Welcome to the production diary of the fantasy epic "The Song and Its Singer", created by Kailyn Kent.

The Song and Its Singer is set in a distant archipelago where music and magic are one in the same. In this world, almost all people are forbidden from singing, or making music of any kind. lest they summon disastrous spirits outside of anyone's control, accidentally or not.

Only specially selected cantors are allowed to make music - and use magic- to control nature, animals, and even other people. Ara is a village girl growing up in the "Scatter" at the far side of the archipelago. Ara must not sing, but she keeps dreaming of mysterious songs. Everything changes when she encounters Enek, a wandering cantor, who discovers her singing in secret.

Hello there! This is Kailyn. I've created this production diary as a way to keep connected with readers and fans of The Song and Its Singer since I put the webcomic on hiatus.

I have a few things I'd like to do as part of this diary:

Publish working drafts of the story, so that my readers can keep the story alive (provided they don't mind things changing in the editorial process!)
Create a non-Webtoons home for the existing webcomic chapters
Help myself better understand and explore my artistic and storytelling process

Telling epic stories, fantasy or otherwise, is a risky endeavor. Lives change, and many storytellers are never able to finish their tales. Many stories end on the doorstep of the journey.

However, I've realized that epic fantasy is the story-form that feels most invigorating, mysterious, and spiritually alive to me. Creating the time in my life to work on my stories, even if only for a few hours a week, makes my life better.

I do care about whether I finish the story or not. That's why I'm spending the next phase of my creative journey in drafting the current arc of TSAIS in the simplest way I can, and then later making changes about how I might "adapt" it back into a comic, a visual novel, an animation - who knows! I'm exploring how I can better structure each segment into standalone chunks, not unlike short stories, and keep my decompressed "flow" while still moving the story along.

If you feel excited just reading about this process, I'm excited you're here!

Timeline

Illustrated Prose:

Spring 2022 - Now

I drafted the action-heavy Chapter 6 as an animatic, viewable on Youtube (above). I wrote Chapter 7, more dialogue heavy, in prose.

Currently my goal is to draft the "Scatterwitch" arc, which follows Ara, as a prose story. Visualization is an important part of my drafting process, however, so I am experimenting with what kinds of illustratons, rough animations, and comic thumbnails best help me discover the story.

Webcomic:

Spring 2020 - Winter 2022

I illustrated Chapters 1 - 5 as a webcomic on Webtoon Canvas, which was edited by Carla Montero Lerner.

Webtoon might require you to create an account to read it on their platform.

Between 2020 and 2022, my goal was to connect with as many readers as possible by publishing TSAIS as a serialized webcomic. I put the comic on hiatus when I realized that both my goals and available work hours had changed.

Read on Webtoon

Early Animatic:

Summer 2018 - Winter 2020

The first part of Chapter 1 was illustrated and roughly animated as an animatic. You can view it on Vimeo here.

Between 2018 and 2020, my goal was to encourage myself to return to storytelling by doing a little bit each day- just 20 - 30 minutes. I decided to work on a story that came into my head in the spring of 2015, and had started to come alive. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I switched to the comics format, when I felt like I wanted to get the story "out there."

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