November Moon

This November I am going to be participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time, working on my upcoming graphic novel Blue Moon.

I have been working on Blue Moon off an on during this last year, but it has been a major challenge to carve out time for it between drawing Orcs in Space and fielding freelance gigs and volunteer positions. The other day I realized that NaNoWriMo was coming up very quickly, and I made a snap decision to dedicate the majority of my working time this November to Blue Moon and really getting the project off the ground. I can tell that it’s already helping out my creative process, I’ve spent the last few days gathering my notes and starting to work things out, and I have to say I’m really excited.

(A color test for Blue Moon… The color won’t be a significant part of the writing/layout process this November, but it is definitely going to be an important narrative element in the final book)

So what do I want to accomplish this month? My goal is that by the end of November I am going to have the full 160-page book roughed out and scripted. Unlike some writer-artists, I find that it doesn’t work for me to write a script separately, the words and images and pacing are all mixed up for me and I need to tackle them all together.

(One of my rough pages from the beginning of the book)

Anyone who has seen my roughs on projects like TITAN, 13e Avenue, or Orcs in Space knows that they are very loose. I rough things out very quickly as a rule, my “thumbnails” and “pencils” are all one single stage, and they tend to be very loose gestural sketches, with very little detail… Mostly just blocking out the characters and dialogue, seeing what fits on a given page or in a particular chapter. So at the end of this month I will hopefully have 160 pages of very rough illustrations complete with dialogue, and I will be well-positioned to complete the final artwork in 2022.

This stage of writing and laying out my pages is probably the hardest part of the creative process for me. Honestly, like many people, I feel a lot of anxiety when I am looking at a blank page (or worse, a whole “stack” of blank pages!), I just get stuck worrying about all the details and doubting if I can pull the whole thing off. Many of my writing projects will gestate in my mind and on the pages of various notebooks for quite a few years before I have a breakthrough and begin working on them in earnest… That was the case with TITAN and it’s the same story with Blue Moon, both came from concepts I had maybe 20 years ago!

Special thanks as always to the Canada Council for the Arts, which has supported the creation of Blue Moon with a grant that is helping me carve out time to work on this passion project.

I think my hands are going to be full trying to tackle this, but I might try to post a few times throughout the month to update folks on my progress (an easy way to keep myself accountable), share some little snippets of the roughs (no spoilers), and perhaps talk a little about my hybrid writing/layout process. You can follow along here and on my Instagram throughout the month, and thanks in advance for your support as I work on this!