I guess before starting on this project I was vaguely aware that you usually had a guy who drew the pages and a guy who coloured them, but if I’d thought about it at all I’d supposed that colouring was a pretty mechanical process, yeah, you decide a jacket’s red and you make it red, APPLY.  Seeing what Pete does with Andie’s pages has been quite a revelation.  He gives every scene a very different treatment, he thinks a hell of a lot about the lighting, the weather, the time of day, the mood.  He gets great variety into each issue that sets a tone for each character.  The atmosphere he creates is astounding, and actually the much greater clarity he gives the action too.  So the time of day wasn’t entirely clear before, but here we have a fire lit, shadowy night.  The officers are ruddy in the glow of welcoming lamplight from inside the inn.  The Practicals are sinister in the long shadows.  Details like the candle glow around the doorframe in the first panel, or shining down the steps and across the cobbles, there are even stars in the night sky in the third panel, all add a sense of realism and atmosphere.

I’ll check over the coloured pages, usually in scene batches.  The sharp-eyed among you may have noticed that on this first run, West’s hair is the wrong colour in panels three and four.  Lettering is usually done on the black and white pages first by unsung hero of the whole process Bill Tortolini, checked by me, amended, then married up with the coloured pages for a final result.  The final result for this page, you’ll be able to see at www.firslawcomic.com tomorrow (Monday 20th), with further pages posted free every monday, wednesday and friday.  Should you wish to get ahead, and read whole issues at a time, you can pay us actual cash money for the privilege over at ComiXology, for which you also receive guided view and some of the inks and pencils.  You can download their software for nothing and it’s a cool way to view this and a vast amount of other material (a fair bit of that free).  I recommend it…

With the ink (digital ink, I would assume) comes texture, shadow, detail, realism and weight.  I usually don’t see the pencils, just comment on the inked pages, and more often than not I’ve got very little to say.  They then go straight on to Pete Pantazis for colouring…

When I think about the amount of work that goes into each page, I get a bit scared.  There’s the design of the costumes, the characters, the architecture, a huge task which is akin to asking the artist to act as costume designer, set designer, and casting agent on a film rolled into one.  Then he or she has to turn director and decide exactly how to organise the panels specified in the script – here Andie’s chosen to make them a little jagged and off-kilter, suggesting Jezal’s drunkeness and the sudden explosion of action, the graphic novel equivalent of wobbly handheld camera work, maybe.  Then there’s choosing the exact angle to take on each panel, the positioning of the characters to most effectively communicate the action.  And that’s before he or she takes on the responsibility of all the actors and starts getting the expressions right, individuality into the faces, a sense of movement and emotion.

Those among you with some artistic talent are probably breaking it down into steps and thinking how you’d go about it.  To me it seems like magic.

Incidentally, the page previous to this is up at www.firstlawcomic.com right now.  Tomorrow, we’ll be talking inks…

Anyway, amended script for page 5 – in which the Union’s brave officers tumble drunk from an inn to find Practicals Frost and Severard in the midst of abducting Sepp dan Teufel – looks a little something like this, and I think is pretty much exactly what Chuck first came up with:

PANEL ONE

Jezal exits the tavern into the street. He’s stumbling. West and Jalenhorm exit behind him. It’s night. They are in a bar of light from the open door illuminating the dark street.

JEZAL: I NEED AIR!

JALENHORM: YOU NEED DRINK, JEZAL!

PANEL TWO

In the foreground we see Practicals Frost and Severard struggling to bind Sepp dan Teufel while slipping sack over his head. Both Practicals are masked. We see Jezal and his two pals turning to regard this scene from the front of the tavern in the background.

JEZAL: WHAT’S THIS?

TEUFEL: HELP—gih!

WEST: YOU THERE!

PANEL THREE

The three soldiers confront the Practicals. Jalenhorm and West have hands on the hilts of their swords. Frost struggles with dan Teufel while Severard holds up a hand to the soldiers.

SEVERARD: GENTLEMEN, PLEASE, WE ARE ON THE KING’S BUSINESS.

JALENHORM: THE KING CONDUCTS HIS BUSINESS IN THE DAY-TIME.

SEVERARD: THAT’S WHY HE NEEDS US FOR THE NIGHT-TIME STUFF, EH, FRIEND?

PANEL FOUR

West whips out his sword and Frost roars and flexes his muscles as he throws dan Teufel to the cobbles.

WEST: WHO IS THIS MAN?

TEUFEL: (MUFFLED) I AM SEPP DAN—oof!

FROST: THAAAAAAH!

Tomorrow, you can see script make the leap to pencils…

George R.R. Martin “Everybody Loves a Rogue” (Introduction)
Joe Abercrombie “Tough Times All Over”
Gillian Flynn “What Do You Do?”
Matthew Hughes “The Inn of the Seven Blessings”
Joe R. Lansdale “Bent Twig”
Michael Swanwick “Tawny Petticoats”
David Ball “Provenance”
Carrie Vaughn “The Roaring Twenties”
Scott Lynch “A Year and a Day in Old Theradane”
Bradley Denton “Bad Brass”
Cherie Priest “Heavy Metal”
Daniel Abraham “The Meaning of Love”
Paul Cornell “A Better Way to Die”
Steven Saylor “Ill Seen in Tyre”
Garth Nix “A Cargo of Ivories”
Walter Jon Williams “Diamonds From Tequila”
Phyllis Eisenstein “The Caravan to Nowhere”
Lisa Tuttle “The Curious Affair of the Dead Wives”
Neil Gaiman “How the Marquis Got His Coat Back”
Connie Willis “Now Showing”
Patrick Rothfuss “The Lightning Tree”

Lipsmacking, huh?  It’s just gone into the publisher, apparently, so it’ll probably be a little while til there’s a firm publication date, but I’ll let you know.  My wild guess would be … er … 2014?

Just as a reminder, I’ve also got a Shy South story in another of Martin and Dozois’ cross-genre anthologies, Dangerous Women, possessed of an equally awesome and various set of contributors.  That one’s a little more imminent, with a publication date in the US of December 3rd at present.

Whisky Deathmatch: Islay Blood Feud

Dangerous sounding, huh?  I started last time thinking I like the cleaner, fresher whiskies more, and hence had two lowlands and five speysides in my dozen, but I ended up being more excited by the smoky and savoury options, and my winner was the Mad Sorcerer of Islay, Ardbeg Corryvreckan.  I felt there’s a degree to which sweet and clean whiskies are all somewhat alike, whereas the peaty seem somehow more varied.  So I thought this time around, you know what, let’s concentrate on Islay, and try and get at least one option from each of the significant distilleries on this home of the peaty.  It’s a small island, but it looms large in the whisky world, that’s for sure.  Stepping into the arena we’ve got:

Ardbeg Uigeadail – another cask strength beastie from Ardbeg, a little lower down their range from Corryvreckan, and with some sherry-wood in the mix, so probably a little sweeter and less crazy than last time’s champion.

Lagavulin Distiller’s Edition – a distillery known for smoke, their standard 16 yo is a favourite of mine already, but some sherry sweetness in this special edition.

Laphroaig Triple Wood – Prince Charles’ favourite distillery, but I’m not holding that against them.  This is a new expression from masters of the medicinal Laphroaig, again with some sherry wood in there to calm the mighty smokes, and a chunky 48% bottling.

Bruichladdich Laddie 16 – Bruichladdich has one of the biggest and most experimental ranges of any distillery.  Their classic expression is light on the peat, heavy on the character, and comes in 10, 16, and 22 year old ages.  This is the 16.

Bunnahabhain 18 – A lesser known Islay distillery whose core eighteen year old is again light on the peat smoke.

Octomore 5.1 – Little bit special this, the fifth batch of Bruichladdich’s ultra-peated, 5 year aged, 59.5% experiment, supposedly the peatiest whisky known to man.

Then we’ve got two boxed sets of three 20cl bottles from smoke-meisters Caol Ila and Bowmore, that I’ll compare against each other before we get started. The Bowmore has a 12yo, 15yo Darkest (with some sherry wood in there) and 18yo.  The Caol Ila has a 12yo, a 12yo Cask Strength, and an 18yo.

Finally, leaving Islay for a couple of further flung curiosities that I’d heard good things about:

Amrut Fusion - coming all the way from India, a much-praised mixture of Himalayan and peated Scottish barley.

Yellow Spot - and whiskEy from Ireland, triple distilled in a traditional Pot Still then matured for 12 years in three different barrels.

I’ve already had a little taste (in some cases a bit more than that) of all these and I can tell you we’ve got some mouth-watering matches in prospect.  First off I’ll decide which is my favourite of the Caol Ila and Bowmore bottles, then we’ll have 5 first round matches.  Five winners and one wildcard will compete in 3 second round matches, and 3 winners and one wildcard will make our semi-final four.  I may simplify my approach a little bit, as well, we shall see how we do…

For those who’d rather not wait, though, all 22 pages of Issue 2 are also available as of now on ComiXology, and it’s a humdinger, with the appearance of the Union’s most self-obsessed young officer, Jezal dan Luthar, not to mention his reluctant fencing partner Collem West and the latter’s unconventional sister Ardee.  Meanwhile Logen wanders into the sort of trouble you can only get out of with a blade, and Inquisitor Glokta shows the results that can be achieved with a cleaver, a set of fingers, and the will.  The art and colours I feel just keep getting better.  Both I and Collem West urge you to contribute to this righteous cause.

Go on, he could do with cheering up, he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders.  As well as cinematic-style guided view, ComiXology will also provide you with a bonus package of inks and pencils. Incidentally, it looks as if a physical collection of the first four issues should be available around end of August, but more on that as I have it.  I’ll also be looking at the development of some of the pages from script, to pencils, to inks, to colours, over here as we go.

In the meantime, a few interviews about how this project came to be, how it’s got where it is, and where we hope it’s going:

With veteran comics writer Chuck Dixon, who’s adapting the books, plus a comment or two from me, over at Comic Book Resources.  You’ll also see a few panels from the second issue in that one.

With me at Graphic Novel Reporter.

With me and Rich Young, the editor and co-ordinator of the project, over at Pipedream Comics.

Then there’s a piece with the artist, Andie Tong, over here.

A quickie at Sword and Laser.

More in-depth at NerdSpan.

Ardbeg Corryvreckan: 57.1% abv, £61.95

Balvenie Single Barrel – 47.8% ABV, £50.75

The cask strength of the Corryvreckan has enabled it to crush less potent adversaries through sheer force of alcohol.  It made even a volcanic old sea dog like Talisker 18 look less Captain Blackbeard and more Captain Birdseye.  Its unholy power was too overwhelming even for a subtle mastermind like Highland Park 18.  Once again it will field a considerable advantage in concentration, but at 47.8% the Balvenie is far from shabby, an uncompromising sipping strength that blew 40% Dalmore 15 away like chaff on the breeze.  The Balvenie also weighs in at more than a tenner cheaper – that’s the price of an e-collection of Joe Abercrombie’s classic fantasy trilogy, The First Law, for heaven’s sakes!  On paper these two look delightfully balanced.  But how do they look … off paper?

LOOK - In many ways Ardbeg and Balvenie have gone for opposite approaches in their presentation and marketing.  Balvenie’s tube and label are clean white with simple black lettering, Ardbeg’s are charcoal greenish-black with golden highlights.  Balvenie’s choice of fonts, plus a few hand-written markings on the label, bring to mind the eighteenth century.  Ardbeg’s celtic accoutrements aim at the legends of prehistory.  Balvenie’s packaging says, ‘light, sweet, classic,’ with spiel that emphasises tradition and quality, while Ardbeg’s says, ‘heavy, smoky, challenging,’ with spiel that emphasises myth and mystery.  I think they both hit pretty much what they aim at, and Ardbeg gets bonus points for exhibiting a little sense of humour and doing something different from the endless twaddle about the best casks, the best water and the special floor maltings, but I think the Balvenie is much the more attractive, and its wooden stopper and metal wrap scores a palpable hit over Ardbeg’s plastic ones.  A points victory to Balvenie this round, but it’s in the glass that the knockout blow will be delivered…

SMELL - With the Corryvreckan, to quote an earlier me because I’m not sure I can say it any better – The rocks crack in the unknown deep and the sea boils with the fearsome heat of the fires below the world.  The knotty pine is ripped asunder by a blinding stroke from the heavens, storm-fire sweeping the parched bracken.  Then the magic words were chocolate-whispered in the pepper smoke of the coffee cauldron, and the words were, ‘disinfectant tablets.’ With the Balvenie - Gold! A crystalline sugar sweetness with a citrus sting in the tail.  Upon a lost island swept by honey storms there is a labyrinth made of lemons, and in the centre of that labyrinth is a golden lion with a face made of barley sugar but the tail of a scorpion. What golden treasure does it guard? What priceless treasure?  Only the opportunity to sip…

TASTE - I’ve drunk close to the whole bottle of Corryvreckan, now, with a little help from a well-meaning friend or two, but it still surprises me every time.  To put it in your mouth is to step into the unknown.  It’s as close as I think I’ve ever come to a mind-expanding whisky.  Partly it’s the high strength, but I’ve drunk stronger whiskies that are much less strange and challenging in their range of flavour.  It delivers an initial heat that’s almost painful, a chili zing across the tongue, then you get the strange cornucopia of unusual flavours, but instead of Willy Wonka’s gum that gave you a three-course meal, here you get visits to chemical works, sawmills, and the bottom of the sea.  Plus chocolatey, coffee-ish flavours, unidentifiable fruits and an antiseptic tang that persists long after you’ve swallowed it.  Baffling, gobsmacking, bizarre.  Now some water will most definitely be needed to swab the persistent salty warmth from the inside of my mouth, then the Balvenie.  Gentler, of course, and with a disarming initial softness, but a potent spicy tingle soon builds nonetheless.  Honey sweetness, but so much citrus sharpness too, and perhaps a little smoke on that long, long finish.  Reminiscent of a lot of Speyside whiskies, but after the workout montage in the middle of the film – cleaner, stronger, quicker, sharpened to a ruthless edge, maintaining that easy-drinking sweetness but with a sense of deadly purpose.

CONCLUSION - This is a really tough one to judge, and I’ve been going back and forth on it for a while. Without doubt, two great whiskies and two worthy finalists. A lot of it depends on what you like, what you’re in the mood for, because in many ways they’re exemplars of opposite styles.  The Corryvreckan is like other Islays, only more so: Smoky, peaty, briny, uncompromisingly savoury, ruthlessly challenging, wild, mad, and ferocious as a stormy sea.  You wouldn’t call it pleasant, but you’d certainly say it’s amazing.  The Balvenie is unsherried Speyside par excellence: Clean, sharp, sweet, definitely pleasant but with plenty of depth and a deadly citrus edge, easy to drink but difficult to forget, fresh and zesty as a spring morning. Oh, crap, it’s a hard choice, but no one said this would be easy.

RESULT - The Balvenie is gorgeous, with everything you could ask for in a Speyside, and a delight to drink, but, but, but, smelling and tasting the two together, one simply cannot deny that the Corryvreckan is the more intense, the more original, the more powerful experience.  It’s a really close run thing, but …

My Whisky Deathmatch Winner – Ardbeg Corryvreckan.

Coming next – I pick over the shattered glass and the whisky soaked sand of the arena in a Whisky Deathmatch post mortem.  What have I learned from this exercise…?

When writing, what made you decide to use third person? Because its easier? Would you recommend writing in third person, or do you think it’s more of a personalised choice? Also, when describing things, do you think it is better to write to much or too little?

An interesting set of nested questions indeed.  The method I tend to use is what’s sometimes called the Third Person Limited, or tight point of view, so it’s third person ‘he said, she said,’ rather than the first person, ‘I said’, but everything is told from the point of view of a single character – relating their thoughts and experiences, trying to give a vivid sense of what it’s like to be that person – although you might move between several different point of view characters at different times.  This is very different from Third Person Omniscient, in which the authorial voice is much more general, describing the action as a whole, relating the thoughts and opinions of different characters as it suits.  You might say in third person omniscient the author tells the story, in first person the character tells the story, while third person limited is somewhere between the two.

So George RR Martin very successfully uses third person limited in Song of Ice and Fire, titling each chapter with the character whose point of view it’s written from.  James Ellroy is another writer whose use of that approach was very influential on me.  Third person limited doesn’t have quite the level of intimacy first person can provide, but it can still be very visceral and involving, while giving you much more flexibility to shift between characters, and perhaps to vary the degree of focus on the point of view character if you want – you can stick very close to their own thought process and experience or take up a slightly more detached position should you so desire.  Being able to shift between characters also allows you to clue the reader into things the individuals might not independently know, or to contrast the way characters see themselves with how others see them to great effect.  I also try and vary my style as widely as possible depending on the point of view – so a Logen chapter instantly has a different voice, a different vocabulary, a different rhythm and feel from a Glokta one, and the style hopefully communicates something about the nature of that character right away.

As far as recommending a certain approach, well, my advice, such as it is, would be to read widely and get a sense of what you like, then experiment a lot and get a sense of what works for you and the story you’re telling, so you can develop your own style.  I don’t know that it’s easier than any other approach, exactly, but I find third person limited to be highly flexible.  Third person omniscient allows you a very free hand but it can be a little uninvolving, perhaps seeming somewhat archaic to the modern reader.  First person can be very powerful but needs to be used with care.  Funnily enough, when I first wrote the First Law the Dogman’s chapters were written in the first person.  And they were great (or I thought they were, at least).  But my editors felt that they unbalanced everything else, giving a sense that this character was somehow THE central one of the series.  In moving to third person limited those chapters lost perhaps a little immediacy, but they sat much more harmoniously with everything else.

On description, everyone’s going to have a different take on what is too much or too little, and it all depends on the style and atmosphere you’re going for, not to mention the particular circumstances.  If you’re writing in third person limited, the description needs to be rooted in the experience of the point of view character.  So in a combat scene you wouldn’t necessarily pause to talk about costume but details and thought about the weapons might be a pressing concern for the people involved.  You probably wouldn’t want to interrupt an impassioned conversation to blather on about the furniture and what it said about its owners, but a scene in which an investigator looks at a crime site could reasonably involve a lot of considered forensic detail.  My own taste is for a relatively light hand on description, especially when a character is in familiar surroundings.  Exhaustive description of the bedroom a character sleeps in every night does not get across the experience of routinely waking up in it.  Perhaps when a point of view character encounters a person or place that’s new and particularly exceptional to them is the time to do some more in-depth description.  Personally I find description one of the least important elements – usually the thing I do last once the dialogue and action is in place.  But where possible I try to bear in mind a character’s emotional reaction, rather than just to literally describe – so that even description becomes about character to some extent.  Better to communicate a few telling details than to bury the reader under unnecessary blandness they can easily supply themselves.  Is hair and eye-colour important, or is it better to use that space to get across something unique about a person that will really stick in the reader’s head and truly says something about their personality?  Also description doesn’t have to be three stodgy paragraphs about a room before breaking into dialogue, there are ways to much more artfully drip things through as they become appropriate.  Better to involve the reader then allow them to update their impressions with new details.  So rather than lovingly describe a bottle along with a room at the start of a scene, describe the room briefly, then have a character interact with that bottle in a way that maybe advances our understanding of that character, their relationship with another, and so on, hence killing two birds with one stone and preventing the description seeming info-dumpy.  Dialogue can be a superb way to get across the nature of a character while still moving other things forward, and in general the more work you can do with dialogue the better.  Elmore Leonard is a master at this – he can set up a compelling character with an off-hand line and a sentence of description.  One good exercise is always to ask yourself with every sentence – is this really needed?  If not, cut, and see how things feel.  Often a stripped down scene which asks the reader to fill in the detail is much more compelling and involving than a hugely detailed one that does all the work.

Game of Thrones, season 2.  Yes, yes, I know you’re all watching season 3, you bastards, but I watch the box sets, so I’m way behind, and I just got through season 2. It’s hard for me to step back from this, in a sense, partly because it’s an adaptation of some material I’ve loved for a long time, partly because it’s a very big deal within my profession.  The impression I’m getting is that it’s becoming more and more successful, being talked about more and more widely – perhaps still with a slight sense of, ‘yes I’m watching this fantasy thing which surprises me as much as you but it’s actually quite good,’ but talked about even so – which can only be a good thing for the whole arena of gritty fantasy. Overall I continue to be very impressed, I must say.  I think it hits far, far more than it misses, is hugely professional and well realised, with great costume and design and just a very effective adaptation of challenging material – they’ve made a great TV series out of it.  A slightly uneven start to this season though, I felt.  In general they’re very good at juggling a lot of balls (hur hur), but the addition of new characters, and the steady spreading out of many of those they’ve got, makes things a little hard to follow initially – my main problem with the books, in so far as I have one.  Massive amount of sex early on, as well, which got more than a bit eye-rolley for me, but that settled down later.  I think I’d probably say the greatest strength is the casting – so many characters and the great majority of the actors are very good.  It almost seems unfair to pick anyone out but I think Iain Glen and Charles Dance were brilliant with characters who weren’t particularly memorable in the books.

Boardwalk Empire, season 2: Hmm, yeah, a powerful evocation of the period and all, and nicely made, and nicely acted, and some memorable moments but, I dunno, perhaps this will come as a little rich from me, but the bleakness, the lack of anyone to root for, the frequent really horrible violence, it got a bit wearing.  Everyone’s such a humourless bastard, I’m not really sure what the point of it all is.  There’s a sense of an exercise in futility.  Mad men is shiny and hard, full of meaningful lines in an ocean of silence and packed with period detail in a similar way, but Mad Men manages to produce really touching moments, and believable personalities, and offhand profundities that, for me, Boardwalk Empire doesn’t get anywhere near.

Friday Night Lights, seasons 1 and 2: A series about a high school football team in small-town Texas doesn’t sound like a winner, but this is absolutely brilliant.  So much of the relatively recent crop of great telly, from the Sopranos, through the Shield, the Wire, Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, Mad Men, etc. has been bleak, cyncial, and highly violent with the aforementioned Boardwalk Empire being a good example.  They’re all fantastic series, but a little variety in the diet has to be a good thing, and Friday Night Lights is the exact opposite – everyday, small-scale, moving, involving, funny, tender (I’m tearing up right now), with great characters and performances.  If you described some of the plotlines it’d sound cheesy as all hell, but it totally transcends its ingredients through quality of script and ensemble playing.  Pretty much everyone in it is a fully realised character, with no villains to speak of, just folks motivated by their everyday hopes and petty disappointments, trying to do the best they can as they see it.  I love these people.  I’m tearing up again.  I wish I was one of them.  Never been much good at sports, though.  And 38 may be a little late for a High School running back.  Coaching staff, maybe…?

Try to avoid spoilers in the comments, if you please!