It's been a rough semester, but the good sort of S&M type of rough that I don't mind as much, everything that's happened has ended up benefiting me in one way or another. My novel got snapped in half and is now two novels. I have no clue how anyone else would look at it, but it's DAMNED annoying. The snapper was one Gina Frangello, and awesome teacher and really good editor. She pointed out some things in my plot, things I'd been fearing personally since coming up with the concept, but she also helped me restructure the plot and now the book is kind of a completely different one.
The new plot isn't completely finished yet, much to my dismay, and it's different enough where some of the 220 pages I've already written and by some I mean kind of a lot is going to be scrapped. But there's a lot to keep. So sadly my plan of just writing through the winter and next semester is out of the window and I'm going to spend the next couple of week slaving over what stays and what goes while putting the finishing touches on the new plot. What really blows about the whole experience is just that it's a setback, but I'd rather have it happen now than have finished my original idea and have to break that too. Also in the end I'm a lot happier with where everything stands, i'd always been afraid I was writing two different books that'd been sewn together like a pair of terrified and unwilling Siamese twins. Whereas now I have something I'm a lot more confident in and something I can throw my weight behind.
Also, in the past week, a friend turned editor pointed out something to me in regards to Black Dogs which is up to 9 pages now. The first chapter has no major hook; now that doesn't mean it's hopeless just that I fucked up. I'm still kicking myself over it, and I've figured out how to fix it and it'll be fixed by the printing but it's still pretty frustrating. I know this was my first time doing a comic, and I was exited and excitable and ready to go and all but in the big ball of enthusiasm that is me I managed to forget the fundamentals of storytelling. Start with the dead horse in the living room, make sure to keep the reader asking questions, keep it compelling. Somehow all of that slipped my mind, between the rush and the obsession with plot I fucked up. Again, not an irreversible fuckup by any means but it is what it is.
Now that this is in my mind, I will make sure that the mistake isn't repeated in issue 2 and at the end of the day, BD is a giant learning process for both me and Sarah, I'm just hoping that we managed to make some money off our progress, at least that's the hope, and gain some fans. But all in all fucking up is a part of the process and at the end of the day I learned something, which is the most important part of this whole journey, learning and applying that knowledge.
It's the night before Christmas and I'm going to get some reading done, then I'm going to lay out exactly what my plan is for the novel, which also needs to be renamed because of the changes. I also need to pop out a story to submit to Story Week Reader...try and pull 5 publications in a year...now that would be impressive. We'll see what goes down, but for now, I'm out.
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