Step 4: Remember Why You Do It (Because Of Kenshin, Mostly)

I got another rejection letter from a full manuscript request last night. The silver lining is that the agent took the time to give me a lot of really positive feedback, which helped to take the sting out of it. Still, I'm 0/2 on fulls, and haven't gotten any more requests based on my query letters.

MFW I see the word "unfortunately" in a query reply.

When I was writing my book, and I was on the 38209348092384th draft and the damn story was fighting me tooth and nail every step of the way, I took a break and spent three solid days crying my eyes out. I felt like an imposter, and was burdened with a tremendous amount of guilt knowing I would never be able to give my characters the life they deserved.

When my tears had tried and I had ejected a metric fuckton of snot from my nose, I took a second to remember how this had all begun and the precise moment the main characters of my story were conceived in my consciousness. I was taking my final drawing class of college circa 2007 with a professor named Amy Adler, and our assignment for the course was to work on one project throughout the entire quarter. We had free reign to do anything we wanted, provided that we researched it diligently and we learned something in the process that we hadn't known when we started it.

I proposed creating a 30-page comic that I would write and illustrate entirely on my own in ten weeks. This was at the height of my weaboo days when I ate, slept, and breathed all things Japanese. I had recently become acquainted with the anime Rurouni Kenshin (which is now streaming on Netflix and totally worth the watch for the 2nd season alone) and was completely obsessed with the character of Himura Battōsai. In a burst of inspiration coupled with a weird reimagining of worlds, the main protagonist to my story was birthed.

Kenshin, upon learning he's been appropriated into a six-foot-tall Amazon.

Probably my biggest takeaway from the whole experience was that it is, in fact, possible to pull three all-nighters in a row without dropping dead of exhaustion, but I definitely wouldn't recommend it.  30 pages in ten weeks doesn't seem all that daunting, but I was saddled with a full load of classes and was also a terrible procrastinator but let's be honest that hasn't changed much in ten years and the last few pages of my comic suffered as I struggled to finish them on time.

Still, my laboring paid off, and after finals were over I received an e-mail from my professor that I pull out every now and again when I'm feeling really down on myself:

Dear Shea,

I wanted to let you know I am giving you the lone A+ for the class. You were very important to the class dynamic and your class participation was stellar. Your project was so ambitious and you clearly learned a lot working through it. This is the most i can hope for as a teacher of an advanced projects class. Independence, ambition and discipline. I don't know if I was right to encourage you to speed up the narrative in terms of your "pilot" chapter. I only think that if one did not know the most interesting aspect of your story might be- sadly- missed entirely. I was thinking that even if the last page was about her, and how strange and mysterious she seemed- would leave more of a directed cliff hanger. As far as your paper, I would have liked to hear more about the subject, [redacted for spoilers] and it's role in Japanese and (It's lack thereof) in American pop culture and why you chose to write about this in your book. This is the real meat of the story, I would also like to know if future stories would relate to this- if you have intentions of pursuing an "alternative" story line to further distinguish work from other manga artists.

Good luck with everything, I sincerely hope you continue to build your body of work, whether it stays in Manga form or evolves into something else, you definitely have what it takes.

Amy

As I writer, I understand the importance of not becoming too invested in any one idea, and chances are pretty good that your first story will never see the light of day. But Defining Lines has a special place in my heart, because it truly marked the beginning of my professional career. It was what I showed to the editors of TokyoPop at the 2007 Anime Expo Portfolio Review, and after seeing the pages that I had illustrated they encouraged me to submit an entry to their Rising Stars of Manga contest, which I went on to win. It was the story I had pitched to them per the contest prize, and they had shown great interest in it before unceremoniously shuttering their OEL line of manga and eventually collapsing entirely.

I revisited the opening pages sometime later, and although none of the work is an accurate representation of my art any longer, I thought it would be fun to take a look back and see how much of the story has been preserved in its current iteration (originals on the left, redraws on the right):

That's... pretty much exactly how the novel opens. The redraw is almost certainly objectively better, but the original has its charms.  I'm sure I'm way too sentimentally attached to this work, but in a way it gives me a glimpse of my younger self, my naïve mentality, my heart that had never been broken and my soul that had yet to be tarnished by cynicism. I'm reminded of the person I used to be, and while I maintain the attitude that my thirties have proved to be far better than the hot mess of my teens and twenties, there was something so carefree about being an average girl with an above-average imagination.

Even the main character of my novel is a reflection of the thing I adored the most in my youth: A redheaded vagabond with a sad smile and closely guarded secret.

Defining Lines: Less swords, same about of blood.