Resurrection

With yet another false dawn gracing the sky it is time to dust off this here blog and attempt to return to a reasonable schedule. After some deliberation it has become clear that what I do isn't enough to solely warrant a blog for that purpose, so from now on I will be salting it with information I hope you will find interesting.

Starting with some good news, I have in my possession final pages from my WORK anthology stories that I posted pencils and some inks for at the turn of the year (eight months ago - damn). They turned out really well, as you will hopefully see at the bottom of the post, and as my first short stories to be accepted and make it to completion, this makes me happy.

Sadly however there is some bad news. The WORK anthology has yet to be picked up by a publisher. Although this isn't surprising given the economic climate and any number of other factors we could moan about, it is unfortunate that the excellent work of the creators doesn't seem like it will get the exposure it deserves. Though life doesn't have much to do with deserve does it? Fortunately there are other avenues to pursue and I know that the editors have already begun the process. Fingers crossed and if nothing comes of it I will be posting the two stories for free download on this blog, until then here are the final page 1's for both stories.

Only a Miner Killed Page 01
Art by Chris Fenoglio


















Maggie's Farm Page 01
Co-written with Tim Twelves
Art by Mike Hall

All fall down

Aside from the not-exactly-inconsequential matter of two months of no posting, the train seems to have been, if not derailed, then certainly shunted off the main track. My search for an artist for Heartless has thus far proved fruitless (ha!) and the experience has taught me much about the process, stuff that only getting-beat-down-regularly is willing to teach. He is a harsh taskmaster.

As a result I have siphoned my creative energies off in two different directions, namely two new stories called, for the moment, Broken Hearted and Signal. With Heartless as a guide I've made good progress on both, having almost fully broken down Signal to the point where I can write script pages. Broken Hearted is a little more in the can-I-do-this and if-so-how phase, trying to work through story and world problems that have resulted mostly from the setting.

What I have noticed is that most of the story ideas I want to develop incline toward science fiction, Warren Ellis aside there doesn't seem to be a great inclination within comics to write interesting science fiction and part of me would like to see that change. Another part of me would rather it stayed that way so I can corner the market but seeing as I can't-even-find-an-artist at present, perhaps I'm being a little optimistic. Or, you know, wildly, idiotically optimistic.

Apologies for the hyphen madness, it was intentional.

Under the Radar

An update! After two weeks of escape and evasion I have returned with news. Heartless is currently picking up some solid momentum, though it's taken longer than I hoped (doesn't everything) I have winnowed the beast down to a four issue mini-series as the final story in a larger world. To continue the arse-backwards theme I have managed to write a first draft of #2, don't get me started, as well as all the scene breakdowns for the other three issues. The bible has been updated and I should be posting some more snippets, he says crossing his toes and rubbing the lucky rifle badge, in the not-to-distant future. It will also signal open season on unsuspecting artists who want to draw city samurai and psychodelic dream worlds. The point of no return beckons.

Writing ain't (:)) easy

If it is easy then I'd be concerned. I struggle to write, everyday is about wondering whether I’ll make the connections in a story and be able to write about it. No doubt I’m not alone in this. Everyone’s been in a place where you just stare at the screen for an age without managing to add anything of value. I know there are all kinds of theories for getting on; leaving the piece at a point where you’ve got more to write, doing a prescribed amount of work then stopping no matter what, finishing in the middle of a sentence you can pick up next time you sit down to write etc. The problem for me is if I’m on a roll, writing for all I’m worth, then I don’t want to stop. It seems like the easy option to say ‘Done my bit for the day’ when it’s evident to myself, if no-one else, the words are ready, willing and able to continue. But by the same token, writing until you’re flush out of ideas/inspiration, leaving yourself a flickering screen full of frustration next visit, isn’t exactly ideal either. Hence the dilemma.

Personally I’m beginning to find that sitting down to write only becomes unbearably difficult when I don’t have a plan. Writing the script isn’t easy, but it’s the easiest part of the process because by that stage the story is fully planned out, broken down into manageable chunks and all the dots have been joined. Getting to that stage is where all the effort and frustration come in; teasing threads of story out of the loosest connections, melding characters based on a feeling, throwing away bits you like that don't work, this is the skill of a writer and it ain't easy.

Diamond's not a creator's best friend

In case you haven’t heard already the comic mountain’s gotten a little steeper in the last week to ten days. Diamond Comics Distributor Inc., the distributor for pretty much all of North America’s comic books and other associated merchandise is raising its minimums. Instead of the current standard whereby every item would be expected to earn the distributor $1500 before it would be offered through the direct market, Diamond has raised the standard to $2500. This equates to a significant two-thirds increase. People smarter than myself have crunched the numbers and pointed to the fact this now means for an item to justify its listing in Diamond's Previews catalogue, from which retailers order the vast majority of their stock, that item would now have to make $6250 retail. In other words OUCH!

Realistically I haven’t made a published comic yet, but while this is still down the list of issues to worry about in terms of progression, it is by far the biggest. I can honestly say it worries me no end. I’m still going to make comics and this will unquestionably make me raise my game because the stakes have gone up. It also mean though, there is no room for error and you may need lady luck on your side a bit more too. When even popular, award-winning creators and products step away from the industry due to this turn of events, it says loud and clear that there is absolutely no learning period for new creators. Got a quirky little gem hoping to find a niche? Good luck with that. With a lot more on the line every time a project is conceived I think a major concern for the industry has to be that the type of title on offer doesn’t narrow to spandex and superhero derivatives. There’s far too many of them about as it is and the loss of range in the indie and alternative comics sections would be a real disaster for creativity. Or, if you like, the potential for creativity with people thinking in a narrower mindset.

Tom Spurgeon’s article at the Comics Reporter here explains why this situation is bad far better than I can. I guess all eyes will be on the DM for the foreseeable future, to understand what exactly the changes mean and how it will affect the industry.

Breaking it down

I was lucky enough to get a look at another writer’s, Chad Michael Ward, project bible a few weeks ago. I have started one for Heartless, as you may have seen below, but as with all things writing his and mine were quite different. What I found most interesting were his scene breakdowns. Working as I had been in beats within a single issue (or the equivalent of page wise), I was used to smaller units of story at that stage. Seeing five or six large blocks of story with specific beats inside, as the scene breakdowns were, made a whole lot more sense. Although technically it is adding another stage to the process, what it does do is allow a smoother breakdown from a single paragraph for that block of story, to several segments that make it easier to script.

Luckily this came before I’d fully understood and broken down Heartless’ storyline, so that issues 2-4 and possibly 5 if there is one, are going to be easier to work out. Looking at how it works now, it seems like an obvious step, which makes me wonder what else I’m missing on the road to a final draft. Obviously learning is part of the process and in some cases can only be achieved by doing, but I am concerned that I may not have enough of the theory and basics in my head to think I can write a decent script at this moment. That’s not going to stop me trying but [note to self] I’m going to try and spend an equal amount of time reading up on writing.

So if anyone does have suggestions on good books/articles/resources, please let me know.

Back with a Bitch

My best intentions were defeated by a series of shitty events called Life. It tends to get in the way of planning occasionally and last month it chose to obstruct me no end. So rather than write I ended up doing critiques of other creator’s writing they'd sent me, something that ended up being both enoyable and valuable. The crazy thing about looking at someone else’s work is how clear everything seems to be up to a certain level. Why a medium shot here when a wide shot gives much more scope to the artist, do you need a caption there? etc Removed from the involvement of creation, analysis seems comparatively easy. I guess that's why there are so many critics :)

I’ve found it quite enlightning, both in gaining knowledge of how to tell my stories and understanding how narrow-sighted the initial creation process is. Given my own scripts to analyse in the same way I would fail miserably because I have not yet become as discerning and dispassionately cutthroat about my own work as I can be about others. Inevitably you’re attached to your work while it’s being formed, or I imagine you should be, so one of the hardest things to do is judge it’s worth commensurate with your present ability. Harder still is that I like my stories and the frustration that I’m not able to just sit down and put the whole piece to bed in one sitting, kills me sometimes.

Partly, I think my attention span has just dwindled badly since university, my own fault no doubt, and also I haven’t found a means that I’m happy with of turning story idea into script quickly enough to not get distracted or frustrated. Despite my lengthy process post earlier, it’s not proving as fertile and conducive as I’d like. But I have recently found out a few things that helped in altering ‘my way’ and I’ll detail these later in the week. [/End Bitch … hopefully]

Back Soon

Blog Under Reconstruction - Back Soon

Just doing a bit of fiddling under the hood. I wanted to see if I could maintain a blog and I'm kinda happy I can, so now I want to pimp it out.

Heartless the Workblog part 4

Another workblog update, the last five days have been slow going apart from a gradually building Heartless momentum that will hopefully mean something more interesting to post soon. Until something shiny appears this is a brief catch-up on some of the issues I'm having.

Problems:

Threw out the high concept until I can say something that immediately grabs you, citing influences is all well and good but if very few people have heard of them it defeats the object completely.

The dream plane name and idea is too bland, I’m thinking of renaming it the One Dream as a start. All names of characters are made up because I liked the sounds, not exactly the scientific method I know, I haven’t yet looked into what they mean and whether I’ve called a character dog poo through my lack of research. Googling as I type.

Most of all though the sword is giving me issues because I can’t fit it into what I need it to be … yet. It may take a little grease and simply ignoring a certain problem with how it works, though I’m hoping not. I’m also struggling a little with the whole heart thing, I wonder where Mari puts it while he is out hunting. They must have found some method of sustaining it during the night.

Have also discovered my fight-scene-fu is weak and am spending too long breaking them down. May avoid one in particular for now, I know how it starts and ends so I can fill in the details once the rest is locked down ... I hope.

On a separate thought trail I started a bible for Heartless today to keep track of a lot of detail, which may only be seen in passing in the actual comic but I hope will add a level of depth to the story. I'm also worryingly discarding a lot of ideas I like, they don't fit the story and I know that, having tried to force them in, but I'm hoping they'll find a home in other Tales of the Two Planes stories.

The Writing Habit

Whilst browsing the nethernet today I was introduced by Bryan Richmond to an article in Locus Magazine on Cory Doctorow's techniques for managing/avoiding distraction whilst writing in the web age, full article here.

To borrow Brandon Seifert's summary of the article, Doctorow's techniques look like this:

1. Make a short, regular work schedule. He shoots for one page, 20 minutes of writing a day, seven days a week. When he does a page a day for a year. he's written more than a full novel. And he can always find 20 minutes.
2. Don't go over your goal. Even if you want to. Because if you force yourself not to, then the next day you'll be dying to pick it up again (I've received this advice before).
3. Don't stop writing to research something. Throw in a "TK" ("to come") in its place and leave it for later
4. Don't try to control your writing environment. Just write.
5. Don't use a word-processor. Use a text editor. It's less distracting.
6. Don't use real-time communication tools while you write. They just distract you.

They are for the most part common sense, but things you likely don't do. Personally I'm going to try and adapt the parts that would be advantageous to me, particularly the page a day idea - my writing production is all over the place at present. However, some of the advice I'd struggle with because no matter how ingrained it became, letting a juicy idea wait until the nexy day or not writing a passage that's perfectly clear in my head would be next to impossible for me. I'd HAVE to write it down. On the flip side, perhaps that's a part of my problem.

Heartless the Workblog part 3

Last one for the moment - Cast and Problems coming soon.

Set Up:
This is the legacy of the Dreamer, Torikami, his story will be one of the Tales of the Two Planes, the rough title I came up with as a way of getting around those damn search engines and as a framework for a few different semi-related pieces that sprang from what I’ve discarded so far from this.

Torikami is the original dreamer, the entire dream world exists within his dream thus making him undisputed lord. However, so big has the dream plane become that the original dream can no longer support it. It now requires a constant source of fresh dreams to continue to exist. Dreams quickly diminish when taken from the human dreamers so the dream plane is constantly eating itself, eternally needing new dreams to maintain and renew itself. Expansion of the dream plane is now nothing more than wishful thinking.

Until the coming of Orash, the denizens of the dream plane collected the dreams themselves from sleeping humans, though it pained them to do so, making it a haphazard, piecemeal affair. Orash initially added order and stability to the dream collection, creating Collectors that could exist in both planes. But the Dreamer feared the power such a position granted and recruited a group of humans, through their dreams, to be the Balance. They are gifted with the ability to see and interact with the dream plane, a trait passed down to their offspring to continue the role. Working in tandem with the Collectors, the humans maintained the balance between planes, when you ‘slept without dreams,’ it is because they were taken to renew the dream plane. Should the volume of dreams entering the dream plane become too great, sections of it would solidify and merge with reality. In response to the Balance, Orash recruited his own human agents, including the Dream Weavers and the Shield.

Be under no illusion though, the Dreamer cares nothing for Reality beyond continuing to renew the Dream plane. As long as Orash constantly supplies the required volume of dreams, then his methods do not interest the Dreamer, unless they should come to threaten the Dream Plane. Orash understands this and over the millennia has been, slowly at first, collecting more dreams than required and storing them in his fortress (formerly just a place to collect the dreams) next to the bridge to Reality, in order to achieve the eventual merging of the city with his fiefdom. This would give him and his people what he feels is their ‘right’, direct access to the dreams.

Opposing him stands Tajitsu the last living member of the Balance and wielder of the Dragon’s Dream. The Dragon’s Dream is a fabled dream blade that no human can hold. The sword exists in both planes and thus allows the dream being who wields it to walk in both, granting the finality of the real world in the dream plane and the abilities of the dream plane in the real world. In order to control and use the blade Tajitsu has to be literally ‘heartless’. However the sword comes with a price, not only must his heart be removed daily (it’s fucking painful every time, thick scar tissue on his chest, over the heart – taking it out with Mari becomes ritualised) but the blade is slowly draining his humanity, whilst constantly standing between the two planes is robbing him of his sanity.

I love Greek mythology and as per many of those stories, this one does not end well. In essence it’s the story of a hero on the verge of a breakdown, whose life is irrevocably shattered and who falls into darkness.

Heartless the Workblog part 2

Inspiration:

Whilst working on another piece called Broken Hearted there was a thread on here about titles and how they work, or don’t, with the Amazon search engine. Given Broken Hearted as a title is likely to drown me in more Mills & Boon than anyone can rightfully expect to survive in a dozen lifetimes, I started playing with alternatives. The piss poor, and likely worse, Heartless immediately came to mind but was quickly discarded for obvious reasons. It did flip one of those random switches in my head though and two images popped out. The first was a samurai style warrior who had to remove his heart, which he gave to his love, in order to do what needed to be done. The second image was the first page of the first issue, no clue how they fitted together or even if it would work but you know, fuck it, it looked good in my head. So I wrote the first page and a bit down, using placeholder panel descriptions and it came out looking like this (the demons became the Collectors later):

___________________________________________________
Heartless #1 D1

Page 1
All page width panels

1
Establishing shot. Over head view of a night scene in a large oriental city (think Tokyo) with neon lights and sky scrapers. There’s something wrong with the picture though, black smudges (our demons) – like speed blurs – are visible across rooftops, looking in windows etc

[no dialogue]

2
Closer in on some of the lower rooftops and residential buildings, we see a large, shadowy demon with red eyes as it’s halfway through a section of wall close to the roof of a flat-topped building with fire escape. It’s stopped as the left side of its ‘body’ is already through the wall, looking straight back at us. [describe building in detail!]

[no dialogue]


3
Same shot but pull it back so we can see what the demon is staring at. The demon is pulling its left side back out of the wall because we’re looking at the back of a small, lean man in flowing oriental robes (lots of red with dragon designs and gold filigree) with a long, narrow sword in a plain, dark wood scabbard. Tajitsu!. The hilt is giving off a red glow/aura. [detail!]

[no dialogue]

4
Taj reaches back with his right hand and grabs the sword handle. The world around him has now changed drastically. All the real world objects – buildings, wires, billboards etc have faded and crazy things intermingle, overlay and work around them. There are dragons in the sky, ancient buildings in the gaps between the real ones, the roof Taj stands on is now a neatly cropped field full of bamboo trees and although the building is visible, it is faint and there is ivy crawling all over it with a four armed monkey hanging off the fire escape, which has become a red tree. This is our dream world merged with reality thanks to the Dragon’s Dream (the sword – shitty name?). The demon has lost its black shape and is now clearly defined. [Work out what demons look like, not homogenous but characteristically similar.]

[no dialogue]

5
The demon charges, a silent terror (side on shot showing that Tajitsu hasn’t moved yet, despite the size and speed of the demon, which clearly towers over Taj.)

[no dialogue]


Page 2

1
As the demon body falls to the floor, sprouting a vivid red ‘blood’ from having been chopped to pieces, Taj remains in exactly the same position as the last panel of the previous page, except a small section of the sword blade is visible in the scabbard and is dripping blood, with splashes over the nearest bamboo stalk/tree - research! He is that damn fast.

[no dialogue]

__________________________________________________

Over the course of the following week absolutely loads of details came to me about who the samurai warrior was, his journey and why on earth would he take his heart out. It started with a dream.

Heartless the Workblog part 1

So I started a workblog at Panel and Pixel because as previously mentioned there have been a few really interesting ones set up there recently. The goal being to make me finish the project, there's nothing like the thought of stuffing up and not following through in a forum full of professionals and soon-to-be's to focus the mind. Just starting it up made me think in more detail about certain aspects of the story, how to explain ideas concisely and what exactly was missing from what I'd already done. Don't think I nailed either part but if nothing else it is a start and something to build on. Here's where I am so far:

Putting up or shutting up, as B. Clay Moore said in his comicsbulletin interview - Do The Work. So here we go, the old familiar new format, bastardised from Jimmie and Brandon with apologies to both for not being quite as good at it.

Tales of the Two Planes: Heartless by Owen Jones and (any artist interested - email me)
Action / Myth / Tragedy

Format: Standard comic book, colour – may need to seek other format if pitches are unsuccessful.
Length: Tentatively Five issues
Distribution: Comic direct market for singles, wider book distribution for trades
Audience: Teen to adult, comic violence.
Production: Sometime in 2009 dependent on artist and eventual format.
Publisher: Still researching, small indy is likely my best bet at this stage.
Goal: Make the story-come-myth I enjoy reading myself.

Pitch (lengthy at present – just getting it set in my head):

Tajitsu is the Balance. Formerly a large group of warriors set against the Demon Lord, Orash Dream- Stealer, the Balance used to control the Collectors, creatures Orash unleashes to steal the City’s dreams. Now that duty falls to just the one man and the burden is taking its toll. However, Tajitsu wields the Dragon’s Dream, one of the most feared dream weapons, a blade that grants any dream being the finality of the real world in the dream plane and the abilities of the dream plane in the real world. Problem being Tajitsu isn’t a dream being, so he must remove his heart and give it to his soul mate, Mari, and rely on the blade to sustain him until his hunting is done. But the blade is driving him insane and Orash is about to attempt to merge the two planes.

High Pitch Concept: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (The Blizzard) meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

Start as you mean to go on

More Artwork! As part of the WORK! Anthology I wrote two rough drafts for a piece called Maggie's Farm incredibly loosely based on the Bob Dylan song (more the title actually). I couldn't quite nail it so Tim took over, trying to make the script presentable and that was that ... until today. I wasn't really expecting to see anything from the piece until the final version because I felt it was Tim's story, good guy that he is though (for an Englishman :)) he sent me the first three pages of pencils with a little ink and lettering thrown in. Great way to start the new year, hope you enjoy them.