The Red Goddess Cometh – freak’n finally

I’m not sure how Donald happened upon www.darkgeometry.ca, but what a find it was. The man behind it, Jesselee Lang, is clearly very gifted but he is also very generous. As an artist he gives away some amazing stuff and his site is certainly worth a visit.

Donald knowing me, though very excited himself, was justifiably hesitant to fully share his discovery until after Jesselee had agreed to come onboard. The problem was that Donald had told me (read: tormented me) that he’d found a very talented graphic artist and then just left it at that. Argh! A summary of my exchange of phone calls with Donald goes something like:  Donald: "He’s tremendously gifted, perfect for the project, a dream find. But I’m not telling you who he is." I’m sure Donald remembers it differently, but this is my blog and this is how history will be recorded.

With childlike enthusiasm, which to an outsider observer could, I will concede, have been misconstrued for childish impatience, I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Admittedly wait time is rather subjective. Imagine a five year-old on Christmas Eve that is simultaneously doing the pee-pee dance. Well that kid had nothing on me.

Finally, Donald contacted me to say that Jesselee was onboard and that it was safe for all involved if I were to now go look at his website. It was a paradise of rendering. If anyone could capture Alexandra, my Red Goddess, it would be this genius. It wasn’t too long after Jesselee had joined the project (by ‘too long’ keep in mind the pee-pee dance on Christmas Eve) that he provided the first images. When I saw Alexandra I think I squealed – which if done correctly is not as emasculating as one might imagine.

But then it all started to slowly unravel…  

The Ottawa Come-on-buddy Con

Gaining public attention and interest, aka effective promotion, is an area in publishing that I’m a little more familiar with than this collaboration thing that graphic novels entail. While I cannot tell you what will get your book flying off the shelf I can tell you about expensive mistakes. Just not at this moment and on this blog. This blog is strictly dedicated the expensive mistakes that I make solely with respect to graphic novels. So far there hasn’t been any. What can go wrong on journey when you’re still on your doorstep?

I mention promotion because Comic Cons would seem like a dandy place to get a comic before the general public and distributors. One might be tempted to think of it as a natural fit. When the promoters of the Montreal Comic Con brought the road show to Ottawa for the first time this May this would have seemed like a golden opportunity for local talent (I’m alluding to myself here) and those in the industry, like Ucreate. It was not.

Here’s a fun fact, while Ottawa and Montreal are on the same continent and even in the same country they are, actually, two distinctly separate places.  I have travelled internationally and at no time have I ever come across anyone confusing the two. (Admittedly this is because most people, internationally, couldn’t find Canada on a map of the world and have never even heard of Ottawa. And by internationally I mean that this phenomenon starts in upper state New York and goes from there.) Well, the folks running the Ottawa Comic Con did just that. They must’ve had it in their heads that Montreal and Ottawa were the same place.

This would explain, at least to me, why they didn’t make much of an effort to contact industry locals. After all, why contact everyone when you already did in Montreal? Or, conspiracy alert, maybe they didn’t even do that. Maybe they just blew into town in Montreal too. Maybe it’s not a friendly Comic Con at all, maybe it’s invasive. Just strutting in and rolling over the indigenous comic industry and pillaging our comic peoples of their comic buying loot and then skedaddling out of town before the dust has settled from their blitzkrieg. Or maybe, just maybe, they're aliens using the Comic Con to find converts and sympathizers to their master plan of total domination.

Whatever the reason my point is, as I mentioned above, when they came to Ottawa they didn’t feel a need to make much of an effort to contact anyone locally who might have wanted to participate. I only found out through a friend that it was happening at all and Ucreate found out through me.

As it stands I’m only pissed-off in principle but had we had something to promote (ie had we had the forethought to lock a graphic artist in the basement until they produced) I would have been fully vested in my pissed-offed-ness (that’s a real term… starting now)

The thing about a graphic novel

The thing about a graphic novel is that it really requires graphics. If you’re going to write one you need to come to terms with your words taking a backseat. Much like writing a screenplay I suppose - where pretty people wind up saying the words that smart people wrote for them. And the director is hailed a genius.

I only mention this because it didn’t even occur to me that this would be a sticking point. How hard could it be to get a graphic artist to come onboard? I was so naïve. Fortunately I had previously written a book and had soon discovered that the writing was the easiest part. Putting out a graphic is similar.

Our search began with the local college here in Ottawa, Algonquin. Ucreate has a relationship with Algonquin that allowed them to put a competition in place. The premise was that the winner would get the gig and $10,000.00. Really a double bonus pack; good money (for a college kid) and resume material. Seemed fool proof. It was not.

The competition was started, the flood gates were opened, and poof – a dry popcorn fart of interest. Give it time. The more time it got the more it sort of just festered. There was some minimal interest, but we had clearly been hornswoggled by the generation gap. We had thought that what would have interested us twenty (plus and then a little more) years ago would interest the college crowd today. Clearly – we had thought wrong. If Red Goddess had been an “App” or a Facebook game I expect we’d have been off to the races.

So utterly incapable of coming to terms with our inability to motivate this crowd to action were we that we just waited and waited, stupefied and undaunted by the actual non-event before us. The rocket just sat on the launch pad relentlessly fizzling and we continued to watch – childlike in our hope.   You can only stare at fizzle for so long before reality dawns on you. After several months an executive decision was made – let’s acknowledge the obvious.

What lesson did we extract from this? Nothing really, but the whole affair did serve as a reference point when it began to happen, in a manner of speaking, again. And, a graphic artist nearly ruined me for all others.

Think “Avatar”, but steeped in the occult and with a killer soundtrack.

In my previous blog entry I mentioned the dinner where I discussed the concept of “Red Goddess” with Donald. It took place late in 2010, more-or-less as a seasonal Christmas shindig.

 It wasn’t until a month or so later, in the winter of 2011, that Donald and I met at the bookstore, Chapters, to revisit the project. The location had been chosen so that Donald could give me a cursory introduction to the world of graphic novels, which, I have to concede, I was not as brushed up on as I should have been considering that I was about to undertake writing one. Lack of foreknowledge, incidentally, has never held me back on anything previously. Take parenting for example or that fun preamble that can result in being a parent.

After meeting up Donald, led me to the graphic novel section and in a manner clearly relaying his love for the art form, informed me that it was the fastest growing section in the bookstore – which was quite possible as it was also the smallest section in the bookstore. It’s not that I was being cynical in this observation, quite the opposite. There was a welcoming energy in the possibility; something that I found the stogy gate-keeper bloated world of publishing lacked.

Generally I associate the real cool graphic novels with the specialty shops. Where, in the past, as part my research for “Pairs” I had purchased a few looking specifically for either female writers or female lead characters. Nevertheless, as a result of this crash course in the genre, I ended up purchasing a few at Chapters of Donald’s choosing.

Subsequent to this tutorial-slash-shopping-spree, we had a chat at the Starbucks inside the bookstore. Over a couple of rounds coffee, during which his wife, Karen, briefly joined us while en route to some final destination that I don’t recall, I outlined the big sweep of my thoughts and the relationship between my novel, “Pairs”, and the impending graphic novel, “Red Goddess”.

Though he liked the broader concept of the protagonist from “Pairs”, Kayley, writing the graphic novel in which she was unwittingly predicting the future of the “Pairs” story arc, Donald has a polite way of letting one know that they are rambling, which I was, so I changed my tact. I reeled in the conversation to focus on the graphic novel itself and turned it into an ‘elevator’ pitch. By that I mean a single sentence. “Red Goddess is a full-throttle blending of sci-fi and the occult where one woman is protecting a coven spread across space and time from an ancient demon named Leviathan.” Sold!

I may not know graphic novels but I do love sci-fi and occult movies and television. What I was really on track to write was a movie script. In the back of my mind I had visions of the “Red Goddess” becoming an animated motion picture like “Heavy Metal”, only with a better and more consistent animation style, a more cohesive storyline and cooler music. Not that the music was awful. In retrospect I guess what mean by like “Heavy Metal” is conceptually inspired by. Think “Avatar”, but steeped in the occult (as opposed to spirituality) and with a killer soundtrack.

A little bit of back story:

Here’s the skinny; several years ago I wrote a book called “The Fifth Pillar” (which is now out of print) and through that experience came to know the man and wife team, Donald and Karen respectively, which are the company Partner Publishing. Donald liked my writing style, okay let’s be honest, he thought the story was about nothing but liked the book because he loved the dialogue. Seinfeld isn’t the only one that can make entire stories about nothing entertaining.

Fast forward a few years and Donald has launched a company called Ucreate Media, www.ucreatemedia.com . And he approaches me with a script, working title "Gettysburg Continuum", and asks me if I could do a little script doctoring on it. By that he meant that the story arc was essentially in place so please don’t screw with it (i.e. make it about nothing) but could I please buff up the characters and dialogue. (Characters and dialogue go hand-in-hand. Flat characters are not going to have sparkling dialogue. )So I did.

During this same period of time I was in the final edits of a novel that I wrote and self-published called “Pairs” (shameless plug alert) www.pairsthenovel.com  which is available on Amazon and other fine Internet book retailers – including Kobo.In the novel the protagonist, Kayley, has writing aspirations and one of the options which presents itself to her, via her love interest, Adam, is to write a graphic novel.

It occurred to me one evening during a dinner with Donald and Karen, perhaps inspired by a few glasses of wine, that if I could bring something to Gettysburg Continuum then I could likely write my own graphic novel. However, my twist, and there must always be a twist, is that it’s actually Kayley’s graphic novel. She’s getting the writer’s credit. And after those aforementioned glasses of wine that seemed like an absolutely brilliant concept. And further down this amazing path of supercharged creativity I came up with the idea that the graphic novel would actually be part of the broader story arc of which “Pairs” is the beginning. I certainly impressed myself that night. Little did I know....

At this stage I’m not sure if I would qualify my endeavour to get “Red Goddess” to print as a labour of love but there must be something about it that has a hold on me...but it's not reason

This blog is a journal of birthing the “Red Goddess”.