One/Third

Alright, so it's been a month since my last update and things are going fairly well. I just finished scripting page 131. Which means I'm a third of the way there. I anticipate two to three more months before the script is complete and ready for revisions. All told, that'll be about six months for a 350-400 page graphic novel, written in my little free time after juggling a full-time job and full-time family. Not quite the one-month we were all aiming for, but I am satisfied. Ah, if only I were a student on my parents' bill...

I am, of course, longing to be done though. And since I've promised myself no new video games until the script goes through revision and is sent to a couple people for critique, I'm pretty well inspired to keep on truckin'. (This sadly, means that I am having to forestall my return to World of Warcraft and its glorious crusade of burninating - which beckons me with an O-So-Sweet Siren's call.)

How 'bout the rest of our ragtag crew of overly ambitious GraNo scriptors? Have you guys made any progress? Dave, are you further than 31 pages? Rob, have you found the time to keep moving on your project (last you said, in November, you had potted out to 100 pages)?

NEWSFLASH: Past Deadline

So you know what happened? You know how I was going to try to finish my first draft of Influence by the end of the year, by 31 December 2006? Something happened that got in my way. A duo of villains initiated themselves into my life and duly hampered my noble work.

And who could these dastardly souls be? Why none other than An Oppressive Need to Finish Playing Oblivion and his foul sidekick, The Winter Holidays and Associated Parties and Hooplah. *sigh*

Still, I'm proud to announce that I am still making progress, chipping away at the beast while its minions harry me at every turn. I've successfully scripted and laid out (in simple thumbnails) forty-five pages my baby behemoth. Hoorah for that, eh?

One very real difficulty I am facing, though, is a ballooning of content. What I was anticipating to be a 325-page book is looking more and more like a 400+-page book. Which, among other things, just means I'll have that much more to draw. *double sigh*

Ah well. Wish me luck :)

Sigh

So, the good news is that I wrote 31 more pages of comic script than I ever have before!

The bad news: since I'd never written any comic script, that means I only completed 31 pages--far short of the goal of 175.

Ah well, I'll keep working on it. If I keep up the rate of a page a day, I should be finished by mid-2007...

The Stretch

So there's two days left on the official NaGraNoWriMo calendar and I finally finished plotting my story out page-by-page last night. It was tough - as I ran into some serious writer's block last week and didn't produce anything for six days (I assuaged my conscience by drowning it in Elder Scrolls IV and several movies). Currently, my plot calls for about 250 pages, but I think it will probably balloon by about 25% as I nail down script and art (which will actually take me to right around where I had originally planned to be).

So, while it's not realistic to imagine that I could have the script finished by tomorrow night, I'm still pretty happy with my progress. My new goal is to have a second draft of the script delivered into a critical friend's hands for review and advice by New Year's.

I'll post my final NaGraNoWriMo progress on Friday.

Half way and way behind

We're half way through the month and I am WAY behind. It's not that the ideas aren't coming, I'm just not finding the time to actually writing the scripts. I have only fifteen pages fully scripted, but I twelve more pages plotted in detail and a brief outline that would probably make for at least 100 pages. The ideas are coming but the page count it not.

But I'm not giving up! I'm going to push ahead and kick some butt. Seriously!

No, really!

The Ob-Stackles in My Way

The amount of research I've had to do (and will continue to have to do) is really hampering my progress. (And I reeeeeally need to interview some blind and deaf people still!) So far, I have 120 pages pretty strictly plotted, with pretty loose scripting. Every time I get twenty-or-so pages further, I stop and think to myself, Waitaminnut... would that even happen? And then I have to get several hours of research in. And about half the time, I've had to go back and reformulate the story to keep it at least plausible.

Still, progress is pretty steady and I should definitely have all the pages plotted out by month's end. I'm pretty sure that a full script is unrealistic at this point, but if I can have all the pages plotted and about 150 pages scripted, I'll be very excited.

I'm beginning to include more action than I had originally intended, fearing that the story wouldn't have enough draw if I stuck merely to the cerebral. Now I'm fearing that it'll be too "light." Too—pardon the term—comic booky. Really, I think I'm making a great editor for myself as I'm so brutal toward my ideas in my need to produce something that isn't cliche. At least, that's what it's like in my head.

Here's hoping the world in my head bears some resemblance to reality as others perceive it!

I Smell a Plot

After getting five pages into my script, I realized that I couldn't just improv my way through. My story was too complicated and too winding. No this wasn't remotely Bendis's Daredevil, but I still needed some serious structure before I could continue.

So for the last couple nights I've been plotting. In my Influence-notebook—I'm going to various coffeeshops, pubs, parks, fountains, etc. and hand-writing the whole thing before moving on to digital; it's just easier to scribble notes and ideas down and sketch out layout ideas on paper than in Textpad). Anyway, in my Influence-notebook, I've layed out three columns: Page, Time, and Location.

These let me easily delineate story-pacing (both general flow and placement of anticipation/reveals). I can say something like:

PAGE:	TIME:	LOCATION:
14-15	1970; Junior High	Pemberly; The sitting room to caverenous walk-in closet; A rousing game of spin the bottle—Darcy has just spun Miss Elizabeth Bennett; her distaste is facially evident. But peer pressure being what it is... Etc.
16	1991	Pemberly; The same closet; on the floor—Darcy chides Elizabeth for her childish prejudices; and Elizabeth laughs at Darcy's long-past discomfiture at her visible rejection of him. Things get steamy. Naturally.

I wasn't sure how well this would work and it's been tough essentially pre-writing every page before I get to write it for reals, but in the end, it should make my scripting task much easier.

Annnnnd, it's revealed the areas I'll need to research before I can even hope to write a certain segment realistically. I had gotten fifty pages of good plotting accomplished in this manner when I came to a section that I absolutely needed to research before I could touch it. And since I can't know how many pages to devote to this section, it's rather hard to proceed. In order to continue plotting to some degree, I've temporarily abandoned my more rigourous plotting for a more general order of events. And since my research begins tonight, I hope to be able to accurately plot those pages by week's end. I hope!

[[ Update: I have no idea why the table is so poorly rendered (esp. in IE). I've tried numerous fixes. One worked but destroyed the post in IE for baffling reasons. So, I've left it and hope the reader will be understanding. ]]