbnails for the next chapter. This IS a sci-fi/fantasy story, but all the pretty stuff doesn’t really happen until chapter 2. :)

I can’t wait to start inking! And then coloring; it’s so different thinking in color instead of black and white, and I’m starting to find there’s a lot more I can do with storytelling when I think in color; you can show things off-camera by changing lighting and colors that you couldn’t otherwise, and you can really affect the mood. Plus, it means I can’t draw so much detail which is GREAT for me, because I’m a detail freak, and it’s why all the half-finished comics drowned at my mom’s house (they had a flood) were never completed.

Now just to figure out what the heck I’m going to ink WITH. I started out thinking of a Guy Davis approach; all rough, nearly sketchy and thick nib lines, but I may go with something more ligne claire; I think it’s more forgiving to color. Or I could go even more drastic than that and just to freakin’ pencil lines like they do in The Triplets of Belleville. Did you hear that director just made a new movie? L’illusionniste. I desperately want to see it. It’s out!

Now, for your viewing pleasure, art-in-progress. Hopefully next time I’m here, I’ll have inks!!!

One of those planes is a Demoiselle by Alberto Santos-Dumont, btw, and the world’s first series production airplane. I’ve been reading Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It’s one of the most beautiful books ever written about aviation. But Antoine flew something more like that other plane which is a DH50 biplane, at least, early in his career.

Btw, if you haven’t bought or read Joann Sfar’s adaptation of Le Petit Prince yet, you better. It’s simple and beautiful and perfect in only a way that Sfar can make it.

WHAT COULD IT BE??? :D

Been getting in the habit of penciling my backgrounds first, doing just the barest outline of my characters’ action and actually drawing my people on the computer. Unfortunately, Matt’s 4×6 wacom is painful to use, so I’m trying to figure out how to get my hands on a 6×8 wacom temporarily. Until I can buy one to replace the one I had to sell in Austin (though that one was actually too large).

Hmm…

It will be in color. :)

As a cartoonist who hasn’t published anything in about five years, it’s difficult, I think, to relate to others just how profoundly living in this city has affected me. I was still producing back in Austin, but they were stories that got tucked into drawers, hidden away from anybody who might see them. I felt lethargic. Nothing was pushing me. Nothing was either painful or happy enough to inspire me to new heights. There was no community to scream and cry and laugh with … or to compete against in a way to push one another to new levels.

Yes, there’s the internet. But it’s not the same as a community that breathes in your face and lets you know when you’re stepping on its toes. I’m still something of a recluse; I don’t go out every night. I don’t party with other cartoonists. Our gatherings our random, infrequent, and low key. My candle is burning neither bright nor fast anymore. But, it’s been relit. Just being NEAR people I can relate to, who make me feel love and hate and passion towards their works inspire me. Simply knowing there’s access to a wealth of resources, even if I frequent those resources less often than I otherwise could or possibly should, sets the candle burning. I think my passion’s finally come back to me, and it was nice last night being able to talk about it to somebody who’s been there, gone through that, can relate to so many similarities.

Not everything is solved by the internet. Real life friendships and community make a portion of that which can never be replaced by digital interaction. I’ve learned that in the last year. The value of friendships. Of maintaining those friendships. Of not being afraid to seek out what’s right.

Oh heck, to live in a city I know I’ll never be unemployed in. That’s certainly 40% of it right there. My guts no longer gnawing with worry over whether I’ll be able to make rent THIS month, then what about NEXT month and dear God, what am I going to EAT?

Starving, kinda sucks. Not starving is kinda nice. New York’s a good place to keep fed.

And I’ve seen people living different kind of lives: cartoonists making it but each of them in different ways and drawing inspiration from that and finding a place that’s right for ME. Small towns don’t give you those options. There are only so many styles of life to choose from. Here, I can make the life that *I* want and be psychologically and financially free to pursue my cartooning career again.

Anyway, I’m not going to be at NYCC this weekend. I have no reason to be there because there’s nothing for me to show yet. I hate showing up to a party with empty hands. But Matt’s out of town for his best friend’s wedding, and I’m willfully unemployed so that I can be working on a 40-page children’s comic. One of my own. I think I’m gonna be doing that this weekend, just like I have for ten hours every day for the last month, excluding weekends to cuddle with my honey-bunn and terrorize the town. :P This one aims at being finished, not just roughs. Here’s to it!

Lately, I’ve been working mostly with making test pages for color. Takes a very different mindset to ink with color in mind instead of black and white. I have to berate myself every few minutes to back off from the detail; too much and the colors will be pointless.

Also, I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot of BLANKETS lately. Not because I’m trying to emulate it, but because Craig’s storytelling style is so unconventional, it gives me heart. BUTLER, P.A. jumps and leaps and dives about a very non-linear narrative and it takes a lot of side trips and rest stops a long the way, which isn’t my usual storytelling style. I like a narrative that is linear and concise and doesn’t wander. But this is what works for the story, so wander I must.

Most challenging of all, however, is figuring out the parts to leave out and what to change outside of reality. I’m not putting down events verbatim, but rather taking the most significant bits, cutting out the lesser bits, and attempting to stuff them together into a new story that isn’t exactly how real life went, but more perfectly lays out the emotions and feelings better than telling it straight-up ever would. This book would be a million pages long if I told it as-is.

Certainly makes me wonder how many other memoir-style comics and stories I’ve read were more fiction than fact. Then does it still deserve to be called a memoir? Where does the line start and where does it blur? I believe in telling the heart of the story I lived rather than the carbon copy. It seems more potent that way. But it also makes it more difficult to tell, because now I have two stories going: the one on paper and the one in my head. The important thing is, they both have the same message and they both contain the same ideas.

In a bit, having dinner with the neighbors, and after that, possibly more writing. Sleeping at some point, too. :D

Anyway … nervous. :\ I want to live in a place more accessible to my work, and really, I just love Sunset Park. It’s mostly Latino and … it feels like home to me. My dad and I were talking about how much more comfortable we feel in a Latino community than a heavily white one (which is how it is where I live now, in Brooklyn). Maybe it’s because I grew up in Texas, or maybe it’s because people meet your eyes there and don’t look away guiltily, but rather smile or nod or at least acknowledge your presence, just as curious as myself. It’s where I was for the census, and I fell in love with it.

Other things I’ve been up to? Well, working a 45 hour week at a real-estate company lately. Oddly, for having longer hours, I’ve actually had MORE energy to draw outside of work than I did working at HarperCollins. People here are energetic and friendly and there’s a nice sort of family feeling to the place. HarperCollins was well … it’s a lot of creatives and a lot of use sort of keep to ourselves or develop little cliques that make it difficult for outsiders to intrude. I do miss all the books however … I have a stack of books now against my wall, that if stacked on top of each other, they’d reach my ceiling. My 12-foot high ceiling.

So every day now, at lunch, I go to the break room overlooking Grand Central Station, swing my legs from a stool perched along the wall of windows, and draw my little heart out. It’s never a lot … but it’s enough. Enough to know that I’m still going. Enough to know I’m setting pencil on paper every day and slowly .. but surely … making progress.

In the meantime, proof that I’m actually working and not just saying it. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to post art:

PS. I can’t believe I get up every day at 6:30 for work and go to bed at 1 after drawing for several hours when I get home, and yet I still feel happy and rested the next day. I must be getting old to be able to survive on only 5.5 hours of sleep every night … I’m turning into an old lady! Oh noes!!!! ;D

PPS. I love my job. My boss yells a lot (not at me) and it’s amazing.

PPSS. But I also miss my friends. I think once Matt & I move, life will be a bit less crazy and hectic, and I look forward to seeing my friends again! Maybe we’ll even have a little party once we get settled in a bit. <3 <3 <3 If we get the apartment we want, we’ll have roof access with a view of ALL of downtown Manhattan PLUS the Statue of Liberty PLUS the island next to it (Staton Island?) AND the park behind us. I WANT THIS APARTMENT. ;_; But I will accept if it’s not meant to be. ;_;

I’ve had a few people ask me lately why I keep going back and reworking pages. A common bit of wisdom for writers working on their first draft is to just GET IT DOWN. And wise indeed! The first draft of “Jane’s S.O.S.” was written in two months on lined notebook paper, filling journal after journal of my dutiful plotting. Hand-writing, I’ve found, makes it impossible for me to hit “delete” or to get stuck on a word or two that may eventually get thrown away.

However, I am no longer on the first draft of this book, nor the second. Last year, I finished what I thought was my most polished draft and put it in a drawer to sit and ponder. I’ve gotten in the habit of self-editing which many writers and artists claim is impossible, but I believe merely requires the weathering of time on my neurons. A year later, I dusted off that manuscript and read it through, beginning to end.

My decision after finishing that read-through was that the entire manuscript needed a rewrite. The basic structure and themes would remain, but the plot needed tightening. The characters also weren’t as compelling or dynamic as I believe they could be. My voice lacked the focus that the story needed. The samples I’d sent to friends all said that they enjoyed the writing itself (yeay!) but that it needed more punch (owch!). I agreed.

This later incarnation of this book is basically me folding over my old manuscript and writing it from memory. I do not reference or go back to the old one. As far as that’s concerned, it’s an outline, not a manuscript.

As I began to hack away at the new book, I realized that part of the problem with the old book is the science. My fantasy writing is heavily influenced by my love of physics. Even if I don’t sit and talk about Einstein’s models of Special and General Relativity (okay, maybe a TEENSY bit!), in order for the fantasy to work, the science has to work in my head first.

Reaching a major “reveal all” scene in my book–the pre-climax I guess you could call it–I found myself going into detailed explainations of the physics behind the fantasy. Five pages turned into ten, into twenty, into fifty. I could have written a novel on the science alone!

My internal dialog:

Okay, so I obviously need to cut this down. Fifty is a quarter of the book!

But! But! It needs to make sense to the reader! There are reveals about plot, story, character’s deaths and motivations, etc.

Wait a sec. You’re revealing it all at ONCE?

Well. Yeah. You know, she meets a major character and he knows EVERYTHING–

Hold up. Listen to yourself! You can’t just DUMP on your reader.

I can’t?

NO YOU CAN’T! You’ll blow their braincells! And worse? You’ll BORE THEM TO TEARS. I’m not sure which is worse.

Oh my god. I hate being bored. But the science is so NEAT. How could it be boring?

Print it out. Read it.

So, I printed it out. I read it. And the little devil of my editorial conscience was right.

And instead of whining, I went back and rewrote it. The science bits? They didn’t need to be thrown out entirely, but they could be revealed in stages in other ways and toned down. The character bits? The most interesting parts are revealed, but I left out one or two key pieces of information to be revealed later, because you know the other annoying thing about info dumping?

You lose your hook.

Explain too much to the reader, there is suddenly less mystery. The less mystery, the less your reader is going to wonder what’s going to happen next. The less they wonder what’s going to happen next, the more bored they become and wander off to do other things. Like clean their bathroom.

So fifty pages became twenty again, got revised and became twelve.

Sigh of relief, I finished the chapter, and now it’s one of the best bits (so I like to think) of the entire book. I was literally jumping up and down in my seat as they made their escape, shivering with fear as they got nearly caught, and crying when ____ ____ (major plot spoiler there).

At a certain point in this draft, I took on the mantra “as short as you can make it”. I’m ADD girl. I loathe books that drag out further than necessary. You don’t need a mountain of description to establish mood or setting. You give just enough to the reader to fill in the rest themselves and what comes out is a story that’s just as, if not more compelling than if you’d spent pages describing the color of their hair or the freckles in the shape of Kansas on their forehead (okay, that is kind of neat, but you get the point here).

Anyway, I think I want to get back to my book now. Listening to the Asylum Street Spankers (um… not quite work-safe) and Squirrel Nut Zippers. Wammo (singer in the tophat) reminds me of my ex. HA! Eerily similar facial expressions and singing voice. And that devil beard goatee thingy… LOL.h

However, I am managing to juggle it, at least. I may be tired now, but I actually left at 5 am and 6 am my first two days so I could work on “Jeannie Carmini” before work and worked on it again during my hour lunch. I find it impossible to do creative work afterwards because I go home and crash, but I’m tossing around the idea of taking up an offer to work in the same building as the Deep 6 studios. It’s on my way home from work, it should be only $150 a month, and I find it a heck of a lot easier to work when I’m tired when I’m out, than to get home tired and hear my comfy bed and laptop calling me.

So “Jeannie Carnini” is going slowly now, but at least it’s still going, and steadily. I think because I enjoy my job, I’m not watching the clock and therefore have the joy still left in my heart throughout the day.

And seriously? I LOVE MY JOB. This is just a three-week temp job, but if they don’t ask me back right away or hire me full time, I plan on going to Human Resources and asking if they have any positions available. I get to look at book sales figures all day (I know. Only *I* would find that amazing), the pay is AMAZING (considering the most I’ve ever been paid for a 9-5 job was $10/hr because Austinites are CHEAP), and IT’S IN PUBLISHING. If I were offered any other 9-5 type job in New York … this would be the place I’d first pick.

And of course, once I get my second paycheck, I’m immediately singing up for a letterpress class at The Center For Book Arts.

It’s almost $600 for the class, but … letterpress is a beautiful art form. I don’t know why more printers don’t switch to gravure plates (printing plates that have raised text/illustrations so they leave an impression on the paper), considering they’re so much cheaper to make now, and WAY easier. A little UV light and BOOM! Photopolymer plate! Which taken care of properly will last indefinitely.

Offset printing, however, uses lithographic plates, which uses a thin layer of oil to create the image, so that’s why they don’t leave indents in the paper, and I hate it. I also want to mix my own inks instead of being limited to stupid CMYK halftones for color reproductions. Mixing a color directly makes it vibrant and ALIVE. And “Jeannie Carmini” is going to be either two or three color anyway (I’m thinking brown, yellow, red/pink), so it’s not like there will be any screening involved.

I also want a foot-operated platen press. ;_; OMG. IT’S LOVE. I’ve been drawing designs throughout the day of how to make my own from more readily accessible materials.

But I digress. I like my job. And I’m actually feeling good about the book I’m working on. Life is good.

On another note, I was looking at my click-throughs, and found the response at bottom of this post entertaining to read: http://comicsworthreading.com/2010/01/12/lea-franco-makes-comic-about-slur/

I’m not a particularly PC person. I use words like “retarded” and “gay” and “queer”, but I’ve always used them in more of a … playful way? They’re words that have come to have colorful meanings with subtle differences dependent  upon inflection and situation. I mean, I’m queer. But I also use “queer” to mean “odd in a fun, quizzical” way. I say “retarded” to mean someone who is ignorant. And I use “gay” to mean “retardedly stupid”. Dan Savage of Savage Love (it’s a cynical, brilliantly funny sex advice column for the uninitiated, btw) had a whole rant about this word, and it’s a common thread throughout his podcasts of people who call him up offended that he’d “dare” use them and that somehow he’s single-handedly bringing down the whole of American Society by using them.

I’ve never used any of these words as a slur because well … I don’t use slurs because they’re disrespectful and ignorant. But I still use them with their alternate meanings. I’m not trying to insult anybody or show my superiority. Like I’d never call someone a “nigger” (I refuse to use an asterick for that word, btw, because it has too much power as it is, and being afraid to say something in demonstration is the same as showing highschoolers how to put on condoms by having a banana but no condom), and there’s no other double, subtle meaning to it, so there’s no reason for me to ever use it (except in rhetorical demonstration, of course).

Some words are purely racist/sexist/etc slurs. But some words have subtle double meanings, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to use that alternate meaning. It doesn’t make me ignorant. If anything, it makes me MORE literate because I understand the humor of the double meaning and know how to use it in ways that fit the context. It’s like dancing on a pile of knives: it can be safe and fun and exhilarating as long as you step the right way.

I also know people who use FAR worse words in funny, humorous ways that make even me cringe. But I let them have their way because oh my gosh, I’m smart enough to realize their intent is not of malice or ignorance, but of making a new word out of something old. It’s the intent and not the words themselves that hold power. Just watch one of Sarah Palin’s many speeches someday if you don’t believe me. They have some of the most foul-intent hate-speech of any politician I’ve ever heard. But she never says it directly. She never uses the WORDS. But her intent behind simple language that typically relay more gentle meanings, make her one of the most horrific people I know. Of course, that’s why she scares me. Because some people hear only the words, see them as sunshine and roses, and then don’t wonder later why they’re up on The Daily Show as Hatechild of the Week.

But that’s just my two-cents.

(edit) I should probably also mention that my mother’s step-sister has Down’s Syndrome and my mom makes “retarded” jokes ALL. THE. TIME.  Matt thinks people who have mentally handicapped kids or relatives get a pass for getting offended about the use of this particular word, but then why does my mom do it? She loves her sister. I’ve never heard her say anything with insulting or cruel intent about her. Perhaps, then, she just has a sense of humor? Because my mom is one of the nicest, most considerate people I know.

I have a few more samples from what I’ve been working on lately. Oh! And my children’s comic has a name now, too! “Jeannie Carnini! Clean Your Room!” Hee. I already know what I’m going to do with the cover, too, but that’ll have to wait until the interior is actually done as well. I’d say I’m about 3/5th’s there. Optimistically, I finish by the end of February. Realistically, by the end of March.

The character for the girl in this book, Jeannie Carnini, was a particularly tricky one. As you can see, these are some of my (many!) initial, horribly failed attempts (which actually starts on the right and works left):

You’d think I’d have learned by now that if I don’t like a face, I shouldn’t try to just erase and rework it. I really should just throw away the entire pose.

Usually, the problem isn’t where I initially think it is. I would erase and redraw the face, thinking, “WTF is UP? Nothing looks right!” I must have erased that stupid face about fourty times when I finally went to bed, woke up the next morning, looked at it once and realized in a flash of dumb inspiration that I needed to redraw the entire pose, and really the whole character. That wasn’t Jeannie Carnini on my page. That was some other girl dressed in her clothes.

So I drew another character, but I still wasn’t satisfied. Something just wasn’t sitting right, but I couldn’t pinpoint it.

Later that night,  I went over to my boyfriend’s because sometimes I need to work away from home, and we sat and discussed (he IS an artist), and I doodled, and thought about how Jeannie Carnini would REALLY stand, and finally I hit upon it:

First of all, the pose is better. She’s more awkward, less sure of herself, which is more her personality. I’m a pretty confident person about most things in life, and I tend to project that on to my main characters. But … kids are awkward creatures. Smart little snaps, but unsure in the way they walk and stand. I don’t know any kid that holds themselves with surety except for the bullies. And the brownnosers (which ah … I was one of those).  Or kids pretending to be mutant turtles on the playground. >_>; (I dug Raphael because he could swear and get away with it).

The other problem I kept running into with this character was that I kept whispering to myself, “simplify! simplify!” because it’s the style I’m running for, but it kept being either too much or too little (should have scanned in the overly simple ones. oops. too late now.) I would catch an expression on the first sketch, a few simple lines, and then I’d run in with a pointed lead and ruin it with detail. I needed to find that happy balance, and at last, by trying and trying and throwing away an awful lot of sketches but never giving up, and thinking about it and thinking about it some more, I finally got it. And slowly, as I get into the character, the easier she becomes to draw.  Not just in the face either, but in her body language as well.

It takes time to get to know your characters! I actually sit down and talk with them in my head. When I find myself struggling with their body language and expressions, I tell them, “Okay. What would YOU do in this situation? What kind of person are you? SHOW me.” And eventually they do.

Sometimes, it’s silly to admit, I play the actor, stand in front of a mirror and pretend to be my characters. And really, it’s the more subtle characters that are the most difficult. I struggle a lot with main characters because they need to be generic enough to appeal to anybody but also have a strong personality that is charming and engaging. Kind of a paradox, isn’t it? In this story, the easy character is the Frog Prince. He’s one aspect of a personality he doesn’t veer outside of. But Jeannie Carnini? Well. She’s an emotional, inquisitive, odd little girl, and sometimes she overreacts like the Frog Prince while other times she’s still and contemplative.

It takes knowing your characters to draw the expressions beneath the cartoon mask out, and truly reveal who they are.

And it’s made yet more difficult when you’re drawing in a new style! But hey, I think it’s worth it. It makes them real and breathes them to life.

The above are some of the pencils from the beginning of the book. I take an 8.5×11 sheet of 65 lb cardstock (I prefer a heavier paper because it doesn’t tear from all my erasing), fold it in half, and then I work on the right while I use the left space for reference drawings, thumbnails, and practice sketches. I’m having to think in a two-color space for this book, so there’s a LOT more planning that goes into it!  I’m particularly fond of some of my light studies in moodily lit woods. :)

Off to bed now! Tomorrow I have an interview with a temp agency. I plan on self-publishing this book, but that means I’ll be needing capital, and I don’t have good enough credit unfortunately to get a loan. Or heck, I get declined for high-interest credit cards. And I’ve never even owned one before! No credit is worse than bad credit, I guess? Anyway, ideally, I would like more web site and illustration work, but this agency is mostly office jobs. I do what I have to so I can continue pursuing my dream. :)