My week off in two pictures

There are times when your DIY art thing really doesn’t make sense to anybody but you. Last week was one of those times.

I took the week off from writing/posting chapters to work on art for Masks volume 2. And it’s getting done (slowly and behind schedule, like everything else. One of the results is this preliminary sketch of Mike, sitting on a familiar riverbank (note the bridge in the background):

Why, of all the images I could have chosen for that chapter, did I pick Mike? Well, for one thing, these early chapters involve a lot of people walking around in the dark and talking. That’s hard to draw, if you’re me. (Actually everything is hard to draw, if you’re me, but more about that later.) And Mike … well, he’ll be important later. That’s all I’m saying for now. Plus I didn’t have any art of him except for the dopey group shot in Volume 1, where he came out looking weirdly like Nightcrawler from X-Men: Evolution. I don’t know what was going on there.

The other thing I did this week was this:

Yeah, that’s 41 cards. It’s not a Masks saga—it’s Teh Novel, which had previously taken up about 20 cards. On the advice of a much better writer than I, I cut most of its chapters in half so readers wouldn’t blanch at the prospect of 4000 words before t heir next chapter break. (I’m used to reading books with 20-page chapters, or no chapters at all. Shut up.) The same stuff basically happens, though I’ve added a few events. But making an entirely new deck of scene cards, figuring out where the new chapter breaks would fall and doing the final placement of the four poems that appear over the course of the book (those are the cards with the blue stripes on the top), turned out to be a great exercise.

For one thing, I had to figure out how to work in the definition of the word resurrectionist if the book is to keep its current working title, The Resurrectionist’s Song. For another, I had to invent an arc for a minor character who kind of didn’t do anything in the previous draft except foam at the mouth on cue, stab the protagonist in the stomach, and then mysteriously stop foaming and stabbing in time for the finale. But more importantly …

As I was working on these cards, I found myself slowing down to reread sections of the previous draft. That’s always a good sign—like most writers (I suspect), I write first and foremost for my own entertainment, and getting distracted by my own story usually means it’s finally starting to work. And around about the time I got to the three-quarter mark in the deck (card 27, right before the third blue poem card—and yes, that brown/orange stripe means it’s an emotional crisis and a physical fight scene), I noticed that I could hear my heart thumping in my ears. It was louder than it had been on the elliptical machine in the gym the previous night, right before I realized I couldn’t breathe and had to drop off. I’m pretty sure I don’t have an undiagnosed heart condition (I am very careful about that kind of thing—long story), which basically meant my book was getting me more worked up than an actual workout.

Good signs. But nothing terribly photogenic (or blogogenic, I suppose). So that’s what I’ve been up to. More stuff soon …

How to make your own MASKS T-shirts (and other stuff too)

Okay, here’s how I put together the T-shirts the stylin’ Masks Posse wore to Comic-Con. These directions tell you how to create the image on a black T-shirt, which is considerably harder than on a white one. All images referenced in this post are available in this Photobucket album.

1. Snag the image of Rae and Trevor holding hands—either full-color or black, white, and red. Save it to your computer.

2. Open it using the GIMP image manipulation freeware (available at http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/The_GIMP/gimp.html)

3. Copy the image (right-click + “Copy”).

4. Open a new image in GIMP of the same dimensions (my version was 4844 x 5358 pixels).

5. From the “Layers” menu, select “Add Alpha Channel.”

6. Also from the “Layers” menu, select “Color to Alpha” and set the color to whatever the background color of your image is. (In my case, it was white.)

7. Paste the Rae-Trevor image onto your new image.

8. Now here’s the tricky and time-consuming and crazy-making part. Using the Eraser tool from the main GIMP toolbox, erase all the parts of the image that aren’t Rae and Trevor. All that uniform white around them? Erase as much of it as you can, keeping as close to their bodies as you can without erasing the figures. You will see a checkerboard pattern emerge as you erase the black. Everywhere you see checkerboard, you will have a transparent image. So erase everything you don’t want to see on a shirt.

9. Save the file as a PNG file, and jump through any hoops GIMP makes you jump through to do that.

10. Go to http://www.cafepress.com/make/custom-t-shirts.

11. Click on whatever T-shirt you want to design. I created this design for a black T-shirt, so I recommend something that comes in black. There are sizing charts and whatall—just pick what you like, click on the shirt, and go to the shirt designer.

12. Upload your image to Cafepress. If it’s too big, go back to GIMP and re-save your image in a smaller size.

13. Add the text to your shirt. I used the Chandler font in a dark red for “MASKS” and in white for “Truth / Justice / Secrets.”

14. Drop your image onto the shirt and pull it around and resize it until it’s where you want it. The pattern will let you center your image, but please note that Rae’s and Trevor’s hands are slightly off-center because Trevor’s throwing arm sticks out a little more on his side. I chose to center their hands over the S in MASKS, and centered the text. Don’t go outside the boundaries of the design area on the shirt. Nothing outside that box will print.

15. When you’re satisfied, click “Done” and order your shirt!

TO DO THIS ON A WHITE SHIRT:

Just upload the image and add the text. No muss, no fuss.

TO MAKE BUTTONS:

The button images are available too. Upload them to either Cafepress or Zazzle.com (the site I used this time around), center and jigger them around until you’ve got what you want, and then order as many buttons as you can stand.

There. You are now the most stylish walking billboard in town!

Five tips for writers

A friend of mine is currently developing a Masks website as a class project, and asked me to write up some tips for aspiring writers. I enjoyed the exercise enough to reprint it here, since the website will be a strictly private project—at least for now.

Five Tips For Writers

First, write for yourself. If you do not love writing, all the money and fame in the world won’t make it worth your while. If you do love it, any reward will pale in comparison to the joy it brings you. You must love your story, you must love at least some of the hours you put in sweating over words and phrases and sentences and paragraphs. You don’t have to love every part of it—but you have to love the work as a whole. Writing is first and foremost an act of love. I used to tell myself that as long as I was writing something I loved, I would be content to spend my whole life writing, even if everyone else hated my work, and wish that life to be long. Now I’m living the life I only dreamed about when I was a kid, and I still find that writing is too much work to do if you don’t love it. So that’s lesson one—love your work, or find other work to do.

Second, read! I cannot stress this enough. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read books you like and books you don’t. Read magazines. Read newspapers. Read blogs. Read the encyclopedia, if you can find one. Carry something to read with you wherever you go. Read on the bus. Read while you’re standing in line. Your writing comes out of your hopes, your dreams, your thoughts, your ideas, and your memories—and reading enhances all of those. Reading gives you new words to use, new concepts to ponder, new ways of looking at the world. It gives you story ideas you could not have imagined. If a book is bad, figure out how it could be better. Look at how your favorite authors do things, and use that as your starting point for discovering how you do things. Most of all, just read! You will never be sorry. And you’ll never be bored in line at the bank, either. So that’s lesson two—when in doubt, read.

Third, be curious. Learn from the world around you. Watch what people do, listen to what they say. See if you can figure out what they’re thinking. Ask questions. Try to find out how things work. Use all of your senses, not just your eyes! Find out how things sound, how they feel, how they smell, how they taste. And pay attention to people. It’s been said that every person has at least one good story in them, and if you are a writer you will find people want to tell you their stories. Listen to them. You never know when they’ll come in handy. And thinking about the world beyond yourself is good practice for creating characters and worlds that can live outside your mind. So that’s lesson three—it’s not only okay to be curious, it’s vital.

Fourth, practice! The difference between a writer and someone who wants to be a writer is that a writer actually sits down and writes. Even if it’s terrible, even if it sounds stupid, a writer writes. Practice writing first drafts—getting everything down on paper before it flies out of your head, sitting down for a few minutes or an hour or however long it takes you to finish something. Keep at it. When you’ve written your first draft, put it away for a while and practice patience. Then take it out again and practice revising and rewriting and polishing your work until it shines. Know that it’s always hard at the beginning, but the more you practice and the harder you work, the more delightful your work becomes. So that’s lesson four—writing is a skill that must be practiced or lost.

Finally, keep the faith. Writing is a solitary effort, and it means spending a lot of time by yourself, getting ink stains on your fingers and scars on your heart, before you’re ready to share your creation with the world. Being a writer means believing that you can write, and that you should write. That kind of faith must be fed, so be sure to spend time every once in a while with readers, other writers, or whatever you need to keep yourself believing. Sometimes faith means slogging through a draft, putting one word after another because you believe you’ll end up with something you’ll love. Sometimes it means accepting criticism because it’s good for your story, even if it hurts. Sometimes it means rejecting criticism because it’s bad for your story, even if it feeds your ego. Often it means working hard to tell the difference. But mostly faith means never forgetting that what you do is worth it. You are a better human being for having written, and the world is a better place for what you wrote. So that’s lesson five—have faith.

If you can do these five things, you can shake the world to its very foundations. And I, for one, look forward to seeing that. I can’t wait to read the stories you will write.