Real stuff getting posted to the internet on April Fools Day. How strange.
These past few weeks, while I've been posting process stuff, I've also been preparing a proposal for the Xeric Grant. It shipped out on the deadline yesterday, and it was an enormous undertaking. The proposal itself was a joint effort between myself and my oldest friend, designer extraordinaire Michelle Sukle, and I feel we put together a very good proposal. We won't know until middle of June, but I'm proud of what we accomplished regardless of the outcome.
I think anyone who is doing their own graphic novel should put together everything the Xeric asks for, regardless of whether or not they feel like they have a real shot at it. It forces you to answer the questions you may have been putting off or working around, and to mentally get a complete handle on the project. Writing the Statement of Purpose alone was enormously helpful when making my first pass on the script, and needing printing quotes forced me to finalize a page count and decide which ideas I could keep and which ones needed to be edited out. A lot got edited out honestly...this book needs to get done. Not every good idea I have needs to happen right now.
Where do we go now?
When I started this project in earnest six months ago and when I wanted everything done by March 15th- I don't think the book is running late as much as I didn't really understand how much work was involved. The time that has been involved in writing a full draft of the script, thumbnailing through the end of the book, preparing a final page count was something I hilariously enough thought would be easy. Of course, a Xeric proposal also includes a lot of the business end of the business and a ton of research.
I'm happy with the process I outlined, as far as the pencil-ink-grayscale workflow goes. The writing method will get seriously revamped for a future project. I haven't penciled and inked in the last two weeks, but mentally the project is much farther now. I'm exploring my options on lettering for this project, and I'll have to have that resolved before I know a new completion date. Progress is good though.
