Back to the Query-go-Round

Once upon a time I finished a manuscript, let it rest, revised it, did everything I could to make it as good as can be, and decided it was worth sending out to query.

I'd done my homework (with the exception of how to create a blinder of a query letter - more on that in another post). I had read the advice of PEOPLE, who had BOOKS of their own. I had searched out people who I felt would enjoy my subject/style. I even waited until there was a social media MOVEMENT based around my genre, that being the #YesGayYA hashtag. I knew what to expect - the greatest authors in the world all receive multiple rejections. It WILL NOT make it through on the first try. I was ready. The publishing world was Johnny of the Cobra-Kai Dojo and I was Daniel-san, ready to deliver a crane kick right to its face.

Then something weird happened.

I got a poor-to-mild response from maybe 3 agents and...I stopped. I gave up on sending out the queries I swore to keep barraging the market with. I can't really explain why. I was prepared for exactly this outcome. I had specifically planned for anywhere up to 50 rejections before I considered giving up.

But I stopped anyway. Why?

I wasn't mad or crushed or anything like that. I wasn't convinced that the world was against me and that nobody could see my special snowflake-diamond-flower uniqueness amongst a sea of HACKS. That's called professional jealousy, or not even in my case - I am not a professional, so technically it's just being a 'stonking great git'. I'm nothing if not acutely aware of how un-special and non-prodigious I am.

That's not to say that I had a crisis of confidence, either. It is possible to think yourself a decent writer that people may want to spend some time escaping to outer space with while NOT believing you're Fiction Jesus, here to save literature from its sins. Joke about cruci-fiction here.

It might be fair to say I had the perfectly natural reaction of 'Oh, I might be doing something wrong, I had better press pause on this process and make sure'. There was no reason that pause had to last a year, though. And it did.

I wasn't idle in that time. I set about creating the comic pages that I've been uploading to this blog, which was fun and I hope to continue. I began work on a new novel which I am almost finished and hope to shop around shortly. I learned to draw. I racked up an absolute mountain of creative development and project options.

But I didn't come back to the novel until now. Why?

I've had good feedback from beta readers and Internet strangers who agreed to critique chapters. That helped. I heard stories of people I'd been following on twitter about their success. Also very helpful. I read a couple of great books that inspired me to try and join the authorship ranks. I also read some terrible ones that I was absolutely SURE I could do better than. Each is equally inspiring in its way.

Still, it all just equates to tiny incidents. There's no one unifying and powerful force that got me back to the email account and pressing the 'send' button again.

There might be one little thing I did, though, that made me feel like I was doing the right thing. When you leave a manuscript for a long time, there's a tendency to come back to it and notice all the little errors and mistakes. Authors often talk about how they went back to some of their early works and could read them, such was their cringeworthy-ness. Time puts distance between you and your own work. You lose that thing in your head that says 'this is the way I KNOW everything goes' and it suddenly becomes 'Hey, dude who wrote this a year ago...how did this go, again?' It's a new perspective on your own work.

And when I sat down to read Crisis Generation again - without a red pen to bully me through the pages, just a comfy chair and a cup of coffee - something weird happened. I wasn't embarrassed. I didn't cringe (much). It wasnt perfect, by any means, but the story was better than even I remembered. This was an MS I could feel comfortable putting forward and saying 'I like this, and I think you will, too.'

So, everyone, my point follows. There's an old saying that no elegant plan ever survives contact with the battlefield. This is definitely true of fiction, and of querying agents. No matter how you think it will go, no matter what scenarios you prepare for - you will still be caught off guard.

It's no good me telling you to keep at it no matter what, though you should. I told myself that. It didn't work. It's no good reading about JK Rowling's 20-odd rejections before someone bit, because JK Rowling is less an author than she is a mythical superbeing from another planet with an alien skill for snatching the attention of entire generations.

All you can do is get on the Query Go Round and see where it takes you. Persistence will help. Belief in yourself will help. Not believing in yourself too much will also help.

The only thing that doesn't help at all is not doing it.

Wish me luck. And go and check out the art post if you haven't already! It's got purdy pitchers in it.


**Disclaimer: Written on my phone. Formatting errors and Americanisations may have happened.

Crisis Generation

This is Dominick Costigan. The Protagonist I've spent the last two years with.

Dom's got a problem.

He lives on a 400 year old generation ship named Cataclyst. He is one of the last teenagers left alive in the universe and will be seventy years old before the ship finally reaches its destination, but that's not the problem.

He's butting heads with his mother - and the majority of the crew, at that - because he won't accept the Doctrine of Redress that Humanity must return to the dead Earth to try and save it. Nothing new.

His crush on a fellow crew mate named Geoffrey isn't so bad, even if it'll never go anywhere and is kind of illegal. His decision to confess that crush to his devoutly Redressionist brother, Prince, was probably a mistake. Still, not the end of Humanity.

Accidentally discovering he is one of the ship's CryBabies - the lab-grown children that help keep Cataclyst's genetic diversity, unrelated to the family that raised him - was definitely a surprise blow, but even that will have to wait.

His biggest problem is not that Cataclyst has just been ripped in half by a violent explosion that's trapped the underage crew in the aft section, far from the adult crew and his Captain father in the fore.

It's not the strange, armed vessel looming outside Cataclyst’s windows that caused the explosion in the first place.

The worst of it is not even that the Redressionists believe the ship has come to tow them all the way back to Earth.

No, the worst of it is that the Redressionist crew that Dom grew up with - friends, family, all of them - knew the ship was coming, let the attack happen, and will kill to make sure the Doctrine of Redress is fulfilled.

  

A freshly torn divide between the Redressionist crew and the unbelievers thrusts Dom in charge of hundreds of young lives, pitting him against the boy he'd always called ‘brother’. Determined to get away from their attackers, he must find a way to get the broken generation ship moving again before their chance to reach a new home planet is gone for good. To do that, he will need to rejoin the two halves of Cataclyst, all the while trying to stay one step ahead of his fanatical brother and his dangerous allies.

Redress would kill to drag them backward toward Earth. Dom is ready to die to make sure they keep moving forward.

CRISIS GENERATION: DIVIDE.

Mitch Sullivan

Hopefully, you get to read it one day.

Conclusions

You've got to feel for writers who set out to create an unforgettable series.

You just know that, one day, that series is going to have to end. And you know that the conclusion to that series isn't going to satisfy everyone.

A little while ago I sat down to plot out a trilogy of YA books. It was going great until I began plotting book three and realised that there was absolutely no way I could ever come to a satisfactory conclusion in the space of one book. I made it a Quadrilogy to cater for the extra story, but the darndest thing happened.

I couldn't plot the final book to save my life.

I attempted it several times over a period of weeks. Every time I decided it was too derivative, it was too sappy, the plot didn't work, I couldn't cover enough ground...at the low point I even played with the idea of making it a Pantalogy. Around then, I knew I was just extending the series so I wouldn't have to worry about a satisfying conclusion.

I come to this post now, almost a year since I first had that problem, having just finished the rough outline of a story I'm happy with. It's dark. It's dark as all hell, and I spare no character the sword. But it harks back to the earlier books and ties up thematic loose ends. It uses the more memorable images from way back in chapter two of book one to tie things together. By god, it even made me cry at one point. That's a good sign.

Why did it take a year? I honestly can't answer. All I know is that conclusions are bloody hard to write. I've got no advice to make it easier, other than don't lose hope with them if you're struggling to get one done. They will work themselves out.

A special good luck to George R.R. Martin, though. How the hell he's going to wrap A Song of Ice and Fire up is anyone's guess.

Sovereigns - Scene 3

It's been a while, eh?

When is lens flare acceptable?

Are there any skilled artists or photoshoppy types out there that can give me an insight on whether or not lens flare is an acceptable thing? From what I understand, lens flare is something of a godwin's law in digital art circles: use it and your credibility is shot.

But is there any leeway?

Take these two images. The first is 'Doctor - the Cyclops Scientist'.

In the future, all science will be done in the dark and look ten times cooler.

And here it is with lens flare added. Is it okay, given the context of a reading light strapped to the man's head?

In the future, all science will be done in the dark with SWEET LENS FLARE and look FIFTY times cooler.

Does it really matter?

At midnight on a Tuesday, probably not, I suppose.

Words and Pictures

I remember about five years ago, bashing out my first ever full length, original novel MS (that I look back on fondly, but with a certain amount of embarassment), I was about to engage somebody to paint a portrait of my main characters. Ultimately, I gave up on the idea, but was about to part with about $300 for a full-length portrait of two characters from a descriptive passage.

One of the unexpectedly great parts about this 'learning to draw' stint I've been on lately has been the ability to create my own concept and character art. This weekend I did some for a lark. Here's some concept paintings for my latest YA novel project, 'Mission'.

'Meph' - A character portrait. Meph is a Cyclops, having dug out his own eye at age 11.

The Titular Character, 'Mission' (left), sits in the room he will call home for the foreseeable future. It's lit only by a set of stolen traffic lights. Meph helps him acclimate.

Mood Lighting

Sometimes a good play around with lighting really pays off. Here's a full-size cell of Alak attacking a guard from one of the upcoming pages that I think turned out quite nicely.

I post it here for no other reason than I wasn't finished the page and wanted to feel more productive.

Down you go.

Quick Thoughts on a Long Process

It's been just over a month since I made the first post about Sovereigns, at which point I had 4 pages ready to upload. I was an utterly green amateur then and, now that I've reached the lofty heights of yellowish-green amateur, I figured I had enough perspective to comment on what the process is like.

First off, this isn't about the creative process or the technical process. That stuff is innate to me, and talking about it will only serve to bewilder people. Besides, if everyone knew about every little shortcut I take and every cheat move I use to get the finished page, they'd rightly declare me a hack. A little mystery is good for everyone.

Second off - some stats, hurled ungracefully:

In 35 days, I have published 17 pages of comic and 1 title page.

This represents approximately 2.5 pages of script.

The script is 26 pages long.

There are 8 completed scripts out of 24 outlined episodes.

With this information, I can infer the following:


Average time to finish an episode:

At 8 comic pages per single page of script, the first episode will be 208 pages long. At this rate, I'll be finished episode 1 in 330-odd days. This doesn't take into account a few different factors, including increased speed as I gain experience, delays from real life interference and delays from challenges as I encounter new technical hurdles. (There are riot scenes coming up. How the fuck do you do riot scenes? I don't know!).

Average time to finish the season:

330 days for one episode. Times 24 for the first season.


If nothing changes, I will be nearly 50 by the time the first season is finished.

Shit.

Estimated time to finish all 3 seasons:

65 years.

 The year 2077.

I will be 91.


Important things to remember:

- I'm getting faster. I can knock a page together in as little as 2 hours, depending on its complexity.
- Currently, I work 48 hours a week in an unrelated, labour-intensive job. If that changes, there will be more time.
- I generally work on the comic for 3 hours in the evening and 4 hours per day on the weekend. Obviously, if there were strong interest in it, I'd have some clear incentives to increase that time allocation. (Note: This sounds like a cop-out, but it's not as much of one as you might think. It's very difficult to turn people down for demands on your time when you have nothing concrete to show for it. One a schedule and an audience come in to play, however, people are more understanding).

And here endeth this post. I really, really want to keep at this comic and so I will. Finishing it sometime before I'm 90 will just be icing on the cake.

Sovereigns - Scene 2

Scene two begins! Same deal as last time - I'll update here as I go.

Rane and Alak have broken out of the holding cells - Now, to get some clothes on.

The Title

The Title Page.

I've finally stopped updating the old post. I'll add scenes as I go, but for now here's the title page.

A good old fashioned noir-ish cell-divided cover :D

See?? I'm doing it!

Draft pages. They're coming up all right!

We're going dark, gritty and storyboard-style up in here.

I have finally finished the opening sequence - it took a while but I quite like the result. If you're curious as to what happens next and you are even slightly inclined to leave a comment, keep in mind that I'll love you forever if you do!

Sovereigns

Exciting news!

I'm going to go ahead and announce that I'm officially taking a (short) break from bashing my head against the wall with agents and publishers and moving on to something completely different.

I'm a frustrated artist at heart, and so I've decided to channel that with writing to come up with a happy medium. Ladies and gentlement, announcing:

Sovereigns is a webcomic, arranged in the format of half-hour TV episodes, and it's 24 episodes long. It's set in the far future. Humans have colonised the galaxy and a war over drug control tore civilisation to shreds. Set in the aftermath of the war, we follow the crew of the Dimity Rane as they fight to survive in a solar system that seems to want them all dead at any cost.

Left to right in the picture:

Prince Alak Hsing na Sao Lak - His title translates to 'Prince Alak Hsing of the Sovereign Ship Sao Lak', but when we meet him he has become famously known as 'The Runaway Prince'. In his desperation, he joined the crew of the Dimity - a move that he almost instantly regretted.


Captain Benedict Rane - Standing cross-armed behind his son, Benedict Rane is an ex-soldier whose life revolves around one thing: the illegal drug, Gratin. He doesn't use it. He doesn't sell it. But he needs it, more than anything in the universe.

Jackson Rane - A 23 year old man that has known little else but crime for his entire life. Suffering from an extremely rare form of terminal illness that he inherited from his long-dead mother, there is nothing his father wouldn't do to keep his last remaining family alive.

Ellie Stillaway - One of the most powerful women in the galaxy and a politician to be reckoned with - or at least, she was until a few years ago. One power play too many saw her ousted and exiled from the Coalition, and more than one or two hitmen set on her trail. In exchange for safe harbour with the Dimity, she is an excellent information broker and intelligence gatherer.


I'm working on episode one and I'm not entirely sure where or when to start posting it, but I will do so as soon as I feel it's ready. The concept painting here isn't really representative of the finished art style and I'm still pretty green and sloppy with the tablet. It'll be a learning experience, but one that I think will be fun.

I'll post updates on my progress and link to any finished material.

If you want to know more/have questions/advice, my e-door is always open. Twitter is probably the best way to get hold of me, though.

See you soon, adventurers.

Vague Outline Syndrome

I've been struck trying to write the same chapter for about a week now. Maybe even longer.

The reason? I am suffering from a peculiar affliction known as Vague Outline Syndrome. It happens when you're writing and the entire chapter summary is as follows:

Tilly is enraged that he would show her such things – didn’t he listen to her at all about her family being cited? She can’t risk it. She storms away.

Tania is sympathetic, but concedes that this is over their heads. He should probably try to forget about this before it gets him in to a lot of trouble.

I could barely manage to wring 1000 words out of it.

I strongly suspect that I've glossed over the entire passage so as to get to the action in Chapter 11. But at least I've moved on. Take that, vague outline! I did what you said.

Now, onward. Someone yell at me until this chapter is done.

Week 2 - Learning to Draw

I decided to teach myself how to draw. It's been a challenge, but I'm hopeful to be able to draw illustrations for a little webcomic style idea I've had.

This was my first attempt at a head:

And this is one I did tonight.

Bring on week 3! More about the comic strip as it happens.

Exciting News...

Time Consuming Novels...

Man, it takes ages to write a novel.

I mean, it might not seem like much while you're doing it, or while you're waiting for new installments in your favourite trilogy, but holy balls it takes a long time.

Just to pick one example out of the blue: God created the world in seven days, and then rested on the eigth. Well, it's been 4.5 billion years since then, and he only managed to put the finishing touches on the bible about 2000 years ago.

And that was with the help of 27 co-authors.

"What the hell was I thinking when I created writer's block??"

Writing. It takes way longer than creating a whole planet from nothing.