Space Camp: Making Page 3 (Patreon)

My agent sent me back a bundle of editorial notes on my first draft and, irritatingly, they all were spot-on and would make the story stronger 😤

For reference:

• Day Two: First Draft (16 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons
• Day Two: Revised (22 pages) 🔒 Comics Tier Patrons

In the original draft, the class begins with a group member stating "I'm scared to say I'm 'quitting' drinking, so I've been calling it my abatement...'  and then my narration takes over the rest of the panel with "Some of my classmates have just completed fresh stints of sobriety and some are graduating from the program today. Others are at their bottom, despairing." The next panel shows me crying with the narration, "I don't know these people. But my tears rolled out of my eyes for them."

Without violating anyone's actual private stories, she urged me to share more of what I heard, to show the despair. It's one thing to be informed "Others are at their bottom, despairing" and another to see someone despairing.

There is a moment in the program that has always stuck with me. I was brand new, so I didn't know anyone yet, and it was another woman's last day. During group check-in she was clearly sad and angry, making a non-commital comment that I don't remember when it was her turn to share. Her friend said something encouraging to her, some "There's a silver lining/things will get better" type of comment.

She broke.

"I'm losing everything." She said. "My marriage, my home, my job..." She didn't go into a blow-by-blow of what happened, but I gleaned that she was in a high conflict relationship with her husband and in-laws, with whom she ran some kind of family business, I guess. To be honest, I had the impression that she had acted erratically and aggressively, she was someone I would have avoided in real life. And my heart hurt for her. 

She was here. She was learning how to change. She was trying to change. 

As a daughter who cut off all contact with her mother more than a decade ago, I fully understand and support people who need to do that. Some damage is relationship-ending, no matter how sorry you are or how much work you put into changing. She caused real harm to her loved ones so they had to remove her from their lives, and also she's a human being in pain who was only ever doing what she thought was right in the moment. LOL, am I talking about the patient or my mom? Honestly, could be all of us! We're all guilty of hurting others to some degree because of our ineffective handling of our emotions.

So, I inserted a version of that experience into this part of my story.

In real life, the woman wasn't weeping, she had more of a sad, simmering anger. And I don't think chronologically this is even when I heard her story. But it serves my book's purpose here. 

I diagonally mirrored the recovering patient to the weeping patient, which keeps the page visually balanced while also physically pushing the latter deeper down the page and into darkness. The airy light blue of the first panel becomes a weight pressing down on the weeper and creates the sense that the black space is being pressed upon by it. Your eyes descend down the page as this person emotionally and mentally tumbles downwards into their dark place. 

There were a loooot of balloons to manage here. I could have kept the weeper's text all contained in one or two balloons, I guess, but I wanted each thing that they were losing to have importance. Each statement is stacato here. You can see above that path I was trying to create with the text direction, although I'm not sure I quite pulled it off at the very end, since it's too easy to read that last cluster out of order. 

What we have now is a look at the group check-in, an example of a patient improving and a patient despairing. We don't know any identifying information about the weeping patient, but we know enough to empathize- which then sets us up for the next page where I have my emotional reaction, myself! 

Don't you hate it when the editorial notes are right? 😤