why hello

Wow, I haven't posted anything in like... a week? something like that?? Lands alive, I am super behind the times. I'm actually writing some articles, but I can't post them yet because I am an idiot living in a house with like five computers and no internet.

So todays post will be very long, rambly, filled with announcements, and mostly about my birthday!

Read more beneath the cut.

a few disjointed thoughts about writing relationships

(mostly romantic relationships but also other relationships)

(these are my entirely subjective thoughts, as usual)

(also don't read this if you happen to hate disorganized rambling)

(maybe just stop reading this blog if you hate disorganized rambling, actually)


Okay. Disclaimers over.

I was talking to my sole friend this one time, and we got onto the subject of relationships in fiction. Specifically, we were talking about romantic relationships in writing and all the ways it seems to be done wrong, and all the ways we longed to see it portrayed.

So here I am, talking about relationships in fiction and all my many weird opinions about it.

First off, I'm just going to ignore how relationships work in our society at the moment because that's what I want to do. But I will just say that for all the fascination we have with human relationships in our writing we should really as an entire universe learn to depict it better.



Thought One: 

So many books now completely butcher the idea of romance (my friend pointed out Twilight as the obvious famous literary culprit). The characters in the stories, which tend to be ridiculously popular and read, have absolutely terrible relationships. These relationships range from obsessive to abusive, and I can't really think of a single good, healthy, pious example of a romantic relationship in mainstream fiction.

The Twilight characters, which are quite typical for characters nowadays, have a notoriously bad relationship. It is abusive, and I'm not even going to bother listing the factors that make it abusive because you can just Google it and find out yourself, easy peasy.

Twilight is also a great example of lustful relationships, overly obsessive relationships, and sort of boringly written relationships. The characters have a very bad habit of looking over each other's faults.

The really terrible part about fiction showing this junk positively is young people are learning to accept and even want that kind of relationship.Let me just say right off the bat: NO. DO NOT WANT.


Thought Two:

Romance is something that seems to be very poorly handled in general-- poorly plotted, poorly developed, and just generally all-around poorly written. Even romantic subplots are boring and house dull characters.

I personally feel like romantic relationships could be much better written if they were character driven rather than plot driven. (Goes without saying that if you are writing something like Dirk Pitt or something you should just ignore this advice, and probably all advice on this blog, because if you are writing Dirk Pitt it means you are writing full on action with no time for real character development. That's okay. You can give your books to my sister, she loves that stuff.)

I digress.

Most of the romance I see (and have written, ugh) is not really character driven. I have characters, they have to fall in love within a certain period, they have to follow this sort of vague plot... yeah. Pretty much 100% of my romantic relationships. Shoot me now.

Also like 90% of all the romantic relationships I have ever read.



Thought Two Part Two: 

Let us think for a moment about human relationships without romance: how a character meets, becomes friends (or not-friends), and how they interact all rests on the individual characters' personalities, habits, backgrounds, speaking style, etc.

Now let us ponder all the aspects of a healthy awesome character: they have a certain personality, certain thoughts, ways of expressing themselves, beliefs, families, friends, general lives.

Now romantic relationships, keeping these things in mind: two characters, who have individual personalities, habits, backgrounds, and modes of expression, meet and decide to form a relationship, which is either immediately or eventually romantic in nature.

So okay. Basically what I'm saying is that your characters need to actually... you know... be characters.

Or, to put it a totally different sort of way, your characters should not exist for the sole purpose of being in love with each other. They are individual characters first, lovers second.

Put it a third way: CHARACTERS ARE SO COOL GUYS

LET'S MAKE CHARACTERS

AND THEN SHIP THEM

Because the problem with writing the romance first and the characters second is that the characters will never be allowed to develop outside the story. If they can't do that, then it will be so hard to make them seem like anything more than two little cardboard cutouts with no lives and no chemistry.

(PS. This was hard to write, because this is basically me hitting myself over the head. Totally preaching to myself on this one.)


END PART ONE OF THIS POST (part two coming like Saturday or something)

asking questions in order to fortify writing, whoo!

Whenever I write anything, I make sure to keep a list of questions I ask while working on it. It has proved to be an invaluable resource for both developing and editing.

For example, let's look at a VERY abridged list of questions I asked while writing my terrible NaNoWriMo novel, Dreamcaught:

• Why are they staying with Aunt K? Do they have other relatives? And how long is this arrangement lasting for? Have things like this happened before?
• Foster's ex-girlfriend Tam is probably ACTUALLY STILL HIS GIRLFRIEND???
• How much does Adam know about his wifes's life and existence? How much does Aunt K know about her husband's?
• This could actually be a much better way to show Aunt K's personality. Her attempts to help but general failure, and how she's coming to believe she's totally insane.
• Where have the Pritchards lived previously?
• Why did Jonas eat the apples? What an idiot!
• Her Majesty wants them all dead, why doesn't she just chop their heads off?
• everybody (I mean, literally everybody) knows immediately that Foster is the heir. Why?
• people are befuddled when they first arrive in VA... why? It seems they cannot get near normal humans without triggering a response in them.
•  Brianna has a cold in only one scene?
• The hands are everywhere-- they are a sign of the House of Fera and are a constant reminder of Cat's many murders and the fact that she married into the throne. 
• how long ago did Cat's husband die? what about the royal family?
• what family does Jonas belong to?
• who wrote the original prophesies that run most of the plot?
• what is the monetary system in Fae? I mention it several times, but use different names and it is never explained.
• how do Connie and Brianna see down in the tunnel system?
• and what exactly are these enormous tunnels used for? (Perhaps they are not all actually sewer systems, but rather huge caverns underneath the city that were once lived in but now are abandoned. The sewer systems were built around the caverns and involving them. Huge underwater lakes and such)
• How did the dragon get named after the prophesy?
• mode of transportation? Victorian modes of transport? Trains? Horse carriages? 
• what instrument does Nico play?

You can't really tell (but I promise, it's true) that these questions cover every aspect of the novel. There are questions about plot, inconsistencies, characters, names, factual information, world building, scenes, writing, and of course: plot holes. 

This is perhaps only one fourth of the massive amount of questions I have saved in my "Dreamcaught questions" document, but every day before I write I first open the questions document and read through the entire thing. It gives my brain time to process the information, and I am pleased to say that I have come up with some really helpful answers to a lot of questions this way. By listing it and then reminding myself of it, my brain works through issues without me really having to focus on it. 

Most days, when I go through the list I find tons of questions I can cross out really easily, because even though I'd been frustrated with it before, my subconscious had been working on it. 

Another god thing about the list: I'm much more trained to notice when things don't add up, so it is easier for me to catch plot holes. 

So there you go. It works for me. Keep lists, kids.

no internet? *horrified gasping*

Greetings, friends!

Housekeeping post today: you may have noticed that I tend to post things at breakneck speeds, and that the dates of my posts never match when I actually post them. 

I'm not changing the whole 'weird dates' thing, because it works for me, but I am sad to announce that the 'posting at breakneck speed' thing is unfortunately coming to an end. 

Reason: I just moved to the middle of nowhere, and unfortunately the middle of nowhere has no Internet access at all. Zero Internet access. None. 

Also, we won't be getting Internet access. So I'll probably still be posting fairly often, but I will not be posting four times a day! Probably twice a week, maybe once a week. 

That is all. Housekeeping over. 

more story editing!

This time I won't be editing my NaNoWriMo novel, Dreamcaught-- oh, no, that is far too dull. Instead, I'll be editing this weird story beginning I wrote one day when I had a fever. It is appropriately titled "Fever Story" and it is actually something that was mulling over in my mind for years before I ended up writing it down. Unfortunately, this idea is so stupid that I actually had to get a fever in order to be crazy enough to write it out. Here, let's watch me plow through this hallucinated word sludge...

...but first, synopsis. Fever Story is  a very odd story. Its plot traverses through time and it has a lot of seemingly unrelated characters. No, really: it either has six main characters or ten main characters, depending on how you look at it (I say ten), and then three more point-of-view supporting characters. Most of these characters hardly interact with each other.

With the ensemble cast and multiple plot lines (and time lines) it's pretty much impossible to write a coherent synopsis of the story. It also doesn't help that I'm terrible at writing synopses, but here goes:

At the age of seven, Mercedes Brown wished her two-year-old brother would just vanish... and then he did. The kicker? Nobody in the world besides her can remember his existence. 

Unknown to her, there is a journal being kept on the opposite coast. On the outside, this journal is nothing more remarkable than a seventeen-cent Wal-Mart notebook, but inside it holds unbelievable stories; including that of Mercedes Brown. The kicker here? It's written in minute detail in Mercedes' own handwriting.

So, there we have it. It really isn't a very good synopsis, but let's dive into the first chapter anyways...

Alright, so. Aqua blue is stuff that maybe doesn't make sense, pink is character stuff that might not add up, red is dialogue, and sky blue is all the other stuff that just isn't quite right.

As you can see, there is not much white (and what little I didn't highlight is pretty boring).

Ugh.

First, let's see the characters.

Mercedes Grace Brown is introduced first-- what do we know about her?

• she has a kind of wacky but also kind of boring name
• she's seven years old
• she throws temper tantrums several times a day (sheesh.)
• she dislikes her brother
• disobedient
• rarely uses her doll house
• likes spaceships and is content to use a pillow as a space dock
• grew out of being picky??
• calms down quickly after an apparent temper tantrum
• appearance: big brown eyes

Okay, now I'm going to pick apart these points...

• she's seven years old BUT...
• ...she throws temper tantrums several times a day. This is probably due to her being spoiled, but she probably also has issues expressing herself. Mostly it's being spoiled, though.
• She dislikes her brother, and much preferred being an only child. She enjoys soaking up all her parents attention and misses the attention she got before he was born.
• Disobedient, but it's probably less because she intellectually disagrees and more because she wants to have her own way and has found that being disobedient usually ends in gratification. She doesn't strike me as being particularly intelligent, so it isn't rebellion against something. She just wants what she wants, and she doesn't want to sit on the carpet with her loathsome brother.
• Rarely uses her doll house? I actually think this was a mistake on my part. I think she would enjoy the use of a doll house. Even if she wasn't playing with dolls, she seems like the type who would ignore its intended use and figure out ways to break stuff with it.
• She likes Lego spaceships and is content to use a pillow as a space dock, which suggests she doesn't really care about accuracy of the facts in her games.
• She grew out of being picky?? Again, I think this is, if not a character failure, at least a poor use of words. Her parents are spoiling types, but they're also minimalists. Perhaps she was not spoiled with toys, but with other gratifications-- food or attention or permission slips. And perhaps she isn't the toy type.
• She calms down weirdly quickly after her rage with her brother. I would like to suggest she doesn't calm down this quickly usually, but since her brother literally vanished from her memory, she's actually just had something very traumatic happen to her which totally knocked the anger out of her head. She's probably very very bewildered, even if she doesn't completely realize it.

Okay, enough about her. Let's move on to Travis Brown:

• two years old
• his sister is mean to him
• eats strawberries and pancakes despite being two
• doesn't really do much, seems pretty quiet
• appearance: roly-poly, with fat hands and a stuffed rabbit. drools on everything.

 Oh, Travis. You were such a sweet youth until your evil sister wished you out of existence. Again, let's look at this in detail (although seriously, he's like two. How much detail can I possibly add?)

• Eats strawberries and pancakes despite being two... might be a slight error, as he is said to have possibly been fed more than his sister. Then again, it is entirely conceivable that her jealous and bitter heart contrived up reasons to make her even more jealous and bitter.
• He doesn't really do much, and seems pretty quiet. It kind of makes it hard to tell when he's there and when he's not there. Overall seems to be pretty laid back-- he doesn't seem to bother his sister too much while she's attempting to build an armada of spaceships.
• appearance: he's a typical baby. He has a disgusting stuffed animal he loves, which still sticks around after he's gone.

And final characters who are pretty much just there: Mother and Father Brown!

• end up with a spoiled brat of a daughter
• keep the Legos on the top shelf of the pantry where it is hard for little kids to get them. Maybe they only take them out when they want the kids to be quiet and out of the way?
• neat freaks
• minimalist furniture
• Mother cooks, Father sets the table.
• Mother does not seem to be too terribly concerned when Mercedes throws a fit, mostly just angry. She also isn't very surprised when Mercedes calms down immediately and can't remember what she was screaming about. Possibly she's suffering from the "wow something just happened" effect, too.

Okay, all that out of the way. Final decision on these characters: Mercedes is obnoxious and highly unlikable, everyone else is just sort of there.

Nobody wants to read a book where the only character with a personality of any sort is totally despicable.

So now, let's look at the Mercedes Brown who's been hanging out in my head for like twenty seven years*.

(bad phone picture of a sketch of seven-year-old Mercedes)

Who is Mercedes? Is she an impossibly unpleasant person who should never have graced paper?

Yeah, probably.

Spoiler alert: This is the only time we will see her at age seven. Most of the chapters don't even have her in it. As such, I will not be writing stuff about her personality at the age of seven, but rather at the age which she spends most of her time in the spotlight.

Most important part of figuring out who she is: what role does she play in the story?

Probably my favorite piece of character advice is that to every character, they are their own protagonists. The story revolves around each character separately, and if you can figure out how each character sees the world, you have a multi layered story. This also means that each character has lots of different aspects and can play different roles, depending on through who's eyes you look at the story. I mean, if you see the world through Lex Luthor's eyes, Superman is just plain awful.

Mercedes' role in this story is a little bit odd. From her point of view, she is a heroine. She always does the right thing in her situation, and always stays on the good side (which is more than can be said for half the other protagonists). But to all the other characters, whom she is allies with, she is an antagonist. Nobody likes her because yes, she is a rather unpleasant person. I have to write it so you can see why she likes herself and why everybody else dislikes her.

Another problem with writing a character like this is that you don't want your readers to hate her. Readers aren't supposed to truly hate any character, especially not a protagonist. (I mean, the only character I can think of that everybody truly hated was Umbridge from Harry Potter. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was sad when she left. I'm pretty sure everybody in the entire world was frustrated when she returned to the books.)

So. Huh.

Um.

I'll try to figure out what to do about this later. For now, here's Mercedes' character description.

She grew up in a house where she was given everything she wanted. She's not used to not getting her own way immediately, and tends to be impatient and a bit entitled. She's stubborn and it's very hard to persuade her to change her ideas because she's also pretty dumb. She often has a hard time respecting other people and tends to be kind of mean.

On the other hand, she's very funny, usually without meaning to be. She knows full well that she is an idiot, and she doesn't mind when people laugh at her or try to belittle her. She's very protective of other people and she works towards good goals. She gets very focused on her projects and she gets them done very well. Her values are very black and white, and she always does the very best that she is capable of doing. When she loves somebody, she loves them a lot and she makes sure they know it. She can laugh at herself and so she does, often.

Sigh.

Eternal sighing.

There is a much better way to describe her, but I have not found it as of yet.

Okay, enough with the character-y stuff for now. Onto the real mess... the plot.

"This has a plot?" you say with a high pitched squeal. I say nothing, and merely stare at you in terror and confusion. Was this supposed to have a plot? Oh man, this was supposed to have a plot. I forgot. I'm a disaster.

All weeping and gnashing of teeth aside, chapter 1 actually has a very simple and easily understandable plot. Ready for it? Here it is.

Wow, that's such a simple plot.

TOO BAD I CAN'T WRITE IT COHESIVELY.

Seriously, my telling of this simple plot is terrible! It makes very little sense, and it's hard to follow the narrative! When you realize it has the simplest plot in the entire universe, it's really frustrating because it does not read well or simply at all. 

That's all I'm going to say about that for now, because that is all that matters.

So. Here we have, at the end of this long critique, a list of the stuff that needs to be fixed:

• opening scene is dull
• main character is completely unlikable
• all supporting characters are lifeless
• poorly worded sentences
• poorly laid out and foreshadowed plot
• confusing

Draft Two, which hopefully combats some of these issues: 

Seattle, Washington (Year: 2005)

Mercedes was in a foul mood. It wasn't particularly uncommon for her, perhaps-- at seven years old she remained undignified to the degree that she continued to throw temper tantrums regularly.

This had been an unpleasant Monday. The little terror had decided at breakfast that her brother had been given the choicest pancakes at breakfast. As the day went on, she also realized that he'd been given extra strawberries and whipped cream as well. She moped about the house, snapping at the slightest provocations as her temper grew more and more rotten.

Travis, age two, was a very fat baby, and possessed an impressive ability to eat whatever was put in front of him. Still, this accusation was no doubt nothing more than Mercedes' jealous heart inventing new excuses to further injure itself. The baby had been an unwelcome addition to Mercedes' home and she treated him accordingly. She'd had a mere five years to soak up her parent's limited affections before he'd arrived, and she resented his dual status as an adorable newcomer and the first-born son. What little she knew about compromising had been tossed out the window. She was a spoiled brat.

Her parents were oddly oblivious to their daughter's bitter attitude, as they were oddly oblivious to most of her life. The circumstances that surrounded their son's disappearance would later be indirectly traced back to the Mrs., who on that fateful Monday afternoon forced her children to sit together and play with Legos.

As a general rule, Mercedes refused to play in the vicinity of her brother. However, Legos were a special occasion. The plastic bin they were kept in usually resided on the top shelf of the pantry, far from the floor where they would look messy and get vacuumed up. It was only taken down when company was coming over and Mercedes' mother wanted her to stay quiet and out of the way for a little while. Mercedes loved Legos, and so she grudgingly sat down next to her brother and began building an armada of spaceships. Travis, contented and perfectly quiet as usual, sat next to the box and watched her, drooling on himself.

Her father arrived with a guest, and the house filled with polite chatter instead of the whining of Mercedes' voice. She stayed on the floor, as did Travis, and they both ignored how friendly and engaged their parents were pretending to be.

After building half a dozen little uncreative aircrafts, Mercedes scampered back to her room to find a suitable space dock. Her bedroom, like the rest of the house, was decorated with minimalist style. Her mother had filled the room with princessy playthings (a doll house, a tea table), which Mercedes appreciated but rarely used. Through the years she'd learned to make do with her meager assortment of toys, and had figured out that pretty much anything could fly if you threw it. Returning to the living room with a large fairy-tale anthology (that was just the right size to work as a mother-ship), she was horrified to discover Travis with not one but two of her carefully constructed spaceships stuffed in his mouth. He clenched one more in his hand, and had somehow managed to get a thick layer of saliva on the whole fleet. Of course her monstrosity of a brother had waited for her to leave before striking.

Mercedes went absolutely ballistic. All her anger boiled up inside of her like magma inside a volcano, made hotter by the terrible mood she'd been simmering in all day.

She left the two in his mouth, but she yanked the third out of his fingers. Next, she tore his stuffed rabbit away from him, using it to wipe up the drool. It was futile, as the child only had the rabbit in the first place because he liked to use it as a chew toy.

"What is wrong with you?" Mercedes screamed, her little voice shrill with disgust and frustration. "I hate you! I wish you'd never been born!"

And she really wished it, too. It was a very bad Monday.

"Mercedes Grace Brown! Stop that," her mother said, ducking her head into the room. Her lips were thin, her face beginning to turn slightly red as the conversation slowed in the other room. "Why are you screaming? What's the matter?"

She stared at her mother with big brown eyes, completely baffled. Her mother stared back, her anger slowly melting into a matching expression of confusion. Mercedes felt very odd, like her insides had been taken out and she was hollow on the inside.

"It was nothing," Mercedes said finally, looking down at the rabbit in her hands. She wondered why she was holding such a disgusting thing, which seemed to be covered in some kind of gross sticky liquid. It felt important, but she didn't know why. She looked back up at her mother, who rolled her eyes and turned away.
"Dinner's almost ready. Why don't you take your brother and go wash your hands?" she suggested.
"My brother?" Mercedes asked, glancing around the empty room as if she'd find someone there. There was a pause.
"I don't know why I said that. That was silly of me," her mother said, looking even more baffled. Mercedes really didn't feel quite like herself, and she quietly dropped the rabbit and washed up her hands.

"Hello, Mercedes," the guest said, as the four of them sat around the table. Mercedes said nothing, but the man continued. "Where's Travis? Isn't he around here somewhere?"
"Who?" Mr. and Mrs. Brown said in unison. That same confusion momentarily swept over their guest's face, and then cleared.
"Oh, I'm sorry. I was mixed up." he said, and they continued chatting.

Mercedes just stared at the place set next to her mother's chair. For some reason they had a baby's high chair at that place, with a little bowl of spaghetti. Mercedes couldn't imagine why.

Later into the meal, even the high chair became nothing more than a blurry memory.

If nothing else, I think the plot makes an itsy-bitsy teeny-tiny little bit more sense in this version. Mercedes is still pretty unlikable, but the supporting characters all have a bit more going on. (Which kind of makes them unlikable, too. Oh well.)

Also, I added a lot of words to the word count, which is always nice. (I think it was somewhere around five hundred words-- which, considering the fact that this is still really topographical and not-very-well explored, is pretty impressive.)

*also technically I haven't been thinking about this for twenty seven years since I have only been alive for a mere seventeen years.

character design: graphic novels vs. novels

(First off: I never claim to be an expert on stuff like this, because I am in fact the opposite of an expert.)

(Secondly, this will be illustrated with a lot of random character design sketches for one of my graphic novel characters, a short and very baby-faced twelve-year old boy named Orwell. Stuff to know about him: he's a pompous little grouch and I am really, really bad at drawing him.)

(he's the shortest one. he's also the baby of the family.)

So, today I will be blathering on about two things very dear to my heart: graphic novels and character design.

You definitely already have some idea of what character design is, because you aren't dumb. I trust you guys. I like to think I, too, am similarly not dumb, but literally every single time I begin drawing a character my brain goes: "WHOA WHAT IS THIS??? CHARACTERS? PEoPLE? DESIGHNSHAAAAAAA!"

I mean, that's... pretty ordinary... for my brain... but anyways.

Probably one of the weirdest things about creating this comic (and FYI everything about creating the comic is one of the weirdest things) has been the difference in how things are important.

Like, here's a (subjective) list of what isn't of supreme importance when you're explaining what your character looks like in a novel:

• clothing
• hair color, eye color, and colors in general
• exact height and weight, and how that compares to every other character
• most fact-y stuff in general 

And here's a (subjective) list of what is exceedingly important for you to know when you draw a character in a graphic novel type setting:

• clothing
• hair color, eye color, and colors in general
• exact height and weight, and how that compares to every other character
• most fact-y stuff in general

 (Pro tip: I totally just copied and pasted the "stuff that isn't important in writing" list.)

I'm not saying that I think knowing all that facts-y information-y stuff is useless for you to know when you write your novel. Far from it. But when you write a novel it isn't important for your readers to know that your character is 6'5" tall, 235 pounds, brown hair dip-dyed with black tips, green eyes, always wears jeans, and is about seven inches taller than his sister. I mean, sure, some of that information is pretty important or interesting but nobody is actually going to remember the exact numbers. (I dare you to minimize your browzer right now and try to remember that whole description. I dare you.)

Seriously. 6'5"? Who cares? Even I don't really care, I couldn't remember the number and had to look it up in my handy-dandy character file. A hulking giant of a teenager with hands the size of dinner plates and hair that looks like it was cut with a weedwhacker is, in my laughably non-professional opinion, way more interesting.

(And yeah, I just used one of my own characters as an example. I'm so sorry. I try not to do that.)

I think probably my favorite rule when describing characters in writing is this: first describe their most interesting features, and later add factual information in a way that makes it important.

(Am I good at this? HaHAHAAHAHAHAaa no)

Not so with graphic novels. With art, you aren't going to be seeing any numbers and descriptions at all, so for the artist to know what they're doing in the whole height/weight/hair color thing is exceedingly important.

Also, yeah, my pet peeve when it comes to describing characters: detailed descriptions of clothing. I don't mind if somebody mentions in passing what their character is wearing, but I see so many people who describe their characters' clothing in minute detail. That kills me a little bit inside. Clothing is very rarely actually important to plot or characterization, and paragraphs devoted to the colors and patterns of a character's shirt just... it just sort of hurts me.

But that's just me.

And actually, clothing is very important from a visual standpoint, and is thus very very important in the character design of a graphic novel character (which, by the way, is why there are like a billion drawings of clothing design in this blog post. Sheesh, so many clothes).

(Colors are also very, very important in graphic novels, because colors are one of the central aspects of artistic composition. You don't use the same sort of artistic composition in novel writing, so they're pretty much completely unnecessary. I mean, I think it might be nice for you to describe your character's hair color (because we are visual creatures and colors are important to us), but if you don't mind me going back to this angry rant, I'd be much more interested in a big muscular girl with a smooshed nose that in a girl with a blond wedge-cut and green eyes.

Let me attempt to further clarify what I am thinking. (Ugh the amount of times I use that sentence is alarming.)

When you read any story, you are most likely planning to develop a relationship with the characters. It's really hard to stick with a group of characters you don't care about, and I find that if I am reading something and I don't know anything about the characters when they are introduced, I don't keep reading.

Novels are all made out of words. Appearance isn't going to capture our interest immediately, (unless there are special circumstances), so I'd say my best bet while writing is to give each character a distinct personality the second they are introduced and leave their appearance until later.

Graphic novels are opposite: they're mostly constructed with pictures, so the very first glimpse you're going to get of every character is one of their physical appearance. In the typical format of a graphic novel, it is very very hard to actually let every character demonstrate their actual personalities right away. You have to make sure your readers are interested in your characters based on their appearance alone.

Notice: All character designs really are completely about personality. The design you show in a novel must absolutely develop the character further. The design in a graphic novel must absolutely develop the character further.

I don't know, I probably have way more to say, but I'm so disorganized that it totally doesn't matter.

Basically: Everything you share about your character needs to develop him in the medium you are using. You're only going to have a few thousand words to share entire lives and words: make them count.

Maybe I'll post some design forms or something? Nah, I have no idea. I'll just end the post here while I still have a tiny bit of dignity left. (My posts are completely made up of word salad, have you noticed?)

(Also, I may be terrible at drawing Orwell, but he is really fun to draw.)

The House Game: what it is and why it is awesome.

I'm a character nut. There, I said it, the end.

I tend to get really excited about things in general, and since I'm super addicted to my characters sometimes I just have to talk about them for five hours straight. It is little surprise that I have no friends.

Okay, actually I have one friend. We haven't lived in the same state for several years now, but she never seems to mind me talking to her for hours and hours and hours about how thick X character's eyelashes are. I love her. She's the best.

Anyways, last year I invented this game which I creatively called "the House Game". It requires two people-- one to describe a house in minute detail, the other to guess things about the person or people who live there.

Guidelines:

• Pick a character.
• Describe their house/living space in detail, but not telling anything in particular about the people who live there. (like, not how many people live there or the genders or anything.) 
• Give this description to a friend
• Cruelly force them to describe who they think would live there. Preferably in detail.

Here's a round I played with my very lovely friend (who, by the way, always lets me do the house describing). This also happens to be the very first round we ever played.

(picture taken from my guest article on the blog Nevermore November)

My description: a little single-wide trailer with a porch, with a small back yard where there’s a sizable vegetable garden. The inside of the trailer is cramped and cluttered with books, notebooks, cups of pens, and random weird knick-knacks from around the world. there are rugs of different sizes and textures all over the floor, along with a love seat and a small wing-backed armchair. the porch has two mismatched plastic lawn chairs, a cigarette pan set on top of a wooden produce crate, a really weather-beaten rug, and tons of hanging plant baskets and window boxes tomatoes hanging over the railings. there’s an enormous, stereotypical hippie VW van with bumper stickers parked outside. there are two pairs of rain boots on the bottom step to the porch.

My friend’s interpretation: A little white trash, kind of earthy and hippieish; vegetarian; someone who travels a lot and can’t throw anything away; there are two pairs of boots, so there are two people. I like to think it is a mother and child. The daddy left them, and the mother is kind of flighty. The kid is about six or seven, a girl. They’re always on the road, going somewhere and doing something cool and having adventures and making the best out of things; they sell a lot of things at the farmer’s market;


Okay, I won't tell you what my friend got right here: suffice it to say that most of it was right. (in fact, she only got two facts wrong. TWO FACTS. TWO!)


Now that I have laid out the rules of this little game, let me rant for a minute about why I absolutely adore it.


Reason #1: Descriptive Writing

I have never really been a descriptive writer. If anything, I suffer from "this is what happened the end" syndrome, without giving any thought to settings or other descriptive... stuff.

I always kind of thought descriptive writing was sort of boring and dumb. Writing these houses gave me a different perspective on that.


I write about them with such a specific image in mind. I know everything about the people who live there. I know their names and how they dress and what they eat, and I know everything that ever happened to them. (Reminder: I am a character nut.)

Picking and choosing what details to incorporate into the paragraph is weird. I pick the stuff that feels right to me-- I've found things tend to work out best that way. I keep it all factual. And, as my person eloquently put it, the house description should work like a word problem: everything that is said is important and helps you figure out something you need to know. No clutter. You should be able to easily pick out the information you need and solve the problem.

I'm not there yet (ha. sigh.) but I think that is a very interesting and good way to look at descriptive writing, and the House Game has been helping me learn how to do it.


Reason #2: You Get Heaps of New Info

When my person and I play the game, she's pretty amazing. She gets an incredible amount of very specific information right. On the one hand, it is fascinating to see that. I've watched in awe as she's accurately figured out things like "teenage child, lives with father, parents divorced" and "currently works in blue-collar job but has always wished for a literary career" and "one of them is a werewolf". It's really fun and kind of validating when she gets stuff right.

But sometimes things are wrong, and that's possibly even more interesting. Sometimes she gets the relationships just a little bit backwards, and character roles get flipped. That's still fascinating because she still gets the relationship mostly right. Every now and then she gets something completely wrong, although that is quite rare. I love seeing how she messes up, because you can really see how with the information that I added one would draw certain (wrong) conclusions.

It raises questions that I hadn't thought to ask. Things are worded in a way I hadn't thought about before, and gives me insight in my own head. It's a little bit like getting a second opinion.


That's all I wanted to say.

If anybody wants to give me their house descriptions, I'd be happy to try to guess stuff. (I'm really bad at guessing, but hey! I'm free!)

spotlight: urban barn room planner

My friends, I present to you the most magnificent of house websites. That's right: the famed Urban Barn Room Planner!

Being the amateur graphic novelist person that I am, and having absolutely zero abilities in the fields of architecture and background drawing, this room planner thingummy has been unbelievably helpful.

Even though I still suck at architecture and drawing backgrounds, now I have a nice blueprint to work from and so I'm more consistent.

This top room plan is one I made myself using measurements from an actual row house blueprint. It's the upstairs of the house that three of my main graphic novel characters live in. Prior to making this beautiful blueprint, every single time I drew a background in this house the furniture was in a different spot. The only reason was that I couldn't remember where the furniture was actually supposed to go.

The bottom room plan is for another one of the main character's houses; he lives in an apartment, the measurements for which came preprogrammed into the Make Room thing. (YEAH)

I will admit that this thing takes a little bit of time to figure out, and I have not entirely mastered it yet.

To use it for yourself, click the LINK I REALLY HELPFULLY PROVIDED and then click the "enter room planner" button.

YEEEAHHH!

Camp Preparation

I am currently preparing for the wonderful world of Camp NaNoWriMo.

What the heck is Camp NaNoWriMo? Everybody in the universe asks me.  Me: it's just like regular NaNoWriMo... you write a novel in a month. The difference is that normal NaNoWriMo is in November, and Camp is in April and July.

(There's also the minor difference that you can't add buddies, and you can choose your own word-count.)

You can see the Camp website here.

I loooooovve NaNoWriMo, so I do it for all three months. It's sort of dumb, probably, but I get a lot of writing done.

I'll probably write a big long list about the pros and cons of NaNoWriMo sometime around November, when I'm procrastinating on it, but for now, here's a little bit of me geeking out about it. 

I have so many issues with commitment. I have a super short attention span and writing the same thing day after day seems impossible to me. What if I get bored? I'll be stuck writing it for days, or even worse, I'll fail.

Thank goodness, my desire to not fail usually wins out. And thus I end up writing tons and tons of words, finish projects, and am filled with a glowing pride at the end of the month.

I look forward to November all year.

April and July are also good, although I've only won one round of Camp. This is probably because I don't know enough people doing it, so if you know anybody who does, introduce me so I can get really competitive with them. That would be great. Thanks.

What will I be doing this April? Well, gonna be straight with you-- I'm a rebel this year (As I was last November, actually). I have a lot of stuff to get done, and I intend to structure that stuff so that I can get it done and still use the handy word-count tools their website offers.

"Stuff" is codename for my graphic novel comic thing, of course.

This is the way I counted words last November, which was a pretty effective way of doing things:

finish lineart on page= 1,900 words
finish coloring on page= 1,600 words
finish sketching one page= 1,200 words
finish paneling layout on one page= 1,000 words
one thumbnail completed= 280 words
sketch background for one panel= 350 words
script written= amount of words written

I'm a really slow artist so this is kind of a terrifying chart, but I am going to win this April!

This is my word count for last November. Sigh.

(I will be working with a slightly less daunting word count this April, though. I'm thinking 40,000 words. I really need to get stuff done.)