So, I'm taking Fiction Seminar this semester instead of one of Columbia's conventional fiction classes and I've been turning in the 30 page chapters I'd written last winter and this past summer for revisions, and due to some rushing on my part, my book is now two books. I've always been really selective with what advice I will and won't take and the major reason I decided to go along with this is because it's something I'd been fearing since I devised the plot in the first place. Despite how frustrating it is to know I need to go back and reorganize the plot and devise new subplots to flesh the book out, I'm happy this happened when it did. It would have been far more frustrating to have finished the book and had to rewrite then.
Thing is, my oversights have made me start to wonder about Black Dogs, or at least it's made me more wary of the plot and in the time between this semester and Spring I'm going to be thoroughly working on the world, the plot and the characters. For once my impatient ass is quite happy that it's going to take so long to get to the real meat of the story. On the other hand, after careful evaluation the fact that Black Dogs and Publicity Tour are such drastically different types of story gives me less reason to worry, also the fact that pacing in comics as opposed to novels is quite different and easier to manipulate.
I'm still going to be working my ass off on the first draft of the novel, it'd be nice to have it by the end of my final semester, but it's unlikely it'll be done by then. I may be able to have the first draft done by the end of summer if I'm lucky, but I probably won't be. Now that the comic is up I'm almost more impatient; everything's going the way I want it to, but as I've felt since I was like 13 everything is taking too long. But as the great Mort Castle once said "it's a cross country race, not a sprint." and given how long it's taken me to get to this point, and how long I've been trying to start a comic and start a novel...I'm actually doing pretty good.
But I refuse to slow down...I'm not sure what I'd do if I tried.
