Okay, first, I must say that it is totally bizarre that I am able to even try to post from work – I guess they reset their global block settings, and my website isn’t “Profanity” anymore … we’ll see how long that lasts.
What was I going to post about?
Oh, yes. Poetry and comics.
So, I’ve been working on the scripting for this ‘graphic novel’ project in my writing time, and it’s been coming, but slowly. Which is, of course, totally reasonable. As I said before, the subject matter is … emotionally difficult, as well as known to me, both of which slow me down considerably, and since I’m trying to stick to a particular meter and rhyme scheme throughout without having screwy pacing it’s slower still. But it’s definitely moving forward.
I seem to be reasonably good at writing poetry in that strange shore where waking and sleeping meet; I’ve taken to napping on my breaks with a pen in my hand and a chunk of the story in mind, my fingers tapping out syllables softer and softer as I drift from consciousness. Last night after I laid down in my bed, I very quickly wrote a verse of the story that … well, I’d forgotten that I’d already written a verse for that page, but the new one, the one written half-asleep, was much more effective, so I kept it.
I haven’t had a chance to touch the drawings again since this weekend, but I think I’ll tackle that again when I have the poetry written for at least the first half of the first chapter. (Did I mention that each chapter has two distinct ‘halves’? Am I giving too much away?) Then I can see how to lay out pictures that tell their part of the story that the poetry tells in its own way with some idea of what should actually be there. It’s actually turning out to be a fun sort of back-and-forth, where my sketches inform the pace of the story/poetry and then my poetry informs the next generation of sketches.
Regardless, what I wanted to get to was that while the pace seems slow, and is certainly much slower than I’d been aiming for when I hadn’t thought it would be poetry, I’m satisfied with the pace I’m making progress. Slow, but steady. I may not be able to finish by the deadline I’d set (though I’ll still try) but I’ll certainly finish, and it’ll be something to be proud of when I’m through.
Oh, and I wrote about half of that diet book yesterday. Well, actually, I was looking at some alternate printing options and I may have to beef it up to two or three times longer than my current goal to meet minimum page counts to do a bulk order. The key being that at about 25 pages, though Cafepress, I’ll have to price it at about $8, while through this other printer (whose minimum page count is 64), I can price it … probably at $5 or $6. Which … well, I’m pretty confident that the actual information needed to follow the diet can be laid out in … one, maybe two pages. It’s the clever idea I’ve had for presenting that diet that takes up the rest of the space: writing it as though it were a “Choose Your Own Adventure” type storybook. I’ve had another idea for it that might take up some extra pages, though, so we’ll have to see how my mind works.
Anyway, staying productive, happy, happy with my progress. Going to Willow House again tonight, and unlike Monday, if she’s there I’ll just go in and sit someplace else and hope she doesn’t see me. This town is big enough for both of us.
