Way awesome.!

Yeah. I am very glad I gave up on my attempt to color this. Pixel by pixel, and not nearly as good. I was losing my mind.

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I write, I don't draw. I believe my offerings to be worthy but there is nothing pretty where I live. Fair warning.

Thanks! Despite the fact I now see I've FUBAR'd a few major parts of this, I still think is one of the best things I've done since...er, the last time I drew something for somebody else?

Hmm...

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Where I'm at:

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Well, it looks good to me, but in the event that I get a second book finished and we decide we want to go ahead and publish it and the first as a collaborative work, you are more than welcome to photoshop the piss out of it before publication.

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I write, I don't draw. I believe my offerings to be worthy but there is nothing pretty where I live. Fair warning.

Well who knows, if I go the way I'm going just now, we could end up with dozens of pix to choose from. I've decided to stick with Tiff and produce a portrait, as an excuse to work out (finally) how to ink hair properly. Simply an exercise, but a fun one.

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Where I'm at:

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Well, it's not like you are lacking time. I am going to be sidelined for a month for "NaNoWriMo" because if I don't this crazy woman I know is going to beat me until I bleed.

After that it will be all Kyle, all the time, until book two is done. But then I only have maybe another five or six chapter to go on that. So I am thinking probably January sometime to be done with the writing, February for the editing and formating. Probably look into publishing either February or March. Not sure how much art it is going to need, but with graphic novels being all the rage I am going to say the more the better. Unfortunately, I am a realist and probably going to self publish. So color art is gonna be on the front and back, if I try to do any color in the book itself I am positive the print costs would kill the project in it's infancy.

Know what I mean?

I am imagining something like the old battletech books. A picture at the start of each chapter and color art in the front, with a few extra pictures of notable mechs er... characters at the end of the book. That is a lot of drawing though, and I will totally understand if it is more than you are interested in doing.

Anyway, I am really impressed with your work and regardless of whether you are drawing my characters I am interested in seeing more of it.

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I write, I don't draw. I believe my offerings to be worthy but there is nothing pretty where I live. Fair warning.

You know... The way your art style is put together you might consider a "Sin City" style approach to coloring your pieces. This one for example, the shirt, eyes, lips, and tatt might have a bit of color. The rest left black and white. Don't get me wrong, I love the coloring job you have here, I was just thinking you might want to try it sometime and see how it looked for you.

In the INCREDIBLY unlikely event you haven't seen the movie adaptatation for that comic you should by the way. Sin City is pure gold.

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I write, I don't draw. I believe my offerings to be worthy but there is nothing pretty where I live. Fair warning.

I stuck the first 10 minutes of that movie before I gave up on it. I really can't be doing with movies made up of lots of little itty-bitty stories (I think the original 'Heavy Metal' is the only anthology film I ever sat through to the end). But I see exactly what you mean, and I may look into doing a (even more) stylized colour scheme in future.

As I'm not good with 'real' colouring, I'd be happier going for that kind of stylee anyway rather than trying to compete in an area where I'm clearly way out of my depth, and which may well cheapen my linework.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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Where I'm at:

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If time isn't a constraint, I'd suggest putting as much time as you can afford into the editing once the writing is done. Not to suggest that you need massive revisions (I haven't read that far yet - I'm working on it), but you may be amazed.

I finished the 1st draft of my current book inside 4 months, as of last April. I took a few weeks out, went back to it, edited it out of its mind for about 6 weeks.

Shopped it around. No interest.

Tweaked some more. Ditto.

Took it to a professional editing agency last September. They were very complimentary but also suggested massive revisions which basically involved rewriting half the book - a book which I had already pretty much assumed was as good as I could get it.

A year later, 2 more revisions and comments from the agency, and I now have something so far removed from my original, but do much better in so many ways. The point is, the ante always goes up. The last thing you should be with a book is precious about this line, or that bit of dialogue, or a little joke here. If something is superfluous, or not quite right, cut it. I think it was Hemingway who said, 'You never regret cutting anything out of a novel.'

You'd also be amazed just how much you can be willing to lose. And you can find yourself looking at an entire scene you've just slashed and think, "WHy was that there?" or read a passage truly objectively and think, "Nah, this can go," or "I can do this better."

I'd encourage you to forget all about the thing when you've finished it. Come back to it cold after 2-3 weeks, a month, whatever. Then pick up a blue pencil and pick through it line by line, word by word. Don't worry about having to rejig plots, push characters either upfront or into the background, or develop new storylines.

Don't get hung up on grammar and technicalities at that stage. Do that last. It's only polish, and let Word or Lotus do the donkey work. (By the way, in the finished stage, don't leave blank lines in between paragraphs, like you have just now. Indent only the 1st line, and double space everything in 12 point Times. Trust me, agencies and publishers will bin anything that isn't formatted according to standard.)

This, I'm hoping is where I can be really be of some benefit here. To share my experience of professional editors, published novelists and people who work with literary agencies every day. What they view as commercial, what they view as indulgent. Of course, if you self-publish, you can throw out everything I just said, but I think it's worth the effort to do it anyway, to try to be commercial. You can always reinstate those treasured cut scenes for the 'Director's Cut' if you decide to DIY.

And yeh, in the meantime I'll be scribbling away. I've just conceived of a new character for a series of gothic Luis Royo-style pieces, so I'm not going to be slouching. But strangely, the more I have to do, the quicker I get through it. Trust me. I know what I'm doing...

*Lmao*

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Where I'm at:

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Any advice on the publishing side would be great. That said, I need to get enough done to START editing it before I worry about it a whole lot. One thing you will probably notice as you read it is that I wrote this fairly episodic for the most part. If I need to edit a chapter, or even edit OUT a chapter, it can be done with minimal fuss or muss for the most part.

Now, I don't know if that is a good thing or not, but I keep getting compliments on it so I am going to hope it will fly.

How far have you read, anyway?

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I write, I don't draw. I believe my offerings to be worthy but there is nothing pretty where I live. Fair warning.