I have just finished writing down a preliminary script for Black Flag 2: Blood Price. It’s 10696 words long, and took me three days.
I say ‘preliminary’ script because it doesn’t have any page or panel information, making it not really a comic script at all. But I’m not all that good at figuring out that stuff in my head. I’ve been working that all out in pencil during the storyboard stage — after which I can always make a more typical looking comic script if I feel like it. For Scent of Spring, all I ever had was a handwritten preliminary script, and although I typed up a nice proper comic script for Black Flag 1, when I did revisions I did them as storyboards and they never got transfered back to the script.
Blood Price has been in my head for so long, and I’ve visited it so frequently, that I ended up with more conversational material than actually fit. And then I found myself making up even more on the fly… some of which also needed to get snipped. (More than I actually got around to snipping, probably — I’ll find out when I storyboard it. I love dialog. I could let my characters natter on for hours. But when those words end up in horrible nasty dialog bubbles that cover up my artwork, suddenly I become a lot more ruthless about sticking to essentials.)
I’m not sure why I decided to get Blood Price written down, BTW. Suddenly it felt like something I needed to do. Very strange.