# I'm so scared. I submitted material to a comic book publisher and....



## morfiction (Aug 10, 2012)

.... well, I'm not very good at script format. I also under-sold myself in the cover letter. 

It's not rejection I'm afraid of but acceptance and having a deadline I might not be able to meet. 

Anyone else have any anxiety they'd like to share?

P.S. I answered an online talent call from the publisher. It wasn't unsolicited.


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## Butterfly (Aug 10, 2012)

Good luck.

I know what you mean about deadlines. I can't even stick to my own!


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## Chilari (Aug 14, 2012)

If the publisher posted a talent call online, they'll get quite a lot of responses. Underselling yourself won't help. Never do that when applying for a job. It lost me one job at interview stage once (well, I might just have not been good enough) but when everyone else applying is doing their best to exaggerate their accomplishments without being dishonest about it, underselling yourself will make you the one they discard first. Lack of confidence is not attractive to an employer. So, sorry to say this, but on that alone you probably won't get it. So there's no need to worry about deadlines!

Learn from this. Underselling yourself at least reveals one thing: you are aware of your weaknesses. Work on eliminating them. Also, for future opportunities of this nature, prepare material you can use as proof to back up your application. Once you've worked on improving your comic writing abilities (and I'm sure a Google search will help you find ways to do that), why not turn it into a comic and post it online? You don't have to be a great artist to draw a comic - in fact it's how many comic artists learn, by doing. Or if you really struggle with drawing, you can solicit an artist to work with, but make sure you have something to offer - either money, or paying for hosting costs for the comic you create at the very least. A shorter comic will have better luck finding an artist. If you have a twelve page script, you're far more likely to find an artist than if you have a fifty page script, or a hundred page script (and I'm counting comic pages here). If you want more advice on webcomics, I can point you in the right direction, so PM me.

In terms of anxiety I feel, mostly it's that bit when I've planned the story, I've got most of the characters sketched out, I know the world and the setting and the plot, and I'm sitting down to actually start writing. I panic. I wonder whether I'm good enough, whether I am capable of telling this story, and then I chicken out and work on something else, or go back to the planning stage and rework it over and over and over until I get bored with it or try again. Usually the worst of the anxiety comes about 2000 words in, once I'm past the opening scene and starting to get things really moving. It's probably because I've not done enough planning.


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