Progress Report -- October 28, 2013

Still writing, still waiting.

Three Shamans is going very well, but I'm just about at the one point where I don't quite know what happens. My outline, which is otherwise very thorough, takes a skip. "Our protagonist does this, then something something, then she's onto the next stage of her adventure where lots of important things unfold..."

It's the "something something" part I'm still wrestling with.

This is how writing is a leap of faith, at least for me. You go along with a vision in mind, but eventually you get to a part that you're not sure how to handle. A blank spot on the map, if you will. And you have faith that something will come to you, that the landscape between what you've written and what you want to write will have a navigable road in it somewhere.

Which it generally does, in the end.

Got a question in the comments of the last blog post about whether I would do something like Thunderstruck ever again, and I had to chew on that a while before I could answer (sorry for the delay, J D). The question was if I'd do Thunderstruck or something like it again. I assume the question is about writing another webcomic, or continuing Thunderstruck as a webcomic, not about writing prose. The novel version of Thunderstruck is in progress, though other projects compete for attention.

But what about a webcomic?

My first response was "Nah, no way," but upon introspection I think that's not entirely true. I do miss webcomic writing, as much as it's not my focus anymore. I had a lot of fun with Thunderstruck, and I haven't been drawing much since I stopped. It would be cool to flex those muscles again.

If I did, there's no way I could go back to a schedule of three strips a week. That took an average of 15 hours of work per week, and if I want to have a career as a fiction author there's no way I can afford that much time. But something with a less ambitious schedule... that might work. Maybe not quite as irregular as Dresden Codak or comics like that, but still...

Okay, we're plunging towards the end of the year, and now is not a good time to start up anything new. I will revisit the question in January. And we'll see what emerges.