Brotherhood of the
BLACK FLAG

Weeks of production: 93

43/61 characters created — 70% complete
18/40 constructions modeled — 45% complete
42/217 pages — 19% complete

32% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

Weeks of production: 92

43/61 characters created — 70% complete
18/40 constructions modeled — 45% complete
41/217 pages — 19% complete

32% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

Weeks of production: 92

43/61 characters created — 70% complete
18/40 constructions modeled — 45% complete
40/217 pages — 18% complete

32% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

Weeks of production: 92

43/61 characters created — 70% complete
18/40 constructions modeled — 45% complete
39/217 pages — 18% complete

31% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

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.

I spent most of today watching other people clean my house for me (which shouldn’t be tiring, but somehow is) and when that wasn’t happening I was fixated on the music I’ve done for Black Flag. Not working on it, just listening to it over and over, especially Waltz in a Whirl. Wallowing in in my past accomplishments is very typical of me when I want to be progressing on a project and don’t have enough oomph. 🙁

(Scent of Spring, however, is moving along at the same pace as usual. That’s the one that I traditionally take along with me to kids’ music lessons and doctor appointments to work on while I wait.) ::rueful grin::

To add to my frustration I seem to have invented yet another Black Flag story, and in the main sequence, too. ::Wah!:: When I haven’t been working on that, I’ve been doing In My Head Theater runs of Black Flag 3, during which I came up with a reason for Turner to be explaining the Brotherhood’s Articles as part of his court case to get Black Flag acknowledged as a nation, which was one of the scenes in my head, but it seemed a bit absurd: why would the ins and outs of Black Flag Law have much of an effect as its status as a country? The question should be quite simply, “Does it have laws?” And the answer is “Yes”, and the Articles are presented as evidence of same…
…and then the question is raised “How can we know that these are the actual laws that these people are actually using, and not just some recently created document that claims to be their laws?” (A question that goes along very nicely with “How can we know that these people control any territory that is not under the jurisdiction any other country, if they won’t tell us where that territory is?” — which I haven’t figured out an answer for yet, by the way.)

Anyway, my current theory is that they decide to let the lawyers go through all the evidence of Black Flag activities that they can find, and whenever they encounter something that looks like it’s contrary to the Articles, they pull Turner into court, and he has to explain the discrepancy. If he can explain away an adequate percentage of whatever is found in the next x amount of time, the Articles are accepted as genuine, and if he can’t his case is tossed out of court. Which not only gives me an excuse for him to explain why Bonnie Anne killing that idiot back in Book 1 was not murder (according to the Articles), but my back brain has actually invented a new, nicely visual scene where the lawyers realize that the Articles do not list theft as a crime, and decide to pretend to rob Turner, so that his own reaction can be used as evidence that the Articles are fake. (I’m not sure how plausible it would be to have a court willing to enact such a demonstration, and I’m not sure I care — having my dashing young pirate mugged by a bunch of stuffy lawyers just tickles me too much.) >:)

Weeks of production: 83

43/61 characters created — 70% complete
17/40 constructions modeled — 43% complete
38/217 pages — 18% complete

31% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

Weeks of production: 83

43/61 characters created — 70% complete
17/40 constructions modeled — 43% complete
37/217 pages — 17% complete

30% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

Weeks of production: 82

42/61 characters created — 69% complete
17/40 constructions modeled — 43% complete
36/217 pages — 17% complete

30% done
Estimated completion date: 2013

I am still brain-dead and sleepy from Marcon. Going for a walk on Saturday with the family didn’t help that at all, but there’s no point in having a family if you never do things with them.

The In-My-Head Theatre has mostly been running Black Flag. It added a brawl scene to Blood Price, which doesn’t seem to move the story along at all, so at the moment is not slated to go into the final product. But there are some fun character and background aspects to it, so I’m keeping my eyes open for a way to make it plot contributing as well. It’s also been doing Blood at Bonnie Anne’s 18th birthday ball, which at the moment is a partial page mini-flashback. And for pacing reasons it needs to remain a partial page mini-flashback, no matter how much fun stuff my backbrain comes up for it.
Ah well, at least I’m not bored.

On rasfc the subject of poetry-ish stuff in books has come up, and umpteen zillion people (it feels like) have stated that they don’t like it, and they always skip it, and it usually stinks. Just what someone who has written a book in which it is a rare chapter that doesn’t have song lyrics inserted into it wants to hear. ::sigh::