With a rush of clear crisp wind and the scent of cinnamon, vanilla, and fallen leaves, October has arrived. Probably my favorite month of the year—and one I share with many book-lovers, I think. It’s a great time to pick up a new book (May I suggest The Boy Who Called the Foxes) or an old book (Hound of the Baskervilles, anybody?) But how about one that’s not even out yet?
I’m looking seriously at November for the long-awaited relaunch of the Dronefall Series. As some of you know, I completely rewrote book one of my six-book Christian dystopian series this year. The relaunch is going to be a big event, but in the meantime, I wanted to give certain people a chance to be on the cutting edge—and an exclusive look at the new Dronefall One before anybody else gets it.
What this isn’t:
No, this isn’t a street team or ARC reader recruitment. I’m not doing this to enlist help for promotion or get flashy reviews for launch-day. Think of it as the formation of a book club—one with very few rules or obligations attached. I wanted to give readers who actually were curious about Dronefall an exclusive experience.
Here’s the deal, if you join my email list in the month of October, in the year 2024, you automatically will become a member of the October Club.
What this is:
So, what are the benefits of joining the October Club, and where’s the catch?
The benefits:
If you are on my email list already, or join anytime this October, you will be sent a free ebook copy of Dronefall—the rewritten second edition.
You can read it anytime you want—or ignore it.
But you might want to check it out, because during October, I’ll be sending extra emails, giving you a behind-the scenes look at the rewrite and the vision behind it, as well as a chance for you to send me your questions and get answers.
You’ll be tagged as the October Club on my email list, so there’s a chance you’ll get October Club exclusive emails and content in the future.
The catch:
None
You have no obligation to review the book or even read the book, if it turns out to not be your thing. Like I said, you’re not a launch team. This club is for you and your own cozy autumn reading enjoyment. Of course, if you want to review the book when it finally comes out, that would be amazing. Thank you in advance if you plan to. But the book is really just a thank-you and a chance to give you a look at my heart and vision for the series before you support it. I really want to give you that.
How to Join
If you’re on my email list already, you’re automatically part of the October Club. No action needed on your part, just wait for the link to the ebook to drop into your inbox. I’ll send it out as soon as it’s ready.
If you’re not on my email list, go sign up! All I need is your name and an email address that works best for you.
One final reminder—this is a limited-time opportunity. To join the club and get the book for free you have to sign up before November 1st, 2024. The earlier in October you join, the better, since I will be sending some exclusive emails in real time, but even if you join on October 31st, you’ll still get the book.
So, join us for some cozy autumn nights in with a hot drink and a good book. Invite a friend or two to sign up with you so you’ll have some people to rant to, and I hope you all have the best October ever.
I’m a novelist—most of you guys know that. I’ve studied and practiced that particular mode of storytelling for around 15 years now. That creates a lot of habits and expectations when I sit down to work on a story.
But I’ve been thinking about branching out into comics for a long time. And it was while I was working on thinking up an idea for a newsletter freebie that I decided to finally commit to finishing a project. That project was “A Reason to Run: the comic.”
The idea was, I wanted to give my readers a view of my story they couldn’t get just from reading my books. I set my sights on the first chapter of the first book of the Dronefall Series. I wanted to adapt it to the comic medium. But I really had no idea how I was going to do that.
How Do You Adapt Novel Text To Comics?
Of course, this is what I asked Google—actually, I asked Pinterest first, because I typically do, but when I didn’t find what I needed there, I took it to Google. And guess what? I also didn’t find a lot there.
So, is this not something people do? Clearly, they do it—novels do occasionally get graphic novel adaptations, after all. But I was able to find very little guidance on how to do it online. And so, I realized I was going to have to log off and use my own brain.
That’s a good thing to do sometimes. Kids, you don’t need people on the internet to do all your thinking for you. God created you with a brain that can think on its own. Sometimes you have to step away from other voices and remember you can figure things out for yourself. It’s actually one of the best things you can do for your creativity.
But, having said all that, I thought it was too bad there were hardly any tips for how to do this on the internet. So, I’m going to share my insights with you. Read on.
My Process
Being an extremely visual writer who for some reason always knows exactly what compass-point everything in a given scene is facing, I had a lot of very strong imagery in my head already. This process would probably be a lot longer if you needed to make a lot of character and setting design decisions before you started. I dived straight in without writing out a script or anything. I just started story-boarding the whole thing shot-by-shot like a movie.
Don’t do it this way.
It was getting really long and tedious. I was many pages into my thumbnailing when it occurred to me that comics are not films. So, that’s my first tip.
Tip #1 Comics are NOT Film Storyboards
Comics are their own medium. It’s possible to use way too many panels to show an action. It can actually make the action more confusing. I also didn’t want to make this a 30-page project. This was my first time trying to complete a comic for public consumption. I wanted it to be manageable.
So, I scrapped the thumbnails and started rethinking things. I needed to think about what parts on this first chapter of Dronefall One actually needed to be communicated. What could I make clear? What could I get a casual reader interested in without a lot of exposition?
I ended up selecting two passages of text that would end up appearing on the pages. One was that iconic intro about the Blindworm and train-jumping. The other was the conversation my MC Halcyon and her friend Reveille have as Halcyon is making a run for it. Off of that, I could build my pages.
Tip #2 Draw your thumbnails—worry about page layout later
Now that I had the text to use as a framework, I started drawing new thumbnails. At first, they were just a string of rectangle panels. I didn’t bother thinking about layouts and different panel shapes or sizes until I knew what panels I actually needed to tell my story.
By rethinking my thumbnails in a much less play-by-play progression, I flew through the thumbnailing process and was ready to move on to page layouts.
Tip #3 Decide how many pages you want to draw
I managed to condense the whole of chapter one into eight pages. I was able to guesstimate the number by knowing about how many panels I would probably be able to fit on a page, and then starting to mark out potential page-breaks in the thumbnail sketches.
Staying flexible at this stage is helpful. None of the panels were set in stone yet. A lot would shift around and evolve as I got into sketching my tentative layouts. I ended up dropping and combining a lot of panels. I wanted to stay sensitive to readability and composition in the sketching phase.
Tip #4 Stay noncommittal in the early stages
Comic art is more than just a string of pretty pictures. It’s about telling a story.
Once I was satisfied with the layouts, the scary part began. This was also the point where I realized I was going to do the whole comic in traditional media—also a scary decision. I went out and bought the biggest pad of Bristol board I could find. I don’t know a lot about comics, but I do know you’re supposed to work much larger than your print-size. And with all the pictures within pictures in the medium, I knew I would still be getting into some pretty small details if I wasn’t careful.
Tip #5 Work LARGE
The original pages of this comic are 17inx14in (43.18cm x 35.56cm) and I almost wished they were bigger. Still, working even on that scale has its challenges. If you’re not an artist, you might not realize how distorted a large page is when you’re sitting at a desk. I had to stand up and look straight down at it to keep it from getting too skewed. An easel or drawing-board might have been helpful.
Tip #6 Use a medium you’re comfortable with for your first comic
Kind of a bonus tip. Also, I didn’t do this.
I opted to use alcohol markers for this project. For the most part, I like how it turned out, but I felt a little panicky the whole time I was using them. They interacted strangely with graphite. (Which I used to sketch the pages out before inking with alcohol-based fine-liners.) They each blended a little differently. And boy, I sure used some of them up. We took a couple of emergency trips to Hobby Lobby to replenish them over the two weeks I was working on this.
I was using the store-brand ones, luckily. But you know they still weren’t cheap. That’s the thing about alcohol markers.
Anyway. Once I had inked and colored all eight pages and a cover, I photographed them with my phone, cropped and adjusted them, and popped them into Canva where I added the text. I could have hand-lettered the text on the physical pages, but I didn’t. Because I kinda forgot. I got in the zone.
Tip #7 Leave room for your text boxes/speech bubbles
Mine got a little crowded. This probably takes some practice to get right. But in the end, I think I ended up with a totally readable, and even kind of cool-looking comic that gives my readers an exciting taste of the world of Dronefall. That was my goal.
I hope you got something out of this behind-the-scenes look at my comic-making process. I’m obviously a complete newbie, but I wanted to share my experience with other complete newbies out there who might be just as lost as I was at the beginning of the process. If you have any questions for me, please drop them in the comments, and I’ll be sure to answer them as best I can.
Want to see the full comic?
Download it when you join my email list. I try to send entertaining, inspiring emails every other week. I want to make your inbox a better place, so if that sounds like something you would appreciate, welcome to my exclusive café.
Well, I’ve been working obsessively again. I got an idea a while back and have been refining it for a long time in my head, but finally, two weeks ago, I started working on actually creating it.
I wanted to make something cool for my future email subscribers. Since I don’t use social media, my email list has become a top priority. I wanted to give you something you couldn’t find anywhere else—something unique to me and my skillset as well as my story-world. So, I started scheming up what I think is a perfect gift for readers or potential readers of the Dronefall Series.
Has the pop-up interrupted me yet? Yep, that’s it. I created a comic adaptation for the first chapter of the first book in the Dronefall Series.
Read the Comic
I’ve got a dedicated landing page for it, too. If you check the menu and click on “Free Comic” it will take you there. The comic is 8 pages long (plus a cover and a bonus page at the end.) I drew the whole thing traditionally using alcohol markers in a manga-like grayscale. I’m still gun-shy about full-color. Alcohol markers are a new medium for me.
I’m going to do a post on my whole process for adapting and creating the comic, so you’ll get more details on that, shortly. In the meantime, I’m really excited to share this rather unusual teaser with you. I’m a visual person, and I’ve always had very strong imagery in my head while writing Dronefall. This is a chance for you to get a uniquely visual introduction to my story in a way few authors could replicate. My lifelong love of sequential art made me do it. You’re welcome. *rubs migraine-glitter out of eyes*
So, that was kind of intense. Especially coming right off finishing the Dronefall One rewrite. I finished that, by the way. I want to get it re-released toward the end of July. Another reason you need to subscribe to my newsletter is so you can know what’s going on with my crazy release schedule this summer. Book Five will be out soon as well. Six…hopefully early Fall.
What about the blog?
Where does it come in in the middle of all this chaos? I’ve got a few older unreleased stories I want to serialize—two of which I guess aren’t really unreleased. I’m going to post the two stories that were formerly exclusive to the “Secret Library,” which I took down in favor of something more streamlined. There’s another one, too. That should keep the blog active until Dronefall One relaunches.
Anyway, thanks for waiting for me! I hope you enjoy the comic. And the subsequent newsletter. I’m putting a lot of effort into making my emails actually enjoyable to read. None of this sales-pitch after sales-pitch stuff a lot of email lists do. I’ll send you art and pictures and stuff. It will be worth it, I promise.
P.S. Some of you faithful readers might wonder what’s going to happen to my Dreamscape, IN serial here on the blog. Well, I realized it was developing more of a plot than I wanted it to have. I think that was because I was trying to make it a regular series on a regular posting schedule. It’s supposed to be all vibes with multiple diffuse plot-threads that break off and pick up and fade out again. So, I’m going to try dropping an episode whenever I feel like it without warning instead.
She left Instagram long ago, her email newsletter has dropped off, and her blog his been eerily quiet for months. Where is she? What happened? Is she actually gone this time?
I’m writing to answer those questions. If you’ve followed my blog, or have read certain posts from a while back, you know what happened to my social media presence. And, after all these months of hiatus, I can say now, more than ever, I’m never going back to social media. It’s…kind of a whitewashed sepulcher.
But anyway, I’m now going to vanish from the internet again, because I need to immerse myself fully in the task of rewriting Dronefall One.
The Dronefall Rewrite
If you didn’t get the memo, book one of the Dronefall series is being completely overhauled. I’m going to re-release it before I drop the final two books and finish the series. This has been a massive task already—brain-wracking, creativity-stretching, and sometimes discouraging. But this is what I do, and I want to give myself the space and quiet to do it. And hopefully enjoy it.
I want Dronefall to be a strong first book for the series. That fact that it was the weakest book by far had been bothering me for quite a while, crippling my confidence in the whole story. If people weren’t hooked by the end of book one, they probably wouldn’t read on. They would miss the best part.
At this point, I know for sure I can make Dronefall One a better book. A rewrite and relaunch could be a beautiful thing. It could light the fire to the fuse that could give me the energy to finish book six at last, knowing the whole series was locked and loaded. I’m working on chapter eight of seventeen right now. It’s going to happen.
But I need the breathing room. So, I’m going to vanish from Goodreads interactions (my last social media stronghold) and disappear into the wilderness of art and solitude until it’s done. Probably until the relaunch is quite imminent.
You’ll know when the eagles gather….
It’s Okay to be Alone
This is something almost no one in the writing community will admit, but there’s no right way to create. And that extends to whether you choose to work completely independently or not. Some need a whole community to motivate them to write and help them every step of the way. Others, like me, can be destroyed by too much input. No, it doesn’t necessarily take a village to raise a book. You can do it alone. I’ve found I like it much better that way.
So, bye for now. I’ll be back with a brand-new Dronefall.
I have decided to do something completely different with this blog. I’ve decided to wreck its entire commercial potential as well as its community-building potential and make it a type of blog I can’t even find a niche name for. It’s not going to be an author blog anymore. But it’s not really going to be an art blog either. It’s not going to be a ‘life-updates’ type of blog, or a devotional blog, or a lifestyle blog or anything you’re used to seeing.
UnsweetenedDarjeeling.com is going to go from a useful educational writing blog to an entertaining and hopefully inspiring outlet for all kinds of creative output. It’s definitely a risky move. I can’t even find anything online about how to run a blog like this. I’m going to have to totally wing it and figure everything out for myself.
This is a terrible idea, right? We’re kind of doomed, aren’t we?
Not if you read on. Not if you find anything here that entertains or inspires you and are interested enough to seek out more.
What kind of content can you expect now?
I have no shortage of ideas for what to share with you here. I’ll be sure to put my best efforts into learning how to create the most engaging content I can in this new style. I won’t be droning on dully about my WIPs or doing random sketch-dumps and calling it a post. Writing great blogposts is an art in itself, and I intend to perfect it.
What type of post will likely dominate UnsweetenedDarjeeling.com going forward?
Fiction Posts
I’m really excited about this. I’ve got some specific things planned, which I’ll talk about in a second. Probably about two-thirds of the posts on UnsweetenedDarjeeling.com will be fiction—like my own personal Wattpad website. I’ll do flash-fiction, bonus material from my books, and short-run as well as long-running serial stories. Some will be regular, but others will have random posting schedules to keep you guessing. I’m looking forward to the freedom and variety I’ll get to enjoy writing shorter more informal work. You’ll be seeing some brand-new worlds open up.
Here and there, I’ll do other types of posts, including:
Art Posts
Like I said, no sketch-dumps or single-picture with no caption posts. I want to do side-by-side comparisons of redraws of my old art, detailed character-design sheets and intros to characters (you’ll get to see some of my book characters in vivid detail and full-color for the first time!) my art-journaling pages and processes, sketchbook tours with full commentary, etc.
Tutorials
No, I’m not cutting this category completely. Gotta do something to keep Pinterest happy, right? But probably not a lot of writing how-to. Things like multimedia art-journaling, beating creative block, and creating inspiring creative workspaces are in the cards. I’ll probably branch out into other things as my vision gets clearer.
Challenges and New Media
I want to become more creatively adventurous. I want to try to do stuff I’m terrible at and see if I like it. Whether it’s creating art from random prompts using random materials, trying to learn a brand-new medium or technique in a set amount of time, or something significantly crazier, I want to take a tip or two from the “I tried____” trend and dive into some new and exciting experiences.
And now, I’d like to introduce the first serial fiction series ever to come to UnsweetenedDarjeeling.com.
Dreamscape, IN: a flash-fiction series
“Everything life has to offer can be gotten by accident.”
This is an ongoing flash-fiction series written completely on the fly. Not so much a story as an ethereal rhapsody of reoccurring themes and images haunting one main character. Anything can happen from episode to episode. Read one. Read every other one. Go back and read them all if you’d like. The story is whatever you remember when you wake up.
What’s particularly unique about Dreamscape, IN is I’ve planned it to be a multimedia series. That means some episodes will be mostly writing, but will probably include illustrations. Some will feature multiple more detailed images with snippets of prose between them. Still others will lapse almost completely into webcomic form—some of which will be nearly wordless.
It’s the story of a teenage girl living in some undefined Indiana town in the Great Lakes area. The visuals will be pretty, a bit lonely, sometimes surreal. Dreamscape isn’t a real town. It’s a place she goes in her mind where there’s always the hope of something more to be had but no guaranteed way to get to it. I think, when you’ve read a few episodes, you’ll start to remember you’ve been to Dreamscape, too.
The prologue will be released on 8/11/23, so there’s something to look forward too. Hopefully, episodes will come out weekly.
What’s Next?
We’re about to jump into the regular posting schedule! Keep an eye open for my next post where I will be redrawing my art from years ago. Did I improve? Did I develop a distinctive style? Did I used to have significantly cooler ideas for things to draw?! Find out on 8/7/23!
One More Thing:
So, I’ve tried a lot of different creative and artistic media throughout my life. I’ve only actually gotten good at a few of them and there still some I’ve never tried at all. In the comment section, throw out all your best guesses on which ones I’ve never tried before. Go wild. I’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong. If you can hit on one I haven’t tried, maybe I’ll use it to challenge myself and report how it went in a later post.
