Here Be Dragons
What do you do when you’re waiting on comic pitches to land [or not]? I write a short story.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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This fortnightly drop goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.
2023 -- better.
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This fortnight has been a funny one because it’s been a bit of a holding pattern. As someone who likes to feel the forward movement through my hair, these times can feel odd. Who am I if I’m not the guy writing some comic pages today?
To stave off this kind of introspection, under which I’m sure to mentally buckle, I come up with things to keep me busy. In the past fortnight, I saw a pitch get put on hold for a minute and the publisher asked for more, so I sent through three very different projects. The hope would be, at least one gets picked up and that gives me my 2023 writing focus. If not, then what I need to do is start developing my next slate of pitches. But I don’t currently have those stories sorted out, and my brain doesn’t seem smart or flexible enough to keep a dozen worlds and people all swirling in separate biomes, so I usually just have a few pitches I might be massaging and if they all flop, then I’ll go back to the drawing board.
Maybe there’s a part of me that lives in hope - these three pitches are good, surely one will get through. My heart does believe in crazy things.
But for now, I’m not actively grinding away at the ideation mines, I’m just patiently waiting. Though I need to do something else, too.
Mostly, I’ve been working on actual work stuff. I had a class swap and suddenly find myself thrust into a class already one week deep into HAMLET. So I’m busy reading this, which I haven’t read in nearly 25 years, and making notes and then trying to come up with interesting lessons to help unpack the best parts of this text.
I’m also having an absolute blast teaching the Romance genre. Last week, we analysed BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, the short story, and considered how it so very closely aligns with the traditional romantic story structure - except that the reunion isn’t what we expect, it’s Ennis and Jack’s ashes, and the together forever is represented through their two shirts hanging on a nail. The story is otherwise insanely romantic, but the point is that society would never allow such a thing in that time and place.
We then looked at how perspectives can help broaden our view of the world beyond just what we know. It was a powerful lesson, but also just a really fun chat.
My downfall in teaching is always thinking each lesson can be 15% better, so I constantly try to put a little more in - more prep time, more resources, more reading so I know it better. But, when it pays most of the bills, and it’s all genuinely fun, it’s hard to move my brain away from it. So this is what’s been keeping me busy and happy most mornings while I wait, and I wait. Not a bad way to do it.
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Paring down a prose short.
Each year, there’s a writing competition for students, but there’s also a teacher category. I entered last year and rated as a finalist, which was cool, but mostly I just wanted to enter the mines with the students so they could see that their teachers could practise what they preach. And I preach a whole lot about writing stories :]
So I wrote this short about a kind of pirate who was gifted eternal life, so long as they took a life each day before midnight. It was a fun exploration of toxic masculinity and the need to discover and conquer and get more and be more, but ultimately be empty inside.
I knew I wanted to enter again this year, and though the entries aren’t due until like September or something, I saw my gap now so I used my time wisely. It took me a while to get the idea I wanted, but from there I had to fit it into 1500 words, or less.
The thing I learnt was - and this will help with my students - I kept paring it back. I started with a central idea - someone returns for their father’s funeral, and they confront the trauma of their childhood as shown by this weird plant cult the entire village/town was kinda built upon. And there would be a sword, buried in the ground, just because.
I knew I wanted them to end up on a surfboard, out in the water, not knowing if some eldritch creature was below them or if it was all just the silliest bullshit ever. The ultimate questioning of whether parents actually know anything about what they are doing.
So I had these beats, and I worked them out on paper, threading them, aligning them, explaining them, setting them up. But it wasn’t clicking. So I just kept tweaking and asking myself questions - the only way I know to navigate through the map of a story.
It’s actually been a few weeks of tinkering, here and there, but the outcome has been really interesting. The end result is really different from where I started, and hopefully better for it. And most changes came from me trying to find explanations for things, and then realising I just needed to think smaller.
So the person isn’t there for a funeral, which felt too large to really haul together, but instead they haven’t heard from their father in a long while so they return home [for the first time in quite a while] to see what’s up. They find an empty village, just nobody, and this is strange - but then to make it not feel just super random, I decided to steer into the weird; seeing a China Mieville book cover in the library helped me realise this. If it’s esoteric, then I can pare it down with less explanation, just some good thoughtful hints of explanation. This story does not take place in the real world, it’s got a slightly different logic.
So our lead character returns, finds no one, and in a quick exploration of the village/town, we unpack tiny details of back story - her childhood, the place’s/adults’ obsession with this strange flower they couldn’t seem to hack. She reads old notes she has written, and reaccesses the hate she has for this place and these people, and then falls asleep by a campfire, which quickly spreads and takes her father’s hut out [and spills a stockpile of flower buds across the sand and into the ocean].
You’ll see now, no funeral, no sword, and finally no surfboard. Instead, at the end, she drives away from this stupid secluded beach hamlet, ready to just forget it all [don’t we all face this at some stage - or is that just me?]. While sipping coffee on a stop on the long drive home, at a cafe where she can enjoy a quiet read, she doesn’t see that out on the water the buds of the flower, which they could never make bloom, float past [the people were so controlling and worried the flower would make it out into the real world, that they kept it from the water and any chance it could float to other shores], they float past and slowly unfurl due to the soaking from the water.
It’s a simple short, I just kept stripping back, mostly so I’d have less to explain, because the punch of it is the folly of parents, the isolation of a controlling nature.
Now I need to let it sit for a week, or until I can get back to it, and I’ll see if it actually holds up or if it’s just stupid. Heck, sometimes it can be both, right?
But it’s been nice to dive back into a touch of prose. It flows in such a different way from comics.
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?
I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.
I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
The French side of my family had asked everyone what gifts they wanted when they visited for Xmas. I said a graphic novel in French, please. They got me SHANGRI-LA by M. Bablet. I have it on my desk and randomly I’ll just open it up and stare at a page.
It’s a masterclass of using the comic page in regards to composition and colour and mood. It actively makes me want to then turn back to the screen and write something.
I can’t read French, but I can follow this well enough. And I can be inspired by awesome comic pages endlessly. The expanse of the centre of this page just hits like a silent shove.
I could just leave books like this all over the house so wherever I am, I can open something up and recharge the creative soul.
Because to be inspired and then guide that energy back into the page into something that feels magical is just about the greatest thing a creator can be a part of. The synthesis of creativity into more creativity in the wheel is a wheel I hope never stops turning.
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Also: I use the Substack app to read so many great newsletters, and that means my phone isn’t used for social media anymore and as we head towards the third month of 2023, I can feel my brain continuing the declutter. If that might work for you, the app is definitely something I happily promote.