Category Archives: Writing

NaNoWriMo(esque)

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So we were talking at the writers’ group today, and the subject of NaNoWriMo came up. NaNoWriMo is National Novel-Writing Month, basically a dare to write 50 000 words in thirty days, the month of November.

One of the members had a spreadsheet of something similar, called “Fifty Thousand Words in Fifty Days”. This seems a little less intense, given that I’m doing other things as well, like art and work and finishing The Lonely Little Fridge.

I asked to use it, and got the okay. Here’s my version of the spreadsheet, as a Google Sheet handily embedded in this post (find out how):

It starts out quite small. Work was running fast today, but I had plenty of chances to think about things. I am going to work on “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”, first finishing off some planning with Jackie, then onward.

First things: three endings and three beginnings to the story.

Drawing Blog Posting 2021-10-05 (or so I thought)

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So what I want to do is put a hashtag or something in each on my Tiny Sketchbook posts on Facebook, and then gather them all up on a page here on my WordPress blog. However, using the WordPress embed for Facebook to access the first of my Facebook drawing posts… did not work.

Looking at the WordPress embeds documentation…

https://wordpress.org/support/article/embeds/

…tells me that Facebook has decided to ‘close the oEmbed end point for embedding Facebook links’.

https://wordpress.org/support/article/facebook-embed/

Well, it turns out that you now need to provide a FaceBook Application ID and an authentication token to use the Facebook API to display posts in other locations. I think. Facebook does provide ways to embed posts:

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/embedded-posts/

Fortunately (?) I have a Facebook developer account, from when I was taking web development at Durham. I went back in and discovered all the FaceBook apps I had written as assignments, forgotten, but still there after all this time. I archived them, and am now trying to refamiliarize myself with the whole thing.

Books: How To Think When You Draw (and Write)

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Kickstarters I Have Known and Loved #2

After 2018 I started following things on Kickstarter and Patreon. After pledging to a Kickstarter project to create a clock-radio using actual nixie tubes for display, I started to look at descriptions of other projects.

One such project was a series of cookbooks of art and writing tutorials by the Etherington Brothers out of England. Lorenzo Etherington handles the drawing; Robin Etherington handles the writing.

Lorenzo has a very intriguing, very traditional style of drawing. It’s very 1940’s dieselpunk, all big internal-combustion engines strapped to race cars. It reminds me of the old CARtoons magazine I used to read when I was a kid, or the original Mad Magazine, or even some of Will Eisner’s work (for examples, see Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art).

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Useful books and Other Resources

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Various writing, story design, comics, art, and animation books. The beginnings of a list…

The Understanding Comics series by Scott McCloud:
Understanding Comics
Making Comics
Reinventing Comics
A pioneering exploration of what makes comics tick.

Drawing People by Joumana Medlej
A book remarkable for its examination of different skin colours and body forms of people from around the world. Look in Joumana’s shop for the ebook.

Digital Prepress for Comic Books by Kevin Tinsley.
Goes into the details of preparing comics for print.

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When Can I Use Real Names and Products?

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In the Devilbunnies universe, writers used the names of existing concepts, characters, products and companies. Some of them were associated with the Bunnies or their enemies:

For the Bunnies

For the Bunnies’ Opponents

  • Elmer Fudd (from Warner Brothers; lent his name to the anti-Bunny forces);
  • Moxie, Irn Bru, D&B (“uncute” drinks);
  • Vanilla extract (the Bunnies were actually supposed to be allergic or even burned by it);

In some cases the group authors took the name and ran with it.

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Drawing Test

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This is a test of a slightly-different drawing technique.

Usually, I sketch in pencil, draw over it in black marker or ink, then scan that and clean it up in Photoshop. Afterwards, I add colour in Photoshop. This is how I did the rabbit background picture, and the four-page intro to Scaffoldworld.

It’s also a good way to make even quite a rough sketch presentable (this Toasterman sketch, for example).

Drawing of Toasterman trying to escape an underwater menace.

However, for Little Lost Part, I want to do something different.

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Jacket text for “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”

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I am working through a series of exercises with Jackie on planning Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!. Step 4 involves writing ‘jacket text’ for the story. This is the text that might appear on the back of the book, or on the front flap of a dust jacket. It’s a kind of marketing text intended to draw the readers interest.

So for, I’ve come up with this:

A hidden society of supremacists is trying to take over the world. They are outnumbered by the rest of us, yet they believe that their strength, intelligence, weaponry, and general cuteness give them the right to rule us all.  Yes, cuteness… for these supremacists are rabbits.

Years ago, Tom Johnson and his parents had fled the rabbits’ captivity to build a new life on the outside. Tom’s father had gone back in later to rescue other humans from the rabbits’ totalitarian nightmare… and never returned.

Now, Tom was in high school. But his earliest memories were of the safe predictable environment that the rabbits provided for their human guests. He remembered the rabbits’ soft fur and cute little voices, and their warmth and love… and he looked around at the harsh world of high school, the bullying and endless struggle, and he knew he had to leave.