Friday, September 19, 2008

working on Amulet book 2

I realized I haven't updated my website in a while. Boy, does this place need a major overhaul...

Well, I've finished another full draft of my book. It's around 400 pages (if each page had 250 words on it), and 30 chapters. Kazu is reading through it right now. My friend Jen (she's open for commission, folks!) has also read through and seemed to like it, but I know there's a lot of edits that need to be made before I feel comfortable handing it off to seek publication. Kazu's been giving me some awesome story notes, but I'm taking some time away from it to work on Amulet, which, by the way, has been a blast. We have a few people helping us, and doing team comics is just... well, it's just a lot of fun. Way more fun than solo comics, in my opinion. :P It's been nice to be a part of a team again after a year and a half swimming around in the not-so-dark recesses of my imagination.

Not much else is going on besides that. We're trying to wrap up as much of the book as we can before heading off to Italy for the Lucca Comics Festival October 27th. We'll be there for two weeks, thanks to the kind folks at Renoir Comics. The first week will be a five city tour to promote the Italian edition of Sorcerers & Secretaries, and the Italian edition of Daisy Kutter, both published by Renoir. You can be sure there'll be a nice flickr report when we get back, like the one we did from Japan.

In the mean time, it's gonna be pretty busy around here. I'm hoping to squeeze in some personal art time between painting pages to keep my visualization skills sharp. That's something else I realized while writing, drawing so much has really helped me visualize landscapes and such in prose. I used to struggle with that when I was writing intensely in high school, but now it comes quite easily. Don't want to lose that.

The above picture was a drawing I've had in my head for a while and had to get down on paper. It's just the beginning of chapter one, Tabby waking up on her last day on Earth.