Weekly Update - 218 - 5/13/24 (Patreon)

Welp, didn't get anything posted last week, but I did get a lot of drawing done. Still have a lot of work to do on Comic #2 before I'm ready to post page one, but I'm excited to share it in relative soon-ish-ness! (Less than a year, certainly.) Would you believe that I'm a digital artist who has never before indulged in the wonderful world of custom brushes? Like, what? How did I never use these things before? So yeah, after six years, still learning.

So I think my plan to work on something that's distinctly different from Kiva's story and setting is actually working, because when I sat down last night to work on Page 196, I found it interesting again, and I kept working on it long into the evening. So yeah!

The next character poll is still up, but I feel like everyone who's going to vote by this point has probably voted, so I'll probably close it out by the end of the day.

Who Should I Draw Next? - Round 5! | Patreon

The Ancestor actually ended up ahead with a come-from-behind victory. I'm noticing there's this group of about 4 people who come in right as I'm thinking about closing the poll and they all seem to vote for something unexpected, which has twice now thrown me for a loop. It's good though, because part of the point of letting people vote on who I draw is to help me choose to draw different things!

Now I just gotta figure out what the Ancestor would be doing in a solo image. Happy to hear your suggestions! Being honest, I was really hoping that Secret Mystery Character would win, but ah well. You'll get to meet her soon enough.

Comic this week? Yes! I think Page 196 will be done by Wednesday.

Drawing: Page 196, Page 001-004 (???), Ancestor Bonus Art (probably), and I wanna do something with Quinn's fluffy character Frey.

Playing: V Rising, but I really need to stop, because the game just EVAPORATES time.

Ramble:

I'm a discovery author, through and through. And no, I'm NOT a "pantser" and how dare you for even SUGGESTING I fly by the seat of my pants no matter HOW TRUE that may be!!! I am positive the term "pantser" must have been coined by a "plotter." I like the term "discovery author." Or perhaps "explorer." They're at least a tiny bit more flattering.

In regards to this new comic... I've jumped in with both feet now despite the fact that I know... hardly anything about it. I've done some worldbuilding, laying the bones for what I believe will be the structure of the setting. I've drawn the main character, and I have a pretty good idea of what their story is and how it goes, but while I'm drawing is also when I'm learning things about the character, their relationships and their personality and experiences. As I draw with my right brain, my left brain asks questions. "Who is this?" I'll ask myself constantly, even as I give them form on a page. I'm constantly wondering about what their place in their world is, and how their choices will ultimately shape or change their world and the people in their lives. At a slow trickle, the answers reveal themselves. And pretty often I'll even be surprised by them. I know that Taisuko, for example, has a fierce rivalry with another Undergrounder named Rico. Who the fuck is Rico? I honestly have no clue, but I know Taisuko bears quite a bit of resentment for Rico and that's an interesting data point I can perhaps use later on. Or perhaps not! Maybe it'll never come up. Maybe it'll just be some mysterious bitter tickle at the back of Taisuko's mind that we'll never hear more than a whisper of.

Now all the information comes from me and my brain of course, but it often feels to me as though I'm listening to the character as they tell me their story. I'll just be drawing, and I'll hear them, explaining their situation in their own voice. And their telling of it isn't perfect, either. I still have to listen with an objective ear and separate fact from fiction. And it's kind of through this process that I learn both what the character's story is, and also what their personality might be. What sort of things do they like to talk about the most? Do they tend to overexaggerate their successes and downplay their mistakes? Do they express certain opinions about other characters in their lives? Does what they say to me conflict with something another character tells me? Where is the truth of their conflicting tales? Then, every once in awhile, a character will tell me something that sounds a bit too cliche, or like it was taken directly from a show I watched or a book I read recently. That usually gets thrown out and then I ask to hear a new version of that story.

Occasionally some of my friends will ask for me to give advice on their own creative projects, and I'm admittedly really bad at that. Most of my friends seem to be plotters, or at least they fall further on that side of the spectrum than I do. They'll give me this outline where everything is planned out and they'll describe how they're having trouble getting their character to fit into the plot and I just... can't help. Because I don't KNOW their characters. I haven't met them, we haven't shaken hands and sat down in a cozy mental lounge and had us a long chat over a hot pot of imaginary coffee. That's the sort of thing that goes on inside of my head all the time with my own characters, (usually while I'm staring off into space, ignoring the real world.) I learn my characters inside and out, so I know what motivates them, why they do things. It's really, really hard for me, perhaps even impossible, to try and imagine a character I don't know, and working them into a plot outline I didn't write and can't easily visualize.

I empathize with them, though, because plotting has a very important place in storytelling. Discovery writing is great for coming up with a more character-centric story, I believe, but I don't think an author can succeed with ONLY discovery writing. Discovery authors struggle a lot with pacing, because they often get caught up in exploring all the rich details of their characters and their world that they forget that in a story, stuff is supposed to HAPPEN and things have to move forward. There's an important structure to good storytelling, we've known what it is for thousands of years and it doesn't change much. I sometimes struggle with getting my characters to go along with the plot that I wrote, because every once in awhile I'll need them to do something they simply don't want to do. Then I have to figure out ways to apply pressure to them, take them out of their comfort zones, push them and shove them until they reach whatever feels like a natural breaking point so that they would naturally make the choice to go along with the plot. This leads to pacing issues, perhaps, but I think for me nine out of ten times I'd rather side with my characters over the plot.

Anyway, listen to me rambling on about this stuff like I have any idea what I'm doing. I don't. But maybe I actually do and I just don't know it! Who knows! What's even real, thanks for reading!