We will WRITE and WE MEAN IT (chat thread)

[Twillie]

Between Alex and Brook, neither come across as overly jerkish to me at least. From what I understand, it mainly sounds like a difference of opinion between the two of them, and their emotions were heightened enough from the argument between the Uni and Bruce that there was little room to talk through their differences with civility in that moment. I think Alex's response to the Uni's dark magic is more reactionary, and I personally wouldn't agree with them in such a situation either, but it's also believable that there'd be a lot of fears and theories of the Void's origins, even if those fears are unfounded or lead to unkind thoughts and actions. People don't usually handle ambiguity well, especially when there's danger tied to it, so Alex's initial reaction still makes sense.

I don't think this is a conversation that would annoy me or feel contrived, going from what's shared here.

[June Scarlet]

Yes! I finally managed to track down comp titles for my upcoming Crime Show book!

I had been wildly guessing that maybe it was a middle grade graphic novel, but wasn't coming up with good titles to support that theory. Then I had someone tell me that if my main characters were adults, then my audience was likely adults as well. But adult graphic novels tend to be edgy, which my comic isn't really.

Well, today I went to a different, bigger bookstore. I looked at adult graphic novels, which were mostly comic book anthologies. I looked for YA graphic novels, which they mix in with regular YA there. Then I looked in the humor section. And there I found comic strips, and in the comic strip books, I found a small section of cute comics that were originally webcomics. Books like "What's Up, Beanie?" by Alina Tysoe and "A Great Big Visual Hug," by Andres J. Colmenares. I bought those two, but there were others as well.

Armed with these two books, I went to the library and asked the librarian for more books like these two. She took me to the adult graphic novel section, but it was the same, too edgy compared to mine. But then my mom thought to check the books we brought along for subject classification, and sure enough one of them helpfully had the Dewey Decimal System number on there. So we went to that shelf, and more comp titles! Stuff like "Strange Planet" by Nathan W Pyle and "Breaking Cat News" by Georgia Dunn.

I went to a different librarian to ask the difference between graphic novels and 741.5, and they explained that graphic novels are novels, a full story, told visually, while the ones filed in nonfiction are comic strips.

Tomorrow, I plan to go down to my favorite bookstore and ask where they put books like these, so I know where to look.

This is such great progress, you have no idea how lost I've been trying to find comparable titles to my book, so I know how to classify it.