News

Neil Kleid posted this really thoughtful, wonderful interview with me on Newsarama. You should totally go read it.

Got two of the four Troublesome Pages (there were two at last post; now there are four, though some or all may be cut during final editing…) pencilled and inked since Sunday night. This may prove a bit easier than I’d reckoned.
The other two are going to be an exercise in making talking heads interesting.

Eleven pages done between yesterday and August 16th. That’s eleven pages in just under two months, or just under a page and a half per week. Could be better, could be worse.
I have one more page pencilled, and two more yet to do. These last two are going to be pulling teeth; difficult, pivotal for expression and nuance of dialogue. Whine.
Scanned twenty-five pages last night, because I couldn’t get my head around either page. No matter; any progress is forward progress.
Okay, now it’s officially time to stop pissing and moaning and actually do the work.

Yes, yes, I’m sure you’re all good and tired of hearing me say “New book soon. Soon, I promise.”
Believe me, I’m sick of it too. I’m so sick of saying it that I’m going to bag going to Motor City entirely this year just so that I can stay home and work on the book. Man, am I ready for this project to be over.
It’s chugging along, though these last few weeks have been insane. In the last month, I’ve squeezed out another Del Rey site, went to two weddings and a baby shower, work’s gone insane, and I’ve got three library gigs in the next three weeks. The sked’s a little tight, in other words.
I’m thrilled to find out that one upcoming gig has been cancelled (I was essentially doing a three-hour talk for almost no money, and the organization couldn’t be arsed to advertise, so it was cancelled for low signups. Go figure. Not heartbroken.) and another date’s been shifted so that it happens concurrently with an existing drive, so I don’t have to make two four-hour round trips. Yay. Rest assured, dear readers, I’ll be using that time wisely.
Though I’ve only got a few hours each week to work, I’ve got five pages left to tone in the batch of 12 that I started in August. If I can keep knocking out two a week, I’ll be done before the end of the month. That gives me till my self-imposed Thanksgiving deadline to get them all scanned and up into PDF form for my beta readers.
Whew. Believe me when I say I’m not slacking. But also believe me when I say that cramming a comic into the tiny cracks in your life isn’t easy. I’m tryin’, I really am. Nobody wants this new book done sooner than I do.

Twelve completed pencils. Eleven completed inks. Gonna sit on the last page before inking, think about it a while. Two more, maybe three more ‘pickup’ pages to pencil before this set is done. that means I’m going to go back and flesh out one character’s history with another page of exposition, and give another some qualms about an action, the better to round out the character. Fourteen, maybe fifteen total.
Lordy, am I sick of pencilling. Inking’s a welcome respite, and I’m looking forward to the autopilot of painting. That means audiobooks, conversations, and something a little less than my full brainwracking attention.

So I did a Mouse Guard pinup a while ago, with the intention of surprising David with it at Wizard World Chicago. As you may have read, all hell broke loose and, though Paul did a bangup job of computer coloring it so that David could see what I had in mind, I hadn’t had a chance to get back to it.
Till now. Click for a bigger image.

The character is Gwendolyn, the as-yet-unseen leader of the Mouse Guard. Hey, I had to draw her as a buttkicker, didn’t I? She’s fighting — of course — a green rat snake. Yes, they really do have blue eyes.

A couple weeks back, I also finished the pinup of Scipio from Templar Arizona:

Hot. Tay.
Spike’s posted him in the Templar gallery with her commentary, here.

Somewhere in here, a while back, I crossed the line over my one-hundreth page. The hundreth page is not yet painted, but it is inked, which makes it almost halfway there. There are another twelve pages in this sequence, which, when finished, will put me well over the mark. There’s a ten-page-or-so scene from midway in there (it fits in around current page 70 or so) that I’m waiting to hear from one of my advisors before I start. There’s also about, oh, thiirty or forty pages left in the current plot, I think. So the book may cap out at a nice, respectable 160 pages, plus some gallery stuff and footnoting, so — maybe about 180 pages total.
*squints*
By golly.
I think that there’s a light, at the end of this long dark tunnel.
Hum.
I think once I get this batch done, I’ll take another art break and scan and letter them. Then, I might just start releasing the earlier pages as a webcomic. We’ll see. It may take longer than that.

Since last Wednesday, I’ve pencilled six, almost seven pages. I’m getting a little weary of pencilling; think I’ll take a break and ink for a while. Pencilling’s difficult. Inking and painting are much easier on the brains.

Work’s progressing steadily, now that my family life’s calmed down again. Last week I finished the batch of nine pages that I started the week of July 1. Nine pages in six weeks is still pretty good, but if you subtract the two weeks when I was barely at home and got no work done whatsoever, it becomes nine pages in four weeks, which is some kind of new record.
Last weekend and early this week I banged out the thumbnails for the next 12 pages. This is really good progress, as thumbnails can sometimes take me longer than pencilling, especially in a big choreographed scene like this one. I have to get angles and placement and backgrounds and interaction to all work together, and make sure that everything’s still in accurate position to everything else in each panel. It’s harder than it sounds, trust me. Half the time I lay out these little diagrams — I’ve seen artists who make tiny sculpey mockups of a scene to get everything just so, and others who actually go on location and shoot photos of each angle to get them right. Me, I’m just pulling it out of my ear, and hoping it doesn’t suck.
For the two nights previous, I also banged out a pencilled page. That’s a good pace; a pencilled page per night, and probably 2-3 inked pages a night. I have one or two pages that I’d like to go back and insert, to flesh out a scene, and I think I’ll do those two with this batch, for a total of fourteen. Hm. I wonder if I can do fourteen pages between now and the end of October? I have two weddings and two workshops in between; if I do, it’ll be a serious achievement.