Good news, everybody! This week, co-writer Kristi McDowell and I will have completed the first draft of our 100 (or so) page graphic novel for Gamer Girl & Vixen. We’d originally planned the story as a 6-issue mini-series, but minds changed, ideas shifted, and now we’re going to have it all in one big, wonderful collection. This tpb is going to sit proudly on my shelf — and hopefully yours too — for the rest of my life, a testament to kicking butt, doing good work and making your dreams come true.

So I thought this week I’d share with you all a little bit about the writing process.

The fan art that won Gemma Moody the job!

I can’t exactly post the entire script on my blog, that would give everything away! But I think I can share a page or two, along with the accompanying art, so you can see how we go from the written word to the drawn picture. It’s a neat process, and I’ve definitely learned so much about making comics just from doing it myself.

So join me after the jump to get a crash course in scripting Gamer Girl & Vixen!

Back in the very, very beginning, Gamer Girl & Vixen was going to be an ongoing series, because one has the luxury of thinking big at the beginning. But as we kicked around ideas and hopes for the future, we eventually crunched that down into a six issue mini-series. We were hoping to get interest from a professional publisher, but the big companies never returned our calls and we weren’t able to make any deals with the smaller publishers (yet!). But everyone who looked over our pitch had very nice things to say about the general idea, so Kristi, Gemma Moody and I decided to forge ahead with our comic. The plan was then to produce just the first issue, for which we’d already written the script, until Kristi had the genius idea of turning the whole thing into a graphic novel!

Genius!

I am incredibly lucky to be working with some creative smarty-pantses.

So here we are, on the Road to Kickstarter, with only 1/6th of the script written. With this new goal in mind, and Gemma cranking away on art, Kristi and I rolled up our sleeves and got to work!

We plotted out six issues, then crunched them down into six chapters for our graphic novel, doing our best to keep the size manageable while still telling a complete story.

Once we had the overall story in place, we got to work writing it out. The ideas for Gamer Girl & Vixen have their origins in online role-playing and fan fiction. Kristi and I actually met in some online writing clubs, dedicated to writers working, plotting and writing together. So when it came time to really dig into Gamer Girl & Vixen, we decided to go back to that old style. Every chapter we’ve written together starts out as prose writing, which we’ve termed a ‘novella’. We write out dialogue, the characters’ thoughts, their actions, the scenery and everything you’d expect in a normal book or short story.

Then we take that novella and write it out as a script. For example, here is a look at page #13.

Words and stuff

There are no set rules or guidelines to laying out panels and dialogue. It can be whatever the writer and artists want. Obviously, you’ve got to keep in mind that the artist can’t draw everything. You can’t cram a page with 10 panels and a short story’s worth of dialogue, that’s just not going to work. You’ve got to keep the panels at a good number and the dialogue spread out evenly. I had no formal training whatsoever going into scripting, but I’d like to think I did a pretty good job. I would just picture how I wanted the page to look and the best way to keep the dialogue flowing.

It helps that I’ve read thousands upon thousands of comic books in my lifetime.

Here’s the finished page #13.

All the pretty pictures

You can see for yourself how the script lines up with the panels. Gemma is great at panels, adding artistic touches that I didn’t even consider when writing up the page. Like how the panel on the bottom left is tilted, pink and cracking. That’s just awesome stuff. She was also our letterer for these early pages, but she won’t be lettering the graphic novel. We’ll have a big announcement about that coming up in a few weeks, and we’re very excited. I’ll be sure to talk more about what goes into comic book lettering then.

And that is basically how the process is done. Kristi and I write out the prose novella, then we transform that into a script, keeping in mind space and flow, and then Gemma draws and colors the hell out of it. The whole adventure has been very fun and fascinating. I have learned so much simply from doing.

If there are any other aspects of making our comic that you’d like to hear about, let me know in the comments. Your support and readership is going to mean everything to this project.

As always, you can follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook and read up on the project on Tumblr. And if you’d be so kind, please share our info in your own social networks. Every new set of eyes is potentially a new fan!

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