Last of the Scripts

This week, I’m moving on to the last of the issue 1 scripts! Last week, I spoke about keeping all four titles in existence, even though I intend to focus on just the one going forward. These stories are pretty important to me, even as they are just “when I get around to it” books because I don’t want to just drop a story. There are some longer-term goals that are tied to these stories existing, even if its in my head or just in sketch or draft form. And with luck and patience, I may return to them in a regular capacity in the future.

So here's where we are: last week, I took a look at the script for Hedge Kingdom #1, which would be the basis for the script of Highdark #1, and said, “Wow. I was really doing something with this.” So that now stays as it was, but with some minor revisions for dialogue. That made the week much easier to work through, and the script is actually complete! What's funny about all of this is that I expected to keep the script for Blackbirds unchanged, and everything else to morph into something else. But what happened instead was Blackbirds for a full rewrite and became Nightingales.

I'm honestly struggling with my renaming all the titles, and I've been mulling over returning them to their original names and just moving on with new #1 scripts and art. Especially my lead story, Nightingales. The name means something in the story, but outside of that, it just sounds so common. Again, I've been thinking of just giving the books back their original names, especially as I don't really know why I wanted to change the names in the first place, outside of not having two stories with the word “Black” in them. That actually may have been it, and so I've also been thinking about what other solid book titles could fit this story and this set of characters.

In any case, this coming week will see a much-needed redraft of Black Mercury, which will become Black Crown. The biggest changes to this title were actually the focus characters. I plucked a pair from one title and put them there to carry the drama instead of my original plan, which would fall out of alignment with the other stories.

All this to say that I'm considering all these changes I've made and asking myself if any of them are actually worth it. Considering I hadn't gotten far in publishing the original planned pages, what do these changes mean? It's all going to be new to anyone who reads them. I guess, as the person making these stories, they mean more to me than I should ever expect them to mean to anyone else. The things I've changed will be brand new material to anyone, not me, so I can just make the story I want from the start and see what develops.

So what story do I want? I guess that's where I am now.

Thanks for reading. More next week.