Jamar Nicholas and I have been working on a story together, Bulletproof West. This project is my first co-writing experience. While Brock and I acted as a writing team on Emily Edison, when it came down to it, I was the one happily slogging through the synopsis and script. With Karma Incorporated, Tom's editorial insight was invaluable. He took issue three, which was forty pages, and cut it down to a crisp thirty. Tom also helped me through a tedious epilogue, requiring three or four re-writes. Still, our roles were pretty clear -- I sat in front of Microsoft Word. Tom sat in front of bristol board. Astronaut Dad is in the middle of a second re-write. Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir have been helpful with notes and suggestions. Bolivar is in its fourth draft of the synopsis. Whether or not A.C. Hall knows it, he's been my voice of reason. I keep asking, "Does this make sense? Does this work?"
Now for the first time, look Ma, I'm co-writing.
Can't say I'm completely comfortable or understanding of the process. My instinct is to take control of the narrative and have my way with it. I don't second guess whether or not a particular character moment is the will of the partnership, maybe with Emily Edison I did. However, Bulletproof West is coming together nicely. Storytelling by way of e-mail, after almost a hundred e-mails back and forth, the plot crawled onto the shore from its primordial ooze. Yesterday, I dug through all the e-mail, organized the ideas, and filled in some blanks. At around 2 AM, I sent Jamar a first draft synopsis, which I'm pretty proud of. Now I'm waiting Jamar's feedback, and who knows? Half of it might end up in the trash, and we'll have to start again. We've got a story though. It's there. And that's exciting.
Another thing I've noticed, when I first started writing comics, I hated writing the synopsis. I figured it was one of those things that was simply impossible for me. I was a jump-right-in kind of writer. Now, I've gotten to a point where it's an absolutely essential part of my process. And a good synopsis makes everything else easier. Heck, I didn't even know I'd get to a point where I have a process.
It came out of necessity. Didn't take me long to figure that publishers don't read scripts (maybe one or two exist, but I doubt it). They want an interesting two page to four page version of your series with a beginning, middle, and end. Omisoka Bridge was my first fully written synopsis, followed by the short-lived Rocket Science story and then Karma Incorporated. After that, everything else.
