Inking has begun, more Master and Commander, and a Book Length question.

It’s inking time again! I’m back to working on Chapter Five while, elsewhere in the comics greenhouse, the I’ve potted up the tender thumbnails for Chapter Six and set them in a sunny spot, and I’ve put a warming mat beneath the seeds for Chapters Seven through Ten.

I don’t have many inked pages to show yet, so I’ll save those for next week. This week, a quick Patrick O’Brian update — including thoughts on story shape and historical accuracy— and then a quick question about the length of PRACTICAL DEFENCE.

THE IONIAN MISSION

I just finished the audiobook of this instalment in the MASTER AND COMMANDER series, and it confirms my belief that O’Brian’s plotting is absolutely unhinged.

A quick reminder: these audiobooks are great. I’m finding them much easier to get into than reading the books, which I cooled on because a respectable understanding of nautical specifics is required to make sense of the combat and because the shape of O’Brian’s stories is so strange. The Ionian Mission is more of that. The titular Mission does not appear until 80% of the way through the story, introduces us to many new players, and then the plot crashes into the end of the book like sailing a ship into a brick wall. The conclusion of the novel is so sudden I thought the audiobook app was broken.

I am not suggesting this is bad. In many ways, it’s delightful. I found O’Brian’s strange story shapes curious to begin with, an I am learning to appreciate them more.

Was this book originally published serially, like in a magazine? It feels like it. This one could easily have been three or four separate books. It’s bound into the shape of a whole story by a few themes and character through-lines, but it still feels like individual adventures.

The “Patrick O’Brian Mapping Project” reveals that many of his locations are made up… but only some of them. This feels strange, because I’m doing it myself — PRACTICAL DEFENCE’s Istoria is a fictional island set in otherwise real-world waters — but I didn’t know you were “allowed to do it.” Maybe you’re not! It seems like you should either have to pick real locations or make everything up. I didn’t think twice about it, reading O’Brian’s book, because I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of the eastern Mediterranean and because the historical and multicultural elements make place-names hard to know anything for sure. Since it didn’t bump me, I’ve decided not to sweat it with PDAP. Historical fiction is strange waters to sail.

WHY IS PRACTICAL DEFENCE SO LONG?

I just compiled a PDF of PDAP, and it comes to roughly 240 pages. When Chapter Five is done, it’ll be 300. That will be roughly half-way through the story; after all of this month’s writing, I’m feeling confident that the book can and will be ten chapters long. The chapters might be shorter, though (Chapter Two is unusually long), so we’ll end up with somewhere around 550 pages.

That’s a long book. I think this question of length is interesting from a few angles. For one, I thought it would be shorter, so why isn’t it? I’m academically curious what choices led me down this path. For another, does the length matter? It must, but in what ways? What benefits am I getting from a long book?

Is this something you’d like me to talk about? Should I discuss this at all?

Honestly, let me know. Readers have told me they’ve enjoyed my thoughts on this whole comic-making process and found it useful. If that’s the case, I ought to be honest about it all, including addressing foundational questions like this. Plus, I enjoy this sort of honest introspection when I see some of my other comics-making friends write it out. On the other hand, maybe this is too navel-gaze-y for even this already quite navel-gaze-y Production Diary.

Okay, I have to pick up Kiddo from preschool. Next week: inked pages!

Until then,
I remain,
a tender thumbnail,

TC