A bonus list of Things You Mangaka Need To Think About When Drawing Your RSOM Entry I came up with when reading through all the entries.

1) FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PEOPLE, don't submit work to a competition with spelling mistakes and bad grammar! They make you look careless and leave a bad impression. The author Patricia Wrede said it best when she told a young wannabe writer to learn spelling and grammar and he said that he didn't need to because publishers had people to do that. She replied, "Yes. They're called writers."

2) Backgrounds. Learn to draw them. If you can't draw them, find someone who can draw them but can't draw people and team up with them. If you can't do that, go take photographs and trace them. You don't need to put one in every panel, but you'd better have them somewhere

3) Hands. Learn to draw them. You can't fake them, and your characters can't keep their hands in their pockets the entire time.

4) The very first page of your manga ought to be stunning. Figure out what you're best at drawing and use that. If you can do awesome backgrounds, make sure you've got a big one there. If you can nail a character's face, have one on there.

5) Learn to spot your blacks. That means adding areas of black to the page - it makes things come alive.

6) Learn to vary your line weight - it gives a dynamic flow to them and makes the figures and objects you draw convincing. It also hides the bits where your line goes wibbly, to an extent.

7) Graphic design is not something that happens to other people. Find a good class or a book on composition and design and study it well. Your work doesn't have to be as obviously designed as CLAMP's Clover is, but you still need to know how to balance out a page.

8) Characterization. You have a really short time to make us want to read about the characters in your story. Don't blow it. Your first few pages should answer the question "Why should I care about this person?" Because they're young and in love? Big deal. That happens to everyone. What's different about this person or their situation? You don't have to answer that fully - you can just drop hints - but you have to address it somehow.

9) Artists: Take a good hard look at your writing. I know that many of you say that you can't imagine drawing anyone else's stories, and I understand that, but if you're going to write your own stories, you're going to have to pay just as much attention to learning to write as you do to learning to draw - maybe more, if it's not a strength of yours. If you can't do that, suck it up and get a writer. You can write your own stories later, when you've learned how.

10) Research what you're writing about. Because if you don't and you mess it up, any reader who knows more than you about it is going to be thrown out of the story, hard. You have the Internet and the library at your hands to help you find out the answers - don't go by TV. If you can't find the answer online, go to the library and ask the reference librarian - it's their job to answer weird questions like that. (And speaking as someone who occasionally does reference duty myself ... trust me, your question isn't going to be any weirder than anybody else's.)

11) You know what I'd like to see more of? Non-generic-American elements. There's a bit of Native American, some Korean, but otherwise, everything seems generically American to me, or if fantasy, Generic Manga Fantasyland. What happened to the rest of the world? India, Australia, Oceania, Eastern Europe, South and Central America, far Northern Europe? Let's get some really interesting cultural elements in there next time, ok?