Production

Guess I should've posted this last week, but I'm in the midst of actual 'production' writing on the book. That's my term for when the real writing starts. I still make notes in my journal, and of course sketches. More sketches later once I get around to scanning them in.

Monday last week began my 2500 word per day quota. That's roughly fifty pages a week. It's carry over from my screenwriting schedule so there might be some tweaks here and there. Especially considering a script is usually 18,000-20,000 words. Novels are a wee bit bigger; anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000. I had three chapters (plus the prologue) written before last week, but because of the two children's books I'm working on, hadn't committed to cranking out the novel. Well, since there's a bit of a pause right now on the kid's books, I couldn't hold off on the novel any longer.

There'll be sketches o'plenty as I go along, but I'll also be writing more about the actual writing. This being my first novel, I'll be learning a lot along the way and that's mainly what I'll jot down here on the blog. Oh and yes, I've started some sketching for the actual Conjurers website. The blog will stay but there's many things I'd like to add. On that note, feel free to fire some suggestions my way about what you like and don't like about book sites. I certainly don't want the website to be just a billboard for the book (like many movie sites). I'll be relying on my internet background to drum up some new and creative things that can be done on a book's website.

My main goal in all my sites (including dogeatdoug.com ) is to not just promote the product, i.e. a comic strip or a book. Rather I love the idea of building a franchise and not in the McDonald's sense or just in terms of merchandise. Really the goal is to find new mediums to explore ideas. For the comic strip I'm working on children's books. That's one example. But I also want to explore doing fully animated strips on the site. I still have a lot of brainstorming to do on the novel in regards to fleshing out the franchise. Obviously the first priority is writing the book...and re-writing it, and re-writing it again. But I'd love to spin it off into comics too. We shall see. I'm new to this, but the possibilities are dazzling.

To get a 'tip of the iceberg' idea on what I'm talking about, check out Atherton. It's the upcoming series from Patrick Carman, and he's done some really cool stuff on his site.