No News is No News

Checked in re: Unusual Project 2 yesterday and was told that She Who Must Be Impressed has not made a decision yet. But I'm still in the running. If I actually snag the assignment, June's going to be a bear, with a July 1 deadline for UP2 (which is going to be of some length) and probably another forty-page story for Unusual Project 1.

Which would be good. I tend to work more effectively when I've got a deadline someone other than me has set. Especially when the someone other than me is paying the someone who is me to hit it.

Yesterday was a wash, production-wise. Lots of e-mails, lots of phone calls. Putting out a couple of fires I'd inadvertently set, getting the lay of the land on a couple different fronts (in one case, the land is looking more and more like pure quicksand.) Today's not looking much better--got more phone calls to make, and I'm still bone-weary. My day started at 4:00 AM, much to my chagrin. Still, being up that early at least lets me get some work done before the rest of the world wakes up and starts distracting me.

Am currently working on a 12-page script for UP1. It's tricky--the short comic story is not a comfortable format for me. I like dialogue too much, and having a limited amount of space really inhibits how much character you an give develop through conversation. At the same time, UP1's higher-ups have recently decided that narrative captions are more or less verboten, because they're not hip enough. That's not what they said, exactly, but that's how I read it.

Losing that tool when you need to get a decent amount of information into a short story hurts. It's why I still haven't tried to revise my 15-pager, which relied a lot on narrative captions, both aesthetically and technically. In the case of the former, it allowed me to give the story a character and tone via the voice of the captions that I fear is going to fall by the wayside now. In the case of the latter, the captions also allowed me to relay information crucial to the story without having pages of characters dealing with minutiae.

"Show, don't tell" is the North American comic book storytelling rule these days, but I'll take talking heads that are saying something interesting or well-thought out captions over a page of What Bob Did At Work Today any day.

Foley