Layoffs and Comics and Bears, Oh My!
in which our hero gets laid off and doubles down on his comic book (for now)
Dear Readers,
This update is a week and a half late, and I thank you for your patience. The truth is, it’s been one of the most challenging fortnights of the year—one which culminated, last week, with my layoff from the university where I’ve worked and taught since 2007. I’m still making sense of things and deciding what’s next for me, so for now I’m wrestling with emotions and making art and trying to get some writing in there as well.
In previous updates, I’ve shared with you the first six pages of my recently completed The Blood of Seven Queens: Prologue. I’m happy to share the next three pages here, along with the news that you can now preorder a printed copy of the comic from my Ko-fi store (where you can also find copies of all my books).
Please know that I will continue to keep the comic up on my site to read for free, as I want to make my work accessible to as many people as possible—including former students who are on a slim budget. If you’d prefer to just read the whole thing for free right now, you can do so here.
And now, on with the updates about how the work has been going.
WRITING
I’m continuing work on Chapter 1 of The Blood of Seven Queens and I finally got to the moment where Red Riding Hood finds the wolf at her grandmother’s door. It was a target that seemed to move further and further away each time I sat down to write, but I finally got there… on page 12 of 24! I originally thought the moment was going to be on page 4, right after the reader turned the page. Then I thought it was going to be page 6, then page 8.
Oh, silly me.
It just goes to show that you have to be willing to work with your story throughout the process. Sticking to a rigid outline has never worked for me. I need to have room to play.
ART
Though I’m working on a slew of new art right now, in advance of World Anvil’s big WorldEmber worldbuilding event next month, none of it’s done yet. What I can talk about here is the map I finally finished a week or so ago.
This has been sitting around on my computer’s desktop, unfinished, for months now. And while I was glad to finally get a chance to finish it off, I almost didn’t. The quest for perfection almost killed me instead.
That’s definitely a thing I continue to struggle with. The artist part of me is much younger and less mature than the writer part of me. The artist part never did an MFA program. He’s been hiding out deep inside of me, wounded and full of doubt, since my undergraduate days—and so, he’s never learned all of the truths about creativity and the process that my writer half has. I have to be way more patient with him. I have to encourage him to make mistakes and realize they’re not the end of the world.
I have to give him lots of hugs.
WORLDBUILDING
My true white whale this past fortnight, though, was the constructed language or conlang that I was working on. Basically, I was trying to recreate the goddamned English language in all its complexity, and I completely lost sight of why I was doing what I was doing.
That’s the danger of worldbuilding for writers. We can get so carried away with backstory that we never write the story itself. Writing down the details of towns and superpowers and made-up words we’ve been storing in our overstuffed heads—that can be a lot of fun. But if we lose sight of why we started making all this shit up in the first place, we’re in trouble. And that’s what happened with the language of Bekiskish. I was making up a set of rules to help me write dialogue for a certain set of characters who I wanted to sound like Shakespearean barbarians, but rather than just do a search for “English to Shakespeare translator” and finding what I was looking for in about 30 seconds flat, I spent days and days copying grammar charts and building a glossary of words that were mostly just English anyway.
It was a huge waste of time during a period where I didn’t have nearly as much free time as I do now, now that I’ve been let go from my job. And given that this time I have away from work is going to end eventually—and probably way more quickly than I’d like or expect—I still need to be very careful with what I spend my time on, and what I don’t.
In this week’s paid-only segment (below the fold on Substack and posted separately on Ko-fi and Patreon), I’ll discuss how I came to create page 9 of The Blood of Seven Queens: Prologue and what I learned along the way. So, if you’re paying subscriber, I’ll see you over there (or down below). Everyone else, I’ll see you back here in two weeks.
Yours,
Chris
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