A couple years ago, I decided to try something a little off-center for NaNoWriMo: I decided to teach myself how to write a graphic novel. I had a story idea that wasn’t coming together as a work of straight-up prose: It wanted to be something partly visual, too. So I decided to set that project aside for a month and learn how to assemble a graphic novel with proper formatting. I needed to learn how to ‘write down’ imagery as well as dialogue, and tell the story they both make in tandem.
I realized that one of my all-time favorite historical novels – by a woman author we’ll call J – would be a great fit. In fact, one of the plot lines is all about a young female writer learning how to throw off the world’s assumptions, and her own habits, to find a creative path that is truly her own. I have always identified with that struggle. It still feels relevant, both personally and in terms of where women are as an artistic species.
To make a long story very short, I ended up producing a graphic novel script that actually had merit. Somehow along the way, it evolved beyond a writing exercise or a primer on formatting, and that left me with a dilemma. The story wasn’t mine – the intellectual property wasn’t mine – and, because the whole thing started out as a lark, I hadn’t secured permission to adapt J’s work before I got started.
I am already published many times over, as a nonfiction and textbook author. I wrote for all the big names. I had top-shelf representation. For that matter, I’ve also worked for Macmillan as a development editor, and for Pearson as a custom media project wrangler. So I know full well how the publishing sausage gets made: if you lack the properly documented, legal permission to use someone else’s work in a project of your own, you’re dead in the water.
Just to be sure, I paid a freelance comics editor for a consult and he confirmed my conclusion. No comics agent, editor, or publisher worth having would look twice at a query for my script unless I had J’s permission already in hand. For that matter, no comics illustrator worth having would agree to collaborate with me, either, not even on a handful of sample pages for a query. The editor helped me locate J’s agent and confirm the comic adaptation rights were available. But I had no idea how to secure them.
And that’s the moment – when I was stymied, yet unwilling to give up – that cancer struck twice. First, I learned that J had died from ovarian cancer. Then, just a few months later, I was diagnosed with cancer, too.
The symmetry of those facts stuck with me through the diagnostic testing and the surgery: I was going through what J had gone through. While I was sitting in the treatment ward, watching the chemo drugs trickle through the IV, I wondered if J had also felt shock and rage and helplessness at the idea of being done, being stopped in her creative tracks, of maybe never getting the chance to tell more stories. I think she must have felt that way. I felt that way on J’s behalf, not just because I had one of her stories still percolating inside me, waiting to be told again.
So now that I’m done with treatment and cancer-free, I’m back at work on solving this dilemma. I have legal help from a kick-ass comics contract attorney, and we’re working with J’s agent to secure the shopping rights. But it’s taking more time than I thought it would, and my fight against cancer has left me exquisitely sensitive to the ticking clock. I feel J coming up behind me and holding out a baton, because she was yanked off the track but I got lucky and I can still run.
I hope J’s agent lets me finish this race for both our sakes. I can’t promise that we’ve produced a bestseller, or the next big comics-based TV series. But I can promise, wholeheartedly, that I’ll remember the part that cancer played. There’s more to J’s baton than just one woman’s story – it’s mine, it’s hers, it’s ours – and someone up ahead of me needs to know her cancer doesn’t have to mean a full-stop.
medicinal sausage 