No, no, come back! I promise, it isn’t mad!
Here’s what it is:
- Write a 48* page story. No more. No less. Any topic. Any subject. Make it finite.
- Draw one page per week. Post it online. Tell people about it. You have all week. Post about it every day in every venue you can find.
- Repeat every week for a year.
- Now you have a complete 48 page story that you own.
Repeat every year for the rest of your life.
(*I mean or 50, whatever, I’m not the boss of you – just that’s a good number and translates into a two issues of a comic as well as a single french style graphic album, if that’s your thing)
That’s it.
Well look, this was my approach, it worked for me, and I’m going to try and repeat it year after year. If it goes well I get a book a year that I know is mine.
I’m about to start year two. Now, I think it’s a solid idea to make each of these stories unique, brand new, self contained, ideally different genres (one day I think I’d like to do a romance story, some day a western) but I’ve sort of locked myself in to a second Terran Omega story.
Though going through my files there’s loads of little shorts and a bunch of other ideas. So maybe next year I’ll take an anthology approach and take some of the shorts and do them. I’m bound to have 48 pages worth of stuff.
Last year I picked Terran Omega out of the pile of half formed stories because it was the most complete, and the most likely to sustain more than one story, and I’m glad I did.
In other news, as you’ll no doubt know I didn’t win an Eisner. I tried not to get my hopes up, but that’s what hopes do. In the plus column, before doing this book and before the nomination I had really felt like I was going nowhere. I’d resigned myself to being stuff in something of a box of my own crafting. Sure, it was nice and sure I got to do fun stuff I enjoyed, but the days of feeling out the shape of the box where long over. Now I’ve found there are nooks and crannies yet to explore. Places I can push myself in to that I’d hitherto ignored. It’s been a real solid shot in the arm to my motivation. (Maybe a little too much because I’m caught myself sometimes being more inclined to doing Terran Omega than paid work, and that’s … not good).
There’s still the Harvey Awards in October – which has also nominated Terran Omega: The Ghosts of War, if you’re a voter and want to vote for me, I’d be honoured.
In the meantime, I’m just going to get on with making more comics. I’ve a whole year ahead of me…
