The Writing Continues

It seems a bit contradictory that for a writer, I’m not actually writing much. Blog-wise, anyway. Yeah, sure there are daily updates (Sometimes seriously post-dated to make up the lack) but otherwise, the entries are faily short, just little blips on the radar.

The reason for that, of course is the writing.

Aside from GameAxis which is now keeping me busy with a lot of articles on a monthly basis, there’s also all the other projects that are ongoing. The kid’s comic book is entering into round two; it’s actually 12 parts, 4 pages each, and I’ve done parts 1-4 already, with parts 5-8 coming up in August. I can now safely say that this is the first professional comic I’ve ever done if, by professional, you mean you were paid by a genuine mass circulation publication to write it. It ain’t DC, Marvel or Dark Horse, and it ain’t even in America, it’s for a local children’s magazine in Singapore called Kid’s Company, but hey, their checks don’t bounce.

Still there is a kind of warm, gooshy feeling (However small and unwarranted it is) to actually see the Wife draw the pictures and then see them colored, and then see them printed out and think, “Hey, we made a comic!” It’s doubly cool that this something we can work on together, even if neither one of us is particularly over the moon about it; I mean, it’s not like this kid’s comic is our Great Work, but we’re getting paid for it, and it’s a good learning experience. At the very least, we learned that we can work together and still sleep in the same bed and eat meals with each other rather than screaming about the insensitivity we show to the other person’s art.

The other thing is the pilot for the animated series, which should be wrapped up before the end of the week. I’m still curious to see how this one will go since it’s a relatively new thing, and to be honest, I have very real doubts about whether it will fly, but I’ve written something that I can admit to and think “Yeah, that’s not bad, I like it.” Whether it will actually stay in that form is another question all together.

It’s not like the previous animated script I wrote, which was for a “short subject” style animated program called Nano-Boy. That program was actually two 12-14 minute segments shown together, so the episodes moved EXTREMELY fast. This time around I get the full 22 minutes to play with, meaning I can actually set up 3 act narratives, though I still find myself wishing I just had zero limitations the way I do with novels. Still, I can’t talk too much about this one at all, since it’s all hush, hush and may very well come to nothing in the end, but I will give this utterly meaningless hint; Arabic Noir.

And then there’s the Great Work, which is Nowhere. I can’t talk about this one too much either, not plot-wise, but I will say that this is pretty cool to work on. The idea actually belongs to the Wife, she’s been nursing the basic seed of Nowhere for years, since she was teenager, and even went so far as to draw the first issue and disribute it to local comic stores when she was younger. Since then it’s sort of been sitting in some obscure shelf in her mental bric-a-brac space, collecting dust as careers, complications, relationships that didn’t work and relationships that finally did, came into her life. Nowhere was actually one of those things that kind of helped us to bond together early on, because it was thing that was incredibly dear to her, and when she talked to me about it, I talked back to her about it and she liked the ideas that were bouncing back at her. It was that point that she sort of decided that not only did we have some common ground, but I had ideas that she could respect and the pragmatic part of her brain kicked in and hinted, “It’s lot easier to write a comic book when you own the writer,” and that was that.

Over the last 3-4 years, we’ve talked about Nowhere in fits and starts, and very early on in the relationship we even did a test run with a short 7-8 pager. It was here that I learned a few things about comics and how I write them. 1) I write WAAAAAY too much dialoge for one panel and 2) I try to squeeze WAAAAAAAAAY too many panels into one page. This, I thought, was exactly what Neil-O did until I went back and looked at the kindly ones and saw that lo and behold, he was going with 5-6 panels per page, not 14 with paragraphs and paragraphs of dialog. The reason I did this, I suspect, was because I was convinced that the Wife had a TARDIS like pocket dimension generator that she could use on every page of comic she drew and when it was revealed to me that I would have to make do with old fashioned Newtonian physics, not a quantum particle or super-string to be had anywhere, I grumbled and learned how to not make characters have rapid-fire, witty, snappy, Kevin Smith-esque, cracking wise exchanges that were somehow expected to convey the first quarter of War & Peace in one panel.

But this one is really cool to me because it’s a REAL comic. As in, it’s one that I’m making myself, not entirely out of whole cloth, since the back bone of it is still the Wife’s genesis, but she insists this is ours and not hers, and so I’ve been happily making characters, adding new plots, and throwing in liberal amounts of 80′s aesthetic so that girls have massive, massive hair.

This is the project that, almost involuntarily, the Wife finds herself spending a lot of time on. I can’t blame her; this is like a decade’s worth of “I have a story to tell” welling up inside her. And I find it extremely cool to see the rough boards, and then to see the first pencils and then see the finished product with word balloons and everything. Here, everyone is talking the way I want them to talk and doing the things I want them to do with no restrictions about “Make sure it’s politically correct and pleasing to children.” And I have no idea how long this is going to take, or even what we’re going to do once the first part is done.

Oh well, guess we’ll worry about that later. Worst comes to worst, there’s always independent publishing. Hell, if Dave Sim can do it…