Home
Artists
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register
Partychan Telegram ThePornDude
Home Artists Posts Import Register

Inventory - Lost Omens (Patreon)

Published:
2017-01-20 22:02:00
Imported:
2021-07

Content

Lost Omens is… well. It's a story I've been pecking at for a very long time. For years it was the story I was most interested in pursuing, mostly because it was stocked with characters that I really loved, and lived in a genre that I thought was really fun to write (fantasy action, or as I like to say, "ladies with weird ears fighting stuff"). I was quietly anxious about the story for many years because I didn't know what a story that long looked like, and I didn't know whether finishing something like that was even possible for me. 

So, I set myself towards finishing it. In thumbnail form anyway (the last image is a scan of the thumbnails). It took a few months. For me, that work was more about confronting the fear of it than anything else. The current draft is 703 pages (??? That seems crazy but I just recounted. It's supposed to be four books.) I had two different writer friends that I trust read it. And ultimately… it was a failure. It didn't resonate with my friends the way I was hoping it would. It had some serious problems in the later acts, and didn't ultimately succeed at sticking its landing. It's missing its core premise, or maybe, the core premise isn't clear enough. There wasn't an obvious fix in sight. The problems were big and subtle and hard to pin down. 

That was hard. Putting that much energy into something that you care so much about only to see it fail is very, very hard. It broke my heart! (And then my arms, twice). In the last two years since I've written this I've gone through some significant changes in my life, and I think finally I've achieved enough growth and distance/perspective that I can start to see exactly how this work failed. Or maybe, why I'm not yet the author who can manage it. 

The core I was trying to write is about how one should react to a profound injustice, and how one deals with the deep and righteous anger that accompanies it. It was something I had intense feelings about, but about which I hadn't yet formed a conclusion I could clearly articulate. I think I'm still working on that, and that work (which is basically getting more life experience and a deeper understanding of myself) can and will continue. 

At a higher level, the goal of the work was to explore the intersection of faith and conflict, and about how your ability to hold another group apart as a caricaturized "other" falls apart once you get to know them. I wanted the work to "feel" like a fantasy version of World War 2 (whereas most fantasies take place in a more medieval context). WW2 is something that has such a deep and profound impact on our cultural psyche. I've read and absorbed so much about this conflict in a "reflected" sense. It never impacted me directly, but it impacted my grandparents and then my parents and our cultures, and I do feel affected by that. I'm also interested in showing a world at "total war" - illustrating tangible impacts on the everyday lives of civilians (and how much that sucks) - rather than focusing necessarily on the front lines of battle, or the political machinations of the leaders. I had mixed success in this draft, but my interest in this aspect has renewed recently. 

Finally, the work is very dark and different in tone from most of my other published works. I'm not sure I'm ready to be "a writer who writes like this" and I'm not sure my readership would be receptive!

So where we go from here… I'm not sure. I think whatever I proceed with will necessarily be very different from this current draft, and I'm not sure yet whether it's worth the work it will take to salvage. I think my next step, other than continuing research, is to find a good editor. Finding a talented freelance editor is difficult… especially one who specializes in graphic novels. When you add on top of it that it needs to be someone objective but who I still get along with and can trust, it's a very narrow set of potential candidates. Finding the right person will take time. 

I also think that it may be valuable to get some additional eyes on this piece. Our culture over-prioritizes success, and so has something of a warped relationship with failure. You can learn so much more from failure than success, and I'm eager to learn as much as I can from this experience. 

In a way Patreon is the perfect place for this. Because of its known flaws, it's something that I'm definitely not ready to release publicly, but I'm open to sharing with a group of "beta readers". To be crystal clear, my goal in sharing it would be to gauge how an audience reacts - to find other tangible aspects where the work either succeeds or fails. I don't want beta readers to fix the problems -- or to even try -- I just want to know how the work makes them feel. Do they like the characters, and why? Am I clearly communicating, and where does that fail? Is it enjoyable? 

If you're interested in joining a beta reader group for this work, please let me know! I'll probably start cleaning up and posting it one scene at a time. I might also finish a few of my favourite scenes in full colour as an exercise. Before I was ready to step away from this work, I finished the first few pages. I'll post those over the next few days for $5 Patrons :)

Files

Comments

Anonymous

I've had some similar experiences with long-term projects that didn't turn out well. I did a lot of writing in high school, including a 350,000+ word scifi parody novel, which I loved at the time but now find largely embarrassing to look back on. I started a webcomic about ten years ago, which was initially just dumb skits but I gradually tried to turn it into a coherent story as it progressed, and it didn't work at all. I think you are already onto the most important truth in writing though, when you say that failed projects are valuable learning experiences. I've learned to look at my past projects in that light, and found it very useful. Initially though, I found I had a lot of anxiety to overcome, so maybe it could be helpful to describe what I've learned about that aspect, since it sounds like your anxiety plays a role in your writing process too. I think the hardest thing to get my head around was to stop equating editing your work with "undoing" the work you've already done. Particularly when writing prose, I always hated the idea of going back and changing, or especially, *deleting* passages that didn't work or were otherwise unnecessary. Perhaps because creative projects generally require a significant investment of time, our brains tend to place a disproportionate amount of value on everything produced during this process, especially if you feel like you've had to struggle and work hard to progress as far as you have to that point. Going back to rework things can bring up feelings of failure, and that you've been wasting your time, and that everything you've done so far is ultimately worthless. I first started to overcome this hurdle somewhat by accident, when I was looking back at a short story I wrote a few years ago, and decided it needed a lot of work to get up to the same standard as subsequent stories I was working on at the time. Because I hated the idea of "losing" what I had already done, even if it wasn't that good to begin with, I decided to start piecing together a new version in a separate document, so the first version would be preserved. This probably sounds like a fairly obvious approach to more experienced editors, but for me, it was the first time I really stepped away from that anxiety over "losing" the work you've already done, and it made me realise that even when you are deleting and changing major aspects of your project, you are never actually undoing the progress you'd previously made; quite the opposite, you are building on that progress. And more importantly, when I ended up with a new version of my story that I liked a LOT more than the old one, I began to appreciate editing and revision as powerful tools in the writing process, as opposed to just the tedious process of tiding up grammatical errors and stuff once the "important" work was done. The anxiety over the "loss" of the first draft was replaced with satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment over the final piece. I'm mainly talking about this stuff because of how you seem to regard Lost Omens as a failed project, when it was really only your first serious run at the project that didn't meet your expectations. Sometimes that's how it goes. But a bad first draft is only a failure if it's never improved upon. Once you stop equating the value of that work with the amount of time it took to produce it, you can take a much more positive view, even when looking back at stuff that didn't turn out as well as you had hoped. Instead of wondering whether it would be worth investing even MORE time on what you've already put in to try and salvage the project (implying that you've been wasting your time and risk wasting even more), you can instead say, ok I've got a foundation down, it still needs work but what can I build from here? Or you can pick out the parts of the first draft that you like the most, and view them as puzzle pieces to be rearranged into a more pleasing whole. I think that in order to revise properly, you need to approach the task with a sense of ruthless freedom, to ensure you will be able to chop and change whatever is necessary to produce a superior final product. This can't happen until you overcome the anxiety of losing the progress you've already made. Anyway that's just some stuff I thought about while reading your post, hopefully it is of some use. And if you're looking for beta readers, I'm happy to take a look at it :)

jam
>>3656397

Thanks for your comment, I will reflect on this :)

NJGR

I'm a writer of fiction and creative non-fiction (though mostly the former), besides teaching writing at the college level so keep that in mind with my comments (since that doesn't quite match up with graphic novels). But some of what you said here remind me of a short story I really struggled with, because I was so close to it. The overall concept was good, but my readers were saying it didn't work, and it was with more specific things--characters and their relationships, etc. I had to let it sit for a year before I could get the distance to figure out what wasn't working, but even then, I just had to work on completely re-writing some sections besides writing new ones to fix the things my readers said were bugging me. But not EVERYTHING was new, some scenes had the same words or action, but how I approached them were different, so it was easier than creating it all completely. I don't think you can know exactly where any work is going to end up, no matter how much you outline it, but it might be worth looking at your feedback and playing with what the issues were in those later acts, sketching out ideas (in words or drawing) that could make those stronger, etc. Oh, and since a big thing you're trying to deal with in this text is how to deal with injustice, Dostoevsky might help you, believe it or not! He often had 2-3 characters that represented diverging viewpoints on an issue, and through their interactions, they could emphasize a better way of looking at such a divisive issue. It kept it realistic and reflects how the world works, but also made those viewpoints easier to grasp and connect to (and I'm quite certain Dostoevsky figured out some of what he wanted to say by making these different viewpoints collide--that's how it works for every writer I've talked to or read about). I'm sure you're doing some of that already, but that might help you in finding your core. At any rate, I'd be interested in beta reading this. It's very different from what I have seen from you, but I think it's got solid ideas as a foundation (and I like the look of the art from the first couple pages!). --Neal