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admesser · 5 years

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Hello everyone!

To kick off my new series of interviews with authors, artists, and creators, I want to introduce you to Seth Greenwood and Angela Zhang. I have been following their work for a couple of years now, and find the story intriguing and the artwork incredible.

Seth Greenwood

Angela Zhang

1) Please discuss your creative background. Who are you, and how did you get involved with your art?

SG: I would love to tell you some quirky little story of how I got involved in writing comics. But I am afraid the answer is very simple. I was a dreamer, a poet, and a blogger when I traveled to South Korea to live for a year. One of my co-workers kept telling me about all of these ideas he wanted to make into comics. At that time I was 27 or so and I didn’t know the first thing about comics, and to be honest I had never even read my first comic book. I was always into reading novels and watching films. You might even say that I was disinterested but I believe I finally decided to do it because a friend needed my help and I felt I had the ability to make it happen. Stories are stories, right? So when I said yes, I jumped into research head first. I learned how to write, and format scripts. I started reading many comics from the past and present, and ultimately I started writing my first script for a P.A. piece called “Covenant”.

AZ: While I didn’t realize it back then, I was making wordless comics on the back of my mom’s PhD thesis drafts since I was 7 years old. When I grew up, I thought academia and teaching were the only viable career paths for artists. So I ended up going to art school and then completed a master’s in Art History. I realized that reading theory and writing about art really wasn’t my thing. I ended up working in administration full time for a while. It was during this time that I discovered there are people who will pay you to draw if you were good enough. So I kept working on my art on the side. (I spent a whole year waking up at 5AM before work to practice drawing and I am NOT a morning person hahaha!) In 2014, I quit my job to pursue freelance illustration. It’s been hard, to say the least, but no doubt creatively rewarding. So far I’ve done storyboards, concept art, architecture illustration, product design, book covers and of course comics!

2) How did you two meet and collaborate on the Gale Project?

SG: Long story short? “Covenant” never happened. I decided to try my hand at screenwriting since I had such a bad first experience. I realized quickly that even with the best of friends, partnerships can be very difficult to maintain. One night I posted a snippet from one of my screenplays on a blog and tweeted the link. I never expected to get a reaction but that script reeled in one of my favorite artists to this day! Angela Zhang tweeted me and said that she liked my style and to contact her if I ever wanted to do a noir style comic. I didn’t know if this was an empty gesture, but I immediately replied that I knew just the story for us. The rest is history. Angela and I have known each other for a little over 3 years now and we have been moonlighting Gale ever since.

AZ: My big dream has been to make a long-running comic series. But I’m not a writer. As an adult, I really got into comics through the works of Craig Thompson (Blankets) and independent creators like Rich Barrett (Nathan Sorry), Lora Innes (The Dreamer) and Jason Brubaker (reMIND). The first comic that I posted online was a realistic, drama that focused on character acting, mood and atmosphere. I didn’t think anyone else would be into this kind of story until I came across Seth’s writing online. He has a knack for natural dialogue and I can imagine his character’s emotions through their words. I honestly didn’t think anything would come out of our tweets. But it was his persistence and speed that convinced me, yes, this guy wants to make a comic as much as I do.

3) What is the inspiration for Gale?

SG: Oh wow! A lot! The idea of Gale, whether I knew it or not, first started to form in 10th grade when I wrote a free verse poem about a man at his father’s funeral who had obviously been murdered for some mysterious reason. The rest of the story comes from my experience with the world that I grew up in. The things I noticed that were beautiful on the outside were actually rotting on the inside. I started writing about those things you don’t introduce yourself with and immediately start talking about. Politics, civil rights, class consciousness, you name it. It’s all in Gale, in a quasi-dystopian alternate reality. I don’t intend to present my solution to these issues in Gale. In the end, it is a fictional story that will hopefully both entertain and inspire.

AZ: In terms of art, Seth and I met over Skype where he would describe his vision. Gale’s world is a mix of the old and new in American culture. The vehicles and architecture are based on 1940s design and they coexist with our everyday technology, like cell phones and laptops. When we visit Ned Norman’s mansion, there’s a touch of gothic horror. I researched Hollywood movies between the 1930s and 1950s. My library has a collection of classic films. I would rent Hitchcock and Dracula to see how directors in those days composed dramatic shots, knowing that the output would be in black and white.

4) Please describe the visualization process from script to screen. How do you imagine it as a writer, and how do you imagine it as an illustrator?

SG: Would it sound too unreal if a lot of what Angela does is almost exactly how I see it in my head. It’s almost as if she downloaded my brain onto a Wacom Tablet. But the process is much harder than that! It’s why I am the writer and she is the artist. Every once in a while she will suggest something and most of the time it makes it better or translates better to the comic medium. One thing that I had a problem doing at first, was getting out of the habit of writing scenes and getting into the habit of writing still panels. Angela did a wonderful job showing movement and expression.

AZ: I’m grateful that Seth trusts me and gives me a lot of creative freedom to put his words into comic form. We have over 50 posts on our Patreon blog detailing the process from script to panel (collecting reference, thumbnailing, layout, word bubbles etc.) To be honest, these days I don’t even think about my process, because drawing Gale has become more intuitive for me. I think what lead to this magical understanding between Seth and I is that we’ve built a solid friendship. If you get to know Seth, you will see that he’s truly caring and generous. We chat almost every day. Seth sends me photos, writing and videos related to Gale and we talk about life too. The more that I think about it, our conversations allow me to have a better understanding of where Seth is coming from and deeper insight into the characters and the world of Gale.

5) Talk about the heart of Gale’s storyline. What challenges does it face?

SG: Angela may want to elaborate, but I believe this sums up the storyline.:

Gale is a drama, mystery and suspense story that draws inspiration from film noir. Rookie attorney Gale Norman is determined to seek out the truth behind his father’s mysterious death. As Gale’s suspicions grow, buried memories of his mother’s disappearance resurface and he refuses to hide from his dark past. With the help of his childhood friend, Laurie Gambill, Gale attempts to solve a seemingly ordinary mystery that may eventually lead him in a downward spiral. Will he uncover the truth to his parent’s demise or will he become further entangled in a web of lies?

As far as challenges? Well here recently my life has been unpredictable. Being a full-time soldier in the US Army and trying to write, update social media and maintain a valuable connection with our audience has been hard to say the very least. We have had to try to remain very flexible. I have had to re-dedicate myself over and over again. It’s something that plagues me but at the same time it is something I can’t and won’t leave.

AZ: Making the characters relatable is one of the challenges that Seth and I are always thinking about. At first, I had a hard time describing Gale to people because the story has many layers. Gale also comes from a wealthy upbringing which is pivotal to the story but I can’t relate to it. After I completed the scene where Gale kisses his childhood friend Laurie, I started relating to them in a real way. I thought about how the 20s is an interesting period to explore the loss of innocence. Unlike adolescence, the loss is more of intellectual awakening. In Gale’s case, it’s about dealing with death, discovering the truth about his past, getting friend-zoned by the only one he trusts and feeling alone in the world. As the series progresses, Gale gets caught up in more and more unbelievable situations. I think as long as we’re grounding the story in an emotional truth we’ll overcome the challenge of making the characters relatable.

6) What are some difficulties you have experienced with the project and how did you overcome them?

SG: I’m glad you said “some”! Let’s see here. The decision to publish Gale independently was not always considered. We did that when we realized the publisher would really not have much more to offer us and we wanted complete freedom for the project.

Angela had issues with me not being patient and almost jumping the gun a couple of times before we were ready. That is just me. I am a little too ambitious at times. She was always the voice of reason when it came to the business side of things. A lot of times she had to pull my head out of the clouds.

We have had to push back launch dates because of our day jobs and we have had to cancel convention appearances for the same thing. The way we overcome obstacles is to keep pressing on, remain flexible, and continue to create this wonderful story that’s brought so many people together. It’s persistence, more than anything, it is always persistence.

AZ: I think Seth and I have an interesting dynamic that I’ve come to appreciate. In the beginning, we had a bit of friction because we didn’t understand our working styles. I have to think things through from all sides, create a plan and put a process in place to execute. Seth, on the other hand, will act immediately when he gets an idea. I don’t think Gale would have the following it does today without Seth’s fearlessness, tenacity and enthusiasm to try new things. However, self-publishing a comic to our standards of quality has a lot of finer details that require time and planning. What I love about Seth is that he’s open to feedback, he’s always willing to improve and that inspires me to do the same.

On a personal side, I was very slow at drawing Gale pages in the beginning. It would take me a month to finish a page. Seth probably worried at some point whether I was cut out for this job and he’s been really flexible and patient with the project. Some people told me I should simplify my art for comics. But I pushed myself to keep going in the style I have for Gale and I reinvented my process along the way. I’ve learned that just because you have an ounce of talent, it doesn’t entitle you to anything except hard work. Now I can produce 3-4 pages a month alongside my full-time work.

7) Please discuss your creative process. Do you follow a schedule? Set deadlines? How do you get the creative juices flowing for your project?

SG: I am chaotic! Ask my wife. Despite my military experience, I can be somewhat all over the place. The reason why Angela is much more than the artist and she carries the title co-creator is because she keeps me on point. She keeps us on schedule. I write when I am inspired, I send notes to Angela and forget to save them in the shared file so she does it for me. If it was not for her I wouldn’t have come this far. No other artist would have taught me how to maintain good order in this line of work. As for creative juices? I read books, watch some character driven NETFLIX shows, and study people and cultures. I love Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology. One thing that is most important in this process, however, is reading. To be a great writer, you have to be a reader first!

AZ: I actually have a militaristic approach when it comes to creativity. If you’ve ever read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, you’ll get where I’m coming from. In the past, I’ve struggled with time management and it has a lot to do with fear and procrastination. I now manage and track my creative time through a pomodoro app. It’s basically an interval timer that alternates between a work and break period. When that whistle sounds for the work interval I’m not checking email or rummaging through social media. The app allows you to export an excel spreadsheet so you can see how long you spent on a task or project. I base my schedule and deadlines around the data and strive to be more efficient over time.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think it’s important for artists to recharge their creative juices to prevent burnout. Although I’m rigid and structured during projects, I’m the complete opposite when it comes to downtime. I like going for aimless walks, cooking, watching movies, reading manga, and comics and playing video games with my fiancé (who by the way has been super supportive of Gale).

8) What is in store for Gale? When will it be released?

SG: I don’t want to steal Angela’s thunder. Most of this is her brilliance. I will let you take the reigns for this, co-creator!

AZ: As Seth mentioned, we’re going the self-publishing route and playing the long game of making a series one page at a time. Instead of releasing Gale when it’s all done, we’re inviting people to follow our journey of making comics by sharing the process, what we’ve learned through trial and error and how we’re constantly striving to improve. I think that’s more fulfilling for us creators to relate to readers every step of the way then just popping up one day and saying ‘hey here’s our product, buy it.’

Last fall we completed Chapter 1: The Calm and launched it on Webtoon and we’re also currently posting it panel by panel on Instagram. We’re halfway through Chapter 2: Storm Chaser and aiming to finish it by the end of this year. Next year, we’re going to explore Kickstarter as well as comic book conventions.

9) Do you have anything you would like to add to the article?

AZ: I want to thank anyone who took the time to read our interview. Although we’re small and at the beginning of our journey, I’m super grateful and touched by all the support that Gale has received. I also want to give huge thanks to the Savannah Quill for having us and putting all of this together. I deeply appreciate this opportunity to share our thoughts and process

SG: Same as Angela, thanks! Also, look out for Gale on Webtoon and make sure you stay tuned for a short we have contributed to Red Stylo Media’s newest upcoming anthology; a collaboration of artists and writers paying tribute to the band, Forence + The Machine entitled “Cosmic Love”. The Kickstarter for the main print run will launch sometime this Fall. Just look for the announcement on IG “Stories” or on Twitter!

www.thegalecomic.com

IG: www.instagram.com/thegalecomic/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegalecomic

Webtoon: http://tiny.cc/mnwrxy

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/galecomic

Inside the minds of The Gale Comic creator and artist. #indie #author #comicbook #artist #adammesser #sethgreenwood #angelazhang #thegalecomic www.adammesser.net Hello everyone! To kick off my new series of interviews with authors, artists, and creators, I want to introduce you to Seth Greenwood and Angela Zhang.

#angela zhang #authors #indie author #publishing #seth greenwood #the gale #writer #writing

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scifrey · 7 years

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Improbable Press put out a call asking fan fiction authors how they went from Free to Fee. Here’s my response. Happy reading!

The Story of How I Started Selling Stories

My parents, teachers, and acting/singing coaches will all tell you that I've always been a story teller. For the first twenty four years of my life, I was determined to do so through musical theatre, though I had always secretly harbored the desire to write a hit stage play. My early writing consisted of plays for my friends and I to put on, interspersed with prose that I supposed would one day become a novel, but which wasn't my passion.

I was a big reader, but where this habit came from, I'm not certain. While my mother always had a book on the go - whatever crumbling paperback law thriller or murder mystery she'd been handed by the woman down the street when she was done it, which was then passed on to the next neighbor - my father and brothers preferred sports (either on TV or outside in the yard) over reading. I stumbled into fantasy and science fiction because Wil Wheaton was hot, and his show was on every Friday night, and from there I consumed every Star Trek tie-in novel my tiny rural library carried, then started following the authors of the novels into their other worlds and series.

So you won't be surprised to learn that this was how I found fan fiction for the first time. My "I love this, gee, I wonder what else there is?" muscle was well developed by junior high, and before the internet had come to The Middle Of Nowhere Rural Ontario, I had already gotten quite adept at search keywords and codexes to track down more books to consume. Imagine my shock and joy when, in the middle of my Phantom of the Opera phase (come on, fess up, you had one too), the internet in my school library told me about not only Fredrick Forsyth and Susan Kay's stunning re-tellings, but of something called fan fiction.

I wasted a lot of the librarian's ink and paper printing out these books and secreting them into binders and pretending to do school work at my desk or backstage between scenes. A lot. And yes, I still have most of them.

And as we all well know, the jump between reading and writing is a short when one is submerged so fully in communities of creators. Everyone else's "What If" rubs off on you, and it's just a matter of time before you find yourself playing with the idea of coaxing a few plot bunnies over to spend some time with you. Not everyone loves to write, but gosh darn it, if you want to give it a try, then you couldn't ask for a better, more supportive community. It doesn't matter how new you are to it, everyone reads, everyone comments, everyone makes suggestions. People beta read. People edit. People co-write. People cheer, and support, and recommend, and enthuse. Yeah, there are the occasional jerks, flammers, and wank-mongers, but on the whole? There's literally no better place to learn how to be a writer than in fandom, I firmly believe this.

So, of course, born storyteller that I am, I had to give it a try.

I started writing fan fiction in 1991 for a small, relatively obscure Canadian/Luxembourg co-pro children’s show called Dracula: the Series. I used to get up and watch it on Saturday mornings, in my PJs, before heading off to whichever rehearsal or read through or practice I had that year.

1995 brought the English dub of Sailor Moon to my life, (and put me on the path to voice acting), and along with a high-school friend, I wrote, printed out, illustrated, and bound my first “book” – a self-insert story that was just over eleven pages long, which introduced new Scouts based on us. From there, I didn’t really stop.

1996 led me to Forever Knight and Dragon Ball Z, and from there to my friend’s basement where they’d just installed the internet. We chatted with strangers on ICQ, joined Yahoo!Groups and Bravenet Chat Boards. (Incidentally, a friend from my DBZ chat group turned out to be a huge DtS fan, too. We wrote a big crossover together which is probably only accessible on the Wayback Machine now. We stayed friends, helped each other through this writing thing, and now she’s Ruthanne Reid, author of the popular Among the Mythos series.) In 2000 I got a fanfiction.net account and never looked back.

In 2001, while in my first year of university for Dramatic Arts, I made my first Real Live fandom friends. We wrote epic-length self-insert fics in Harry Potter and Fushigi Yuugi, cosplayed at conventions (sometimes using the on-campus wardrobe department’s terrifyingly ancient serger), and made fan art and comics in our sketchbooks around studying for our finals and writing essays on critical theory or classical Latin. I was explaining the plot of the next big fic I was going to write to one of them, an older girl who had been my T.A. but loved Interview with the Vampire just as dearly as I, when she said, “You know, this sounds really interesting. Why don’t you strip all the fandom stuff out of the story and just write it as a novel?”

You can do that? was my first thought.

No! I don’t want to! Writing is my fun hobby. What will happen if I try to be a writer and get rejected by everyone and I end up hating it? was my second.

But the seed was planted. Slowly at first, and then at increasingly obsessive pace, I began writing my first novel around an undergrad thesis, fourth-year essays, several other big fanfics that popped me into the cusp of BNF status but never quite over the tine, and then a move to Japan to teach English. From 2002-2007 I wrote about 300 000 words on the novel that I would eventually shut away in my desk drawer and ignore until I published on Wattpad under my pseudonym on a lark. It was messy. It was long. It was self-indulgent and blatantly inspired by Master of Mosquiton, Interview with the Vampire, Forever Knight, and anything written by Tanya Huff, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Charlaine Harris. This was fine for fanfic, but in terms of being comfortable with presenting it to agents and publishing houses, I felt that it wasn’t original enough.

By this time I was teaching overseas, and in my spare time (and boy, was there a lot of spare time while sitting in a Japanese teacher’s office for 40 hours per week when one only actually teaches for 11 of them) I started applying to MA programs (where I eventually wrote my thesis on Mary Sue Fan Fiction). I also spent it researching “How to Get Published”, mostly by Googling it and/or buy/reading the few books on the topic in English I could find at the local book store or order from the just-then-gaining-international traction online bookstore Amazon.

What that research mostly told me was “Write and sell a bunch of short fiction first, so you have proof that a) you can do the work and b) you can finish what you promise you’ll finish and c) you have proof that other people think you’re worth spending money on.”

Short fiction. Huh. Of course we’d studied short stories in school, and I’d even taken a short story writing class in university, though nothing I’d written for the class was indicative of the kinds of stories I preferred to tell. But I felt pretty confident about this whole writing short stories thing… after all, I’d been doing weekly challenges for years. Drabbles. Flashfic. Stories and chapters that were limited to the word count cap that LiveJournal put on its posts. I’d written novellas without knowing that’s what they were called; I’d written whole novels about other people’s characters. All I needed was an idea. Short fiction I could do.

Unfortunately, everything that came to me was fanfic inspired. It frustrated me, because I didn’t want to write a serial-numbers-filed-off story. I wanted to write something original and epic and inspiring. Something just mine. I started and stopped a lot of stories in 2006-2007. I’d been doing NaNoWriMo for years by then, having been introduced to it in undergrad, and I was determined that this would be the year that I wrote something I could shop. Something just mine. Something unique.

While I adored fanfiction, I was convinced that I couldn't make a career on it. What had once been a fun hobby soon because a source of torment. Why could I think of a hundred ways to write a meet-cute between my favorite ships, but come up utterly blank when it came to something new and original and just mine?

It took me a while to realize that my playwriting and short story teachers had been correct when they said that there are no original stories in the world, no way you can tell a tale that someone else hasn’t already tried. The "Man vs." list exists for a reason.

The unique part isn’t your story, it’s your voice. Your lived life, your experiences, your way of forming images and structuring sentences. Your choices about who the narrator character is, and what the POV will be, and how the characters handle the conflict. In that way, every piece of writing ever done is individual and unique, even the fanfic. Because nobody is going to portray that character’s quirk or speech pattern quite like you do, nobody is going to structure your plot or your imagery like you. Because there is only one of you. Only one of me. Even if we're all writing fanfiction, no one's story sounds like anyone else's, or is told like anyone else's.

That is the reality of being a storyteller.

And strangely enough, the woman who opened my eyes to this was a psychic from a psychic fair I attended, who told me that Mark Twain was standing over her shoulder admonishing me to stop fretting and just get something on the page – but to never forget character. My strength, she said that he said, was in creating memorable, well written, well rounded characters. And that my book should focus on that above concerns of plot or pacing.

Well, okay. If Mark Twain says that’s what my strength is, then that’s what my strength is, right? Who am I to argue with the ghost of Mark Freaking Twain?

An accident with a bike and a car on a rice patty left me immobile for six weeks in 2006, and I decided that if I was finally going to write this original short story to sell – especially since I would need income, as the accident made it obvious that I would never be able to dance professionally, and probably would never be able to tread the boards in musicals – now was the perfect time. I was going to stop fighting my fannish training and write.

I cherry picked and combined my favorite aspects of Doctor Who, Stargate: Atlantis, Torchwood, The Farm Show/The Drawer Boy, and my own melancholy experiences with culture shock and liminal-living in a foreign culture, and wrote a novella titled (Back). It was a character study of a woman named Evvie who, through an accident of time travel, meets the future version of her infant daughter Gwen. And realizes she doesn’t like the woman her daughter will become. It was a story about accepting people for who they are, instead of who you wish they would be, and had a strong undercurrent of the turbulence I was going through in trying to figure out my own sexuality and that I wouldn't have the future in performance that I had been working toward since I was four.

Deciding that I would worry about where I would try to publish the story after it had been written, I sat down and wrote what ended up being (at least for me) a pretty standard-length fanfic: 18,762 words. It was only after I had finished the story that I looked up what category that put it in – Novella. Using paying reputable markets, like Duotrope, the Writer’s Digest, MSFV, Absolute Write, SFWA, my local Writer’s Union, Writer Beware, I realized that I had shot myself in the foot.

It seems like nearly nobody publishes novellas anymore. SF/F and Literary Fiction seem to be the last two bastions of the novella, and the competition to get one published is fierce. The markets that accepted SF/F novellas was vanishingly thin I had to do a lot of Googling and digging to figure out who I could submit to with an unagented/unsolicited SF/F novella. If I recall correctly, it was only about ten publications. I built an excel database and filled it with all the info I found.

I put together a query letter and sent it off using my database to guide me. Most of the rejections were kind, and said that the story was good, just too long/too short/ too sci-fi-y/not sci-fi-y enough. Only one market offered on it – for $10 USD. Beggers couldn’t be choosers, even if I had hoped to make a little more than ten bucks, and I accepted.

It was a paid professional publication, and that’s what mattered to me. I had the first entry on my bibliography, and something to point to in my query letters to prove that I was a worthy investment for a publisher/agent.

And energized by this, and now aware that length really does matter, even in online-only publications, I started writing other shorts to pad out my bibliography more.

I tried to tailor these ones to what my research told me the "mainstream industry" and "mainstream audiences" wanted, and those stories? Those were shot down one after the other. I was still writing fanfiction at the time, too, and those stories were doing well, getting lots of positive feedback, so why weren’t my stories?

In 2007 I returned to Canada and Academia, frustrated by my lack of sales, desperate to kick off my publishing career, and feeling a creative void left by having to depart theatre because of my new difficulties walking. I wrote my MA, and decided that if (Back) was the only original story that people liked, then I’d try to expand it into a novel.

Over the course of two years I did my coursework, and read everything there was to read about how to get a book deal, started hanging out in writer’s/author’s groups in Toronto and met some great people who were willing to guide me, and expanded (Back) into the novel Triptych. I kept reminding myself what Mark Twain said – character was my strength, the ability to make the kind of people that other writers wanted to write stories about, a skill I’d honed while writing fanfic. Because that's what we do, isn't it? Sure, we write fix-its and AUs and fusions and finish cancelled shows, and fill in missing scenes, but what we're all really doing is playing with characters, isn't it? Characters draw us to fanfic, and characters keep us there. Characters is what we specialize in.

Fanfic had taught me to work with a beta reader, so I started asking my fic betas if they'd like a go at my original novel. Fellow fanfic writers, can I just say how valuable editors and beta readers in the community are? These are people who do something that I've paid a professional editor thousands of dollars to do for free out of sheer love. Treasure your beta readers, folks. Really.

“It reminds me a lot of fan fiction,” one reader said. “The intense attention to character and their inner life, and the way that the worldbuilding isn’t dumped but sprinkled in an instance at a time, like, you know, a really good AU. I love it.”

Dear Lord. I couldn’t have written a better recommendation or a more flattering description if I’d tried. Mark Twain was right, it seems. And fanfic was the training ground, for me – my apprenticeship in storytelling.

Of course... what Mr. Twain hadn't explained is that character-study novels just don't sell in SF/F. They say Harry Potter was rejected twelve times? HA. I shopped Triptych to both agents and small presses who didn't require you to have an agent to publish with them, and I got 64 rejections. Take that, J.K.

At first the rejection letters were forms and photocopied "no thanks" slips. But every time I got feedback from a publisher or agent, I took it to heart, adjusted the manuscript, edited, tweaked, tweaked, tweaked. Eventually, the rejections started to get more personal. "I loved this character, but I don't know how to sell this book." And "I really enjoyed the read, but it doesn't really fit the rest of our catalogue." And "What if you rewrote the novel to be about the action event that happens before the book even starts, instead of focusing solely on the emotional aftermath?"

In other words - "Stop writing fanfiction." There seemed to be a huge disconnect between what the readership wanted and what the publishing world thought they wanted.

Disheartened, frustrated, and wondering if I was going to have to give up on my dreams of being a professional creative, I attended Ad Astra, a convention in Toronto, in 2009. At a room party, complaining to my author friends that "nobody wanted my gay alien threesome book!" a woman I didn't know asked me about the novel. We chatted, and it turned out she was the acquisitions editor for Dragon Moon Press, and incidentally, also a fan of fan fiction.

I sent her Triptych. She rejected it. I asked why. She gave me a laundry list of reasons. I said, "If I can address these issues and rewrite it, would you be willing to look at it again?" She said yes. She was certain, however, that I wouldn't be able to fix it. I spent the summer rewriting - while making sure to stay true to my original tone of the novel, and writing a character-study fanfiction. I sent it in the fall. I do believe it was Christmas eve when I received the offer of publication.

From there, my little fic-inspired novel was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards and a CBC Bookie, was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Advocate, and garnered a starred review and a place on the Best Books Of The Year at Publishers Weekly.

The award nominations led me to an agent, and further contracts, and even conversations with studio execs. It also made me the target of Requires Only That You Hate, and other cranky, horrible reviewers. But you know what? I've had worse on a forum, and on ff.n, and LJ. It sucked, and it hurt, but if there's one thing fandom has taught me, it's that not everyone is going to love what you do, and not everyone interprets things the same way you do. The only thing we can do is learn from the critique if it's valid and thoughtful, and ignore the screaming hate and bullying. Then you pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and go write something else.

Because a screaming hater? Is not going to ruin my love of storytelling.

But for all that... the day someone made me fan art based on Triptych is one etched in my memory. It means far more to me than any of the emails I ever received inquiring about representation or film rights, or wanting meetings to discuss series.

The lesson I learned from publishing Triptych - now sadly out of print, but we're looking for a new home for it - is that if I chase what the "mainstream" and the "industry" want, I'll never write anything that sells because my heart won't be in it. I have to keep writing like a fanficcer, even if I'm not writing fanfic, if I want to create something that resonates with people. And if it takes time for the publishers and acquiring editors to figure out what I'm doing, and how to sell it, then fine - I have an agent on my side now, and a small growing number of supporters, readers, and editors who love what I do.

Do I still write fanfic? Very, very rarely. I’ve had some pretty demanding contracts and deadlines in the last two years, so I’ve had to pare down my writing to only what’s needed to fulfill my obligations. Doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas for fics constantly.

Sometimes the urge is powerful enough that I do give into it – I wrote To A Stranger, based on Mad Lori’s Performance in a Leading Role Sherlock AU recently, when I should have been writing the second and third novels of The Accidental Turn Series. And even more recently, I cleaned up To A Stranger into something resembling a real screenplay and started shopping it around to film festivals and producers because I love this story, I love what I did with it, and I’m proud of the work. If To A Stranger is only ever a fanfic, that’s fine with me. I poured my heart into it and am so proud of it. But I figure that if there’s one more project I could possibly get into the real world, then why not go for it?

The worst thing the festival heads and producers can say about the work is: “No, thank you.” And being an online writer has taught me not to take the “no, thank you”s personally. Applying the values of Don’t Like Don’t Read or Not My Kink to your publication/agent search makes it much easier to handle the rejections – not every story is for every person.

Maybe once every producer in North America has rejected it, I might think about working with someone to adapt the screenplay into an illustrated comic fanbook? Who knows?

That’s the joy of starting out as a writer in fandom – felixibility, adaptability, creative problem-solving and cross-platform storytelling comes as naturally as breathing to us fan writers. It’s what we do.

You may not think that this is a strength, but trust me, it is. I was never so shocked at an author’s meetup as when I suggested to someone that their “writer’s block” sounded to me like they were telling the story in the wrong format. “I think this is a comic, not a novel,” I’d said. “It sounds so visual. That's why the story is resisting you.” And they stared at me like I suddenly had an extra head and said, “But I’m a novelist.” I said, “No, you’re a writer. Try it.” They never did, as far as I know, and they never finished that book, either.

As fans, our strength isn't just in what we write, or how we come to our stories. It’s also about the physical practice of writing, too. We’re a group of people who have learned to carry notebooks, squeeze in a few hundred words between classes, or when the baby is napping, or during our lunch breaks, or on commute home. This is our hobby, we fit it in around our lives and jobs, and that has taught us the importance of just making time.

We are, on average, more dedicated and constant writers than some of the “novelists” that I’ve met: the folks who wait for inspiration to strike, who quit their day jobs in pursuit of some lofty ideal of having an office and drinking whiskey and walking the quay and waiting for madam muse to grace them, who throw themselves at MFAs and writing retreats, as if it's the attendance that makes them writers and not the work of it.

We fans are career writers. We don’t wait for inspiration to come to us, we chase it down with a butterfly net. We write when and where we can. More than that, we finish things. (Or we have the good sense to know when to abandon something that isn’t working.) We write to deadlines. Self-imposed ones, even.

We write 5k on a weekend for fun, and think NaNoWriMo’s 50k goal and 1667 words per day are a walk in the park. (When I know it terrifies some of the best-selling published authors I hang out with.) Or if we fans don’t write fast, then we know that slow and steady works too, and we’re willing to stick it out until our story is finished, even if it takes years of weekly updates to do so. We have patience, and perseverance, and passion.

This is what being a fanfiction writer has given me. Not only a career as a writer, but tools and a skill-set to write work that other people think is work awarding, adapting, and promoting. And the courage to stick to my guns when it comes to telling the kinds of stories that I want to tell.

This is what being a fanfiction writer gives us.

Aren’t we lucky, fellow fans? Hasn’t our training been spectacular?

J.M. (@scifrey) is a SF/F author, and professional smartypants on AMI Audio’s Live From Studio 5. She’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. Her debut novel TRIPTYCH was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly. Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy THE UNTOLD TALE (Accidental Turn Series #1), debuted to acclaim in 2015 and was followed by THE FORGOTTEN TALE (Accidental Turn Series #2) this past December. FF.N | LJ |AO3| Books | Tumblr

#Improbable Press #Fan Fiction #fanfiction #triptych #j.m. frey #the accidental turn series #free to fee #words for writers

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mastcomm · 4 years

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‘Before Sunrise’: The Making of an Indie Classic

No one knew how “Before Sunrise” would end. In addition to leaving the audience on a cliffhanger — would the visiting American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and the French student Céline (Julie Delpy) meet again after one night of passionate conversation on the streets of Vienna? — the filmmakers themselves were at a loss until the last minute.

“We shot in chronological order and worked on the script every weekend throughout the shoot,” the director and co-writer Richard Linklater said. “We went pretty far into this thinking they weren’t going to plan to meet again, and the night before, we were up until 3 in the morning rewriting the final scene.”

Made for just $2.5 million, “Before Sunrise” opened the 1995 Sundance Film Festival and formed a collaborative partnership between Linklater, Hawke and Delpy that led to two sequels, “Before Sunset” (2004) and “Before Midnight” (2013), and decades of friendship.

In honor of the first film’s 25th anniversary, I interviewed the stars and creators about making the unconventional indie romance. Here are edited excerpts from those conversations.

The idea for the movie came to Linklater during a night spent with a woman he met in a Philadelphia toy store in 1989. Years later, he would learn she had died in a motorcycle accident just before “Before Sunrise” began filming.

RICHARD LINKLATER This girl was flirting with me while I waited for my sister [to finish shopping], so I wrote a little note like, “Hey, I’m in town for one night if you want to hang out.” Somewhere in the night I said to her, “I want to make a film about this. Just this feeling.” That’s really all it was trying to ever capture — that rush of meeting someone and that undercurrent of flirtation and romance.

In 1993, he asked the actress Kim Krizan, who had appeared in his Texas-set films “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused,” if she would help write the screenplay.

KIM KRIZAN (co-writer) I’d never written a script before, but he’d read my master’s thesis on Anaïs Nin and thought I could write.

LINKLATER In my previous films, I felt the male view overwhelmed. So my absolute goal was to have a strong female perspective. Kim was the kind of person you’d run into and within 30 seconds you’re talking about something substantial. I liked that.

KRIZAN We were thinking about the direction it could go, and I said, Well, I’ve met really interesting people traveling on trains in Europe. I’d had fantastic conversations where I knew I’d never see them again. Things tend to happen in the space of a day in Linklater stories, so that instantly created a structure.

LINKLATER It was a wonderful collaboration over an intense 11 days, but I always knew the process would eventually include the two actors. So I was upfront that this was a template of a script, and it was going to be deepened later.

Linklater considered a version set in America, but funding and an interest from Castle Rock Entertainment allowed them to shoot abroad.

LINKLATER On one hand, the movie could be set anywhere. I thought, if I don’t have any money, there’s a train station in San Antonio and we could do this close to home. But I ended up going to the Vienna film festival with “Dazed” and found out they had some European subsidy money. And then Martin Shafer read the script and was like, “Hey, this could be good.”

MARTIN SHAFER (a co-founder of Castle Rock Entertainment) The script came to me and it was very short. I think only about 35 pages. It had a lot of dialogue but was more of a blueprint. It was so different from the so-called romantic comedies of the time, which were often very contrived, and it had such a naturalistic feel to it.

It took a bicoastal casting call and more than six months to find the perfect leads.

LINKLATER That was the biggest casting choice imaginable. It wasn’t clear if it was going to be a European male and American female [or vice versa]. In the first draft, we named the characters Chris and Terry because both are kind of genderless. It was that open.

JUDY HENDERSON (casting director) I kept all the Polaroids because so many of the people who auditioned are superstars today. We saw Gwyneth Paltrow and Jennifer Aniston, before she was on “Friends.”

LINKLATER Anthony Rapp invited me to see a play he was in with Ethan Hawke in New York. I had never met Ethan, but at that moment, he was the biggest star in his age range. I ended up at a bar with him after the play.

ETHAN HAWKE (Jesse) We hung out until 4 a.m. After that, Rick sent me the script, and I thought he was offering me the part. I was really excited and had all these questions, and I realized after talking to my agents that he was not offering — he was asking me to audition with about 10,000 other people.

LINKLATER Julie was the second actor I met on the first day of our big L.A. casting session. I remember liking her, and her résumé was impressive. She’d worked all over Europe. She was just getting started in the U.S., but she immediately went to the top of the list.

JULIE DELPY (Céline) I like the idea of people meeting over one night and falling in love. Linklater clearly stated that he wanted the actors involved in the writing, and I liked that. It wasn’t just a part.

HENDERSON In the end, it came down to two women and two men: Ethan, Julie, Michael Vartan [“Never Been Kissed”] and Sadie Frost [“Bram Stoker’s Dracula”]. I think they went with Julie because she was wonderful, and they thought the French accent gave a definite feeling that Jesse was meeting someone who was not from his world. And with Michael and Ethan, it was a tough choice because they were both really good. You could almost toss a coin.

LINKLATER I was looking for two creative partners. I wasn’t looking for just two pretty faces.

HENDERSON Ethan and Julie had a chemistry that was electric and charming at the same time.

HAWKE Meeting Julie was like meeting a character from a novel, like Anna Karenina or something. She’s a very deep person. I’d never felt so American and so dumb in my life.

DELPY He was like a puppy, so young and sweet. He hates that, but really he had a beautiful naïve quality about him. I mean naïve in a good way, naïve but very smart at the same time.

Delpy, Hawke and Linklater headed to Vienna for a three-week intensive workshop ahead of the summer 1994 shoot and continued revising the script throughout 25 days of filming.

HAWKE Revising is way too mild of a word. Rick wanted to make a movie about living in the moment. And to do that we were all going to have to live in the moment together to create the movie. For every scene in there, we wrote, like, 17 that didn’t make the cut.

DELPY It was intense, and a lot of my personal feelings went into it. I was an extremely romantic person, very pure and full of dreams. The writing was very organic. The guys would listen to me as I was really the only woman in the room, especially when we got to Vienna.

LINKLATER To this day, they don’t really get the credit as actors because everybody thinks they’re improvising.

HAWKE It didn’t piss me off [that there wasn’t a discussion to credit them as writers]. It felt like such a grand adventure. I used to joke there were times when Julie and I didn’t want credit because we were so sure it was going to be so bad.

Regular trains were used to film Jesse and Céline’s meet-cute, as well as Céline’s send-off in the closing scene.

LINKLATER It was hell. We rode the trains from Vienna to Salzburg and back for three days to get the beginning scene and the shots out the windows. You’re good when the train reaches a certain speed, but if it’s jumping around, you’re screwed.

HAWKE My stepfather had given me this burgundy turtleneck, and I was in love with it. I don’t know why. And then I just immediately regretted it because it was really hot. What idiot thinks they look good in a turtleneck in summer in Vienna?

LINKLATER The very last shot of the movie, when Julie walks onto the train, we had that timed to the second and we got one chance to do it. It was like, the train’s going to leave here at 8:37:30. I’m going to say action at 8:20. She’s going to get on a non-moving train. And then when she gets to her seat, the train is going to be moving. It was tense, but we rehearsed the hell out of it and it worked.

DELPY It was insanely hot. I had not slept in days because we shot [mostly] at night. I remember being miserable. It was the end of the shoot, and I felt I was never going to see Rick and Ethan again.

When the pair almost kiss while listening to Kath Bloom’s “Come Here” in the record store booth, Delpy and Hawke’s reactions were authentic.

LINKLATER That’s the only time I withheld anything from the cast. The lyrics were in the script, but they had never actually heard the song. So you can see them really listening because they’d never heard that yearning, creaky thing in Kath Bloom’s voice that’s so moving.

HAWKE It’s probably my single favorite take of anything I’ve been involved with.

DELPY That was really special. It was like magic — each time I felt Ethan looking away, I would look at him and vice versa. I almost fell in love with him right there, but then Rick said cut.

Jesse and Céline’s first kiss takes place on Vienna’s Prater Ferris wheel at sunset, but was difficult in more ways than one.

LINKLATER We tried to shoot it at sunset, but they would only stop the Ferris wheel for 10 minutes, and then we’d have to go around and do it again. We had three different light levels by the time we finished. So we went back a week later and reshot that in the morning when they let us stop it for an hour. When you see their first kiss, that was shot in the a.m.

HAWKE Julie is afraid of heights. Try making out with somebody who’s absolutely petrified. It was challenging, and I don’t think she was terribly impressed — she’d been with a lot more interesting men than me.

DELPY I’ve never been on [a Ferris wheel] since. When you act, you have to get over your fears constantly. I’m also shy with men, and I had to kiss someone who was a friend at this point. It was scary.

HAWKE I remember laughing a lot because Julie just kept making fun of me, “That’s the look you give girls? You’ve got to do better than that!”

Linklater intentionally left several elements of the film up to the audience’s imagination, namely did Jesse and Céline have sex?

LINKLATER Technically, you could see it any way you want. If you look closely, she’s dressed a little differently. So if you really do the math, you go O.K., that dress had to come off to get that shirt off. Something happened. I think all the hints are there.

“Before Sunrise” made only $5.9 million worldwide, but they had created something that would outweigh the box-office receipts.

LINKLATER Ethan was the Gen X actor after “Reality Bites” and I was the Gen X director, and we didn’t really deliver a Gen X film. There’s no pop-culture references, no hipster types. You pay the price at the time, but now I’m kind of proud you can go to Vienna and have a “Before Sunrise” walking tour right next to a “Third Man” walking tour.

DELPY After the third film, now people think of me as Céline, and it’s sometimes hard to get out of this “ideal” woman role. Some people hate me for even trying to do anything different. It’s a bit frustrating.

Last year, Delpy said she was paid about a tenth of what Hawke made on “Before Sunrise” and didn’t achieve equal pay until “Before Midnight.” (She wouldn’t comment on the subject in our interview.) Linklater issued a lengthy statement in response, noting that “nobody was getting paid much at all.”

LINKLATER I got paid a lot less than I had on [“Dazed”]. Ethan, at the height of his popularity, took a huge pay cut. I won’t go as far as to say the film would not have happened without him, but it wouldn’t have happened in the same way.

HAWKE It was kind of a wake-up call for me after “Before Sunrise.” When it’s a young man who’s got ideas and wants to be a filmmaker and write — [people] find that really interesting. But a lot of men are really intimidated when that’s coming from a young female voice. Julie has always been one of the most remarkable film minds I’ve ever come in contact with, bar none. It’s amazing how much I just learned about how gender has played a part in defining and limiting her experience. The “Before” trilogy is a bad example of pay gap because nobody got paid. I have no idea what Julie got paid or what I got paid. On those movies none of us were doing it for the money.

After 25 years, the bygone era of “Before Sunrise” has taken on new meaning for the actors.

DELPY I was so young and vulnerable. I wish I could travel in time and tell Julie then to not self-destruct so much with anxiety and insecurity. Tell her to take care of herself. “Before Sunrise” is a very romantic film, and somehow I never had that romantic, dreamy encounter in my life. Movies are magic a bit, life isn’t.

HAWKE My daughter [the actress Maya Hawke] decided to watch the movie with some of her friends, and there was a certain envy they had for a time where you didn’t have email. Life insisted that you live in the moment more. There’s something about always being digitally present that allows you to not be present, and part of what Jesse and Céline try to do in that movie is actually be present with each other.

Every nine years, there’s been a sequel. But it’s unlikely a fourth film, if it happens, would arrive on schedule.

HAWKE There was a feeling I had in my gut when we finished “Before Midnight” that I’d never had before, which was that we were done. “Sunrise, “Sunset,” “Midnight” is one work in its own strange way. That doesn’t mean there won’t be another work, like an epilogue. I would be curious about an “After” series, about something where you really deal with the second half of your life.

LINKLATER Maybe we’ll wait until they’re in their 80s and do a comic remake of “Amour,” where one euthanizes the other in old age. I’m not ruling that out.

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biofunmy · 4 years