Recombinant
Appearently I don't have the energy this evening to draw, but perhaps I can redeem myself by giving everyone an update on Novella.
A few weeks ago I began to draw the comic. I've tried to be low-key about this for a variety of reasons. I'm not sure how long the average episode will take to produce. Nor do I know how difficult it will be for me to find the time and energy in order to produce them. My artwork is known to take quite a bit of time to draw, although I believe I've found ways to reduce that recently. The biggest reason is simply that I'm unsure of my ability to pull this off.
Right now there seems to be so much that's uncertain about this project. I still don't feel I have the majority of the story planned out. Even more vexing is that I don't understand the main character at all. Novella, as a character, is somewhat perplexing to me. The more I try to unravel her, the more things become unclear. Even as I begin to draw the first comics, I'm still rewriting and redesigning the character. Recently I've been considering joining or merging Novella with a lesser known story of mine, FourByThree.net.
Like Novella, FourByThree also has a transgender main character. Mei is a college student living with her girlfriend, Yuki. Unlike Novella, Mei is living as a woman full-time and is post operative. Mei is a talented programmer and is studying computer science. From the surface, it would seem that she would be quite a success. The reality is that Mei had transitioned too quickly, and suffers from a number of unresolved psychological issues. As I wrote the story, I discovered that the story was more about Yuki than Mei.
While Yuki has been dating Mei for a while, she's had to face a number of unexpected difficulties. Yuki never had a well defined sense of sexual orientation, and never thought it an issue. While she dated a few times in high school, it was mostly under pressure of friends and family members. Mei, however, was a different matter altogether. While Mei was distant and defensive, Yuki managed to work past those barriers. Now Yuki is facing the complexities of a relationship with a transperson, and the difficulty of reconciling that relationship with her parents.
As I wrote the story, I began to realize that the story was far more about Yuki than Mei. I managed to write almost fifty pages before I lost the direction of the plot. In many ways the story was a more positive version of Novella. When I began to work on Novella as my main project, I found it difficult to maintain FourByThree.net. Eventually, I shelved the story with little expectation to return to it.
Recently, I've been toying with the idea of joining the two stories. My first thought was to make FourByThree.net the sequel to Novella. The similarities were enough to believe that Mei was a latter Novella. It seemed a promising idea, but something still seemed off. While waiting in a crowded airport in White Plains, NY, I pulled out my laptop and read the some fifty pages of FourByThree. The more I read it the more I began to realize that the idea wouldn't work. Mei wasn't a latter Novella. The two may be similar in some ways, but they are indeed different characters. Nevertheless, I wasn't about to give up on combining the two stories in some fashion.
Last week I began to develop a new idea. If Mei and Novella are indeed separate characters, what if the events of Novella and FourByThree.net occured at the same time?
Under this idea, Mei has graduated from college and is currently working at a software company. Being that her shift is late at night, she often visits a nearby coffee shop for her nightly eye-opener. Yuki happens to work at that coffee shop at roughly the same time. She prefers the job due to the fact that it gives her plenty of time to catch up on her homework from medical school. After more than a few nights, Yuki worked up the courage to ask Mei out on a date. Needless to say, Mei was shocked.
While this is just the setup, the combination of these two stories opens several possibilities. The most intriguing is the ability to "bookend" the subject matter. Novella, unlike a lot of Transgender fiction, is not intended to be a transition story. Instead, it was about choice. Each of the three main characters faces a critical decision that will effect the person they will become (or not become) in the future. FourByThree.net, is also not about transition, but is primarily concerned about its aftermath: Building a new life, dealing with lost friends and family, stealth-at-work issues, and so on. In many ways, I think that Mei and Novella can be complimentary parallels.
