A first test of the cover for “Little Lost Lamp”.
What happens when a lamp id shipped to the customer and then forgotten?
This is the short eight-pager I hope to have ready for TCAF in the first week of May (whether or not I take part in TCAF).
Here’s Version 5 of the cover for “Parts: An Industrial Fantasy”. I’m getting closer. And I realized that Gordin and Laisa may have red circuit boards for greater visibility.
I’m still learning more about these watercolours. I am going to layer them more; I’ve been treating them like Photoshop paint-bucket fills or comic-strip colours…
I got an email recently that TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, is happening this year… online! The physical version of TCAF has been one of the highlights of my year, but of course recent events have forced changes. After it was cancelled in 2020, TCAF will be online in 2021.
The deadline to apply was Wednesday March the 3rd.
I applied. It’s a long shot, but what the hey.
The book launch party for Nineteen Tales will have door prizes, and as one prize, I’m doing a drawing of a scene from my story. I’m starting with experiments and reminding myself how I draw… important artistic note: the water colour goes on before the india ink…
The next day: test drawings for the door prize. 
One drawing is watercolour and pencil only, the other has india ink added.
This is the same technique I’m going to use for my story Parts.
Continue readingJackie Brown interviews me about my story in the compilation Nineteen Tales of COVID-19.
It came! Nineteen Tales of COVID-19, the compilation I submitted a story to! ? (I changed the pictures when I realized how many crumbs were on the kitchen table… now it’s in front of my computer.)
The compilation was organized by the awesome Jackie Brown of Jackie Brown Books. The writers all have some connection to Durham Region (for example, I grew up in Whitby).
Yes, I also designed the cover and laid the interior out.
This is a listing of various works I have done.
The grade nine sketch. The stories: How Yukon Picket Obtained Salt (grade 10), The Thirteenth Upheaval (grade 11), Virnalian Ranger (comic in co-op newsletter, grade 12 or 13). The Map (detail; grade 10).
First sketchbooks.
Toasterman. Electronic Monsters. (I was the only guy in electronics school with a sketchbook.)
Random sketchbook work. Large drawings as gifts until 1990.
Evelyn’s Story (the World of the Woolly Mountain Incident). I discover Esperanto (for real this time). The Devilbunnies newsgroup and shared fiction. In summer 2000 I go to the Kultura Esperanto Festivalo in Helsinki (music video segment– cut short when I ran out of tape (yes, tape)).
Scaffoldworld (the beginning). Plotting problems extending it. Start learning about story design. Start going to LIFT, the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto, to attend its screenwriting group. French lessons. Japanese lessons (really regret leaving Toronto and quitting these).
The layoff. Go to Bancroft to work on solar-powered houses. Doesn’t work out. Look for work in Sutton. Meet Shawn Shepheard when he led a job search group at Yorkworks. I draw Shawn’s Sugarfree Shawn comic.
Cara Coulson’s children’s literature class. Mary-Rose Thaler’s graphic design class. Linda Cheng’s graphics programming class. The rabbit video. The BUNIX login. French immersion in Jonquière summer 2013. Exploration of Kickstarter.
Sketchbooks and attempts at programming. The ATM Fee Finder. Second attempt at Time Warrior (website, video, and shirt this time). Visits to LIFT.
Parts: An Industrial Fantasy. Meet Jackie and the DRWG. The compilation Nineteen Tales of COVID-19 and the story The Rabbit Hole.
I recently stumbled across a group on Reddit. This particular group is called Writing Prompts, and the topics are story suggestions, meant as practice for writers. People reply with story segments in comments.
I was alerted to one topic by a text announcement on my phone. The topic was:
"People gain superpowers the day after meeting their soulmate. When a hot young celebrity does so the day after a meet-and-greet, they're desperate to find every person who they even just shook hands with that day."
As I got ready for work, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. As I worked on the assembly line, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. At lunch, I read some of the story segments others had posted in response, and I plotted a continuation and thought of all sorts of details.
Continue readingJackie introduced me to Scrivener, a writing program. I wrote a draft script for Parts in it, using the Comic Script template provided with the program, and tips from its author Antony Johnston.
This format gave me automatically-incrementing page and scene numbers, which are adjusted on output. There were paragraph formats for character names, dialogue, narration, and more. It was a lot like the well-known screenwriting program Final Draft.
Final Draft itself is of course one of the well-known programs for screenwriting. It allows the writer to manage characters and plot points and make sure that all the loose ends are tied up. I believe that there is a detailed script output goes so far as to tabulate what characters (and therefore actors) and locations and even important props are in each scene (clearly useful in panning the shooting of a movie).
I have found that graphic-novel scripts are a lot more like screenplays than regular prose novels, and I tend to think more in pictures than text when creating story. I considered using Final Draft for my script, but decided to try Scrivener, as I found that Scrivener was a considerably lighter program, aimed more for writing.
However, Scrivener (and Final Draft) are text only. Parts is going to be a graphic novel. I decided to lay it out in Adobe InDesign, which I had used before. In InDesign I can design pages, choosing page size, margins, fonts, and so on. Then I cam import and place artwork. InDesign is much more flexible than Scrivener in the way that it can size and arrange artwork on a page. It places images and text in “frames”, which can themselves have different shapes and outlines. I immediately thought of dialogue boxes and word balloons in comics.
Ideally, I would like to write the script in Scrivener (or Final Draft for that matter), and export it in such a way that the structural information of the script is preserved. It would include not just a piece of text, but some record that the text was a piece of dialogue spoken by Character X.
Continue readingWe have been working hard over the holidays getting the manuscript of “Nineteen Tales of COVID-19” ready for publication on Amazon.
Jackie Brown, publisher of the compilation, has been masterminding the project: getting needed material from the authors and designers, setting deadlines, and keeping things going.
Maxine Wray, marketer, has been getting promotional material going, such as graphics for posting to social media. She has also been setting up the distribution of the book.
I’ve been setting the book up in Adobe Indesign and generating manuscripts in PDF format for the others to check over and suggest adjustments. I also built a cover in Adobe Illustrator, using a graphic from Freepik (which had to be credited in the book).
Based on the others’ feedback, I’ve been making adjustment after adjustment: eliminating typos, correcting odd formatting errors, adding late-arriving material, and making adjustments to the cover. For example, two of the authors wanted to use different family names, which meant I had to rearrange the names on the cover and the chapters in the book…
We’re getting close!
