Category: Writing Journey

Sun-Walking, Writing Journey, Writing!

i saw your face & hands covered in sun

mary v.

I resolved while talking to some patients a few days ago that I would take some time off from video games to focus on producing art. It helped that on Sunday I got to buy 3 books for my birthday on a trip out with my parents and husband. So all I’ve been doing on my “weekend” is reading, creating, sleeping, and chores. Good times. The only shame is that I’m not into coffee right now. *tear*

Anyway, so Sunday night on my way home from work I got seriously into “Don’t Take the Money” by Bleachers, and as I was sitting at my art desk Monday morning wondering what to draw, I got a vision from the line

Till I saw your face and hands covered in sun and then
I think I understand

and I was like OOH what if I did shafts of sun/shadow on LUCY BECAUSE LIGHT AND STUFF

Needless to say, when I tried the “shafts” part it looked very harsh, bruise-like, and stupid, so it evolved into a more straightfoward light source but with some still fabulous, layered shading and tone transitions. I had her have like this shawl thing draped over one shoulder originally that the more I tried to work with the more I was like -___- I hate, so eventually I was like … this piece is nothing except risk after risk, so I sliced off her whole shoulder and went for some good ol’ fashioned taping a fresh sheet of paper under the rip. I ended up loooving the kind of abstract, sunset shape of her shoulder in the new part.

I find myself very stuck on Sun-Walking. Lucienne feels like my quiet, best friend of a conscience, making me brave and anchored. I put myself to sleep by drifting off into Helios and Agaar. It’s peaceful, it’s centered. It’s a whole world, with a fearsome, loving couple at its helm. I wish I knew what to do with my persistent passion for this project. I keep rereading the manuscript. It’s good. It’s really solid. It’s worth coming back to again and again, and at this point it doesn’t even need any major revisions. So like, at what point do I just gather myself and send off some queries again? I don’t know. The world has become so sacred to me I almost don’t dare to try to push it into the public eye. I don’t want it violated by anyone. At the moment then I suppose I’m just very happy to have Helios and Lucienne to slip away with in the middle of the night, and to be able to continue to draw inspiration from all the themes of the book.

Art!, Writing Journey, Writing!

Faces

mary v.

Though I’ve been doing more reading than art in the past few days (I just finished “Mansfield Park” and am now swooping in on both a Patricia McKillip novel “Ombria in Shadow” and a Patricia C. Wrede novel “A Matter of Magic”, all great female authors with great female-focused casts, although Fanny would have made me puke if she had that personality now), I went and bought myself a dozen canvases (always feels like that word should be “canvasi”) and so I’ve been experimenting more and more with ink on canvas. The only downside to ink on canvas is that the canvas soaks up a lot of the pigment. I did this huge 16×20 canvas and finished off 3 bottles of ink (though they were mostly empty). So these smaller ones make me feel less guilty for smearing deep dark pools of ink on canvas. God I love messy loose art.

bebrave-small
So here’s that huge one I mentioned. I did it a week or so ago so I’ve already raved about it here or there, but every time I look at it (it’s sitting on my desk) I still feel a little swell of affection for it.
And though Margaret said it brought to mind a Sara Bareilles song, which is fine, I actually resisted the impulse to quote a whole Chevelle line, “So be brave/reshape/create/reclaim” because I EFFING LOVE THAT LINE AND HIS VOICE AND UNF. I always wanna use Chevelle lyrics everywhere (at least the few lines that make sense). But it totally fits the wild style of this painting, which dyed my hands and nails indigo for 3 days.

psyche
Believe it or not, I set out with this painting to make myself a “fashionable girl” picture where I’d get to flex my muscles making a stylish outfit for some made-up two-dimensional girl. But as usual my work gets much creepier than that very quickly. I still love her great hair and though I honestly was going for, like, a face, this is much more interesting.

loose-lips
SOOOOO when it hits me, it’s unstoppable, and I LOVE how this turned out! (I just finished it 15 minutes ago) I really wanted to try my new acrylic-based ink (stanks like hell and isn’t as nice as it looks like it should be) and that’s pretty much the only reason I went for a faintly pee-like streaky yellow background. I’m not perfectly happy with how the background came out, especially compared to the cloudy blue beauty in the piece above this one. But then I let it dry for a bit and dove into the lineart and forgot about my mediocre background. BECAUSE QUILLS WORK WOOOO. So I’d been wondering about this since I bought my store of canvas, because honestly drawing with a quill is totally my favorite way to get sharp, loose, dark lines, but I figured it’d catch on the canvas or be too narrow to put down any pigment. WRONG AND WRONG! I’m less at risk to rip canvas than paper, and as long as I’m not drawing on wet canvas, the lines go down like silk. Then on canvas there’s the added benefit of being able to daub SUPER RICH spots of pigment onto the canvas, and also create very thin, blotted washes. So if it’s not clear, OMG I LOVE INK ON CANVAS
And then that last piece (I call her Ingrid) inspired me to try real figure drawings again. Looking at her I thought she kind of looked like she was leaning into a conversation, so at first I was going to make a second panel in yellow, in the same dropper style. But then, I don’t know, BAM? I decided to do Andrew and Micah “exchanging secrets” which of course means Andrew’s duping Micah, what else is new. And then everything fell immediately into place and, barring tiny details, turned out exactly how I meant for it to. And in this case, this piece is actually stronger in the flesh than scanned, as you really get the impression of the two interacting canvases (canvasi) when you see it. I’m going to try more pieces like this, especially figures with the watercolory pigmenting contrasting with the strong blots and lines. YEAH ART
*edit* I just fixed the strongly pee-yellow background but it’s still super wet so I’m just gonna let it dry and then maybe scan the whole thing (rather than photographing it with my iPhone) and post an update with it later!
*edit* Yeeeeeeeahhhhhhhhhhh
loose-lips

Oh and finally, when I was putsing for the second week on the same page of “Cadence” it struck me that I was always at liberty to start a brand new graphic novel, just as easily as I could start a new novel or short story. So I went to work plotting out what kind of story I wanted, etc., etc., and just as soon as I got to the point of thumbnailing pages I realized that I’m kind of horrible at layouts and that was heavily discouraging. Not knowing if the story would even work out seemed like a hefty gamble when considering that I’d push myself into a graphic novel and take lots and lots of time on each phase. So I guess I kind of chickened out. I just don’t know if I’m patient or deliberating enough for graphic novels, not like the quality demands. I mean three years on Sun-Walking was enormous to me, and I don’t expect to have another writing project to work on for that long for a while. I’m too fickle and I seek resolution too quickly with my creative endeavors to feel like committing even to a short story graphic novel (~80 pages I would guess) is worth it. That being said, I started my story idea as a short story and I’m still struggling with it. But if I do finish it, and I do end up thinking it’s got potential for becoming totally visual, then I will try it out. In a way, I see this as an opportunity to do a mean pre-write for the graphic novel, and at the same time maximize the format capabilities for the story.

raquildis
Anyway, here are the two characters who would pretty much make up the whole cast. Raquildis Spencer is new; she came out of liking the idea of Ingrid being black in my efforts towards “Time-Painters.” She kinda ended up resembling Zoe Washburn as soon as I decided to make her face narrow rather than wide in order to offset Micah’s round face. I still haven’t decided what to call Micah, or if it will even really be him in the story form, but as usual I love writing him and he’s hard to resist.

The story’s called “Stealing from Raquildis.” Raquildis is a witch who makes potions on commission out of combinations like toothpaste and memories or dog urine and fears. Micah is a dirt-poor elementary school teacher whose desperation makes a thief out of him. But when he falls into the library of a witch, Raquildis takes him captive as she likes to keep a low profile and can’t have him blabbing about all the magical oddities in her house. She intends to make a memory potion to take away his memories of her house…but complications ensue.

Emotional Breakdowns, Writing Journey, Writing!

And Dad Told Me, “Move On”

mary v.

When you take something you believe in, and you offer it to someone you want to believe in, but it’s turned away, it’s hard. Sorry for being cryptic – I’m not even sure if I should be writing about this here. And these are raw feelings. But I just receive a polite rejection to my query of “Sun-Walking,” having been checking my email spastically for the last week and a half to hear such word.

There were several difficult things about having sent out “Sun-Walking.” First, I’d finished it so soon before I sent it. I mentioned somewhere else that I’m used to sitting on a story for much longer, until my feelings about it have cooled, before sending it into the arms of a critic. And this particular query included the first 5,000 words, which I hastily patched up but still read with slight unease. This is such a long story (140k, omg), and I knew that the arc of the story is too big to be viewed in parts. That’s why I would have pitched it as an epic, rather than a trilogy. But I also wanted to pitch it as one rather than three stories because I knew it had its weak spots. One such weak spot was…you know, the entire beginning. It didn’t help that I started it three years ago, and that the beginning of the story had yet to have a really thorough run-through, and that several times I’d almost decided to re-work the whole story.

It had its weaknesses, and now having been rejected, those weaknesses look particularly garish. It’ll probably be best for me to not even read through it until I’ve accepted what this rejection does and does not mean. But I can’t help wondering what to do with it now. As I’ve gushed previously, I really believe in Lucienne. So I’ll find a way to make that clear to others, no matter how long it takes me.

Art!, Cadence, Manga, Writing Journey, Writing!

I Love You, Cadence

mary v.

Up until I wrote Sophie in “Farewell, Fairytale,” during my first year of college, I really struggled with female characters. I came up with hotshots like Micah and smart guys like Andrew and tough guys like Danyil without any problems, but Shani was annoying and Kyasai was a bitch and Cirrus in …WtR drove me nuts. Creating characters that did things I would do, as Sophie did, was kind of a breakthrough for my approach to character design. One of the worst women I wrote prior to this was Cadence. In the original graphic novel, she was definitely a catalyst but, essentially, I hated her. Which is probably why I killed her in the end. Anyway re-writing the story this time around has given me a cool opportunity to hang onto the strengths of her character — she’s fiercely determined and always speaks her mind — while rounding out the parts of her that were a little unbelievable. Indeed, I could almost credit this one scene I decided to put in towards the beginning of the story. In the original draft you don’t even actually see her and Solaris until the second volume, which was roughly two hundred pages into the story (…159 pages, actually). I talked to Ana (one of the story’s best readers) who agreed it was weird that the namesake of the story took so long to show her face. Anyway, I wrote about that in my last entry. I just wanted to kind of squeal about her a little bit because suddenly I’m really excited about her character. I’ve also changed her fate. As for her image, it’s remained largely the same and has of course simply benefited from a few more years (oh my God…four years) of practice on my part.
Writing Cadence this time around, it’s weird, ’cause I see how she fits in with the rest of the story now. Why Solaris, such a powerful man, would have fallen in love with her. Why she’d have gotten children from epic cosmic forces. Why she didn’t want Cirrus to be with Syracrus. And it’s weird to only now be getting in touch with the main roots of the story, but as far as most people are concerned, the product I’m turning out now is the first of its kind.

Seriously, getting into this graphic novel business again is bringing me a level of pleasure and satisfaction I couldn’t have anticipated. I was expecting to get frustrated…or lose interest…or to not feel like it was doing what it was supposed to. I kept telling people I was done with drawing graphic novels till I felt like I could bring to them something that I couldn’t before. I guess that day felt much more distant than a place I’m at now. But it works. People would always ask me if I would color my penciled pages, but when they’d ask me that I simply couldn’t color. So for years now I’ve been trying to get comfortable with it, and part of it has been a surrender to digital media. But I will accept digital art if it is the key to doing what I want to do with my art. In this case, it means being able to illustrate the characters in TCoaRH the way I mean to. They need colors, and that’s what stopped me from even finishing my novelization. I want to add more images to this than I currently can because frankly I want to go keep working on pages. But I’m 33 pages into this story and I can’t believe it. Yesterday though I thought of how much I have left to write and I started to laugh because I’ve gotten virtually nowhere…but I’m committed. There is a long haul ahead, and I’ll make allowances when I have to put it down to focus on, for instance, graduating. But I believe in this story, and in Cadence.

As an example that I had to come back and add, of how this story needs images…I have been waiting to do a page like this of Solaris since I came up with him in high school. Maybe it seems a little simple, his character design…you know, you’re trying to make the Sun King, so you slap him with a warm-toned palette and give him crazy hair and a godlike body. But when I tried to do him in high school I hadn’t committed to the idea of the Element Kings looking like their elements. Plus unfortunately TCoaRH was done while I was on my way out of my phase where all my characters looked like women. So this is the best I could come up with in 2008 or 2009 when I was angry at people during my last drawing class before English class with Miss Kope. It’s cropped weird ’cause it’s on some of Vifquain’s bigger paper that’s too big for my flatbed.

Also, STATIC. Dynamic images are one thing I’ve kind of aimed for, I’m not sure for how long, but whenever I’m making a character like Solaris these days it’s movement I want. Maybe a part of me has come to believe that a plain old portrait like the one above can’t qualify as art.
So, I figured out sometime before I started working with TCoaRH that I wanted Syracrus to be black and Solaris to have batshit crazy hair. Well the hair comes out later like Shepherd Book in Firefly (God I’m sad) but for now I let him tame it. In the aforementioned scene I introduce Cadence and Solaris. While watching Howl’s Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke on Monday, I decided to really introduce them, and I gave them actual full-page spreads. Solaris’s page was what I’ve kept saying: Exactly the image of him I’ve wanted to do for 4 years.

I won’t even bother pointing out anything that might annoy me about this image because mostly it’s precisely what I wanted to produce.

Art!, Cadence, Manga, Writing Journey

A New Beginning

mary v.

medium-p
I guess I can only ignore that ache for so long. I’ve said it in so many places that every time I looked at TCoaRH pages I desperately wanted to start it as a graphic novel again. I thought maybe it would go away while I was novelizing it, but really, during every scene I’m writing I just wish I were drawing it. My moleskine sketchbook I brought with me to NZ is ridiculously full of sketches of the people from this story. The narration of the novel is clunky and sparse because I’m busy visualizing the scene so that I forget to write it well. This story is begging to be drawn.

I’ve also always known since I drew my last graphic novel that committing to a graphic novel would be a huge investment of time and energy and resources. But because of how many times I’ve told this story now (once in full, and I’m over halfway through the novelization), I’m willing to slow down and work patiently with this endeavor.

I’ve more or less figured out what my process for doing this will be. I know I wouldn’t be satisfied with digital lines. At this point, I can only produce sloppy lines I’m happy with, not neat ones. Meanwhile, I tend to be naturally meticulous drawing traditional ink lines, and I’m really comfortable with them. I know I can colorize traditional lines digitally with ease, and this is such a fantastically colorful story. I might struggle with backgrounds, but I’ll go easy on myself with them.

I already have to be patient, because I don’t have any paper suitable for starting pages here. I am going to buy that tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m slowly thumbnailing my first pages, and working on character designs. I think I need to make myself some legit reference sheets for the characters, especially Solimin, who’s got visible tattoos most of the time. I also happily reminded myself it’ll be a while before a lot of these characters get introduced, which will give me time to fine-tune them and brush up on drawing their faces.

Who knows if this will take off or not, but the thing is I’m not asking for immediate gratification. So it might take off over the course of the next few years. At some point soon I’ll set up a website for this so I can get a webcomic system working.

 

 

Cadence, Writing Journey, Writing!

ohai, ~19,000 words

mary v.

So, I didn’t reeeeeeeeeeally anticipate this …Whispered the River novelization to take off quite this much. I’ve got a volume and a half of the manga all scanned in, which has helped me stay on track and also flip back and forth through the story to keep everything nicely knit together (which was the manga’s major problem.) I’m trying to keep a certain amount of the humor from the manga, and it’s sort of easy with a cast that includes 4 teenagers and a really flamboyant king. I’m really falling in love with these characters in a way I wasn’t quite able to with the manga, and they’re all possibly more distinctive than any of my other casts. The system of magic is so straightforward and lends itself to a lot of vivid imagery and richness.

Okay I’ll stop tooting my own horn, but I’m so glad I’ve got this to pour my energy into with how stressful everything will be for the next few weeks.

Unface, Writing Journey

the thing about breathing life into stories

mary v.

I am loving putting so much of my own experiences into “Unface.” It just makes those rough moments flow right over, and the details are just coming pouring out of my memory and down into the words. I’m talking about every aspect. I say, “Oh, high school art teacher here…that friend’s house there…the neighborhood…the bridge…that dream I had…the smells…the friendship I had with that person…what I know about cats…” and all of a sudden this story’s got its own life.
And just wait. I haven’t even gotten to writing the lesson this whole story is supposed to teach me yet.
And boy am I scared of it.

Also, I find I write most of it at night. The bulk of these almost 15,000 words has been written between 11:30pm-12:30am.
Given this is a story about dreams, I guess that’s incredibly appropriate.

Okay, also, I want to say after pushing out ~5 pages in the last 30 minutes that this story is writing itself. I had to do some planning in the first day or two of coming up with this idea, but since then, the most I’ve had to do is sketch out what Ashlyn looks like for fun.
I always say that my favorite works wrote themselves (I am NOT looking at you, Sun-Walking) and that when a project works, it just WORKS (knock on wood). Well, this is exactly what I mean when I say that. There is something truly effortless about working like this and I LOVE it. I will struggle through all the tough days if this is my pay-off. The same principle goes for my art, but I would say it’s not often as intense of a process as storytelling.

Art!, Emotional Breakdowns, Redefining Evil, Writing Journey

Danyil

mary v.

So in the past few weeks, I’ve been redeveloping the past between Danyil and Ingrid in response to a very logical observation on behalf of an editor. Basically, I needed to recreate Ingrid’s descent from human to vampire because her original story didn’t fly with my handmade vampire logic. A baby turned into a vampire would remain a baby. A baby born a vampire will age to decrepitude. As it stood, Ingrid was a baby turned into a vampire. Now I don’t think she’d have quite the power she does as an infant with an undeveloped neuronal crest (thus, no periphery nervous system, thus, no feelings).

Anyway, I needed Ingrid’s past to fit into the RE time frame with as little disruption to her relationship with the cast as possible. Since that meant turning her into a vampire somewhere in her teens between Lacy’s (13) and Micah’s (17) age, I made a very deliberate decision. I would NOT make Ingrid a victim. That would have been the easiest way to totally annihilate the integrity of her infatuation with Danyil and his reciprocated affection. It would also blow up my idea of vampires completely.

So, I decided what she did to force Danyil to turn her into a vampire in order to keep her from dying. I’m not going to say it here because I want to say it in conjunction with something else later on, and besides I’ve already gotten pretty far off-track from what I meant to write about.

I started working on a short manga that takes place right after Danyil turned Ingrid into a vampire. It felt so good to get back into manga frames and speech bubbles. And Danyil is and always has been my absolute easiest character to draw successfully.

That led me down a very nostalgic path through the pages of Nikkei. It’s partly because of how much amusement I find in looking also at where Ingrid (“Mikara”) started off. She was sort of a flake in Nikkei (her and every other girl in the story). But she was definitely close to Danyil (“Eripmav”) and Alexander (“Alucard”), and that much hasn’t changed.

Anyway, I drew this macho picture of Danyil in his old (creepy) kimono top thing that was his “uniform” in Nikkei, and it made me realize how fundamentally unchanged Danyil’s image has stayed — yet also it made me realize how much better he looks now.

I mean, yes, Micah and Andrew grew visually, but they also changed. I messed with their hair. Their hair colors. Etc.

Danyil’s still rocking the long black ponytail and only in one of his many appearances did I even alter it (I’m not counting “Lannen.” Just no.), and that was because he, as Erik in “Rebels”, took on a significantly different vibe than usual.

Anyway, my ranting can be done now. I’m just going to post a few pictures of Danyil for my own amusement. There’s also a ton about him here.

I think the interesting thing about Danyil especially being so constant is that…he’s sort of the villain. He’s the one that rarely copes with his emotions properly. Maybe that’s one way, then, that I don’t feel like I’ve improved as I’ve matured. No, I don’t throw fits like I used to, but I don’t think that my responses to periods of high emotional stress are healthy. So maybe in that way, I stay with Danyil because he stays with me.

That, and I mean, he’s the only male character of mine whose muscles are so damn ripped.

Art!, Redefining Evil, Writing Journey

personal accomplishment ftw!

mary v.

citygroup-sm
(bigger version of this image on this page)

My lucidity is waning and it’s almost my bedtime (work early in the morning), but I wanted to say AHHH!

One of my biggest challenges as of late is finishing a traditional project — if it isn’t obvious enough. So I did this big group picture of the RE cast (including Andrew AND Sotoka — for once!) AND it had a nice cityscape backdrop AND SO I inked it, and then I was like omg forget this, I’m just going to do it digitally. But then I couldn’t get Danyil’s stupid face right digitally (gradient shading ftl), so that became my motivation to follow through with coloring this image oldschool with colored pencils, because the shading therein is so much easier to control.

SUPER HAPPY I DID.

I’ve been working on it since, like, Friday. I really took my time on each person AND the background, and I’m so glad I went with a much more saturated blue than I originally planned for the sky/shadows. I think it gave the piece a really thick, good atmosphere as opposed to washing it out like I usually do. All I did to it after scanning was upped the contrast and applied this new “salt/pepper” filter that I had which did exactly what I wanted it to in terms of cutting back on the graininess that results from colored pencils.

So, anyway, I was inspired by that pretty-colored character line-up I did from October 2006. I was hoping to outdo myself, but I outdid myself AND surprised myself. So I put them together to show off:
lineup-comparison
Okay so the only downside is that they all look really grim in the new one. But I’ll justify that by saying that the novel is much more serious than the manga was. >.o;
The only character missing from the new one is Tamae. I eliminated her character pretty early on in the novel version, which I think led to Danyil and Ingrid’s relationship (in the manga, the very conceited and rather useless Tamae is head-over-heels for Danny, who gives her a pity kiss after the ball at the same place in the story where Danyil and Ingrid now make love o__O; *weird thought*). Anyway, a lot of the cast is lined up in both pictures except Sotoka and Lacy are pretty far from their originals. In the top picture, from l-r we have Sotoka (far background), Danyil, Ingrid, Micah, Julian, Lacy, and Andrew (seated). In the bottom l-r we have Danyil (then Eripmav), Ingrid (then Mikara), Lacy (then Shani), Micah (then Myoku), Julian (then Takai), Tamae, Sotoka, and Andrew (then Darrin).

—-

I realized (or have for the first time felt capable of articulating this fact) that the way I obsess over then-and-now’s seems a little self-absorbed. Like, “ooh, look at me, I’m so good now” but inside me, it’s (usually) nothing like that.
In some ways, the growth of my artwork/characters is something I can document — “Look, I learned how to do backgrounds/add depth/work with a light source” and it says that I’m not moving through life without any progress.
Even beyond that, it’s just simply that I love my characters. It’s quite clear I’m incredibly committed to this cast. I was committed to them even prior to getting accepted by PYP, which is how it ever got accepted for publication in the first place. I believe in the stories that these people have to tell, and by this point it hardly feels like I’ve concocted them myself.
As one of my all-time favorite authors put it (Jonathan Stroud on his facebook page in reference to Bartimaeus),

the character just pulled me happily into the story. Which is what all good characters do, I think, whether you’re a reader or a writer…

Redefining Evil, Writing Journey

Awkward Promotional Moments

mary v.

(My mom was getting blood drawn at the hospital today. She has very stubborn veins and so finally they used a bigger needle on a new vein, and blood gushed all over her arm and the floor.)
Nurse: Oh, I wish we had a vampire here right now!
Mom: Well, my daughter’s vampire novel is coming out next year!
Nurse: (Wiping up all her blood) Oh, really? That’s very cool.