familial stranger, page 13

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(EDIT NOTE: this commentary is annoyingly long. hit the end page button if you're scrolling for the comments section and save yourself a few seconds.)

folks, you might notice i've put this page up pretty late in the day! if you guessed it's because i had to stay up all night to get it done on time, you'd be right! that's okay, though, it was mostly due to an unfortunately timed lapse of symptoms on sunday, not really my schedule's fault this time.

more importantly, that means i wrote all the dialog today, which means it got a ton of editing in the process of making this page, and it's all pretty fresh in my head still.
i try to post what i can here about the writing process, especially the meta considerations because... hopefully it's helpful or educational for people who feel frustrated with their own writing. or at least entertaining.
dialog is my favorite part of writing, and it also happens to be much easier to tweak than narrative actions, because i don't have to redraw an entire image, so it ends up getting large and tiny fixes and changes the most. i'll just list this by lines of interest:

"i went 'oh SSSHhhssshhoot. // 'that's my hair!'"

• changed from the original line: "you had a full head of hair, too! gorgeous baby. you've always had hair like mine."
• changed the last 2 lines to a direct action/quote and first person. it made jason sound more immersed and personally emotionally invested in what he was saying, like he was actually picturing it again in his head.
• stuck with "oh sh...oot" because i thought it was a cute parallel to obyki. i was originally going to have jason swear, but he scolded lola for swearing immediately before this scene. i also felt like "i went..." was much more casual/conversational than "i said" etc. i preferred for jason to sound more relaxed and less like he was putting on airs in this part. his compliment by calling her gorgeous was supposed to be genuine, but i realized it could easily be taken as sucking up to win her over.
• "she's got MY hair" was considered for a change from "that's my hair" but i don't think that jason has the same relationship to his hair as lola, his hair is clearly grown out a bit because he hasn't bothered to have it cut. that structure also would have had to force a reference to lola's gender as a newborn with a pronoun. i could see this believably working out if it was for a sentence i felt was better in other ways (jason has conceptualized lola as a "she" for like 20 years, it's not unnatural for him), but it just was not worth it at all.

"elizabeth said i was born in a hospital."
not much to this one, the line said "my mom" instead of "elizabeth" in the first way i wrote it. you might have noticed lola caught herself when she was going to refer to elizabeth as "my mom" on page 9; lola is consciously referring to elizabeth with distancing structure that removes any associative grammar referencing a connection to lola ("my" in this case). i felt like if i was going to have lola lapse back into referring to elizabeth in a more attached way, i wanted it to be at a more meaningful moment. here, lola already felt distanced just by the concept of being lied to... i wanted the grammar of the sentence to lean towards "lola thinks elizabeth misled her" instead of "lola is passive-aggressively accusing jason of lying" as well.

"well... y'weren't. eheh."
was originally "you weren't." again, i wanted jason to sound more conversational. in this case he was a little TOO comfortable -- i wanted him to come off (slightly) dismissively self-assured in an oblivious way.
noteworthy: i probably would have left this sentence alone if it was just writing, but comics are interesting in that you have to account for how much space words take up. sometimes i have to change sentences drastically simply because their words can't be arranged or written in a nice circular paragraph shape that reasonably fits in the corresponding panel.
here, "y'weren't" was considered because the bubble of that would be much shorter, and thinking about it, i decided that was an acceptable, maybe even better option.

"that might be what she meant."

• the sentence was originally "maybe that's what she meant?" maybe is a stronger doubting word, especially paired with the question mark. i felt like the original sentence failed to preserve jason's gender in his actions. re-reading it because it seemed off, i thought about how it sounded like something SUGAR would say, but not jason. realized that the wording had more connotations of self-doubt or implying you could tell the speaker they're wrong with no repercussions. to me, the version i stuck with for the final seemed to be more "i technically wasn't there, so i could be off, but i am pitching a legitimate hypothesis that i think is the explanation."
• considered "that might be what she told you." this sentence directed the fault of the miscommunication at lola instead of implying that elizabeth said something that failed to convey what she meant. i didn't want that
• considered "you might be thinking of that." it had the same problem as the previous consideration.

"you were in a bad way. we didn't know that though until you were out."

• the first sentence was exceptionally difficult for me to even write a passable prototype. the very first attempt i wrote down just to know what he says was "you were... very sick." i didn't want jason to mention genitals in this scene at all or even hint at them, so i accepted that there might not be a better alternative to "sick" and i could live with characterizing jason as a parent who was told his child was ill.
• then tried "you just needed a little help." was vaguer and less of a lie than "sick" but it felt off. TOO vague for jason, and i still don't feel like jason has completely worked through his guilt which was one of the main focuses of the flashback in obyki, although i do think it isn't EATING at him anymore and he's rationalized it to be much less severe. so i was not big on his conceptualization of lola's normalization treatment as "help"
• tried classic "you were a little off/different." very, very turned off by options that directly called lola deformed or toed the line at all. scrapped that line of thought quickly, BUT it WAS the line of thought that led me to "in a bad way" which i felt was able to be taken in good or bad faith, in terms of what the viewer thinks jason is implying or saying here.
• THAT was originally "you were born in a bad way." and THAT specific structure was very repulsive to me. i removed the mention of birth, and the connotations that her birth itself was the issue or bad. then i needed to put that little modifier's purpose somewhere else instead! so the second sentence in that quote was born.
• used "you were out" instead of "you were born" though because his meaning was more ambiguous, but it's a very strange idiomatic wording that i've heard many parents use in reference to their children's birth at some point. it's unclear if he means out of the hospital or out of the womb, and i liked that.
• moved though from the end of the sentence to in the middle while experimenting with how to get a circular shape for the text, i noticed that i enjoyed that one in particular, because it's another conversational verbalism instead of obvious writing. the fact that a modifying structure usually at the end of a sentence was put in the middle gives the tone that he's rushing the sentence, or, at the very least, rushing the need to elaborate with a semantic "BUT" to what he just said.

"i left my study room at school" exchange.

• considered really hard whether i wanted to keep the jokes in for this one or not. i get a lot of offshoot jokes that are possible during dialog as i work on it, and i lot of them i have to trash because it's not appropriate or in-character
• decided to keep jason's joke, which was in the original writing of the dialog, as i asked myself why and why not. at that point, i'd felt like the page was lacking a feeling of the story developing towards an end goal, and it was just meandering conversation. jason making this corny joke after a pause indicates some kind of change in their dynamic as he's attempting to adapt
• in that original writing, lola said "aha." with an emphasis on the period to make it obvious she felt incredibly awkward. she fucking loves puns, though, and i think from jason it would especially catch her off-guard, so changed it to a quick, genuine laugh. it wasn't HILARIOUS to her, but if i was going to keep jason's joke in because i felt like it made the writing feel like it was progressing, i felt that having lola's attitude develop was the better choice, too.
• because i made lola more receptive with the laugh, added her "smoker's cough" joke because i think she's the kind of person who responds to a joke with another to show she liked it. it was also communicating to jason that she was receptive, because she was joining in on the joke by referencing something she knew both of them could bond with, but the format she chose was telling him "don't get too cozy just yet" because she chose to make a joke out of pretending she hadn't laughed, and had just coughed.
• considered whether to keep jason's laugh as it was or change it to a more default "haha" of some kind, or remove it altogether. eventually decided that i was assuming my audience would find him creepy for exhibiting any behavior that was less masculine. it's how i personally imagine he laughs most of the time; i might've changed it if it were a more pronounced laugh, but it was just a small squeak, so it didn't seem too jarring ultimately, maybe a nice quirk to build his character. the mental compromise from that option was better than total removal of jason's responding laugh, because i wanted to show he was pretty happy about getting it right, and that he was "getting" that he hasn't been getting something about lola, because he hadn't genuinely laughed at her jokes before.

this is getting massively long, so i'm just going to try to wrap it up. chose "how often do you touch em" over "read them" or "actually look at them" or similar because "touch" was more hyperbolic and jokey.
"i always wondered" was added impromptu during the work on the page as it struck me. it made the panel more cramped, as more speech bubbles always do, but i felt like it added a nice line of depth hinting at how much lola observes things silently and makes judgments about them. this implies that she's questioned the existence of books on shelves for a long time, but has either never had the opportunity or courage to ask. it's also making her seem a bit more emotionally receptive because it's a more personal statement, and because it's quickly leading into jason's observation about lola being perceptive, it worked well thematically.
"they're my favorites" bit was originally "those ones are the most meaningful to me, but reading them can be so emotionally draining." really large sentence, i had to try rewording it to fit into the small amount of space in the panel. wasn't pleased with "they're my favorites" because of something that'll probably be more evident on the next page, but it got the point of personal affection for the books from the original sentence across. removed the implication of being emotionally moved as "draining" because of another thing on the next page; i was fine with jason talking about having emotions openly because i feel like he's not the kind of guy who feels the need to defend his masculinity.
"trust me, i could tell" got a LOT of tweaks and rewrites. tried "trust me, i know" "obviously" "no shit" "you don't gotta tell me" "i wasn't wondering" and various combinations and mixes of those. i wanted lola to sound confident in what she was saying; when she makes an assumption based on her observations, she only makes it if she very strongly feels it's probably right. i was okay with her coming off a little haughty and "i could tell" was the best fit because it focuses on lola's ability and also implies that she already knew what jason's saying more strongly with its use of past tense.
"you're a very... incredibly deductive." this was originally not an incomplete sentence, as the second part was "very deductive person." jason is half lost in memories here. "incredibly" made his appreciation more obvious, and a mistake with his sentence structure when he hesitates hints that he's thinking hard. it was also just a nice conversational occurrence to make the dialog sound more natural. people can accidentally turn their sentences into an entirely different one saying the same thing a lot when they have no time to fix typos before the other person can receive what they're saying. considered "observant" and "perceptive" before "deductive"; "perceptive" was too similar to my own voice, and "observant" was decent, but didn't exactly denote that lola extrapolates with the information she observes. deductive seemed like it would be higher on jason's mental vocabulary list because he has been established as a guy who loves logical methods of thinking.
the last sentence i immediately as i finished writing it noticed that it sounded symbolic, like he could be talking about the plants or lola. the line was originally written "it's comforting to take care of them... even if they don't love me back." which sounded incredibly passive-aggressive - not my intention, and very out-of-character for jason as a rather forthright character. "don't reciprocate" or "don't repay" had similar implications of entitlement to lola's affection; changed "don't" to "can't" to focus on an inability or hindrance rather than implying a possible active choice. i wanted to go with "can't reciprocate" because it hit the right STEM manner of speech, but ultimately had to go with "return" due to space limits within the panel.

WHEW. thanks for reading all of that if you bothered!