life of stories
I've been meaning to do this forever. And I sincerely apologize to those of you who watch our various other social networks since I've announced this crap EVERYWHERE else, on our fic LJs and Twitter and Facebook and all that crap. But here it is: Jess and I have jumped in up to our necks in the world of online comics. I feel like something of a horrible person because I'm not actually a reader of webcomics outside of my friends' works and quite frankly, the amount of ANY comics that I actually read is very minimal. I have the attention span of a spider monkey with ADHD so something has to be REALLY DAMN GOOD for me to take notice of it and usually has to hook me really quick or I'm just not interested. However when I DO get interested, I throw myself in completely. Hence nine years of my life being in part dedicated to the masterpiece that is One Piece.
What has been consistent in my life, however, is the need to tell stories. Whether those stories are fandom related or original doesn't matter, it all comes from the same place. It's a huge part of my relationship with Jess and something that has always made us both really happy, this ability to share stories together. I would venture to say that our shared creativity is the strong core of our relationship and happiness. My first stories came out when I was too young to know what I was doing -- I had an imaginary friend named Johnson (yes, I had an invisible Johnson. Oh sweet irony.) who I would make up very elaborate stories about. My father really encouraged this in me. We shared long, continuing stories about two children and their dog... I should ask my mother about this sometime because I can't remember their names. I think they were siblings. Keep in mind this was when I was probably about six. But it had to be hours that my father spent with me, telling stories and letting me guide their outcomes and leading these characters on adventures. It's funny, my dad wasn't an artistic person but he had such incredible creativity in his heart and he never had a second thought about immersing himself completely in play with me as a child. My Little Ponies were my favorite thing in the world and he was the master at giving them voices and walking them across the living room. There was a time that we went to visit an uncle and I remember trying to get him to play with me and being very frustrated at his inability to wrap his head around 'playing ponies'.
I started writing my first real story in third grade. There was so much pride in having a notebook that was specifically dedicated to writing stories in. The first yarn to be put to paper was about a family with four kids who never had enough money to take a vacation, lucky enough to win an all expense paid trip to the Bahamas only to discover a haunted sunken ship on a snorkeling adventure. That one never got very far. In fourth grade, I did finish a story about a girl who had been trapped in a cat's body by a witch and her ploys in saving her best friend from when she was a human from a kidnapping. That one was typed meticulously on the family's Macintosh and was nearly forty pages long. Stand-up comedy became my dream around this time, telling stories out loud to the tune of laughter. Text based games followed, including Aurora12 which grew out of another writing group that started when I was 14. There I met Kara who would be my first love and is still my best friend and who I will be going to visit in a few weeks and meet her boyfriend for the FIRST TIME! (How long has it even been with Mark anyway, Kara? Ten years? O_o) In Aurora12 we wrote intricate stories of OCs in space for years. My fondest young teen memories come from here. My need to be in charge, to OPERATE something, to organize and direct really took hold with A12 -- urges that would later blossom into the need for self-employment and the drive to run my own business.
I planned other stories, made OCs and wrote down pages and pages of notes that never went anywhere. Space traveling stories. Dystopian stories. There was always an underlying theme of being an outcast -- often being something unusual and hated, an anomaly. My Aurora12 character was a comedian and an artist on a world without expression or emotion. I had underground colonies in abandoned cities that saved paintings and comic books from a heartless regime that had destroyed freedom of expression. A girl that saw smiles on dolphins in a world that had medicated laughter out of itself. It often makes me wonder why I identified so much with the black sheep and the underdog when my life wasn't really that bad. I didn't get made fun of as a kid -- but then again, I had a lot of trouble making friends. I guess things haven't really changed, it takes a lot for me to feel close to a person but when I do, it's something incredibly intense. But maybe it wasn't the subversion itself that I was identifying with but rather some desire to be something 'special' and 'different'.
I started to grow up and write fanfiction. I developed a sexuality and learned what yaoi was. I first 'RP'd with Rue, nice sexy Digimon stuff. Jack and I would write from time to time. And when Jess and I had our second chance, everything fell into place.
The last time, a few years ago, I tried to estimate how much Jess and I had written together. It amounted to close to 200,000 words. That was only the things we had posted onto LJ, not including our originals or the many fanfic stories that never went anywhere or the thousands of words we wrote together in GBU. Now we've got the rough draft for a novel done at around 95,000 words, 40,000 of a second novel and 20,000 of a third. We've plotted in groups and with third parties to plan stories. And we've woven worlds together that are almost embarrassingly intricate.
Strangely enough, in spite of this being such a huge part of my entire life, I almost never talk to people about my stories. Even now, I get incredibly humiliated when people want to know about the stuff Jess and I are working on together. I try not to mention fanfic unless I am absolutely certain the person I'm talking to gives half a damn. I'm constantly worried about boring or annoying someone or sounding like some weaboo jabbering about 'my original character'. As a teenager, I kept my writing hobby as close a secret as my sexuality. So it's been something of a challenge to me now that Jess and I have OFFICIALLY started releasing something original. When you want to get something out there to the public, it doesn't help to be sheepish about it.
Mahou Shounen Fight is something that Jess and I had been playing with on and off for a while now but we forced ourselves to set it aside while we worked on the first novel. We finished the novel draft in late February and immediately snatched up MSF again -- and we tore in to that story. The novel is pretty dark stuff and MSF is stupid and silly and over the top so I think it's been really refreshing for us, as much as I love DTD, after a year of working on it so hard, we needed a break. I got the web site up right before we left for Hawaii and since then we've been putting out a comic page weekly. When Jess finishes her school semester, we're going to try to up it to two pages a week. We're having a great time with it and find that we're really driven to make this go somewhere. Even better, it's actually got me DRAWING again.
Our process is this: We plot out story points. Then we either write out scenes or scripts. Then I translate those scripts in to comic layouts and draw them very roughly, essentially storyboarding. Then Jess draws the actual page and I tone and typeset it. We're really playing off each other's strengths well and have been keeping a great momentum by pushing each other on.
The biggest challenge for me? The promotion. At our table, generally lately I end up selling while Jess works on commissioned pieces and it works out really well. We got postcards made for the comic and 'revealed' it at AnimeConji. It was extremely difficult for me to bring myself to offer those postcards at first, to encourage people to look at our original work. But two cons later, I'm feeling much better about it. I've learned to get a feel for customers that might like the comic and when someone makes a purchase and I think they might give a crap, I can hand them a postcard and ask them to check it out. We've got great response so far and god damn am I excited about this stuff.
There's so much happening in my life right now I can't even begin to touch on it right now but it's all good, if terrifying. Jess and I are going places and we're going to be awesome and I refuse to believe anything else.
What has been consistent in my life, however, is the need to tell stories. Whether those stories are fandom related or original doesn't matter, it all comes from the same place. It's a huge part of my relationship with Jess and something that has always made us both really happy, this ability to share stories together. I would venture to say that our shared creativity is the strong core of our relationship and happiness. My first stories came out when I was too young to know what I was doing -- I had an imaginary friend named Johnson (yes, I had an invisible Johnson. Oh sweet irony.) who I would make up very elaborate stories about. My father really encouraged this in me. We shared long, continuing stories about two children and their dog... I should ask my mother about this sometime because I can't remember their names. I think they were siblings. Keep in mind this was when I was probably about six. But it had to be hours that my father spent with me, telling stories and letting me guide their outcomes and leading these characters on adventures. It's funny, my dad wasn't an artistic person but he had such incredible creativity in his heart and he never had a second thought about immersing himself completely in play with me as a child. My Little Ponies were my favorite thing in the world and he was the master at giving them voices and walking them across the living room. There was a time that we went to visit an uncle and I remember trying to get him to play with me and being very frustrated at his inability to wrap his head around 'playing ponies'.
I started writing my first real story in third grade. There was so much pride in having a notebook that was specifically dedicated to writing stories in. The first yarn to be put to paper was about a family with four kids who never had enough money to take a vacation, lucky enough to win an all expense paid trip to the Bahamas only to discover a haunted sunken ship on a snorkeling adventure. That one never got very far. In fourth grade, I did finish a story about a girl who had been trapped in a cat's body by a witch and her ploys in saving her best friend from when she was a human from a kidnapping. That one was typed meticulously on the family's Macintosh and was nearly forty pages long. Stand-up comedy became my dream around this time, telling stories out loud to the tune of laughter. Text based games followed, including Aurora12 which grew out of another writing group that started when I was 14. There I met Kara who would be my first love and is still my best friend and who I will be going to visit in a few weeks and meet her boyfriend for the FIRST TIME! (How long has it even been with Mark anyway, Kara? Ten years? O_o) In Aurora12 we wrote intricate stories of OCs in space for years. My fondest young teen memories come from here. My need to be in charge, to OPERATE something, to organize and direct really took hold with A12 -- urges that would later blossom into the need for self-employment and the drive to run my own business.
I planned other stories, made OCs and wrote down pages and pages of notes that never went anywhere. Space traveling stories. Dystopian stories. There was always an underlying theme of being an outcast -- often being something unusual and hated, an anomaly. My Aurora12 character was a comedian and an artist on a world without expression or emotion. I had underground colonies in abandoned cities that saved paintings and comic books from a heartless regime that had destroyed freedom of expression. A girl that saw smiles on dolphins in a world that had medicated laughter out of itself. It often makes me wonder why I identified so much with the black sheep and the underdog when my life wasn't really that bad. I didn't get made fun of as a kid -- but then again, I had a lot of trouble making friends. I guess things haven't really changed, it takes a lot for me to feel close to a person but when I do, it's something incredibly intense. But maybe it wasn't the subversion itself that I was identifying with but rather some desire to be something 'special' and 'different'.
I started to grow up and write fanfiction. I developed a sexuality and learned what yaoi was. I first 'RP'd with Rue, nice sexy Digimon stuff. Jack and I would write from time to time. And when Jess and I had our second chance, everything fell into place.
The last time, a few years ago, I tried to estimate how much Jess and I had written together. It amounted to close to 200,000 words. That was only the things we had posted onto LJ, not including our originals or the many fanfic stories that never went anywhere or the thousands of words we wrote together in GBU. Now we've got the rough draft for a novel done at around 95,000 words, 40,000 of a second novel and 20,000 of a third. We've plotted in groups and with third parties to plan stories. And we've woven worlds together that are almost embarrassingly intricate.
Strangely enough, in spite of this being such a huge part of my entire life, I almost never talk to people about my stories. Even now, I get incredibly humiliated when people want to know about the stuff Jess and I are working on together. I try not to mention fanfic unless I am absolutely certain the person I'm talking to gives half a damn. I'm constantly worried about boring or annoying someone or sounding like some weaboo jabbering about 'my original character'. As a teenager, I kept my writing hobby as close a secret as my sexuality. So it's been something of a challenge to me now that Jess and I have OFFICIALLY started releasing something original. When you want to get something out there to the public, it doesn't help to be sheepish about it.
Mahou Shounen Fight is something that Jess and I had been playing with on and off for a while now but we forced ourselves to set it aside while we worked on the first novel. We finished the novel draft in late February and immediately snatched up MSF again -- and we tore in to that story. The novel is pretty dark stuff and MSF is stupid and silly and over the top so I think it's been really refreshing for us, as much as I love DTD, after a year of working on it so hard, we needed a break. I got the web site up right before we left for Hawaii and since then we've been putting out a comic page weekly. When Jess finishes her school semester, we're going to try to up it to two pages a week. We're having a great time with it and find that we're really driven to make this go somewhere. Even better, it's actually got me DRAWING again.
Our process is this: We plot out story points. Then we either write out scenes or scripts. Then I translate those scripts in to comic layouts and draw them very roughly, essentially storyboarding. Then Jess draws the actual page and I tone and typeset it. We're really playing off each other's strengths well and have been keeping a great momentum by pushing each other on.
The biggest challenge for me? The promotion. At our table, generally lately I end up selling while Jess works on commissioned pieces and it works out really well. We got postcards made for the comic and 'revealed' it at AnimeConji. It was extremely difficult for me to bring myself to offer those postcards at first, to encourage people to look at our original work. But two cons later, I'm feeling much better about it. I've learned to get a feel for customers that might like the comic and when someone makes a purchase and I think they might give a crap, I can hand them a postcard and ask them to check it out. We've got great response so far and god damn am I excited about this stuff.
There's so much happening in my life right now I can't even begin to touch on it right now but it's all good, if terrifying. Jess and I are going places and we're going to be awesome and I refuse to believe anything else.