Hello, January; where did you come from?

December went off the rails, obviously. Didn’t get those chapters written.

It went a bit like this:

1. First week: procrastination
2. Second week: planning and prewriting and generally getting things set up for a big productivity push late in the month.
3. Third week: a ghastly bout of gastroenteritis that involved a lot of crying, vomiting, and general misery.
4. Rest of month: sloooooooowly regaining my ability to walk, talk, and concentrate for minutes on end. Oh, and then the holidays happened.

So we’re a bit behind schedule, aren’t we? And thus we come to my brilliant new plan for increased productivity:

Nagging.

Here’s how it works. I’m going to try to get two to three chapters written per week. That’s usually my maximum productivity level, so we’re shooting for the stars here. And to keep me (dis)honest, I’m going to be posting daily photos of my progress on the Masks Facebook page. Notebook pages, photos of my laptop screen, sketches or pictures of paintings-in-progress, some kind of sign that I did something on Masks that day. I’ll try to do the same with Twitter, although I’ve never posted photos to Twitter before, so bear with me on the inevitable technical difficulties. I’m going to be doing a lot of this with an iPad camera, so the photos will be exactly that good … or not, as the case may be.

Your part in all this is to nag me. Go subscribe to the page if you haven’t done so already. I don’t post that much or demand that you buy things; mostly I try to be clever and amusing once a day at most. And if you think it’s been too long without a random progress photo, nag me. Comment on something. Post on the page. I will answer, assuming I haven’t come down with gastroenteritis again (and I threw out the contaminated salad greens that probably caused it, so—fingers crossed!). I am extremely susceptible to guilt, so we’re going to use that as motivation.

The first installment in Operation Nag the Writer is at the top of this blog entry. That’s the prewrite I did for Chapter 11 of Volume 2. It involves three of our heroes going to a bar. Be afraid.

And with luck, I’ll have something worth posting on Pocket Coyote sooner than later …

My own personal Justice League

So I got to shoot the cover for Masks on Saturday, and it was a hoot and a half.

First, we had to find a new site after my carefully orchestrated plan went awry—the friend who’d offered to let us use her spare room as a studio couldn’t be there to open the door for us, so we ended up at the brand-spanking-new apartment of a different friend who didn’t have any real furniture in the place yet, and therefore didn’t mind if we invaded for a while.

So here’s the merry band of lunatics who showed up to help me make my own book cover:

From left to right, we have Tammy, a licensed esthetician who volunteered her services as our makeup artist; Johanna, our model; Paul, Johanna’s friend and a combination videographer/lighting tech; and Heather, the long-suffering owner of the apartment who also ran a mean set of lights. And yes, they were all that excited to prove their nerd cred. Live long and prosper!

It was very much like being able to call on the Justice League, except their superpowers were more specialized and they could be bribed with dinner.

Tammy made Johanna look even more fabulous while Heather, Paul and I got the camera rig set up and laid out snacks for everyone. (I spent too much time as a journalist covering the entertainment industry not to realize the importance of a good craft service table. In this case, the goodies were limited to a basket of apples, a bowl of nuts and raisins, and a box of Cheez-Its, but everyone seemed pretty happy.) Then we all ran around moving lights and messing with cameras and a tripod and generally keeping up a constant stream of wisecracks, stopping only when we needed Johanna to look serious and we were making her laugh too hard.  After a couple of hours of that, we switched over to dinner, the primary bribe—roast chicken, steamed green beans, and French bread.

 

I mention the menu only so I can mention the dessert. Johanna gave me a coyote-shaped cookie cutter for my birthday back in September, and I’d been waiting more than two months to pull out my mom’s gingerbread recipe. Gingerbread coyotes are the best dessert ever!

You’ll be seeing a few of the images that came out of the shoot in the next few days—including the lucky one that ends up on the cover—but I think my favorite raw image from the session is this one, which we captured after we gave up on artificial light and opened Heather’s blinds. The light, reflected off storm clouds outside, is almost painterly. I’m quite taken with it.

And then, of course, Johanna loaded up her kit pouch with throwing stars and went out looking for Captain Catastrophe …

Meet the new Rae!

This is just a fun little side post to show you guys I’m not completely slacking off while Masks is running on Pocket Coyote. Because Masks is my private project unless a publisher comes along and offers to do business with me, I’m working on using my day-job skills as an editor to put it together as a real live book and ebook. To that end, I’m going to have to do something I’ve never done before—design and shoot a cover. Now, technically I have used photo covers before on projects for clients, but I’ve never shot the photos myself. I’ve always had photographically inclined friends and colleagues to do it. Well, no one’s available and/or up for this one, so it’s DIY time. How hard can it be? (I know, I know, famous last words …)

Now, because this cover will be both the paperback cover and the ebook cover, it’s going to have to be an image that looks great as a postage stamp, because that’s the size of the thumbnail image most people will be seeing online. As I’m working on getting Masks optimized for smartphones, tablets, e-readers, etc., I have to make sure the eventual ebook will look attractive on them. And the ebook cover has to match the paperback cover to avoid unnecessary confusion, so I need a clear, simple, striking image to represent Masks to the world.

Naturally, then, I’ve set myself a completely insane task. I want to make a photographic version of my Comic-Con bookmark:

I’m fairly confident that I can actually sew a Peregrine costume. I’ve made more complicated garments before this, and the outfit is supposed to look like the work of an amateur seamstress. Plus I’ll be shooting it in low light, so I’ve got a lot of wiggle room. More importantly, though, I can’t just shoot an empty costume. I need someone to wear it!

Enter Johanna.

My previous model, the lovely Carolyn, is super insanely busy between work, finishing school, and getting engaged (mazel tov, by the way!). Also, the changes between the current version of Masks and the previous draft require Rae to have a slightly different figure. Remember Rae complaining about the “artist’s conception” where she was six feet tall and obviously a guy? I decided that this time around, Rae was going to be a little less well-endowed, both because it got me around the everyone-stare-at-the-girl-superhero problem and because it would give her something to be a bit insecure about—and this draft demanded insecurity. So I needed a slightly more boyish Rae, and Carolyn’s friend Johanna was handy. It didn’t hurt that she had long hair, which Rae also acquired in this draft. (Please note: unlike Rae, Johanna is not at all insecure. This is probably because she’s brilliant, gorgeous, and a skilled martial artist who can deliver a vicious beating to anyone who tries to make her feel insecure. You have been warned!)

I know, I know—she’s blond! Suspend your disbelief for a while, okay? I can do amazing things with Photoshop. Well, actually, I can do amazing things with GIMP, because I can’t afford a copy of Photoshop. Although I do find it funny that her coloration is much closer to Trevor’s than to Rae’s. But because the Peregrine costume covers most of the body except for the upper part of the face, build was more important than coloration, and both were more important than facial structure.

Anyhoo, Johanna is an experienced martial artist and an avid cosplayer, which should make the photo shoot go quite well. We took these test shots in a local park so I could, if necessary, use them as reference for Nicole’s art. Nicole eventually went with a less photorealistic look for the weekly illustrations (she can produce them faster this way), but the photos are neat anyway, and give you a glance of the un-GIMPed Johanna as she appears before I work my costuming and photographic magic.

I’m only sorry we didn’t have a convenient rooftop to shoot on …


Oh, and come back tomorrow for an interview with Christine Johnson, author of Claire de Lune and the newly released Nocturne!

Real-life heroes

I spent the weekend helping Nicole Le with her prep work for the upcoming trailer project. (Note for the newbies: Nicole is a friend from high school who volunteers her artwork to help make Masks look good because I can’t just post the whole book online. I pay her in fast food, usually tacos or Flame Broiler bowls, and the negotiations are … interesting.) She’s gotten heavily into painting of late, and picked up a few ideas from an Alex Ross artbook she found in the local library. Ross does a lot of superhero paintings and works heavily from photographs, and because a) Nicole’s camera doesn’t work and b) I have, from time to time, worked as a news photographer and/or videographer, she asked me to help her out with the technical side.

We didn’t have a live model for Trevor—basically, we didn’t know any guys of the right build and facial cast who were (and this is critical) short enough to pass for Trevor—so there was some pulling out of photos from old yearbooks and the like. But for Rae, we had a real live human being—Carolyn Kabelitz, younger sister of Amber Peters, one of my best friends and (in my humble opinion) the finest living American coloratura.

We didn’t have an actual Peregrine costume lying around for Carolyn (how crazy so you think I am?), so we improvised with an old hooded tunic/shirt I made a few years ago when I was testing how a Peregrine-style tunic would hold up in hot weather. (So, that crazy … and for the record, I walked around in it all day at a theme park in July, and became neither overheated nor sunburned—take that, spandex monkeys!) Carolyn’s slimmer than I am, so we took it in at the sides, hiked the sleeves a bit, and adjusted the hood so she looked more like a superhero and less like a Nazgul. And then we took some pictures.

It was … odd.

I’ve known Carolyn for more than a decade, since she was tagging along after her big sister and sitting in on our anime DVD-a-thons. I’ve lived with Rae in my head for about as long, but hadn’t really put the two of them together until my artists began asking me for visual reference on Rae. My early drafts of the book didn’t describe her until the third chapter or so (an oversight that has now been corrected, although Rae’s view of herself and what Trevor sees when he looks at her later are slightly, and significantly, different). I had never considered her physical appearance particularly important, perhaps because she doesn’t think it’s important, and goes out of her way to disguise it. Rae, in my head, was a voice. But artists need a face. So I grabbed the nearest brunette of the right build and got to work.

At first, I was just looking through my viewfinder at Carolyn and trying to get her to strike whatever poses Nicole had sketched out in her thumbnail roughs. I focused on lighting and position, getting the folds in the cloth to stand out clearly so Nicole could see them when she used the photos as reference later. Carolyn giggled and mugged between takes—she is naturally cheerful, much more so than Rae, and takes a staggering amount of joy in life. I yelled out random words to try to get her to make whatever face Nicole said she needed, and generally tried to make the real person line up with the imaginary one.

But then—briefly at first, then more and more regularly—I began seeing flashes of somebody else when I lined up my shots. Something in Carolyn’s eyes as she glanced up at the camera, the curve of her mouth as she looked down to adjust her costume, the ruffle of her hair in the breeze. For heartbeats at a time, I could almost see Rae standing there. I could see little bits of my character coming through. Carolyn’s been a Masks reader for years, and while she hasn’t read the current draft, she has a pretty good sense of what Rae’s like. Yet I’m fairly certain she wasn’t trying to act between shots. She was just finding the little bits of Rae that were already in her … bits that probably went into the character when I had to design an indomitable teenage girl who enjoyed yanking supervillains’ chains.

Makes me wonder how many people I know went into the people I made …