I'm caught up on dialogue-writing for this Quitclaim story, but it took me what time I had available today and yesterday to do so, which is really kind of impressive given that the story is so short (not quite seven pages so far, will probably end up ten when it's done). The problem, I think, is that I've been rewriting the dialogue and narration a lot as I go, something I don't usually do. (Usually I just get it all out and then clean it up later in the edit read.) Mostly, I've been trying to figure out how I can make it shorter.

The Quitclaim stories have a "too much narration" problem that I haven't been able to kick and probably never will -- they are basically detective procedurals, even if we're using a very broad definition of "detection" here, and those depend on the reader getting to see the internal processes of the detective, which is to say, these stories rely heavily on Randa's monologue.

Amusingly, Randa is fairly taciturn in actual spoken dialogue, but she makes up for that in her narration. The Quitclaim stories are full of narration. I've just sort of leaned into it -- they are what they are -- but it really is too much for the format, and I know it.

Now, one of these days, assuming the fates play along, I will retell some of these stories in a purely prose format, and when that happens, no one will even notice. In fact, when that day comes, I'll have to add even more narration because now Randa will have to do things like describe the other characters. (One of my favorite favorite things about doing these weirdass comics is that I never have to physically describe a character, EVER. I can just show you what they look like and save everybody pain.)

That won't happen for a while yet. The first stories I plan to do that way are the nine stories that make up Coldpoint, which I won't do until after I finish all nine, at the end of this year. Then, assuming that works reasonably well, I'll think about Quitclaim. Sleeper Squad will never get this treatment. It has a constantly shifting POV, so much that at any given time I'd have to explicitly label who's narrating that bit, and it has so much in it that's visual (all those transformations) that I'm not sure it works in a purely verbal medium. Nor am I sure I have the writing skills to verbally describe the process of someone being turned into a banana.