Monday , November 23 , 2009

    Posted by:

    Sarah

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It's nice to be drawing Shelly's breasts again. I've missed them. Incidentally, it must be hard for her to hold that book, since her hands are clearly crippled and retarded.

Not happy with the art today, is what I'm saying. Except for the breasts. Breasts are hard to mess up.

It was a productive weekend, though. Jill and I got every single bit of our laundry done. There is not a scrap of dirty laundry in our house. In our end of it, anyway. Also we cleaned out our closet and bought a door stop, so our cats will stop closing themselves in our room at night.

... So... yeah. A weekend full of cleaning and being complete lesbians.

~sjh

    Posted by:

    James

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Here's someone we haven't seen in a while! Not since we left the tabletop game storyline many moons ago, anyway. But whatever is Shelly doing in the middle of Higgins Park in the wee hours of the weeknight morning? I guess we'll all have to figure that one out at some point, won't we?

I'm trying to keep things fairly even in terms of character relationships. There are basically two spheres of influence in the world of Fancy That, revolving around Kent and Brighton respectively. On the Brighton side of things are Elise and Melody, and on the Kent side of things there are Quin, Shelly, and Gina. Mandy is in Quin's personal orbit, and if the crafty Italian bloke isn't cautious he may wind up with a sphere of influence all his own.

I say crafty, though I'm not sure that's a word really applicable to Quin. He's got a good bit of book smarts to his name, but not a lot of common sense. He'd probably make a brilliant (if unorthodox) military commander. But who knows? There may be cogs turning beneath that very fine hat that even I'm unaware of. It's happened to me before.

The more I work on scripts for things, the less I'm inclined to write traditional prose. I find myself turning over ideas that I've had for novel-length projects, seeing if there's a way to work them into a traditional twenty-six-episode anime run. It's an...interesting process, to be sure. I think it stems from the fact that I tend to be a very visual, cinematic kind of writer when I'm operating in prose, and while I am capable of handling internal characterization, it can't really be said that I'm capable of handling it well. I'm much more comfortable letting characterization flow out of dialogue and action most of the time, which is--simply put--what screenwriters do. Sure, voiceovers can relay characters' internal states, but they've become something of a hackneyed device, stubborn remnants of the days of hard-boiled detectives and deadly dames.

There are still some things that I have at hand that can only ever work in prose, and I'm aware of that. But I'm becoming more and more open to the idea of shifting a portion of my focus permanently to scriptwriting. That way, the explosions, kung-fu, and fantastical heroics I conjure in my prose might not stay in my head-movies. They might get slapped up on a screen to play out for everyone to see.

I know the chances of such a thing happening are slim, but--to quote a great man--never tell me the odds.

-James