The Story of the Beast With Those Four Dirty Paws

Last night I went into my yearly 10:00 on October 31st pre-NaNo panic, outlined a fic I've been planning for a few weeks . . . and then decided in the end not to write it. I have a lifelong bad habit of pitching story ideas to someone and then getting discouraged by their lack of interest/understanding. I know I shouldn't measure the entire worth of an unstarted project by an early lackluster response, but I do and I have abandoned so many of them because of it. It isn't the other person's fault. I just have very little confidence in my own work.

I think part of the reason I've managed to stick with Guardian for so long, despite it being a completely unreasonable thing unmarketable even to its home fandom, was that I didn't tell anyone about it or try to get anyone's opinion before I started it. There was no starry-eyed planning period of announcing "I'm going to do a thing!" I just did the thing, plunked it down in my deviantart gallery, and never looked back to see if anyone cared about the thing. It was the least discouraged I've ever been by a lackluster response, which there certainly was for the first few pages. (I was still disappointed, but I had gone in accepting that that might be the case, since I had just turned up one day like, hello, deviantwatchers! Here's a story for a fandom I've only barely alluded to in my past artwork so all of you are almost certainly watching me because of something else. Oh but it won't be returning to the plot hook introduced on the first page until the last chapter. First it's going to cover the life story of a generally-overlooked character beginning with her childhood. Some of this will be unfamiliar unless you have played the game very thoroughly. None of the really popular characters will be introduced for several weeks. Oh and it's in graphic novel format. I have never written one before and I am also fairly new to digital art.)

And then Auronlu found it, and suddenly I had an audience who was actually paying attention. I probably would have continued trudging stoically along with it otherwise, but knowing that someone is reading it who likes it and is invested in the story really gave me a renewed sense of purpose. There are now a handful of someones following it, but she's still my most diligent reader. :)

So this month my NaNo goal is to finish the first chapter, which has a few more pages to go. (I think this is the point I was trying to make when I started this entry.) There really isn't a NaNo for sequential art, probably because it's hard to quantify and also not something you can go back and easily edit if you've rushed through it. I can't really keep a word count or anything because the pagely process goes like script - panels - sketch - lines - text - color - post - repeat!

I haven't written prose in a really long time and I miss it, and I love/hate the joyous/hair-pulling frenzy of NaNo, I love the camaraderie of writing alongside everyone else, and I wanted to write a fic because I have this increasingly crowded hutch of plotbunnies for them, but I don't want to stop working on Guardian especially since I've finally managed to drag it onto a regular update schedule. And I really don't think I'll be able to keep up with both.

Sooo yes. I don't know if I can still count it as a NaNo project, since I'm still going to be boxed off in panels while everyone else is working with words, but that's my goal for the end of the month.