I Recommend You Learn to Cook

Carla Speed McNeil on self-publishing:

I moved my game to Dark Horse because I am one.

I’ve been a self-publisher for a long time. I highly recommend it. Think of it (as you learn to live on beans and ramen) as an apprenticeship in our business. When you self-publish, you learn to create your own work method. You have to learn what gets you out of bed and away from the game console, the whole season of Stargate from Netflix, the big pile of comics you haven’t read yet, the day job, the significant other, the messy mind that talks you out of working like an anorexic’s mind talks her out of eating. You go through a process that teaches you what can and should be put aside for later or brutally pruned off your life so that you can get your work done consistently. That is the absolute baseline. And you have to do it, because there are gonna be things that cannot be put aside. A family is basically another day job, one you can’t quit once you start. You may find yourself caring for sick parents, a sick spouse, or even sick you; learning how to get the work done in spite of the things you simply must take care of is where you start. I recommend you learn to cook. Beans get to look mighty ugly after a while. I learned to make port-wine reductions living in an efficiency apartment with no kitchen—just an electric skillet and a hot plate.

The Making of Anya's Ghost

From verabee's journal:

" Anya’s Ghost is my first book. Consequently everything I did was a bit trial and error. Maybe wasn’t the most efficient way to get the job done, but it worked for me.I didn’t work from a script. When I write the art and the dialogue come at the same time and one suggests the other; it’s really hard for me just to come up with dialogue onto a blank computer page. I try to show more than tell with my comics and that seems to work best starting with thumbnails rather than attempting to get it across in a script. I did work up an outline for the entire story and plotted it out very carefully, but I let each scene form itself in thumbnails with the dialogue being written as I drew. I’ll run you through a process of some sample pages from writing to drawing to final color. "

Read more here.

Once Upon a Dream