Suuper's Writing Projects & Manga Stories

[Suuper-san]

This thread is for me to organise my projects to easily catalogue and find them, as well as to rant and monologue about my writing issues and breakthroughs.

Current Projects:

The Eye of Light

Old, Completed and Cancelled Projects

Stories:
2012
Blackout

Mangas:
2015
Bokura no Manga
2016
Overdrive
Endlessness
2020
Monday Blues (Collab Manga)
2021
Dark Strike
Et Cetera
Eclipse
Whispering Magic
Omega World


Short Stories:

Short Story Index

[Suuper-san]

Before posting my first chapters of manga, I wanted to make this post as a sort of disclaimer, as well as to make it clear exactly what I am aiming at, and what I am NOT aiming at in these 4 manga projects.

If you critique these 4 works please bear these things in mind, many thanks.
TL;DR I'm a beginner writer and the art is super sketchy, be kind to me :P

While my art is nowhere near where I would like it to be, I'm confident that my art ability far surpasses my writing ability. So one of the major aims of these projects is to improve my writing.

So I've reduced the art quality to the absolute lowest I can do and still convey the idea correctly.

The primary goal is to gain long term stamina for producing a weekly manga. This breaks down into:
-speed - working quickly
-efficiency - working smartly
-focus - actually doing work!

I hope to gradually increase art quality over time, but that's going to be based on a lot of other things, and it's definitely not a priority.

The secondary goal is to become familiar with and develop the workflows, methods and skills for creating a weekly manga.
This breaks into writing:
-Plan a story with plot points/arcs etc
-Develop a story and characters
-Write outlines and chapters of script on a weekly basis
And also into art:
-Visually develop characters, settings, backgrounds that appear in the manga
-Plan individual panels (shots)
-Combine panels into pages of manga
-Create guidelines for inking later.
And also into scheduling/planning:
-organising myself to have time set aside each week
-being able to deal with issues in the workflow

The stories I am writing are incredibly raw ideas. I don't have the ability to polish my work or my ideas at the moment, so I'm just running mostly with what comes into my head first. I'm only 1 chapter in and I have so many regrets with camera angles, dialogue, pacing and so on. But this is good - I'm already getting a sense of quality in my own work and learning to analyse and give myself feedback.

I'm hoping as time passes the quality of writing will improve, but at the moment I'm just aiming to get raw experience to give a base level of what I'm capable of.

[Suuper-san]

Well I have released my first chapters of my stories....and we shall see if I can maintain a weekly output. Success or failure I will learn a lot I'm sure.

Please have a glance and let me know what you think!

Eclipse

Beta Reincarnation

Whispering Magic

Et Cetera


But I thought I would talk about the changes I have made to my manga workflow just to consolidate the method in my own mind, as well as maybe give a hint to anyone that is struggling.

These are the stages that I am using to process my manga. I have grouped them into 5 sets, which I will explain in a moment. The stages are very similar to my manga tutorial stages so I wont explain them again.

Set 1:

• Brainstorming
• Plot Development
• Chapter Synopsis

Set 2:

• Chapter Outline

Set 3:

• Script Draft

Set 4:

• Script Final
• Panelation
• Pagination & Underguides
• Panels
• Guidelines

Set 5:

• Speech Insertion
• Speech Bubbles
• Inked Pages

Starting 5 weeks ago, I did Set 1, for chapter 1 of the stories.
The next week, I did Set 2 for chapter 1 and Set 1 for chapter 2
The following Week, I did Set 3 for chapter 1, Set 2 for chapter 2 and Set 1 for chapter 3.
and so on.

So I have a 5 week pipeline where the story gets more and more detail and development added to it until the final manga pages are produced. It also serves as a slight buffer in that, worst case scenario, to produce the next weeks content, I only have to do the final step, as it is already quite developed and just needs the final stage to reach completion.

So far it's worked well, although when working on a set for a first time it has taken a lot longer, and then I get used to it by next week. This week the art was the new stage and so it took a while before I got into the flow of things and picked up speed.

Schedule-wise, I have one day a week dedicated to each story (not the whole day is free mind you I still have other stuff I do on each day), a catch-up day where I can work on anything, and 2 general art days which are backup catch-up days if need be.
Having a definite project to work on each day makes it really easy to know whats going on and I've been a LOT more productive overall the last few weeks than my general output, although not as high as my burst output. I'm hoping that it is more sustainable long-term, as I'd like to release a new chapter for each of my 4 stories every Sunday.


This is my current project status. I am currently slightly behind for all projects at the moment, but I've got 2 full bonus art days Monday and Tuesday in which I'll catch up for sure.
I have summed up each set of stages (called tasks in the chart) with a single term to make it easy to understand.



The black cells are the stages which need completion to be up to date. So you can see the inking has been done for all chapter 1's of my story, but guidelines for chapter 2, only one story has been completed.

I'm feeling pretty content at the moment, so I think I'll take a rare evening off from the hard work and watch some anime.

onwards and upwards.

[Suuper-san]

I managed to churn out a second chapter of each story. if you like have a look and let me know what you think.

Eclipse

Beta Reincarnation

Whispering Magic

Et Cetera


This is the project status at the moment.

Spoiler

Doing slightly better than last week, but the next two weeks I'm super inundated with other stuff so I'm dreading the workload. That being said I seem to be coping well with the pressure, and it's actually making me more productive and efficient, so I have a 50/50 chance of coping. After the next two weeks I should have a month of normal activity, so I'm hoping that if I manage these two weeks then I can manage anything.

As stated previously, I'll be prioritising producing a chapter of manga over anything else, so the remaining vestiges of quality will be the first thing to go, if need be.
I'm not 100% sure if this is the best way to go, but given the quality boost to my high level that I got when working on low quality sketches, I'm hoping that the same will happen here. It's actually part of one of my larger masterplan theories so I have put more thought into it than it sounds like :P

Surprisingly I feel pretty ok with how the project is going so far, it's new territory as far as producing regular content to a schedule goes, and also for writing scripts and planning manga layouts it's still all very new to me as well.

But already this has been my largest project to date, totalling 142 hours of work so far, but not including about 2 weeks worth at the very beginning when I was jotting down lots of notes.
I've also produced 133 manga pages in just the last 2 weeks, which is just shy of an entire volume of manga (150-200)
But the quality is, of course, epicly low. I'm focusing on learning to express better ideas (more complex angles etc) before I put effort into inking proper pages, otherwise I'll end up with something that I'm not too happy with.

I'm confident that I can add more quality when I'm ready, and as soon as I get a spare moment I'll be working on individual very high quality practice pages to break the barrier on that front too. But so far I dont think I'll get a single spare moment unless I can pick up more speed with my project.

see you all next week.

[legomaestro]

Re:  11-04-2021

Before posting my first chapters of manga, I wanted to make this post as a sort of disclaimer, as well as to make it clear exactly what I am aiming at, and what I am NOT aiming at in these 4 manga projects.

If you critique these 4 works please bear these things in mind, many thanks.
TL;DR I'm a beginner writer and the art is super sketchy, be kind to me :P

Hahahaha suuper you clearly haven't been on MR long enough hehe.

While my art is nowhere near where I would like it to be, I'm confident that my art ability far surpasses my writing ability. So one of the major aims of these projects is to improve my writing.

So I've reduced the art quality to the absolute lowest I can do and still convey the idea correctly.

Tis is true, and defo a solution to work with. I've learnt slowly to not try to go for 100% at any area of my art life even when I want to learn all the aspects alone. Have tunnel vision on one thing instead (say 70-80%) and introduce the other aspect slowly.

The primary goal is to gain long term stamina for producing a weekly manga. This breaks down into:
-speed - working quickly
-efficiency - working smartly
-focus - actually doing work!

I shalt watch with much interest, because making weekly manga is something I really want to be able to do. The perfect moment will be when I just do it as naturally as waking up, brushing my teeth and taking a shower. That's where the chances of getting successful in the industry lies, and where you have a peace of mind even if it doesn't haha.

The secondary goal is to become familiar with and develop the workflows, methods and skills for creating a weekly manga.
This breaks into writing:
-Plan a story with plot points/arcs etc
-Develop a story and characters
-Write outlines and chapters of script on a weekly basis
And also into art:
-Visually develop characters, settings, backgrounds that appear in the manga
-Plan individual panels (shots)
-Combine panels into pages of manga
-Create guidelines for inking later.
And also into scheduling/planning:
-organising myself to have time set aside each week
-being able to deal with issues in the workflow

Individual planning sounds like a hiccup in terms of time flow but I am so interested in that. Post a 'planned panel' at a point man. I've never actually thought of making individual panels, super lazy and just divvy up the page and then draw something in. That approach feels like you find individual panels to be individual illustrations, and I am all for that hehe.

The stories I am writing are incredibly raw ideas. I don't have the ability to polish my work or my ideas at the moment, so I'm just running mostly with what comes into my head first.

*Muffled voice* This is the way.

I'm only 1 chapter in and I have so many regrets with camera angles, dialogue, pacing and so on. But this is good - I'm already getting a sense of quality in my own work and learning to analyse and give myself feedback.

Literally having this flash right now in terms of my personal music process. After years I finally 'get' hearing wrong notes on the guitar or wrong volume levels. It's a really really good thing to see/know what isn't good because it informs you on what you can fix and what direction to go. Simply put, if you turn down a road and end up at a military base, it's practical to know you should probably reverse your car and head off to the national park you were planning to visit rather than just hoping you'll end up there haha. Random but yeah: It's good to know where you're wrong, so that you can turn to where you're right. (Or should I say 'write')

I'm hoping as time passes the quality of writing will improve, but at the moment I'm just aiming to get raw experience to give a base level of what I'm capable of.

Go for it bro. You got this.


Re: 11-04-21 PT 2

These are the stages that I am using to process my manga. I have grouped them into 5 sets, which I will explain in a moment. The stages are very similar to my manga tutorial stages so I wont explain them again.

Set 4:

• Script Final
• Panelation
• Pagination & Underguides
• Panels
• Guidelines

'Pagination.' Holy heck I've learnt a new word and this Set is the one that's freaking me out, but structure is to be expected and I'm looking forward to that Set of the process hehe.

Set 5:

• Speech Insertion
• Speech Bubbles
• Inked Pages

Starting 5 weeks ago, I did Set 1, for chapter 1 of the stories.
The next week, I did Set 2 for chapter 1 and Set 1 for chapter 2
The following Week, I did Set 3 for chapter 1, Set 2 for chapter 2 and Set 1 for chapter 3.
and so on.

Aaaaaaaaaah I get it! Dude that's awesome. It's like a cascading set of cups set under a tap that are pouring water into eachother (First cup recieves the most naturally, then tips and fills the 2nd, e.t.c) and in the end all cups are full! Noiiiiiice. I am stealing this hehe.

So I have a 5 week pipeline where the story gets more and more detail and development added to it until the final manga pages are produced. It also serves as a slight buffer in that, worst case scenario, to produce the next weeks content, I only have to do the final step, as it is already quite developed and just needs the final stage to reach completion.

Naruhodo

Schedule-wise, I have one day a week dedicated to each story (not the whole day is free mind you I still have other stuff I do on each day), a catch-up day where I can work on anything, and 2 general art days which are backup catch-up days if need be.
Having a definite project to work on each day makes it really easy to know whats going on and I've been a LOT more productive overall the last few weeks than my general output, although not as high as my burst output. I'm hoping that it is more sustainable long-term, as I'd like to release a new chapter for each of my 4 stories every Sunday.

That's always the thing right? 1) we still have things to do in our day to day lives and 2) There will, invetibly be a low motivation-too much responsibilities combo and that's the moment this process will be tested, but I'm thinking it could work. Hoping, to be precise. But yes, however much that works wishing you all the best and I think this can legit work man.

And I'm looking forward to a 'burst week' at a point hehe. Those are always epic.


Re: Project Status Update 1

Dude this is the level of planning I neeeeeed. I seriously need to start graphing stuff, but I'm also attached to just going with the flow. But it's real practical knowing how far everything is. I think I want to do this for ALL of my projects and at the very least see what I'll never do. Have way too much stuff on the backburner and even in the oven (Penance, SLG e.t.c haha)

Nice.

I'm feeling pretty content at the moment, so I think I'll take a rare evening off from the hard work and watch some anime.
onwards and upwards.

Re: Project Status Update 2

Doing slightly better than last week, but the next two weeks I'm super inundated with other stuff so I'm dreading the workload. That being said I seem to be coping well with the pressure, and it's actually making me more productive and efficient, so I have a 50/50 chance of coping. After the next two weeks I should have a month of normal activity, so I'm hoping that if I manage these two weeks then I can manage anything.

This always happens when you stumble onto a new good idea. Tips off the top of my head are cut off social media, make sure your phone isn't bothering you too much and feel free to plan vaguely for extra manga/projects. (Like just scribble).

You need that balance of isolating yourself and focusing for whats in front of you and being very ready to pack on other projects. I've hit an epic finish line before after writing a story and it's an awesome feeling, but it can also lead to a crash in productivity hehe. You probably know this though.
Quality sounds like a good thing to focus on.

I'm not 100% sure if this is the best way to go, but given the quality boost to my high level that I got when working on low quality sketches, I'm hoping that the same will happen here. It's actually part of one of my larger masterplan theories so I have put more thought into it than it sounds like :P

I need to hear some of these masterplan theories. It's some good ish hehe.
And dude, as said earlier definitely hope that you know that doesn't work.... So that you know what does. It's not the best feeling in the world but it orients you very well. That being said if it works let it stick and double down on it.

Surprisingly I feel pretty ok with how the project is going so far, it's new territory as far as producing regular content to a schedule goes, and also for writing scripts and planning manga layouts it's still all very new to me as well.

*Thumbs up*

But already this has been my largest project to date, totalling 142 hours of work so far, but not including about 2 weeks worth at the very beginning when I was jotting down lots of notes.
I've also produced 133 manga pages in just the last 2 weeks, which is just shy of an entire volume of manga (150-200)

HOLY HARUHI WHAT THE HELL MAN

But the quality is, of course, epicly low.

Pfft. You should see mine.

I'm focusing on learning to express better ideas (more complex angles etc) before I put effort into inking proper pages, otherwise I'll end up with something that I'm not too happy with.

Angles and stuff are the bane of my existence. I'm really really OK with low quality (to my detriment) but gawd I'd love to draw people sitting at a table in proper perspective. That'd be nice.

You should check out Sidonia no Kishi (Not the best story, but Tsutomu Nihei knows what dimensionality is.) The best thing is that his line work is super clean now and dotty and it really tells you how to use one simple grayscale tone to show dimensionality, and how calming and cool it can be to make massive backgrounds. (I still hate it in comparision to Blame! and Biomega, but yeah its a good artsytle to inspire backgrounds and perspective. Check out random pages you don't even need to read it hehe)

I'm confident that I can add more quality when I'm ready, and as soon as I get a spare moment I'll be working on individual very high quality practice pages to break the barrier on that front too. But so far I dont think I'll get a single spare moment unless I can pick up more speed with my project.

With nuance I'll say this: Take your time. Go for it when you're ready, and I have no worries that you can pack on quality too hehe (INB4 fully coloured weekly manga? Muhuhahhahaha)

Embarrassingly enough I've replied to all of this without checking out the actual manga you're describing. Will get to them at a point hehe. And keep at it *thumbs up*

Onwards and upwards.

[Suuper-san]

Managed to produce a chapter 3 of each story. If you fancy it take a look and let me know what you think.

Eclipse

Beta Reincarnation

Whispering Magic

Et Cetera


this is my project status.

Spoiler

I had 2 very bad days unfortunately this week in addition to my extra loaded week. thanks to my buffer I could produce the final chapters but my next chapter prep is currently lacking. So far, I'm in trouble compared to previous weeks. This is the first week that I've had the script and the art both pending, since I overwrote the chapters previously I've been coasting a little on second halves of scripts rather than writing a new chapter each week. But in the next few days I have some bonus time and I'll just about scrape by I think.
I wanted to get more done this Sunday but I just didn't get very far.

I had one really good day too so it's not all bad, but it didn't make up for the bad days this week.

I'm still quite hopeful for being successful with the weekly content, I'm gaining some sort of focusing abilities, and building up more experience which is useful.

I'm also getting a much more solid idea of the exact workload to produce one chapter, and getting used to the flow and switching between the different stages effectively.

onwards and upwards....I hope.


@Lego

Hahahaha suuper you clearly haven't been on MR long enough hehe.

Ehehe just making sure lol

Have tunnel vision on one thing instead (say 70-80%)

Tunnel vision is definitely a good way to learn new skills by ignoring other things. It's definitely been what's helping me the last couple of years. Regimes are like an extreme version where you only focus on one single thing, at all .

and introduce the other aspect slowly.

This is where I'm quite hopeful that I can gradually do this. I think for a while the quality will be chaotic, and then settle into a rhythm, and then I can work on increasing the quality.

making weekly manga is something I really want to be able to do. The perfect moment will be when I just do it as naturally as waking up, brushing my teeth and taking a shower.

Well much like myself you've shown you can do the mileage, it's just getting the regularity, as you say. But even brushing your teeth, you have days where you forget or really don't feel like showering so even with something that's super simple, you can have off days. But having a method that can deal with off days is super useful, that's what I'm hoping I've got going at the moment.

Post a 'planned panel' at a point man. I've never actually thought of making individual panels, super lazy and just divvy up the page and then draw something in. That approach feels like you find individual panels to be individual illustrations, and I am all for that hehe.

Probably you're imagining it's something way more interesting than it actually is, and it's probably what you're doing already. Simply it's just a concept for the composition, i.e. character position, camera position, type of shot etc. So like a super rough draft. Since I plan the panels on the page it ends up as a page draft but each panel's size and composition has to be considered separately, is what I mean.

I cover a lot of the aspects of creating a manga with my current workflow in my manga tutorial thread, that might clear up any wonderings you have about my workflow.
http://forums.mangaraiders.com/index.php/topic,20764.msg306867.html#msg306867

here is a more recent page workflow

Spoiler

this is what I call "planned panels".
I don't plan them separately although I did want to try that out at some point.


Guidelines for confirmed placement of everything.


And finally details/text/ink

It's good to know where you're wrong, so that you can turn to where you're right. (Or should I say 'write')

Ehehe
But very true. And I'm hoping that by working at a more rough quality I'll hit more issues, and sooner, so it'll help to improve the initial steps of manga planning and writing.

'Pagination.' Holy heck I've learnt a new word and this Set is the one that's freaking me out

It's not as bad as it sounds, but I also hate this set the most. The final script is often just fixing typos from the draft script really, and then breaking it into lines that will be in the same panel,and then just drafting the pages and guidelines

Aaaaaaaaaah I get it! Dude that's awesome. It's like a cascading set of cups set under a tap that are pouring water into eachother (First cup recieves the most naturally, then tips and fills the 2nd, e.t.c) and in the end all cups are full! Noiiiiiice. I am stealing this hehe.

That's a perfect way of describing it, I love it. And it's a super useful method for spacing your work out so you come to it fresh a couple of times before it's finalised. Really it's just iterative stages, but on different pieces of work. In a week you will still do the same amount of work to produce one chapter of manga, but you're working on pieces of different chapters.

And I'm looking forward to a 'burst week' at a point hehe. Those are always epic.

tbh with the high workload level I'm working at now, a burst week would be me getting all the work done on the days I've planned, and getting a Sunday off to relax :P

That's always the thing right? 1) we still have things to do in our day to day lives and 2) There will, invetibly be a low motivation-too much responsibilities combo and that's the moment this process will be tested

You're telling me. I'm super anxious about these issues, but the more I become a weekly author I think the more my life will work around my art, and not the opposite. Basically becoming more pro.

But it's real practical knowing how far everything is.

Totally true, and as long as you keep it up to date it's helpful for quickly getting into gear to get on with the next stage.

Tips off the top of my head are cut off social media, make sure your phone isn't bothering you too much and feel free to plan vaguely for extra manga/projects. (Like just scribble).

Thanks. Mostly I'm doing better with social media,mostly just discord and MR that's the issue lately. And not really that much mostly. I've not had many new ideas actually since focusing so hard on this project, all my brain power is on getting this into the air. Also since testing that I can come up with new plot ideas given prompt words, I don't think I'll ever have to worry about not having an idea again. For my general note taking I don't worry about making typos and just throw the idea down on the page and move on.

I've hit an epic finish line before after writing a story and it's an awesome feeling, but it can also lead to a crash in productivity hehe. You probably know this though.

100%. And I'm hoping that this project will help me to get over that "finish line feeling" every time I finish a chapter of manga, and just get straight on with the next workload. Having a lot to do helps in that regard as I simply can't afford the time to stop and "celebrate".

I need to hear some of these masterplan theories.

Hmmmmm they're pretty messy tbh, and over time the purpose of the masterplan has changed as well. Typically it's either: my end game workflow, or: the steps needed to gain the skills to reach the end game. I'm not aiming low for my end game let me tell you.

But the theories are all based on certain aspects of mental biases and cognitive/psychological theories that I have mentioned before such as:
-decision paralysis
-cognitive load
-working memory
-choice overload
-pareto's principle
-context switching
and a bunch of my own theories and observations and experience.
With the goal of creating a god-level skill in art.
but it sounds a lot more amazing than it is, really it's just "how can I draw/write really well, as quick and efficient as possible?"

you know what doesn't work.... So that you know what does. It's not the best feeling in the world but it orients you very well.

Yeah...this project is basically deliberately set up to produce failure which leads to experience and skill gain, but the failure aspect is quite annoying to deal with so consistently :P

HOLY HARUHI WHAT THE HELL MAN

eheheh
*blush*
It's pretty mad I know. Basically when you cut out every step you "don't" need, you can work pretty quickly.

Pfft. You should see mine.

ahaha we both seem to like our super rough sketches don't we :P

I'd love to draw people sitting at a table in proper perspective. That'd be nice.

Yeah I've given up on that level of control, but I hope to get more controlled at some point. I can sort of ballpark it, but there's always a height issue with the characters growing or shrinking going on.

You should check out Sidonia no Kishi

Will do, I havent read it yet. Been a bit slow on manga reading lately, just dont have the time :P
I did have a quick glance though, it felt like a more organic form of the backgrounds in Battle Angel Alita. Very cool, would love to draw like that.

With nuance I'll say this: Take your time.

Oh for sure, I'm thinking at some point I might take a week hiatus from releasing chapters to do related skill-building that isn't covered in this project.

INB4 fully coloured weekly manga?

ehehe I have considered it, but coloured manga doesn't appeal to me to be honest. I think that I prefer the textured monochrome of normal manga, the coloured manga just feel like anime shots (generally speaking), and so it looses some of that level of expression. But there are some manhua that are a style that I like, so maybe I just have to find a coloured style that I like.

[Suuper-san]

Chapter 4 is realised of each story. Just about made it in time this week, hopefully pick up and it'll be less tight next week.

Eclipse

Beta Reincarnation

Whispering Magic

Et Cetera


This is my project status as of now:

Spoiler

So far it's my worst week, but not only did I have less time available this week but other stuff came up unexpectedly and I lost time on the last day, today, to catch up with stories that were behind. That'll teach me to get the work done earlier in the week and not have to worry about what may or may not happen in the future.

Fortunately I have a bonus day tomorrow as I don't have work on a bank holiday, so I'll be spamming the hours to get the projects back to a stable level.

General Thoughts:

I’m not sure if it’s bad planning but I’m coming up with new scenes after deciding the content of a chapter, and so the chapter expands beyond what can fit and it spills over into a new chapter. So I’m never getting the cliff-hangers I want and then I’m joining the next chapter to the middle of the next chapter and it’s confusing a lot of the time. It’s also extending my plot by quite a bit when one line of idea i.e. “John explains magic to Bob” becomes like 10 pages of manga, so it’s quite arbitrary and I don’t know what I’m doing. In some ways this isn’t a bad thing because I don’t have to worry about what I will write the next week, because I’ve already planned it out this week.

This project is consuming a lot more time than planned, or rather, I’m not being very efficient and so I’m using up all my available time in the week, with nothing to spare for other regimes etc. I really had hoped to have a manga page study/copying going on to get the grasp of new stuff, which would feed back into the projects, but I hope as I get the full hang of this output that I’ll get the time freeing up more. On average this is taking about 40 hours a week, 10 per manga. That’s almost bang on my prediction actually. The trouble is I’m sitting down to do an hours work, and I only get half an hours work done, through fluffing around, not focusing etc. So I’m trying to get my focus fully on track. That’s the issue with long term stamina I guess, the first week I was doing a lot better than I am now. But awareness is helping to keep it in check.

It seems like I’m hopelessly behind as always so my short term goal is just to get further ahead each week, to be in a better point for the next week. I hope within 4 weeks I’ll be 100% on track and not using extra days to catch up.

Something that is already working well is learning what sort of things I don’t like drawing repeatedly, as well as noticing places where I’m not being creative enough with poses. So far I’ve repeated quite a lot of poses where I get stuck for body language, so there’s plenty of room to loosen up even in this sketchy style. It’s creating a lot of artistic regrets, and so I’m hoping when I get to study professional manga pages next, I’ll be able to notice “Oh that’s how I could have done it!” a lot more.

Even with a massively sketchy style it’s good for trialling out poses, shots, expressions, effects and so on, with minimal time investment. This is giving me a lot of experience at a fraction of the time cost. Definitely one of the things I was expecting, although not actually a priority.

Also what’s useful is that I think this is raising my lowest possible quality level. Like I’m drawing on days where I’m seriously tired or don’t care at all, and it’s still coming out...alright, all things considered.

Also I’m feeling that each story is gaining more issues day by day, very quickly. I’m not sure what sort of problem this is, a writing issue, a focus issue, I’m getting too serious about it when it’s just meant to be a loose project, or whatever. I think in some aspects I’ve still set the quality too high, or I’m trying to quality match previous sections when that just won’t be possible some times for time constraints or difficulty etc. Possibly I’m getting scared about failure as well as I build up success each week, the failure will be larger when I can’t do the weekly amount that I want. So whatever the issue is, I’ve got to face it and overcome it. I know I’m definitely getting too serious about it at times, and so I’m trying to just burn through the work without worrying about the lack of quality, because I need the experience of doing anything.

A very annoying paradox about this project is that the only way to keep completing chapters is to avoid too high an emotional investment in it, but that in turn makes it hard to have any sort of quality control or to think seriously about plot development, otherwise I start taking myself too seriously and I can’t move forward. So really I’m rubbishing these stories more than I would have liked. Otherwise I’ll be too scared to try out events that I’ve never done before, like someone dying, betrayal, falling in love etc. So I’m sort of working at an even lower level than my current writing ability. Given the amount of time I’m investing in the project it feels very strange, but it’s the way to get the best improvement long term I’m convinced. Trying to blaze ahead carefree is very not my style as a planner/micromanager but I’m slowly getting used to it. It’s very hard to get my head around, but basically there are a lot of skills gained from just writing anything, and so I’m leaning into experimental writing occasionally, like “shall I make the characters unexpectedly nasty”, or “let’s make this character look really cool”, with not much reason behind it. Something that I had in mind from the beginning of this project was to basically trial out a lot of clichés. Not deliberately, but whatever ones came up, to just go with them and see how they went. That way I’ll gain my own experience for what works and what doesn’t. So if you notice something incredibly cliché, there’s a chance I put it in to just get it off my chest, and I just wanted to see how it looked. This is making each story become more disjointed than I would like, but it’s giving me more chances to try out all sorts of things. Definitely these are becoming “prototypes” in more ways than one. It’s basically a really time-expensive “thinking out loud”.

In a similar way I’m not really focusing on any particular writing skill at the moment while I just get used to creating the volume of content that’s required each week. That’s enough for now, and I’ll start challenging new skills as soon as possible. I’m just focusing on writing any sort of story for now, writing a good story will have to wait a while.

I had to really rush stuff to finish on time this week, and the pressure definitely gave me a speed boost for not only each stage, but getting down to focus faster because of having so much to do, in so little time.

[Suuper-san]

Chapter 5 of each story is released. Have a glance if you like and let me know what you think, although they're pretty crazy rough to be honest :P

Eclipse

Beta Reincarnation

Whispering Magic

Et Cetera


My current project status:

Spoiler

yet again hopelessly behind, but doing better than last week, it wasn't a rush this time. Also I had a couple of really bad non-productive days, so it's beyond a miracle that I produced an entire week's worth of work in the remaining time I had. Actually, it's outright suspicious.
Only issue for next week is that it's a normal week, so I have no bonus days. But in that respect it's also a good thing, as I have no outstanding things that will take my time away. Just gotta stay on track...

General thoughts:

Something regarding plot and dialogue I’ve noticed is that they are basically completely unrelated or completely related, like you can plan “Jenny goes to the shops with her friends”, but the content of their conversation can vary from small talk about the weather, to one of her friends saying that their parent is seriously ill in hospital. Which in turn does change the plot. So not just planning WHAT happens, but what is SAID that’s important. Which is annoying since my plot planning and dialogue are different steps. This might mean that my workflow needs an upgrade, but I’m not sure how yet.

I’m also wondering if I could increase my page output to say 20 pages per chapter, simply because I believe that the main issue with my productivity is getting started, the size of my content doesn’t matter so much once I’m cracking on with it. That might give me a little more space to write fuller chapters. 16 pages per chapter feels a little limiting sometimes, I can’t properly get into what I want. But I’ll save that for when I’m 100% on track before adding work, probably trialling with one story first.

I’m definitely getting used to the workload but it’s still taking time for me to get focused when jumping between stages and projects. I’m trying for a high efficiency output in my day so I’m being quite harsh on myself because I know what’s possible and I don’t want to freewheel.

Something I trialled for the first time was jumping between the same stage, but for different projects, i.e. writing all the scripts, and then drafting all the pages etc. It worked really well but ideally I’d like to be able to switch into different stages of work with minimal lag of focus, so this is really a stopgap while I gain more skill, as I’d like to work on each story separately, as an ideal.

I really would like to take some of the more difficult or interesting pages from the completed chapters and try and redraw them to maximum level, to see if my pages can function as drafts, but also to figure out how to raise my quality of composition and art quality as well. But the project being what it is, I don’t have any spare time yet. Very annoyed but I’m gaining speed I think.

Over the week I’m phasing between “this is a really fun project”, to “I hate this project why did I even start it”, so it’s been an interesting experience so say the least. I think I’m just super susceptible to tiny bumps, and so the moment I hit any problem I start getting moody for no reason.

For writing the script I have permanently had a very strong feeling of “I have no idea what I am doing”, so I’ve just been writing what I can, in any direction, at the moment. It’s all very experimental and I’m grateful that I’m not putting effort into the art otherwise I’d feel dreadful about the quality of the stories. I’m definitely getting better at writing a chapter’s worth of content when it comes round, and the chapter size has become a lot more consistent lately as I get used to how many lines of script make a chapter, and space it accordingly. The only issue is that I’m space filling a lot, or it feels like it, and the actual plot gets pushed back into later and later chapters. I’m certainly gaining experience. While I’m producing the work I’m not producing the quality at the moment, but hopefully that’ll come with time. I’m not a writer, after all :P

A lot of the stories are going in directions I didn’t particularly expect or want, and so far I’m not really liking most of them, but that’s giving me good experience of expressing my idea and making sure that my core idea and direction was correct in the first place. And second to that, I’m getting used to working with ideas that I don’t really like, which will be useful when I’m working on a proper manga and start to get fed up with certain aspects.

A very important thing that I am learning about efficiency, is that there is no point being massively efficient if it starts to become a “good day only” skill, in other words you learn to do something in 1 hour instead of 5, but you don’t feel like it one one day and so you waste 5 hours doing nothing, that could have been spent doing it the old way. Basically it is far better to spend 10 times as long on something that you “could” have done quicker on a good day, than not to spend any time on it at all because you don’t feel your best. The best way to make progress is by constant attention and moving forward, efficiency is just one of the tools to help. Even on like super bad days I try and just do like one page of work, then nap for 20 mins, and repeat. That way I get both productivity and napping. And my mood picks up because I am being productive, so often I gain momentum as well.

I'm definitely feeling optimistic about this project but it's still hard to get used to my awful writing quality ehehehe.

[Suuper-san]

I have just about managed to relase chapter 6 of each story, it's nearly midnight and I was really hammering it to get all the pages done on time :P
The release order is different now as I prioritise the stories that need work or I don't like as much.

Et Cetera

Eclipse

Whispering Magic

Beta Reincarnation


This is my current project status:

Spoiler

This is actually the best state the projects have been in since beginning.

I decided I was fed up of being behind on my projects, and decided to take a sort of measured risk, and work on everything except the final pages, first, and then in the final panic finish off all the inked pages. This is sort of a similar thing when I jumped around the projects on the same stage, and so I spent a couple of days writing nothing but the scripts to catch up.

This led to a compounding of the pre-ink stages such as guidelines into the next few days, and then suddenly, my family decided to have a day out!
Shock Horror, I now lose 8 hours of my schedule with no pages inked yet!
And even by Saturday I was still behind and hadn’t inked anything yet.
So the entirety of the inking fell on Sunday. Not my ideal plan for sure. But the pressure was on, and this kept my focus at the maximum for far longer than I have experienced before, on a “normal” day. And so the pages all got inked. Quality aside, I’ve managed to hang onto my release date one more week. And thanks to working on my backlog first, I’m only about 8 hours work behind now, and should catch up in the next week definitely.

So amazingly, with an entire day out of schedule, and nearly 50% extra work needing doing from the previous backlog, I managed to catch up even more and get everything done. Which raises the ultimate question – how??? I’m guessing the pressure to reach my goals was the main drive. But if this was possible once, then surely with practice I can become even more efficient and focused – and be even more productive in the future. I’ll be working on that later.


General Thoughts:
I’m putting a slightly higher focus on the script writing at the moment, as it seems to be the most difficult stage at the moment. Well that’s not strictly true. What I’m noticing is that once I have a definite direction I can fill out script no problem, it’s the lack of direction, which sometimes even with a chapter outline I don’t have, that causes a slowdown in productivity. And understandably so, as the direction of the story and core idea is arguably one of the most important steps and shapes the story the most. The script is just the execution of said idea. So I’m struggling to commit to any particular path, partly because of lack of experience I just can’t evaluate the pros and cons of each route yet. So in that regard I’m trying not to worry too much and just go with any idea that sounds passable.

Also regarding script writing I’m noticing that I have a general idea of what I want to happen, but once I start writing the characters’ interactions, the story deviates (or expands) and I end up not where I expected, or not getting as far as I expected because I wrote too much. So I’m clueless as to how to deal with that, and if it’s a good or bad thing, at the moment. As long as I’m writing something, I’m saying that’s good for now.

I’m noticing with dialogue that I’m only able to handle about 3 or 4 personality types, and so a lot of my characters are doubling up within the story, and also overlapping with characters in my other stories. I know there are generic character tropes, but it’s more at the moment I can’t handle anything more than a basic character. Also my writing style is too simplistic and I don’t have the vocabulary on hand to give them more distinct ways of speaking yet. But I’m trying :P

I’m having an issue with getting the story to move forward as quickly as I’d like. I jot a few notes down for the chapter, like “Bob goes to the shops and meets Mary”, and it becomes a whole half chapter, unexpectedly, and then my plans for the rest of the chapter get pushed to the next chapter instead. I don’t know if I’m just not getting used to manga as a medium yet, and I’m thinking in novel or anime form and trying to present that as a manga, rather than writing in a way that suits the manga format. I think as I learn more, and especially as I study other artists, I’ll get a better sense of planning and pacing. I think also the issue is that somehow the plot is ending up being conversation driven, so for anything to happen there needs to be a dialogue exchange. I dunno if that’s super obvious or normal but it’s not something I ever noticed about writing before.

I’ve had to get used to a lot of disappointment already with these projects, as I predicted. Even the best plot ideas in my head just don’t translate out into real script very well, so I’m botching even the good bits. But I’m trying to keep in mind that these are really just drafts and prototypes, and go ahead with the easiest way of writing the scene that I’m imagining, even if it ends up something completely different to what I’m imagining in my head.

I would say out of my 4 stories, 2 are currently on fire (in a bad way), one is smouldering, and one is doing “fine”. So at this point it’s just damage control and holding out until the project ends. I think I definitely bit off more than I could chew so I’m just trying to balance the project and keep it afloat. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from it anyhow.

With regard to my own opinion of each story, I’m switching my release order, and order of focus in the week to do the ones I don’t like first, to get the out of the way, then I can look forward to the stories I like more on the weekend.

Because I ended up being nearly 2 chapters behind in some aspects, I caught up by doing the same stage for the same story, i.e. chapter outline for chapters 8 and 9, together. This went much better as I definitely built up momentum. I’m thinking this might change the way I plan my story out in the future, working in larger chunks, perhaps.

It took quite a while to get the next plot in line for a couple of stories but I feel a bit better for having done it, but I’m still only a couple of chapters ahead so it’s an ongoing planning thing.

Also I’m noticing a lot of overlap in plot points, maybe it’s just coincidence or just my limited range of ideas that I can think of meaning I come up with the same idea for multiple stories. I’m not insanely bothered but I’d prefer them to be more unique. Like characters reacting a certain way, or certain shots being the same.

I didn’t have a definite end point to this project when I started, but I’ll be stopping at 12 chapters, as that is the equivalent of one full printed novel for each story. I’ll do some other printing things related to that when I’ve finished too. So I’m now exactly half way through the project. And I’m basically managing to be honest. I think if I can manage 12 weeks regular output then I’m probably safe for longer term, but I’ve got a lot to figure out and evaluate for my skills, so a pit stop is definitely necessary. Will I continue afterwards? Not sure, I’d like to, but it depends what’s the best route for my skill.

I had a lot of thoughts this week ehehe (I actually write this during the week as I think of things!)
But it’s all a lot of new stuff so there you go.

Onwards and upwards.

[Suuper-san]

Chapter 7 is released of each of my stories. It's midnight again and my scheduling really needs some work :P

Et Cetera

Eclipse

Whispering Magic

Beta Reincarnation


Project Status:

Spoiler

meh, could be worse. Mostly my time went ok but I ended up being distracted by other non-project stuff and so lost a lot of time early on.

Another aspect to the project that I wanted to add from a couple weeks back was title pages with the chapter title on them, rather than just pinning it in the corner of my first page. That was a logistics issue and once I got around how I was going to do it, it went quite well.

Here are my chapter 1 Title Pages for each story.
Overall the quality is higher than my panels, and I'm using tone rather than hatching for colour.
I'll be trying to catch up to the current chapter by doing 2 chapter titles a week for each story.

Spoiler

I dunno but it seems like I’m putting a lot of exclamation marks in my script. I can’t remember how other mangas compare to that, but I think perhaps I’m overusing it just a tad. But it feels wrong with full stops/periods somehow, maybe I’m using it as a placebo for expressing excitement :P

I started to struggle this week (I mean it’s been a struggle the whole time, but this was worse), possibly for a lot of reasons, always difficult to pin it down. I’ve been oversleeping for 2/3 hours almost every day for reasons I don’t know – it could be stress (from the project, work or something else even) or just I’m wearing myself out more than normal doing whatever. Also my longest good stretch of high productivity ever was 6 weeks, which is the current length of this project, so I’m passing into new lengths of productivity so this may be the start of my long term stamina forming and upgrading. I also found that I was stressing about getting the workload done for each week’s worth of work, and so made it difficult to focus on each individual task. Once I realised that, I was able to relax and approach the tasks in a much more controlled and relaxed manner, without much more minimal stress. I’m hoping this means my overall productivity can go up as I won’t need to take so many breaks all the time. I was trying to rush to get work done, but by doing that I made it so stressful I couldn’t get anything done. By relaxing and taking bite-sized chunks of work, I actually worked just as fast as my top speed, but I felt like I was working slowly and so it was relaxing. Very strange. I’ll see how that sticks moving forward. Possibly it’s the start of a new mode of productivity I hope :P

I even mentioned it last week that it’s better to be productive than efficient if you’re not putting the time into it, but it’s a lot easier said than done given I’m used to working efficiently. I’m starting to think that efficient working has a stamina of its own, and that’s possibly why I’ve had weeks of much lower productivity followed by another stretch of high output. So I think I’m learning to smooth over the rough patches with a slower paced method of working (which may extend into my good patches and I’m more paced the entire time)

And yet another way of looking at productivity is to focus not on the entire workload you have to do, but just looking at the exact next thing you are doing only, if you are writing a script, the next line, if you are drawing guidelines, the next figure. Just by focusing on the single next element you reduce a lot of stress and you can actually make progress. The few previous weeks I have been caught up with trying to process the entire workload in my head, but that’s not great and it’s been leaving me a little depressed. So I’m trying not to think about everything that needs doing and just crack on with the current task. It’s helping me get over the smaller and bigger bumps that way.

Something this project is working for is just getting me used to producing content, and also getting used to a certain level and type of content. For example, I’ve mostly only done round speech bubbles or super creepy dark ones, but now I’m moving into exclamation style bubbles as I've gotten used to the others and can add a new item into my list of abilities. I’m hoping this continues to cover all sorts of avenues, such as expressions, poses, backgrounds etc. more on that in my final evaluation.

I’m noticing as my cast grows I’m running out of clear ways to draw them and make them recognisable. That’s basically all the art’s fault. I’m not sure how to deal with this, since these mangas are just to test stuff and so they are deliberately low quality. I’d still like to be able to draw more complexly even while rough, though.

so I'm hoping for quite a productive catch-up week the next week as I've got a bit of a better mindset for taking on the workload.

onwards and upwards.

[Suuper-san]

Once again it is midnight and I wonder what's wrong with my scheduling...
Enjoy chapter 8 of each story, released just about on time :P

Et Cetera

Eclipse

Whispering Magic

Omega World
(Previously: Beta Reincarnation)


Here is my project staus:

Spoiler

Possibly one of the better states it's been in.

My schedule took a couple of hits this week and so I wasn’t able to catch up as I would have liked, but I have half term next week and so I’m going to massively gun it to recover to full. The method I’ve switched to is not quite as efficient but it’s good at getting the productivity out. But it still takes time to generate so much content, which is the main draw back of such a large project.

Also didn't get enough time to draw more chapter title pages, hopefully get some done next week, hopefully.

A couple of hours went into making an improved template with better margins, and notations for odd/even pages which will help with double page spreads amongst other things. I'll explain more about that in my final review.

General Thoughts:

Writing the script seems to be getting harder and harder even though I’ve got a fairly good idea of what’s going on in each chapter. I’m wondering if that’s because I’m starting to get a sense of quality in my writing and that’s making me more aware of the low quality that I’m currently writing at. But it’s meant to be low quality anyway so I’m trying to just blaze ahead.

And in a similar vein it seems the scripts are getting lower and lower quality, but it might just be me noticing more areas in which I can improve. I’ve written 40 chapters so far (I’m 2 ahead in each story), and so that’s definitely a lot of experience to give my new writing better analysis.

I don’t want to spend longer on my scripts (even if it would result in higher quality), simply because I don’t have the time available in this project, which is meant to be very fast paced and just churn it out style. I don’t think that’s an issue at the moment but I’d like to figure out how to improve my scripts to a higher level, like a WIP, for future work. I have some clues in that regard so it’s not all a massive mystery now thank goodness.

However I’m finding, to no-one’s surprise, that scenes that I have imagined more (i.e. important/epic scenes) are a lot easier to write, so that’s perhaps a key to getting more in gear for the whole thing. Really it’s not getting the script done that’s the issue, but being efficient about it that’s causing me trouble, it’s a bit random progress a lot of the time.

I’m also getting quite a few ideas for how to improve my prototype manga method for a much higher efficiency, but mostly these are things that I can’t do now, it’s more at the beginning of the project, so I’m wondering now about future projects and what to implement next. I’m just jotting down notes for now as I don’t want to think about it until this project is complete and I’ve given myself feedback on it.

8/12 chapters for each story means I'm past the 2/3 mark of the project, only 4 weeks to go. It seems like I'll make it but I'd like to really get on top of the workload before the end.

With my project nearing the end I faced an interesting problem - do I continue planning the next chapters as if this project were continuing? There were a couple of pros and cons, mostly I’m getting tired and could use with less work to be honest. But at the same time, learning to deal with the workload and having good habits is more important long term, so I will be continuing with writing scripts and drafting pages even if I never produce those chapters to release. I’m hoping that this can help me to find other ways to improve efficiency and deal with improving my methods.

Bizarrely 2 characters in different stories missed a meal for different reasons this week.
Also bizarrely, damaged items were fixed using magical abilities in 2 stories as well...
Also also 2 characters held their cheek where they were clapped/punched.
Not sure if that’s just a happy coincidence or it’s a sign that I’m not very varied with my plot ideas, since that’s not the first time I’ve had a bunch of coincidences across my stories.

Artwise though I’ve been finding that sometimes my line quality increases to a similar style to when I was tracing. It’s probably because I’m working with quite loose proportions, but I’m starting to chain simple lines together which is not only faster but the quality is higher as there are no gaps in the lines. This was my eventual target so it’s surprising to see it start to creep in even when I’m not trying to do it yet.

see you all next week.

[Suuper-san]

11pm this time...I had other stuff going on but managed to just about churn out another chapter. This is one long project :P

Et Cetera

Eclipse

Whispering Magic

Omega World


Here is my project status:

Spoiler

I have marked the project end at chapter 12 but I’m still trying to plan ahead to get a good routine for the weekly workload, otherwise it will get easier and easier as there is less and less planning to do. But I’m also aware of other finalisation tasks for this project that are more important, so I might switch some time into doing them instead.

Being on half term I actually helped my family doing more gardening and chores and stuff, so actually I ended up with not as much extra time as I expected, as well as muscle ache from the hard work (I’m an artist/writer I don’t have muscles ok)

Plus as a kick in the face UK summer suddenly decided to arrive and the jump in heat and humidity was a shock to my system, I lost a couple of DAYS to lethargy while I adjusted into “summer mode”. Fortunately my buffer system meant I didn’t have to do that much work to get this week’s chapters out, but that means next week is an extra crunch. But it seems I’m getting better at handling the workload, so I’m bizarrely confident.

I had a super depressing week to be honest compared with most, and was very close to taking a week off but I really wanted to get this project over and done with, so that was the driving force to keep going, but it’s been tough this week. I'm feeling better now but maybe 5 days this week I felt really bad.

still 25% left of the project but it feels really close to the end now. Well, 3 weeks away is pretty close I guess.

General thoughts:

I absolutely crammed out the chapter title pages to try and catch up with the current chapter and managed to get up to chapter 5 now. And I’m quite impressed with the quality of the pages. They’re taking about 30 minutes each, so about twice a single comic page drawing time. That’s far above what I wanted but it’s tolerable as I did want the quality to be a little higher. Also I’m using proper colouring and shading techniques so it gives me good practice for that without using up a lot of time each week.

I passed 500 pages of manga last week and to be honest, it’s just a number now, it has just got very big, very quick. Obviously it’s sketchy pages but still, that’s not bad for 2 months work. As always it’s got me thinking how I can work faster and better still. I’ve been making improvements to my methods as I go along, and it seems that I’m consistently getting a chapter done in less time now. I’ll have a massive statistics dive at the end to see what metrics have been useful, but so far, basically, it seems that hard work results in experience ahaha who’d‘ave thought :P

So far I’m managing to write chapters of script but it just feels like a fluke every single time I make it to the end of the script. I’m not sure if that’s just lack of experience and so lack of confidence - I remember for almost forever I felt the same way with my art, that I’d never make a good piece again (after doing something/anything vaguely good), so I’m hoping that eventually I’ll get to the confidence to just churn out chapters of script without panicking every time I sit down to write.

As much as I’m confused 100% of the time with writing characters, plot, and pretty much anything you can think of, I’m sort of enjoying the challenge, and the little successes of improving a line of dialogue or fixing a plot hole are really rewarding. I’m leaning more into enjoying my work this year as my skill is finally at a sort of acceptable and workable level. Still lots to learn but I’m seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

As I’m getting literally hundreds of pages of experience I’m starting to think more about better layouts with borderless characters etc, and playing with the composition a lot more. So as I originally suspected it was just that there were too many factors to consider it at the beginning but now I’m used to “normal” pages I can start to think about higher level stuff. But it’ll take a while to get  a nice efficient method for dealing with things outside of my streamlined methods.

I’m suspicious that the quality is far lower than I'm allowing myself to realise, art and story, both. Art for obvious reasons. But to be honest, I look back on the chapters I’ve done and I’m pretty impressed with them. And that, to me, is a red flag. Because there’s no way that anything I have done is remotely good, at all. It’s impossible. But I still like how certain things came out, so I think I’m being less critical at the moment. Perhaps that’s because I said I would do reviewing at the end I’m subconsciously ignoring the errors.

Got 2 princess carries in different stories for coincidences this week. Very suspicious.
Actually so many coincidences with just this week if you look closely. I’m convinced that’s bad writing and lack of variation of ideas now. If I was only doing one story I wouldn’t have noticed that I think.

It’s quite annoying because I am aware of a lot of issues art and storywise but I simply can’t focus on everything at once, so I have to deliberately not work on certain things to allow myself to grow in other areas. I’m hoping that I’ll flip the priorities on subsequent projects so I’m always focusing on new things, but only a few at a time.

Some chapters it does feel like I’m cramming too much into them ,although I think I get a warning quite early on when I write more than 120 lines of script - which typically ends up as more than 80 panels. So possibly I’m not reacting strongly enough when I go over and correcting quickly. I’m trying to keep the page count the same regardless of panels, so sometimes it seems crammed with up to 7/8 panels on a page.

I have to keep reminding myself that this project is just to gain some base experience at writing and manga-ing, and that I shouldn’t keep getting serious about the quality control - it’s more about just doing stuff and figuring out ways to do things, and show stuff happening.

I get the feeling my art quality is dropping (I always wated it low quality anyway), but I look back and it always seems rather constant. But it always feels like I’m working to a lesser and lesser quality. So that’s strange/.

see you all next week.

[Suuper-san]

Regrettably there will be a 1 week hiatus for my mangas, so no new chapters this week.

I did however get some more chapter title pages out so that's something.

Basically a lot of reasons, mainly hayfever and not sleeping well (why I don't know, could be many reasons) have left me not as productive as I would have liked, and I don't want to push myself any harder because it's bad enough staying up to midnight to finish, but I wont even be able to finish by midnight this week and I've got work tomorrow.

I also slept badly and woke up today with an epic backache for no reason, so I can barely sit at my drawing station.

And the fact that I've been rushing the chapter title pages to catch up means I've done an extra 9 pages per manga in the last 2 weeks, of a much higher quality than my normal pages (basically the equivalent of an entire extra chapter per manga), and I think that sucked up a tad too much time from the main project bulk. So it's not like I've been skimping on the work but my focus was a bit too skewed.

there's some other project related stuff that I can do so I'll just potter on with that.

depending on how the next week goes I might be able to churn out 2 chapters and therefore catch up but I wont make any promises. but that would be really cool.

see you all later!

[Suuper-san]

my back didn't recover until Wednesday - didn't get any drawing done for 4 days from Sunday ahaha.
11pm again...but a massive comeback as I've completed 2 chapters this week, and the project is back on track.
Chapters 10 and 11 released.

Et Cetera

Eclipse

Whispering Magic

Omega World

Project status:

Spoiler

I think I’m running out of mental energy for this project as it’s getting harder and harder to do certain stages, especially the script. But that could just be my varying skill since I don’t have much experience. But I also feel pretty worn out so I’m really just looking forward to the project ending and getting back to normal work. I think I need time to stand back and evaluate my skill and progress to re-calibrate myself now. But it’s just a couple weeks more now, so I’m getting there.

I wrote the above paragraph a couple of days ago but after about 2 weeks of feeling like that, I’ve basically rebooted again from last Friday, which perhaps shows that the cause of the moodiness was something else. Either way I managed to push through it and even catch up a little with the project. I think it would be nice to have a larger buffer for being able to deal with downtime without it being an issue very quickly in the pipeline. I can only catch up about ~2 hours a week, so if I lose too much, I can’t catch up for weeks, or in this case, I won’t catch up before the project ends.

Rather than burnout I think I’m just getting plain fed up with the stories and their lack of direction...and my inability to direct them how I want.

I managed to pull out all the stops and not only do last week's missed chapter, but also this week's orignal planned chapter, and so I've drawn 134 pages of manga...in the last 4 days. Really makes me wonder what's the limit now. I tried to keep the original goal in mind, and so I reduced the art quality again to get a boost in speed. This week's chapter has been the fastest ever to produce, taking only 7 hours of work to ink 65 pages, so I miraculously managed to average 6.5 minutes PER PAGE while inking. The quality is naturally awful, but the speed is legendary. And bizarrely I didn't feel to phased working at that high speed, and I mostly felt that If I had more experience and skill, I could have done an even better job of the quality at that speed. so there's always massive room for improvement. I have more thoughts on a possible breakthrough with my style and the high speed, which I'll talk about later.

General Thoughts

I’ve finally noticed that I’m not really short of ideas for my stories, it’s more that I’m short of good ideas. I don’t know how to improve the raw ideas I have into a coherent interesting story. I assume that’ll come with time but I don’t yet know what could help to specifically improve that idea generation step. This is probably the issue that’s causing the most bottlenecking in my work since I slow down when I’m not confident with my idea and can’t really piece things together very well. to make progress I basically have to accept the fact I won’t meet my expectations for each chapter and then it gets easier to write. But I have to do that every time .

I think I’ve discovered a new way to draft scripts, with a much more raw, matter-of-fact way of describing things. Instead of writing actual dialogue, I write the intent of the dialogue in exchanges between characters. i.e. instead of “John: How are you? Janet: I’m fine, thanks, and you?”, it’s more “John ask Janet how she is, and she says fine, and returns the question”. It’s not necessarily useful but on occasion I’ve dropped the quality to this to muscle through tougher bits of script. It’s easier to go back and fill in the proper dialogue once you know the flow of the story. I don’t know if I’ll use this method regularly but for now it seems useful.

Managed to fit target practice into 3 of my stories now, in almost the same chapter. An incredibly bizarre coincidence. Each fits into its own story so I’m not sure what’s going on there at all. Just very strange. Probably I’m not being creative enough.

Small talk takes up a lot of pages and goes nowhere...but still a lot of what I have my characters say I feel strange not having it there, so I dunno if it’s meant to be compacted somehow or I’m just making up random stuff for no reason. Whatever. I’m also doubling up on a lot of phrases that my characters say in passing comments - I’m not sure how to deal with them at the moment. I mean leaving them in makes sense, just for the flow, but I need to keep in mind that I need to give them more uniquely worded phrases so they don’t sound like they’re repeating each other. For now I’m just going with what I think of on the spot and if I can’t improve it then it gets added in anyway. It’s much more important that I get used to writing any level of script and then fixing it up later, rather than aiming for perfection first time. So I’m almost deliberately aiming at clichés to carry me over while I’m learning the basics.

I’ve also noticed, perhaps because I’m working on multiple stories, that I quickly forget small details, like names, or even side characters, plot points, and so on, so I’m quickly looking though my notes and script to re-read it. I think I definitely need a better way of organising my information, sort of wiki-style, to be able to quickly reference my information and not waste time. I have several ideas on that so it’s just trialling out stuff to see what works now.

Artwise I’ve created a method for doing double page spreads (gotta keep an eye out for odd and even pages definitely!), so I sort of forced them into the script just because I wanted to try them out in this project to get some experience and see how it looks printed in a book. So far so good though I think. There’s a ton of artistic regrets for this project but that’s good because I can figure out what went wrong and why.

Because of getting behind for lots of reasons this was the first chapter that I drew up without having a script for next week, and I must say, I felt incredibly not confident knowing clearly what was going to happen. I have an outline planned, but it wasn’t enough to alleviate my worries.

I’m noticing the composition of my pages is quite dry, like I’m presenting the information and the event, and sketchiness aside it’s hopefully clear what’s going on, but there’s no dynamic-ness, no impact, no energy. But the fact that I’m noticing that now means perhaps I’m on the start of figuring out how to add it in the future.

only 1 week to go now, I'm very confident I'll finish early this week. and then it's just bonus stuff like a title page, contents etc, and then I can actually make them into a book. very exciting. But I also just want to get back to my normal WIPs lol.

always busy.

[Suuper-san]

my hay fever is really messing with me
medication isn't helping and my eyes are just so sore, it's making it hard to draw for any long periods and my focus is really out of whack.
also probably same reason I've been super tired the last two weeks becuse my family all have hay fever and we've all been tired lately.

so I'm taking another 1 week hiatus.
I'm hoping I can tack this weeks work onto next week and still get done what I wanted to do in the timescale, just not as regular as I would have wanted.

also work is mucking my days about and it's messing with my schedule.

hopefully next week will be more productive.

EDIT:
work has messed even more with my schedule moving days around and I have no idea what's going on the next two weeks, so annoyingly the project will fizzle out a bit, just before the end. it's the last 2 weeks of the school year so everyone is trying to get projects finished. this is sort of the last straw when it comes to keeping my project together, in fact work has caused at least half the issues with my project annoyingly. so the project may or may not get finished in the next two weeks now I have no idea.

EDIT2: I may also be going on a quick (surprise to me) camping holiday when my work ends in a week and so my project is well and truly messed up big time. not that I count that as a failure, but I wanted it to end nice and clean cut, following the plan right to the end, and with no major breaks for any reason.
I might still be able to salvage something, but we'll see.

also everyone I know has been complaining about being super tired, myself included....which is strange. must be the weather :P