We really can only tell you what we did, and perhaps make you aware of any mistakes we made. The first thing we did is we wrote a full script of our book. To do that, we began with the main themes from our ethnographic data and analysis that we wanted to communicate in the story, so for instance, we wrote down "motivations" and "shared body" and "gift relationship." Then we assembled the themes in a narrative arc of one surrogacy journey and we wrote a brief storyline of what kind of story could communicate that theme. Then we listed a lot of representative quotes from surrogates in our data that illustrated each theme, and this was the basis of the storyline. We then decided on our two characters- Jenn and Dana—and each of us began to write the story and dialogue of each chapter based on our ethnographic data. The words of each surrogate, and the words of the Greek Chorus and Dana's surrogacy group, are all based on actual words of surrogates in our data.
Finally, after we finished our entire script, sending it back and forth over months and months to tweak it, we began to assemble a storyboard using powerpoint in order to map out each page. On the storyboard we indicated exactly which expressions, gestures, dialogue, and background would be on each page. We had to drastically reduce the words and translate our intentions into drawings. We mapped out the entire book this way, and then we added full page spreads where we wanted a pause in the narrative. Only after a year had passed and we had finished mapping out the whole book, we began to look for an artist that had the style we had agreed we both liked: clean lines, realistic drawing, black and white. We were lucky to find Andrea Scebba who was just starting out in his career as a comic artist and agreed to work with us on the book.
Although we thought that we had "finished" at that point, it was only the beginning. Each page took at least a week of back and forth between the three of us. Andrea would first translate the page from our storyboard to a rough sketch, then he would send it to us for comments and redraw. Then he would ink it, and send it back for more comments. Then he would add the text. There were many things that we would go back and forth on in disagreement, and things that were hard to translate into drawings. As we progressed with the book, we also understood that we would need to shade it in greyscale, and therefore Andrea had to go back and shade each page much later in the process.