ib;mu - Incredibly Busy; Mildly Uncertain
General brain leakings, Russian short stories, and PLEASE PREORDER THE DEER EDITOR TPB! :]
♫ Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. ♫
The Sun Rising, John Donne
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This newsletter 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.
2024 -- dig it.
Dabbling, here and there.
Three months into the year, and I’ve got things to show for it, here and there. I mean, my desk has four random sheets of paper on it with notes for different things on them, and my bullet journal, and a story notebook, and a receipt - things are happening. Even when they aren’t.
It’s fascinating to feel incredibly busy while also being mildly uncertain if you’re doing anything at all. This could be the knuckle tatt of my way, though.
Obviously, the past month was all about the Kickstarter during ZineQuest for WITHIN THE KIND RED BUILDING. Over 200 backers, dollars shy of 200% funded, and now I begin the roll out phase. The money is being processed now, I’ve got the files into their final phases, and then I’ll work on printing/collation, which will then yield the assembly phase - last time I assembled print/postage for a Kickstarter I watched most of the first season of THE WITCHER. I wonder what I’ll mindlessly watch this time?
I was, honestly, really pleased with reception to my sci fi rpg - it’s a different swing from me, but one I really appreciated people following me on. I would dearly love to get another zine like this ready for next year, but I’ll see what the year brings me, and if inspiration strikes [which it just did while tabling at the Goulburn Geek markets, let’s see if this bears fruit]. WTKRB took about a year or more to plan, write, and format. I love it, so I’ll want something just as good to sit alongside it.
Then there’s DEER EDITOR - and the first two issues are out, #3 lands this week, and then the trade is up for preorder for a May 8 [MATE!] street date. Beyond hyped for that to be in my hands, and the press and retailer contact mines shall now be entered.
But what else am I working on right now?
Well, I have no clue. Except I do have some ideas/thoughts.
I’m currently kicking around 3 new story ideas. One I have a full pitch doc scripted, but I’m giving it a minute to lie fallow so I can come back to it out of the heat of the creative burst and see if it makes sense and if it pops. But I like this one, it’s weird, and deep, and anti-corporation, and the characters make me smile. All the things I like to write.
Then there’s an idea I’m still kicking around that I had before the one above, but something just isn’t lining up, and I still need that ingredient to mesh in. I shall trust in the process to get it there whenever it happens.
But then another idea came to me recently. A situation. See, I never really know where a story might come at me from. The one at the top here was me seeing something and wondering what was happening and instantly having a character wonder the same. Deer Editor stemmed from a joke about a typo. WTKRB was all about a character walking towards a building on a snow planet and me wondering what was going on in there, and why they wanted to go in.
This new idea - it’s a big situation. I have no characters, yet. I have the world, but I love the set up. So now I’ll be making notes and notes about who might be there, who they are, what they want [need], etc.
It’s a fun time, it’s play. I could choose to see it as pointless, or I can see it as the unfettered part of the job. Right now, this world is ripe, and it’s my job to tend to it with secateurs and the right balances of lime and composted materials and time and love.
Sometimes these end up just fizzling out, and sometimes they blossom. Only one way to find out.
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Short Fiction - just to stretch those muscles a little.
There’s a monthly competition run by the Australian Writers’ Centre called ‘Furious Fiction’ where on the first Friday of each month you get given a set of prompts and then 55 hours to craft something under 500 words that hits it all.
Last month, they wanted a ‘pop’ and some other elements - you can scope out the winning entries here. There’s no prize [far as I can see], just pride and love of the game. At school, we’d set this as a possible writing challenge for the students to enter to hone their skills, so I thought I better put my money where my mouth is and I entered the latest one.
The prompts were: to have someone revisit something, to include the words CAMP, FAST, and SPARK, and then to have the same colour in the opening and closing sentences.
It’s a fun way to get the brain thinking. I knew I wanted to do something not too obvious, and so eventually settled on a short about a jealous partner dealing with a new invention: a perfume that allows people to return to their most important memory and relive it like they are there.
I don’t think mine is going to win, or is particularly great, but it was nice to blow some dust out of some corners and see what I could come up with. And it’s nice to treat a little creative writing with that sense of fun at its heart.
I’m now waiting for the April round to open and I’ll have a trundle again.
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Reading/Writing/Reading/[Probably Watching, Too]
I wanted to start the year strong with some reading under my belt. I hit 6 books for the school holidays, though the final one took me into the first term a little.
I found BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy to be a fascinating read, though obviously as brutal as everyone suggests. I found myself discussing the ending page with a friend and we had different views of what it meant, so that was exciting. For my money [spoilers, maybe, kinda, I don’t even know]: the end is about America being oil farmed, and that this capitalist hope/dream could only happen once the original owners of the land could be hunted off enough that they could no longer stand in the way. Ah, history!
I’m currently reading A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN by George Saunders where he breaks down 7 Russian short stories he’s been teaching in his Russian short story class for 20 years. The stories are reprinted entirely, then he breaks down his thoughts and teaching strategies on them and it’s honestly a fascinating read. Saunders’ voice is just naturally erudite and easy to engage with, and the stories are not the kind of thing I’d naturally read, so it’s awesome to see how/why he tackles them. Huge recommendation for this one if you like: reading short stories, like writing, or perhaps like teaching.
I’m watching THE BEAR each morning when I exercise and the second season is really warming up. It’s a different beast from the first one, which is good, characters need to transition and progress, and I’m thoroughly ‘in’ on everything that’s happening.
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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 University Intro to Creative Writing] 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
Starting to realise I care just as much about being passionate about something as I do about having success with something. Having a thing in my day I get jazzed to do, a genuine thing I look forward to interacting with [and this can be a book to read or a unit of lessons to plan or a comic script to add 2 pages to] is such a joy.
Where something will go, or take me, I can never know - but having something to do that I love: sublime.