Help Make A Book! Part II

There are just 6 short days left to make "A Map in the Dirt" into a beautifully printed book!

Now is the time to tell all your friends about the sweet rewards: sketchbooks, original artwork, the book, the giant coloring poster, music, and the new personalized 24x36" poster filled with drawings of you and your friends or whatever you want!

http://kck.st/bH6PPT

A Map in the Dirt (update)

Bleeding Cool News and Super Duper are helping spread the word about A Map in the Dirt! The project is at 18% and there are 43 days left to get a copy of the book.

In other news: Noah and I are sick, sick, sick! We've had 2 hours of sleep the last three nights and Noah's been throwing up. We both have ear infections and, as of last night, I have Pink Eye. We've been watching The Princess and the Frog over and over and over again. The music is great and the story is a lot of fun. It makes being sick a more bearable experience :)

"A Map In The Dirt" For Sale!

You can buy your very own copy of A Map in the Dirt here for just $15!

This project has been a long time coming and it's finally wearing skin :)

"A Map In The Dirt" Reviews!

The fine people at Avoid the Future shared this great review of my short comic A Map in the Dirt:

http://avoidthefuture.blogspot.com/2010/03/preview-map-in-dirt-by-jess-smart.html

Rachel Dukes (comics artist and owner of Poseur Ink) shared this kind review:

http://poisonrational.livejournal.com/232898.html

In other news, I got to share my thoughts on plagiarism in Pikaland 7.

Published in DAYDREAM

This is the cover for the newest book from DAYDREAM, where one of the 80 pages belongs entirely to me! 

From DAYDREAM's site:

This sleek and sexy 6th edition of Daydream is jam packed with 80 pages of uninterrupted creative offerings, featuring photographers, writers, illustrators and designers. This is also the debut of Inua Ellams as literature editor for word-art submissions, so you are sure to find some surprise and solace in the wise, weird and wonderful words within the pages of one of the finest editions yet!

Graphic Novel, Page 30

Quick update: I've been working on a graphic novel for the last month or so, and I've just finished the rough draft for the first 30 pages. This is great news! 

I really want to post some details, but I want to get started on the final draft first. That way we both know this book is for realsies. I've spent the last few weeks structuring my story on notecards, then fine-tuning it, then typing the dialogue and actions in script-form, then fine-tuning that...now I'm drawing the book, panel-for-panel, in a really rough form, so I know what things will look like and which panels I should put on each page, etc. Right now I'm about a quarter of the way through the book, so it'll be around 120 pages.

Comic Book in the Works, III

Last night I finished the rough draft of the script for the second act. (Phew! That was a mouthful!) I'm really surprised at how many details I've had to work through, then re-work and work again to make it what it needs to be.

The middle was a lot more difficult to structure than the beginning. Even though I know what's happening and how it happens, the mechanics of the whole thing are really challenging. I have my work cut out for me when the time comes to revise and polish the second act!

Comic Book in the Works, II

Right now the book is divided into three really basic parts: the beginning, middle, and end.

I just finished writing the script for the beginning and I'm so excited. It really is torture to sleep, and know that I can't just plow through the middle and end and get that much closer to seeing the finished book.

It's a lot of fun, though, just focusing on the writing. I get to think of the whole story in terms of which characters and parts of the story get the most attention, and if that attention is positive or negative, and making the story interesting by showing the contrast between characters and situations they are in, and concentrating on dialogue and the dynamics of actions and responses...oh man. 

One of my mistakes in story-making in the past has been to build the world I want to show. Then keep building it and building it and building it. It's easy to get excited about and sucked into the world, but if I don't structure it and turn it into something I can share with people, the world only exists for myself, and that's pretty depressing. With this story, I'm being really brutal with keeping only the essentials of the story, and cutting out the distractions. This is really tough for me because I'm finding I make lots of distractions and I like 'em! Part of the game of writing this story is seeing how simplifying the story makes it so much better. 

By the end of this week I plan to have finished the first draft of the whole story, and then I'll change pace a little bit. 

Comic Book In the Works

For whatever it's worth, I've just started laying out the structure to a new comic I'm making. I've developed tons of ideas in the past, but none of them have seen a publisher because I never finish. This time I've decided to adopt Doug TenNapel's working method and I feel really great about it. 

I took out three note cards and labeled them "Beginning", "Middle" and "End". I wrote 1-3 sentences summarizing what happens in each part of the story, then turned each card over and made a numbered list from 1-3. Under items 1-3 I listed the beginning, middle and end of each section of the story, giving me a really solid framework to build my story on and it's a relief to have such a simple, straight-forward format (it sure beats all my plot notes in my sketchbook, in-between drawings and notes for other things!).  

Next I'm going to pull out more note cards and plug in more details in each section. Anyway, I thought I'd share my success story so far with using Doug's approach.