Breaking, not Braking

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Well, that happened.

I’ve not, at least as I recollect, written a breakup letter before…until now. It had the usual “It’s not you it’s me…”, “we’ve grown apart…” sorts of phrases. And they were all well meant. This was written to my publisher, I hasten to add! Over the last year and a half, circumstances changed a lot at the publisher I was under contract with – chief among those being that the excellent editor who originally originally took on and championed the book, a very unusual project for the publisher to work with, left the company. dear_letterThis, and a few other key things that were not to my liking (that it would be inappropriate to discuss here) became causes for concern for me. While I am sure they would have done a fine job of executing the agreed upon aspects of our contract, it was clear that things would be better if I found a new home for this very special (at least to me) book project.

They took it well, and we’ve agreed to terminate our publishing contract.

Of course, this leaves me in the interesting situation of not being under Click to continue reading this post →

Find Your Fair…

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(Click for larger view.)
county_fair_panels_shareThis might be one of my favourite sequences from the book so far*. It’s a significant part of a page so I’ve watermarked it heavily. Sorry about that: It’s days of work to make these things. It is based on a location scouting trip I did last year around this time at the LA County Fair. So consider this a public service announcement if you’ve not yet done a Summer visit this year to a county fair near you… Go! They’re an excellent old-school kind of fun.

There’s a whole sequence in the book that involves such a visit and I’ve just Click to continue reading this post →

Some Action

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sample_sketch_dialogues_30_08_2016I think that the Apple Pencil is one of the best things the company has produced in a very long time. It’s good for both writing and sketching, and so is especially useful in all aspects of my work. I got one back in the Spring when the regular-sized iPad pro came out and it has been a joy to work with. I thought I’d share with you a video stroke by stroke logging of a quick sketch I did with it this morning on the subway on the way to work. The sketch itself is above and the video showing how I made it is embedded below. Yes, it’s another version of the people Click to continue reading this post →

Stranger Stuff…

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Ok all you Stranger Things fans. You were expecting a physicist to say a few things about the show weren’t you? Over at Screen Junkies, they’ve launched the first episode of a focus on TV Science (a companion to the Movie Science series you already know about)… and with the incomparable host Hal Rudnick, I talked about Stranger Things. There are spoilers. Enjoy.

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(Embed and link after the fold:)

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New Style…

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character-design-dialogues-share

(Click for larger view.) Style change. For a story-within-a-story in the book, I’m changing styles, going to a looser, more cartoony style, which sort of fits tonally with the subject matter in the story. The other day on the subway I designed the characters in that style, and I share them with you here. It’s lots of fun to draw in this looser Click to continue reading this post →

All Aboard…!

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The other day, quite recently, I clicked “place your order” on… a toy New York MTA bus. I can’t pretend it was for the youngster of the house, it was for me. No, it is not a mid-life crisis (heh… I’m sure others might differ on this point), and I will happily declare that it is not out of nostalgia for my time in the city, especially back in the 90s.

dialogues_process_share_8-8-16

It’s for the book. I’ve an entire story set on a bus in Manhattan and I neglected to location scout a bus when I was last there. I figured I could work from tourist photos and so forth. Turns out that you don’t get many good tourist photos of MTA bus interiors, and not the angles I want. Then I discovered various online bus-loving subcultures that go through all the details of every model of NYC bus, with endless shots of the buses in different parts of the city… but still not many good interiors and no good overheads and so forth. (See Transittalk, for example – I now know way more about buses in New york than I ever thought I’d want to know.) Then I accidentally had an Amazon link show up in my Click to continue reading this post →

In Other News…

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So two very important pieces of news have come my way and I must share them with you.

The first is big news for writer friends especially. The long-awaited version of Scrivener for iPad has finally arrived! And it is really great, from what I can tell so far after downloading it and playing around a bit. (See my earlier post on why I like Scrivener, and how I use it, here.) I’ve done all the intensive writing that I need for the current book project and so it is too late to café test the iPad app on this, but I’m sure I will for the next big writing project! Now I can at least carry a version of the book’s manuscript with me and make small adjustments on the move, mull over pages I’ll be preparing to do final art for, etc. [Just in case you are wondering, I used Scrivener with a comic scripting template (with slight modifications) to write the prose bits of the book (which is a graphic book – see here).]

The second is that THEY”RE MAKING NEW EPISODES OF SAMURAI JACK!!!!! Genndy Tartakovsky, whose work I love, is still in creative control of it, so that’s good. It’s old news to many, but I just heard last week and I’m excited. Cautiously. (And now in the mood to watch some of the old series…)

-cvj

But Does That Really Happen…?

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panel_sample_real_research_26_07_2016

Sorry I’ve been quiet for a long stretch recently. I’ve been tied up with travel, physics research, numerous meetings of various sorts (from the standard bean-counting variety to the “here’s three awesome science-y things to put into your movie/TVshow” variety*), and other things, like helping my garden survive this heatwave.

I’ve lost some time on the book, but I’m back on it for a while, and have Click to continue reading this post →

Kill Your Darlings…

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dialogues_process_share_7-7-16(Apparently I spent a lot of time cross-hatching, back in 2010-2012? More on this below. click for larger view.)

I’ve changed locations, have several physics research tasks to work on, and so my usual work flow is not going to be appropriate for the next couple of weeks, so I thought I’d work on a different aspect of the book project. I’m well into the “one full page per day for the rest of the year to stay on target” part of the calendar and there’s good news and bad news. On the good news side, I’ve refined my workflow a lot, and devised new ways of achieving various technical tasks too numerous (and probably boring) to mention, and so I’ve actually got Click to continue reading this post →