Yesterday, I went to one of the business-networking events put on by the regional government’s job-search-help people. I am slowly getting the hang of this people stuff, and yesterday’s event was something of a breakthrough.
I arrived, and straight away was thrust into a get-acquainted exercise. We had to pick a person and introduce ourselves. Then we switched and introduced ourselves to others. This was much easier than it had been before, because of the structure.
So I spoke with quite a number of people and handed out my “not a business but I’m looking for a job” contact cards. (These were another thing suggested by the job-search people… and I made a bit of cash designing such cards for someone else earlier…)
After the introductions and chat, we had a presentation about using social media, primarily LinkedIn, to job-search and promote oneself.
After the presentation, we had to fill out comment cards. I was filing out mine when I heard a woman nearby mention that they were having trouble with Excel (the spreadsheet program). Uncharacteristically, I jumped in and said, I know a little about that, can I help? We started to chat, and I mentioned that I’d done some work in spreadsheets and what did she want to know? We ended up talking about tutoring. I handed her my card, but accidentally handed her the Esperanto-language one. When she learned it was Esperanto, she got all excited (“I haven’t seen that since I was in England…”) So hopefully we will connect.
Then it was time for the job-search support group to begin. This is a group where we update each other on what we’ve done to search or prepare for jobs, and what happened during the week.
It’s run by a very good speaker who brings energy and enthusiasm to the group and gives that to everyone. And he has a way of springing little surprise exercises on the participants. For example, within 10 minutes, we had to list 10 things we wanted to do in the coming year.
Among the things I listed was “finish my comic and and publish it as an ebook”.
Then, we had to select one of those things and list three steps we could take towards doing it. I chose the comic, and for steps I chose "write the ‘beat sheet’ for the comic, email someone out west about ebook publishing, and mock up a comic page in HTML5 so that it could be included in an Epub 3 book.
And then he sprang the surprise: these three steps were to be done that evening. And we were to email him to say that we’d done it!
There was another exercise, and the group ended. Uncharacteristically (again), I went up to the speaker to describe to him what I wanted to do with this comic, and mentioned that I had an old test version of the comic on my iPhone. I showed him it, and he got really excited. Turns out he wants to do a kids’-book version of other non-job-search material he does! We talked for half an hour and agreed to look into the matter more.
I headed home feeling much more excited than I was expecting.
In writing, a beat sheet is a rough draft of the events in the story. There is no dialogue, and only a few characters may be present. It’s even more basic than a storyboard; storyboards are all about visual layout, as in movies or cartoons. When I settled down to write the beat sheet, I rapidly came to the same conclusion I had reached earlier when working on it: I had no real antagonist for the protagonist to battle. The story was getting lost, and I had no idea how to finish it.
That was originally what had caused me to turn to learning about story design. I got some books on screenwriting and narrative arcs and that sort of thing, and I started going to a screenwriter’s circle in Toronto. But I set all that aside when I started learning about house design.
So yesterday, I reviewed some McKee-style story design info and was soon back where I’d left off with the comic. I started to fill my sketchbook with notes.
With an hour to go, I realized I had to do a lot more work on the design of the story, and turned to sending the message out west and working on the HTML5 page.
I sent the message, and included the old test version of the book, which I had shown to the speaker.
Now I’d been playing around with the preview version of Adobe Edge. Edge is a program for making HTML5-based web pages, which can include sound, video, animations, and other things in a much easier way than before. I believe that these animated HTML5 pages can be used as pages in ebooks under the new Epub 3 standard, and I’ve seen some ebooks that seem to include these features.
I got a simple animated web page working, and I have an idea on how to rebuild my Photoshop artwork files to make them usable in such web pages. Now I just need to build the book by hand. This is something else that will take some time.
I emailed the speaker back and let him know what was going on. He was fine with it. I think the exercise was more to get us off our butts, so to speak, than to achieve specific results.
I got more done on my comic yesterday than in the previous five years! I even found the old scribbled notes for the first version in my filing cabinet!
While I was writing this, I got a message from the speaker with some background info. So now I’m reviewing his materials and putting together a proposal… 
