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.
EclipseBeta ReincarnationWhispering MagicEt Cetera
This is my project status as of now:
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.
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.
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