My Manga: Update on second draft

Finally, after more than 3 1/2 years of writing, I've finished the second draft of the scripts for my own original manga series which will be called "In The Morning, I'll Say Hello." It's a yuri manga (of course) about a sweet, brilliant, high-school girl who can't speak and a mysterious, angry, delinquent girl who transfers into her class with no memories before a week prior. Something in their shared past is driving them together, but will they find out, and will their connection survive the answer?

The scripts for the series are about 1,100 pages in total (approx. 240,000 words if you're counting) which equates to about 82 chapters in drawn form (don't ask me how I figured this out...). I'm going to take the next couple months and go through it from the beginning for a final formatting, clean up any author voice changes that might (definitely) have occurred over  the years, and edit before figuring out what the heck to do with it. The sad part is that a) I don't speak Japanese and b) I can't draw. This means that effectively, I have no real way to do much with this.

The traditional methods of doing doujinshi until you get discovered or submitting one-shots to magazines or contests in Japan are out for me and given the sheer number of talented people working as mangakas, I can't blame anyone for that. It's also not really the content that makes sense to try and publish as a traditional American graphic novel (even if I could find an artist). I've explored hiring artists but the costs are astronomical, it would be thousands of dollars per chapter and even with crowd sourcing, I doubt I could raise much for an unknown OEL manga. I'm also looking into putting it on some original manga fiction forums for free just to get it out there. I just don't want it to live forever on my computer after putting so much work into it.

But I love manga too much not to want to add my own back into the world, hopefully to add some joy to others' lives the way their manga have added so much joy to my life. I've always had a desire to add more of the good things back into the world (whether that was in my prior career in the music industry, or as a writer). If nothing, else, it's been amazing to see something of this scope through to the end. I hope to have the final version done by the end of summer. I'll keep you posted, but I'm also all ears for any suggestions you might have!

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