So, as some of you may know, I got a new job recently, and consequently needed to delay the release of Roots interlude 1.
As of today, it's up ([read it here]), and as you'll see, it's quite different from anything I've published before.
So, as some of you may know, I got a new job recently, and consequently needed to delay the release of Roots interlude 1.
As of today, it's up ([read it here]), and as you'll see, it's quite different from anything I've published before.
Whew! This is going up late.
This was a difficult chapter. It was pulling teeth every stage of the way, from getting the illustrations done, to alignment, but somehow, I managed to get it all done on schedule.
I can't account for why /illustrating/ it was so difficult--except maybe that of the early drawings, some were so /nice/ that my standards for myself shot up, and I struggled to meet them. (I did meet them, ultimately.) I think by far the bigger reason the chapter felt like such an uphill battle was the crowd scenes, which took a couple hours to illustrate, nearly as much to clean, and were a massive alignment time sink.
I think that's the only big one.
I also have the first interlude up, as of yesterday, so I'll be posting another update today. Stay tuned.
The process of making Emil's first chapter went much smoother than Jwa Fyair's did.
One reason for this, which should not be underestimated, is that this chapter is technically a remake of the second demo chapter. I'd already thought it through, and executed it, and I was even able to re-use a few illustrations.
However, I think that my process improvements between the previous chapter and the latest made an even bigger difference than that.
With this chapter, I all but abandoned the "completion first" experiment, in favour of making the first draft something I could be proud of.
I was still left, when that draft was done, with the nagging feeling that the work wasn't good enough, but a few small edits were enough to settle the fear completely.
Having a storyboard & detailed plan for illustrations let me choose exactly the illustrations I wanted upfront and not waste work.
I'll admit, I cheated on this part. I spent spare hours throughout the weeks before starting the illustration proper working on a storyboard for the chapter, rather than starting this at the beginning of the allotted two weeks. Having this resource helped me tremendously, but interestingly, I found I consulted the catalogue of verbal descriptions of each image that I made after the storyboard was finished more frequently than I did the storyboard, itself.
I think what I needed, more than a visual plan of the chapter, was any plan to work from, at all.
I could probably work as easily from verbal descriptions, from no storyboard at all--but I think there's value in capturing visual ideas visually, first. At very least because iteration helps a drawing. The first thumbnail can tell you a lot about what will and won't work, that words wouldn't have even explored.
Doing a thorough edit of the chapter prose immediately before hooking it up let me work on the edits when I was already focused.
I've come to really appreciate an iterative approach to writing.
To make each chapter the best that it can be, it's crucial to seize that final opportunity to edit--especially in a serial.
I've tried making that edit at two other places in the chapter finalization process--as the first item, and as the last. Neither, I've found, is something that really works for me. If I start with the edit, then I'm not /in/ the chapter yet. It feels like a /barrier/ to the work getting done, rather than something useful and fulfilling. At the end, the edit is just more work, with the prose now being in two places (the sequenced story and the prose draft) instead of just one. Moreover, I tend to get impatient at that point, and then the edit just doesn't happen.
But I find there's naturally a lull in the process after the illustrations are scanned in. Cleaning them takes maybe half a day, and I like to start hooking them in on a new day, so I tend to have an afternoon with nothing much to do. For Emil's first chapter, this turned out to be a great place to start the edits. I was already deep into thinking about the chapter from three days of illustration, but I wasn't so deep in the prose that I couldn't see it for what it was.
The first pass over, I worked with a goal, in this case, of bringing more memories of his parents into the initial chapter. That worked really well. It's probably a good policy to always pick a goal or two for the chapter before launching in. Aimlessness breeds idleness, after all. After I'd done those larger edits, I printed the chapter out and read it with a red pen, picking out parts that didn't feel right; didn't flow right; didn't sit right.
And it worked great!
Illustrating first let me do the aligning/sequencing without interruption.
It might be more accurate to say, "illustration immediately after planning" was the approach I took.
Last chapter, I repeatedly had to stop sequencing, illustrate something, then go back and realign a bunch of things. Not ideal. So, illustration /definitely/ needs to be done before sequencing/alignment starts (should have been a no-brainer, but somehow I guess it wasn't).
This time, I prioritized getting all the illustrations done in the first couple of days, and it helped /so much./
Illustrating isn't the most tedious work of the job (that would be alignment), but it is the most cumbersome. For everything else--aside from the live instruments in the music--all I need is my laptop, and I'm set. But illustration wants paper, watercolours, ink, thus, a drop-sheet ... Just the setup of it is enough to make me want to avoid it, no matter how fun the work itself may be.
Always warming up/loosening up before an illustration session let me draw faster and with more character.
The difference with this is honestly unreal.
Please, for any readers who don't do this already, start.
Before any illustration session, but especially something finicky, detail-extensive, or time-pressured, draw something fast, loose, and wild before you start work on the project.
I would say that my adoption of this practice is singlehandedly responsible for the jump in illustration quality between this chapter and the last, but the next point contributed, too.
Using fineliners made illustration effortless
For Jwa Fyair's first chapter, I illustrated in a fifty-fifty mix of ... dip pen, and ... black ballpoint.
Which makes no sense at all.
I started in dip pen, naturally.
Now, I love my dip pens, but they're cumbersome. Between the extra setup/teardown of having ink and water out, and getting nibs clean and dry in the end so they last, and the extra care they take to keep from smudging while wet, they're just a lot of extra work.
When I needed supplemental illustrations, and I had to just /get it done/ I switched to drawing with what I had on hand--which happened to be ballpoints. /Bad/ ballpoints.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the ballpoint fought with me far worse than dip pens ever did. The struggle to get a nice line out of a tool that was not made for illustration took a major toll on the art. Illustrations became stiff; lines, laboured; stilted.
This time, I happened to have my old friend, black fineliners on hand, the day I started illustrating, and I was amazed at how easily and fluidly the illustrations came out.
The lesson here: be smart about the tools you use.
Draw with crap materials when you have to--but when you don't have to, don't. And especially, use good materials for the good draft, if you can.
On the other hand, the tools you use for your standalone illustrations, when the calling of the art is in the image itself, may not be the right tools to use when you need to churn out image after image on a deadline--for comics or animations, for instance. There's things you can't beat dip pens for. For me, for now, The Roots We Grew and Severed is not one of them. When fast and consistent is what you need, choose tools that make the illustration of an individual image effortless.
Composing music in midi first, then playing along, let me make sure everything lined up correctly from the start.
This was a proposition from last time that worked exactly as I hoped it would. Music went way faster this time.
Drawing every storyboard panel with the same level of finish/detail made storyboarding take too long.
I think storyboarding was good, but I need it to go a lot faster and easier than it did.
I don't want to cut the detail too much, because there were a few places where having it to reference was incredibly useful.
A few, I'll repeat.
Most of the storyboard frames, I barely looked at after consulting them to build the sprite catalogue.
This is a part of the process that probably needs a few more iterations of experimentation. For the next one, I'll try cutting the size of each panel in half, down to maybe 1.5"x1.0"ish.
Being done nearly a week before it was time to publish, with only writing to do made me waste entire days.
Lack of time pressure was the bane of this chapter, honestly.
I don't do well with that "what if there's not enough to do?" feeling.
Seriously. Shuts me down. I sit in a heap of anxiety and give myself a worry headache and get nothing done.
It's a little ironic, but to keep my stress down, there can't be lulls in work. There can't be flex time.
And it appears, from last week's evidence, that this means I can't schedule the last few days of a chapter allotment for chapter writing. Doesn't work. Not totally sure why, but this time at least, it resulted in abject misery.
If the chapter writing is going to get done, it needs to be scheduled in a more routine way. Spending an hour a day, every day, would probably work a lot better.
Allotting the entire first week to illustration let me waste entire days
I gave myself five days to do all the illustrations for the chapter.
And that was way too much time. So, cue panic, of course. I spent two days in bed totally out of it. (Actually not sure how causal that was, in retrospect. Hmm.) But then I worked until 21h00 on Friday night and got it done.
So, let's schedule only 3 days for illustration this time. That was about how long it actually took.
I think I'm definitely learning more about how to do this kind of work.
This chapter, over all, has been a massive success story.
I think it's entirely possible that in time, I could learn to do these chapters /much/ faster than one for every two weeks--which is a big relief, because I'm going to have to get a real job, too, at some point.
I'll try to pace myself for now.
As of 24 August, I have a basically complete version of The Roots We Grew and Severed, chapter 1, illustrated, scored, and hooked up, ready to publish.
The process was clunky; rocky; and took me at least forty percent longer than I'd planned, but I'm happy with the result--and I learned a lot.
Let's back up for a second. We're missing some context here.
I sometimes like to say that I've written "a couple of novels". More accurate would be to say that I've written three and a half unconnected, very rough first drafts, and that I'm stuck on all of them. Every single one of them needs at least one major rewrite before I'm willing to let it see the light of day, and until recently, I have had next to no idea of how to do that.
I've identified two problems with my process that are repeatedly causing me to get stuck after writing the hacked-together first draft:
First, I don't know how to edit. I know how to copy-edit--fix grammar and wording; maybe rewrite a scene or chapter here and there--but I do not know how to step back, look at the project as a whole, and fix the pervasive problems.
Second, my first drafts are much rougher than I'd like them to be, and often fail to capture some of the ideas, feelings, and themes that I was most excited about in early planning.
I think these problems share a solution: Learn how to plan. So that's what I'm doing.
I'm about to start the rewrite for The Roots We Grew and Severed, and since I am also going to be introducing the third POV in this run through, the rewrite should be a fairly even mix of editing, and adding brand new material.
I'm in the last stages of planning for this next iteration, and I think I've finally got a system that's going to work for me.
Let me show you what I'm doing.
Regardless of what organization system you choose for your planning process, you want to have one central place for all of your planning documents and notes, and it needs to be structured in such a way that you can quickly find whatever piece of information you need. In the end, that's what's important.
It's been a while since I've given an update here, but rest assured, I have been hard at work.
I have made 2 demo chapters, the more recent of which is available here.
The audio sequencer is working exactly as intended, and I have made several improvements to the engine since the time of last writing, including the additions of full screen mode, and the ability to undo a page turn.
The most important piece of news I have is my realization that the project I have been calling "The Beast in the Ethos", is not one novel, but several--probably 8. I am pulling the "prologue" stories into the project proper, as novels in their own right. The first of these novels, titled, The Roots We Grew and Severed, has a prose first draft 70% complete at about 60000 words. I am currently making some high level revisions, and getting ready to power through the rest of the first draft, so I can start the next phase of the project.
I've had several issues with Roots, mostly relating to planning, and all stemming from the fact that at the outset, I believed this novel was a short story.
Because of this wrong assumption, I did not follow the planning process I laid out for the project proper, and instead worked from only a very loose, high level plan. As a result, my first draft so far is much messier than I would prefer for a project I plan to work up to releasing as a serial.
I'm not concerned yet, however. A large part of my intent with Roots has been to test out and perfect my process, so that by the time I finish it, I can maintain a steady release schedule without major disruptions for the rest of the process.
On the process note, let's talk about planning.
I started my planning process by planning what I believed was the main body of the story (what has become the second half of the series), from a high level, end to end. My intent was to end up with a fairly complete, scene-by-scene plan for the entire work, which would, in theory, assure that I could put out a first prose draft with a solid, well-constructed structure. It was ... not the funnest thing I ever did, and I did it much more clumsily than I thought I would, but over all, I believe it was a very good time investment.
I wish I'd done the same the first half of the series, particularly the book I'm writing now, The Roots We Grew and Severed.
I made a number of interesting (read: poor) decisions about how to approach Roots. The first, of course, was the lack of scene planning. Also fairly terrible, in retrospect, was my decision to write the three points of view, which took place over the same time, and would be interspersed throughout the final product, one at a time.
This decision seemed to make sense, because it would allow me to become fully immersed in the writing of each character. It did that, but it's also resulted in some structural weirdness for the book as a whole. Which brings me to where I am now.
When I say Roots' first draft is 70% complete, what I mean is, the stories of 2/3 of the POV characters have been told, from beginning to end, and I'm starting on the third. I've taken the opportunity to take a step back, and look at the work from a high level. I am going to do now what I wish I'd done from the start, and look at each chapter in order as I write the third character in. As in, I am going to work on revising chapters from the two existing characters in between writing new chapters.
Before I do that, however, it's time for a second round of planning.
I generally like to re-plan & revisit the existing plan as I begin the editing process, and this step becomes more crucial when the first draft was poorly planned to begin with.
It's always best, I find, to start this process from the very top level, and just note down the general ideas I want to convey with the characters, the setting, and the story. From there, I like to make a checklist of ideas I want to get across, and then map each of these ideas to events and scenes in the story. That creates a nice segue into scene-by-scene planning. The mapping can reveal which scenes are missing, through the ideas which don't come through, and which scenes may not be needed, by the scenes that don't have themes or developments associated to them.
I'm only hoping it goes as smoothly as what I've described. For me, planning is like pulling teeth. I'd always rather dive in and write prose or make illustrations, thank you very much.
In my last post 2 weeks ago, I talked about making a test chapter for the multimedia book project. I anticipated being done a week ago, but sorting out music took me much longer than I thought.
The audio library I'd planned on using turned out to be not very suitable for my purposes, and I ended up deciding to work with the Web Audio API directly.
But after all my fiddling around, the audio system for my custom engine is basically complete. There are some little details left to work out, but the test chapter plays through, and it sounds beautiful.
My main frustration with other audio queueing systems I've used is transitioning to the next track when the current one is playing in a loop. The two typically available options are:
1. start the next track immediately, interrupting the current track
2. wait for the end of the current loop, then start the next track
Option 1 allows us to be very responsive, and update our music immediately for events in our game, but it interrupts the musical experience. Option 2 preserves the flow of the music, but introduces a delay in our responsiveness - and possibly quite a long one, depending on the length of our loop.
Neither of these options appealed to me. I wanted to do something more like
3. wait for the end of the current musical phrase, then start the next track
Of course, this necessitates having some different data.
I decided to save each phrase as a separate audio file, and sequence them dynamically.
Scheduling was my biggest roadblock with that approach. I spent a lot of hours banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to play the next phrase exactly at the end of the current one, with a seamless transition. Finally, just a few days ago, I found a wonderful article by Chris Wilson about using javascript timers to schedule sounds on the Web Audio clock.
After that, I was able to get my "phrase sequencer" working, and I spent my morning today composing music instead of struggling futilely to get sounds to line up properly.
The concept chapter is now very close to done. What's left is mostly engine tweaks.
After a week and a half of frustration, I feel like this is really coming together.