Which brings me to my question to all of you readers. How did you like the first chapter?! I'm very proud of it and I gotta tell you when I finished it up a couple of months back it was a great feeling. It was nice to see a good chunk of content finally finished and out. So now we get strapped in for a much more dramatic chapter 2!
I also hope to have a nice treat for all of you very soon, so be on the look out for something different very soon.
Now on to the reviews...
Just got back from a screening of The Golden Compass and I have to say I feel some where between pleased and unfulfilled. The book I think is pretty high minded for a book written to a young audience, but much of that stuff is kinda changed for the movies. I don't wish to give much away, only to say that they very cleverly snuck around much of the controversy that has been building up.I feel unfulfilled because I think it was beautifully done, but the director lacked a lot of pacing in his storytelling. Things moved too quick and he never really lets up to allow the world to captivate us at all. Something I think really set Lord of the Rings out is that Peter Jackson has a great sense of pacing, of letting moments breath or burst on by. This movie felt very much the same tempo all of the way through.
I was pleased by how much this movie felt like reading the book. I kept waiting to know what dust was and all that just like I did in the book.
I'll do a more well rounded review with Josh once we get back to podcasting.
And finally the mother of all graphic novels that have interested me has finally arrived and I gotta say that this is an amazing well crafted graphic novel. It breathes life with each page and the energy of the story never lets up. My only regret with it is that it went by too fast. I blazed right through it, which I think is something really hard to get your readers not to do in comics and will have to be a part of discussion with Josh and I later...
Back to the book. The opening prologue is very very well crafted and I found myself quickly pulled into the story with it. The overall plot I think works really well and I look forward to sitting down and rereading it at a slow pace. I think I gobbled the whole thing up quickly because I was so excited it was out.
Other news...
FDTN Chapter 2 production continues and I'll be putting some final touch ups in on the script and working my way through the new scenes. The next page I'll be drawing is, in my opinion, the most epic image yet in the comic. I'm really looking forward to the challenge that chapter 2 is going to bring to me as I move forward. Each chapter and each new scene of this book feels like climbing up hill all over again. I feel challenged by it all the time. Which is great!
On another note I'm currently working on the script for a graphic novel series that is aimed at a younger audience. The fun thing with it is that I am writing this book so differently from how I usually write; no planning! I have a general idea for the story and what the end is, but that's about the extent of my planning. Instead I'm letting the story write itself and I'll go back into it during the redraft stage of the writing process. This way I hopefully maintain a sense of enthusiasm in writing the script and discovery at new twists the story can take as I go.
4 comments:
In the front page flash button for page 44, "Cocludes" looks like a typo. Good thing it won't last, eh? ;-)
Not sure what to say about the first chapter. It felt really slow in the end, but let's just chalk that up to weekly updates of pages that are meant to be read in bookform or as an archive. And it wasn't helped by my desire to get back to the fishing trip, which I guess (now) will be interrupted by even more flashbacks in the future. And perhaps even including some flashforwards, like the first few pages? Or will the second chapter focus on something else?
Aside from that, I have only one more thing to say, and it is about George's flashback: I never got the impression that his wife was a bitch for leaving him when and how she did. She seemed way too saddened to be a bitch.
Lol, your post cracks me up. I can't believe I missed that typo too.
I can say that we won't have any flashbacks for awhile. I'm actually really thinking from here on out they'll be pretty scarce. Unless we really need to show something. There'll be at least one more by the end of book one.
I'm glad you didn't think George's wife was the one that we should think badly of. Honestly I never understood why people were mad at her. It was meant to be the other way around. It's supposed to George is the problem, not her. I wanted to show just how selfish he can be.
No flash forwards are planned for anytime soon. I do have one in mind, but you probably won't see it until book three starts. So keep waiting!
I really do agree with you about the end of chapter 1 dragging. It was meant to be about ten pages, but as I kept scripting it and laying it out it felt like it really needed a slower pacing and a somber tone. In the end it was 15 pages long and thats like three months of updates you know?
I think you'll like the way chapter 2 starts and carries on. We go right back to the fishing trip and a lot happens in this section of story.
Oh, flashbacks will be scarce? I guess it was the love you've expressed for Lost that made me think you'd tell your story with a lot of flashbacks. Well, that and the first chapter, of course! ;-)
Not that I thought that you'd tell a story with a lot of flashbacks just because of Lost doing it that way. I just figured that the story would have plenty of opportunities for flashbacks by design.
I don't think I quite got that George was the problem. All I could say for sure was that two people didn't get along well enough to stay together. If none of them, both of them, or one of them was to blame for that I couldn't say for sure based on that short scene alone. And while George's thoughts seemed selfish, they also seemed like they could've been meant as a joke to try to keep his spirit up.
Flashbacks will be coming and going as needed. Honestly I may have jumped the gun with the word 'scarce'. I have no idea what their frequency will be. Originally there were going to be at least two per chapter, but I think I'm gonna just let them play out when needed.
I have this story thought out to the end, as far as the main plot and how we get there, but the flashbacks are there to support the plot. So those I kinda put in where they fit. I have whole sheets written out of ideas for them and its just finding the right spot. Lost basically helped me find a better way to tell the story. Orginally these scenes were written out and they were all in front of the fishing trip in the novel and screenplay versions of the script. I really felt that that was just murder when trying to grab a reader so having flashbacks tell these moments heps the tory move along better.
I can say chapter 2 is a lot of action, so a flashback is right now planned, but we'll see how well it fits once we get there. It seriously is like editing a movie, you're constantly moving and reworking things.
I like how much you got the hospital scene. You just seem to have read it very close to what I intended.
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