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Email the author at qwanderer7+lgc@gmail.com

The Elves of LleuGarnock is Copyright Irene Pitcairn<2008-2009. The Elves of LleuGarnock is hosted on ComicGenesis, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics.

LleuGarnock HOME Archive     --- CHAPTERS & Sections     --- Chapter 1: Amaranta's Grandchildren 1-1: The Berry Incident 1-2: Destiny & Mr. Cat 1-3: By Garnock River 1-4: Pursuit of Fruit Chapter 2: Gemini Alone 2-1: The Dangers of Thinking 2-2: Healing 2-3: Destiny or Somesuch 2-4: Humans in Town Chapter 3: Laws and Secrets 3-1: Comforts of Home 3-2: Colliding Worlds 3-3: Living History 3-4: Gifts Chapter 4: Calindell Roads 4-1: Blue Girl 4-2: Toad's Story 4-3: Getting Along 4-4: Arledge Chapter 5: Under the Full Moon 5-1: Black Cat Inn 5-2: Corn Cat 5-3: Helpless 5-4: Story of the Opals Chapter 6: Prisoners of the Earth 6-1: Bitter Words 6-2: Kings and Constraints 6-3: The Shape of a Prison 6-4: Lightless Chapter 7: Bonds of Hardship 7-1: Differences of Opinion 7-2: Truitt's Tale 7-3: Strange Magic 7-4: The Black-Haired Man 7-5: The Evil-Hearted Monk Chapter 8: Shedding Light 8-1: Curses on Verses 8-2: Who Needs Keys? 8-3: The Sacrifice 8-4: Prayers Chapter 9: An Unequal Fight 9-1: Drawing the Curtains 9-2: Power of the Staff 9-3: To the Ends of the Earth 9-4: And Back Home

May 5, '08
The base of the kitchen tower is made of cordwood masonry, which is awesome. You take firewood, and you build with it as if it's stone. But it's easier and more insulative than stone. And you can make round houses out of it. It's my favorite, even though I've never seen any except on TV and the Internet.

The wallpaper is inching along; it should be ready sometime in the next week. I've done a few things to increase the site's publicity, but I haven't yet posted in CG's Comic-Pitching forum. There keeps being something else I want to do with the site or the features. I think in this case, patience is good. The more material I have when I present it there, the more likely I'll hook lots of new fans.

I really want to get some kind of "Store" page up, and maybe rearrange some of the information pages, get them looking better and making more sense. Having a wallpaper available will be a nice touch. I'm thinking of making a new banner, too, and maybe some in different sizes. I haven't got any comments yet on the new background, but I'm thinking of simplifying it. I'm not sure how.

As usual, the scripts are being troublesome while my drawing continues to improve. I feel redundant saying it, but that's what's on my mind. The thing is, my own standards for myself go up constantly in both areas. In terms of drawing, though, the tasks have been similar throughout - I've focused on facial expressions, because they're the most important thing in expressing the ideas I want to incorporate. So it's pretty easy to look at one drawing and then another and say "I've improved since then." There are a lot of comparable images.

The thing about scripts is each one of them is different. Each one of them is trying to communicate something new. It's easier for me to tell how well my pictures brought out the message of the script, than whether the script expressed what it needed to in the story. There's still so much I don't know about the story, and the only way for me to learn those things is to write the story.

I can see flaws in the earlier scripts that I think I am learning to overcome, but in the minutes when I sit down and try to fish out pieces of the next script that fit together, that experience gained isn't what matters. What matters is that that script comes with a number of problems and questions that need to be answered. Should I rush directly to the next thing I've decided on? Do I know how to do that in one page in an entertaining way? How would this character arrive at that subject in a conversation? Is there some interesting side topic I could touch on?

The more I learn how to write scripts, the more careful I want to be writing each one; and the farther I get into the story, the more variables I have to take into account. It's not like the art, where after drawing a character's face 100 times it only takes a few quick lines to recreate it. A personality is far more complex; the words a character says cannot be burned into the memory the way lines can. They have to be new each time. I have a feeling that once I've learned the broader strokes of my main characters' personalities, it will become easier to write for them as it has become easier to draw them. But by then I will have encountered the really difficult pieces of the plot. The larger picture, the plot, will take years to develop.

I knew I liked rewriting and adding to my work, but it has definitely been more fun than I expected to put so much more into this story the second (or third) time around. Events that I imagined running five or six pages now run ten or twenty, and are immensely more nuanced and more fun. I keep working hard at the scripts every day, and as much as it frustrates me that there's always something I need to know soon and haven't figured out yet, in general the process has been amazingly fun. I was surprised to realize today that it's not, as I thought, an alternation between frustration and fun, but a continually fun process. I enjoy having a problem to mull over and untangle. I think I felt this way from the beginning, but I was so anxious then at every moment that I would stop and never get started again. Every time I got stuck I was afraid it might be the beginning of the end. I've relaxed a bit now into a steady pace, and even though it's still just the beginning, I've developed a sense that this is what I do, and that's not going to change anytime soon. That's a really good feeling.

Wow, it really is just the beginning. At this point it is completely impossible for me to even imagine the possible scope of what I've set out to do. I'm working the script for page 60 of the comic and I haven't even completed the events from the third page of type in the original book. The second draft I created was much longer and more detailed, but nothing even approaching the comic. There just keeps being more I want to add. This is good news for those who want a long-running comic and a deeply detailed story, but bad news for those who are dying to learn what happens. I just write what I'm inspired to.

Every opportunity I get, I like to add references to the little differences between life in LleuGarnock and life here on Earth. In stories I've written in the past, I've been intimidated by the task of creating a consistent and interesting culture. What works in LleuGarnock is that it's a small community, so I can start with the interactions between a few people. I also used a place I'm familiar with here on Earth as inspiration, a camp in the woods where families come to find spiritual respite. When I have a question about how a particular thing is done by the elves of LleuGarnock I go back to my memories of that place to see what fits. It's only a temporary place, though, shut down every winter, but I think that comes across well in the comic because the elves retreated to LleuGarnock as a respite from war, and they didn't intend to stay isolated there forever. It's a kind of in-between place.

Well, I've been rambling, and prancing around subjects I shouldn't mention, for a while now; I'll stop soon. Right now I'm really glad I moved rants down to the bottom. I was just suddenly inspired to write about how much fun I'm having being a comic artist.