**Aerin**

Manwaithiel

What is the new thing in your siggy? It's intriguing me.

aerinpegadrak

Sure!  Hell, I might even end up with something publishable when all is said and done.  I think this is the 11th year, and several winners have had their novels published.  I think if I win, I get access to all sorts of resources for editing and getting an agent.  It's mostly a bragging rights thing, though.

Manwaithiel

Sweet deal. What's it about? Or can you tell us?

jaimed99

I have a friend participating in NaNoWriMo also Good Luck!

aerinpegadrak

I'm actually really excited that I have something of a plot now!  I've seriously been vamping for two days.  I was planning on doing something else for it, but it required more research than I had time for, so I'm literally making it up as I go.

It's a noir-ish thriller that takes place in this city that's in the middle of a sort of guerilla war (I think), and the main character is trying to protect an heiress from a murder plot.  That's all I've figured out so far.

Manwaithiel

I have another question, Aerin.

Is your siggy quote supposed to say dismissed "entire" or dismissed "entirely". I've been confused for awhile...

Manwaithiel

Thank you I didn't realize entire could be used like that. And I thought a few times "Well, that kind of sounds right." And I figured that while I was paging you I would get it off my chest. I seriously doubted you wouldn't have noticed it for weeks, but I couldn't sleep at night without knowing =P

Anywho, I'm off to bed now. Time to have my nightly talk with FI so he can tell me more about these boxes he got from the ABC store. Ha.

aerinpegadrak

Yeah, I'm just waiting for my word count to update (their servers just aren't up to the task this year, it's always slow), then I'm off to bed as well.

bablingbrooke

I'm doing it to!  We can be writing buddies

mkrupar

I have never heard of National Novel Writing Month, but it sounds awesome. Lucas is a writing and is flushing out his first book and in the middle of writing his second (both part of a series he wants to write). He would love to get published or have them turned into graphic novels, but we have no clue how to do that. Any suggestions?

He's always telling me about these ideas for new books. It amazes me because he can create a whole world inside of his head down to every last detail w/o having written it down yet. I'm so not creative enough to do that.

aerinpegadrak

Brooke, what's your NaNo screenname?  Mine's the same as my Knot SN, I'll totally add you.

mkrupar, I was a Writer's Market devotee for a while.  They have a dead tree version, or you can pay the same price for access to the online database.  That way he can look up agents, or look for places to submit his work directly.  I got into a couple of different magazines that way in high school when I was really working the circuit, but since I got into screenwriting, I haven't really been on the fiction scene.

As far as graphic novels go, I've dabbled in that, too.  I was lucky enough to have a friend who's an amazing artist who wanted to work with me, but you can look on places like deviantart.com or conceptart.org if you don't know someone that might work as a collaborator.  He'll want to have a solid synopsis and probably a few examples of the type of art he wants in order to start soliciting.

But you should warn him: it's a very different medium, with very different narrative demands.  He's going to have to think a lot more visually than he may have done before, and the rhythm and structure of the story is going to be different.  The novel I tried to turn into a comic didn't survive, and the project ended up getting scrapped.

Luckily, the web has made self-publishing comics dead easy, and there are numerous people who make a pretty decent living as webcartoonists.  It's a long, hard road to get to that point and it takes a lot of dedication, but it's definitely doable.

I would recommend that he start looking into the convention circuit.  If you guys can't get to the Big Kahuna in San Diego (I think registration opens next week), there are plenty of smaller conventions on the East Coast.  The panels and networking opportunites are priceless, especially if he's into sci-fi/fantasy/horror. 

mkrupar

Thanks Aerin! I'll definitely pass along your advice. I feel like the way he writes is honestly more suited for graphic novels because he's more of a visual person. I really think it could go either way, but I'll let him know what you said about it being difficult to translate from a full novel into a graphic one. I've read his first book and told him that even though he can see things in his head as he's reading the book, others can't get that and he needed to be more descriptive in some of his writing. That's why he's been going back through the first book and flushing it out. I really truly am amazed that he can rattle off all of these plot lines and back stories to soooo many characters and not have written anything. I tell him that all the time. 

He's a big big comic book guy and we've been talking about getting to conventions we just haven't had time to plan a trip to one. I'll look into Big Kahuna in San Diego. I'm sure he'd love it.

aerinpegadrak

It's just a totally different scripting process.  I remember my shock when I discovered that a fight scene I'd painstakingly choreographed, which would take about a minute and a half to act out and a couple of pages of prose to describe, took TWELVE pages of comic script.  So posting online 3x a week, an 80 second fight scene would take a month to read. 

Here's the website for San Diego Comic Con:  http://www.comic-con.org/cci/ If you're going to go this year, book NOW.  It fills up quickly.  Registration was supposed to start Monday and the servers went down in flames before anyone could even get through.  Also be warned that it's a total zoo.  We were so overwhelmed on our last trip that we've taken a couple of years off.

ETA: I meant book your hotel now, as well.  Every hotel room within a half hour of the convention center will be gone by February.