Verdaia

It’s the story I was calling “Mark of the Beast” but my husband said that was a terrible title because it would make people think “apocalypse” and “satanism”, and my story isn’t about either of those things. It’s an alternate history fantasy with action and romance and magic and musketeers and an uber-powerful main character who looks like Annubis.

(And my husband said, “So why does he like this girl, anyway?” and I explain that he doesn’t get along with people because almost everyone is afraid of him, and he can smell that, and has really bad associations with the smell of fear. But she isn’t afraid of him, and that is what first intrigues him– and my husband interupts to say “So he likes her because she smells nice?” AAAUUGGGH! I’m writing a story with a super-powered guy who likes a girl because she smells nice. Someone shoot me now!)

Anyway, I’ve sort of switched the working title to “Compelled”, but I didn’t tell my database that, so it isn’t showing up in my wordcounts. (I haven’t been recording the wordcounts for it regularly anyway.) But I’ve been writing it very quickly (for me, anyway) and I’ve done nearly 20K words in about two weeks. Just at the moment, however, I’m stuck trying to figure out the next scene, (my internal pace-setter is insisting that it needs another action scene NOW!) so today I set it aside to work on Scent of Spring.

I thought I was done with story revisions for Scent of Spring, and I was just putting a current draft version together before starting in or art tweaks, but it seems that some of my revisions are… well, lets just say that their seams are showing. I didn’t notice while working on it in pieces, but now that I’m trying to put everything together I can tell that some of the joins don’t fit together quite right. One of those I just can’t smooth over without new art, but I’ve got this second one that I think I might be able to get away with the existing art, if I can just come up with the right words to go with it. Only I haven’t yet.

So, now I’m stuck on that too.

Hopefully I’ll be unstuck on one or the other by tomorrow.

I have finished the storyboards for Black Flag 2: Blood Price.

Blood Price came in at 232 pages, but that’s not counting chapter title pages, which would put it up to about 250. That’s a chunk longer than Black Flag 1, at 222 pages, but I’m expecting Black Flag 1 to grow a bit more, as I finish the last third of the pages (hopefully sometime this year), and then head into revisions.

I still need to finish deciding where the chapter divisions go, name my chapters, and scan everything. I’m very, very tempted to recycle the chapter titles from 1. My husband warned that I might end up finding myself in a bind that way, feeling locked into the same chapter titles for all the Black Flag stories, but I don’t think so. The script to Black Flag 3: Dominion, is twice as long as the one for Blood Price, and the first two books are more strongly tied together than the second and the third.

Anyway, I’m now back to Scent of Spring for my pencil and paper project, and will once again be hauling my pretty art around, instead of a lot of horrible scribbles. That will be nice. I loooooove Blood Price, but confess to feeling a bit abashed when people got curious as to what I was doing. I can draw better than that, really — just when storyboarding something I will be doing in 3D there’s no point. Worrying about getting it to look right just slows me down. It took me a LOT longer than a month and a half to do the Scent of Spring storyboards, and that was for a much shorter story.

Since nobody actually reads these postings at my home blog, which has progress bars in the sidebar, I assume nobody noticed when, a month ago, the progress bar for Scent of Spring hit 100%. That doesn’t mean I’m done, but it does mean I’ve got a complete set of pencils (I’ve got all the lines drawn) that I would really, really like some feedback on before I start coloring everything.

The reason it took me a month to make this announcement, is that I was doing website alterations that I hoped would make beta-reading Scent of Spring a little easier. So not only does Scent of Spring now have a working website, the site also keeps track of if you are logged in or not, and will only show you the penciled pages if I’ve told it you are one of my beta readers. There is also a page tagging system that will allow you to easily find your place if you have to stop in the middle, and there are comment boxes located directly below each page, so that people can comment as they read.

Keeping in mind that I don’t pretend to be a professional artist, and that I’m very new to this whole Sequential Art storytelling gig, would anyone be willing to look over and comment on a 140 page mannerly romance (sort of Jane Austin-ish, but not set in England) webcomic?

Here’s a bit of sample art:

Not much to say. There’s a flu going round the house. Lissa got it, but her fever never got quite high enough that we had to run her to the emergency room. I got it — but I almost made my wordage for the week anyway. Boyd’s having it over the weekend and probably won’t miss any work. The timing isn’t quite so good for my college student, though, who has it right now, and likely won’t be recovered to make his Monday (heaviest day of his week) classes.

I finished page 120/140 of the Scent of Spring pencils. I’m so close to being done this stage. It’s very exciting, but also a bit frustrating, because the drawing doesn’t get any easier as I near the end, the way the writing always seems to — so this final bit feels like it’s going sooooo sloooooow, when it’s actually progressing at a perfectly normal pace.

And, In My Head Theatre has been running a scene from somewhere near the very end of Song of Asolde, ie, book five or six, when I’ve not even started working on book three yet. :sigh:

I showed/read Scent of Spring to my mother last night, and she loved it.  Which was very heartening.  Nobody in my household really cares for it that much — they laugh at the characters’ quips, but the story itself doesn’t interest them.  And it’s not as plotty a sort of story as I usually do, so I have worried, on occasion, if it might be a little broken.  But the story is quite insistent that it already has all the plot its ever  going to have, so it’s very nice to know there is at least one person out there for whom it works exactly as it is.

I know one’s mother isn’t supposed to count as feedback because they alway love everything you do, or at least say as much, but she was crying — both in the sad way, in the middle, and in the “oh that’s so beautiful” way, at the end.   Also, come to think of it, at Harchung’s ‘all this I loved’ speech, which is just lovely — and I say so even though I wrote it myself.   Not very many of my heroes will let me write romantic speeches for them.  (Although Mijahd, in the novella I just wrote, does recite some poetry, which was very fun for me — I haven’t had a chance to do that sort of thing since Cantata.)

I just finished drawing page 100 of Scent of Spring. Go me!

Scent of Spring storyboards are complete.
138 pages.

I did all the storyboard pages for my last page of script today…

…8 of them.

It was a 60 page script, so I had been getting around two pages of storyboards for each page of script. But, well, the big finale, you know?

It seemed to need the extra pages.

And of course I couldn’t stop. Not in the middle of the last page of script!

I don’t usually Do New Year’s resolutions, because I’m very goal oriented generally and am already working on a number of goals… why add more just because the year has rolled over? But at the beginning of this month I made three ‘get it done before the New Year’ type resolutions. This was my second one. I’ve got one more to go.

I have 116 pages worth storyboards for Scent of Spring now, and have reached page 53 of 60 in my script. My calculator says that's 88%, which would make the total length estimate 131 pages. Fifteen more pages to go. My estimated start of 'actual writing' date was today, which I'm obviously going to miss, but I might not be more than a month behind. That's not bad considering this is a third or fourth string project.

Dicing With Flames continues to remain on hold while I do revisions on Eyes of Infistar.

When I'm doing revisions I have a much harder time sticking to a do-so-much-and-no-more type schedule than when I'm writing, so I have a tendency to do a whole lot one day, wear myself out, and spend the next day doing nothing much at all. I'm probably doing just as much actual “work” as I do normally, but the stop and go format is a lot more frustrating. Today I'm on stop, so I need to find something I can do while brain-dead. Blah.

What I did yesterday while brain-dead, was read aloud the first three volumes of Girl Genius, while my kids followed along over my shoulder. I'm pretty good at reading aloud (even if I do say so myself) and it's great material to work with. As I've already read through what's available on my own at least three times already, I only ended up laughing when I was supposed to be delivering lines once or twice. It's a bit awkward working off a web-page, though. Sometimes I don't scroll down far enough, and I miss a speech bubble or two down at the bottom of the page.

I was reading Romancing the Blog (because I can't find the oompha to do anything) and happened on this discussion of romantic hero archetypes listed as being: Chief, Bad Boy, Best Friend, Lost Soul, Charmer, Professor, Swashbuckler and Warrior.

And I found myself thinking: “Is Silver a Lost Soul? I hope not, because Heathcliff is the listed example, and I couldn't stand Heathcliff. And yet, Silver is a Lost Soul. Phooey! And Blood is a Bad Boy, another archtype I despise. Grumble. That isn't all they are, though… they are both Chiefs. And, both Professors…”

Bad Boy Professor. Lost Soul Chief.
Bwahahaha!
Okay, realizing that you have put together some unusual combinations is sort of fun…

…but mostly I don't get the attraction of classifying one's heroes this way. If, say, Darcy from _Pride and Prejudice_ is a Chief and my Ikhsior from Cantata is a Chief, where does that get me? Trying to equate the two in my head just makes me go :glurk!: Other than that they both have a commanding presence (as they would say at the Coral Palace) what have they got in common, and why should I care? (Actually, I think Silver has a lot more in common with Darcy, although I would not classify Darcy as a Lost Soul.)

But, for the record, as close as I can figure, my hero's archetypes
Ikhsior: Chief (That seems so inadequate, but what else fits?)
Asond: Chief (Those two are the *same* archetype? Pardon me while I glurk again.) Professor
Algernon: Swashbuckler
Kide: Charmer
Silver: Lost Soul, Chief, Professor
Blood: Bad Boy, Professor, Chief
Talon: Charmer, Chief, Swashbuckler
Turner: Swashbuckler, er… Turner's reflexes are so fast and deadly that he tends to kill people without really meaning to. Does that make him a Warrior, a Bad Boy, or a Lost Soul?
Harchung: Chief
Cabal: Lost Soul, Professor, Warrior

I'm a bit short on Best Friends. Maybe because I married one?

I think the overabundance of Chiefs is not a romantic issue but something else entirely. It goes back to the question “Why are the main characters in fantasies almost always royalty?” If I take that one on it probably ought to be a different post.

I counted how many pages I had sketched out for Scent of Spring yesterday, and I was working on page 87. I thought there was only going to be around eighty pages in the silly thing. (Not a very good guesser, am I?) I don't think I can be that much past two thirds through the story… so much for “less than a half as long as Black Flag”.

Although Black Flag just got longer too. I posted the sketches for Flag in Flames online (http://www.lshelby.com/BlackFlag/FlagDraft/0-0.php login:guest, password: crit) in the theory that someone might be willing to look them over and make nasty comments, and if I was going to do that, I needed to make those revisions I had planned. As usual I had kind of rushed the ending, and so I ended up adding an entire new chapter. I think that puts my total pages figure up to 218.

Slightly more cheerfully, I should have no trouble finishing off my weeks' writing quota today. Yay! Progress, makes me happy. That'll put me at about 15 000 words.

(Why am I not posting word counts of this story? Well, for one thing, I have a wordcount page on my website now — http://www.lshelby.com/wordcount.php — and secondly, I'm still not sure what the title is yet. The wordcount page on my website is created dynamically from a database, where I change the name of the story once, and every word count entry for that story is updated. Here on lj that wouldn't happen. Although one disadvantage to the database thingy -> on my own computer the wordcounts on the site are automatically updated, but the copy of my website on the webserver has to wait on me getting around to doing the database datasync routine before it's up to date.)

I'm glad that the writing going well, because UV mapping my space armor is proving problematical. Apparently my 3Dmodelling program does great maps if you do them *before* splitting your object up into different pieces so that it can be made to move with the character. Afterward… no love. Each body part ends up mapped individually. Arg! I need to dig out my older not so cool mapping utility and see what it can do.