TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE February/14 - Award-Winning Inspiration To Create Smile-Making Content
Also: people are rad.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2022 -- bounce.
A week of living has a lot of good in it.
I have to give myself context, constantly. I can be derailed by the silliest, little things. I know it’s silly, and unhelpful, but it happens, so I have to just do the work and rewire my thoughts sometimes.
This week was a good week. I had a slew of lessons that were absolutely top shelf. Fun to prepare and present, engaging to deliver and work with the students, and some of the work completed was really thoughtful and the kind of thing a teacher always wants to see.
Hint: if you ever teach 12 Angry Men, get your students to make memes about what’s happening in the part they’ve read. Not only will it show their understanding of something, so you know they are reading, but it’ll give them a creative way to express this knowledge, and you’ll get to laugh your ass off at some of the goodness that rolls in.
All things considered, a good week for teaching. Not every lesson can be The Best Content, and I’ll not always be the best teacher, but you dust yourself off and just keep learning yourself and improving. It’s been nearly 2 decades in this job, and I still need to remind myself of that.
Around that, it’s been hectic at home with the year starting, but the home is a pleasant machine of which to be caught in the midst. Each day is filled with little victories, and over a decade of being a parent should have taught me that, like teaching, it’s not just rolling thunder of Hallmark Moments. INSIDE OUT taught me, repeatedly, you gotta have the sad moments to balance out and even inform the happy. That’s life. That’s how life needs to be. I gotta embrace it. Even if it does involve reading comics on an iPad on one child’s floor until I pass out [getting a good Apple slap for my efforts] because of sleep issues. Hey, it’s not all that bad, at least I had comics!
I’ve managed to exercise 4 times this week, and walk nearly every day, and eat healthy, and have some laughs at work with coworkers [which is something my brain always needs].
I might gloss over the good to zero in on the bad, but I’m working on not doing that. And sometimes I just gotta be happy I’m even putting in the work, whether it works or not. I take very little in this world lying down, which probably segues into my next point, I suppose…
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Story [Re]Breaking.
I announced it last week [on here] that a story of mine has been given the greenlight with a publisher. It’s a big deal for my brain, my heart, and my writing. It’s a big positive injection that’s kept me afloat since last week.
But then I got a curveball.
The gist of it is: do you want more issues with less pages, or less issues with more pages?
Firstly, I told them I’d need to do some story calculus to work out what my answer was, so I hope they didn’t mind a pause before my answer. They were totally cool with it.
I then took to my story plan. Where I’d put this beast together in 5 issues, each issue offering its own selection of story, beats, and proper moments to end on. I liked this plan, I pitched this plan. But I wanted space to breathe in all the right spaces.
So I ruled up two A4 sheets into 4 boxes and started dragging scenes across and seeing how it would fit. Half the issues would now end in different ways, and different spots. I didn’t think it would work, but wanted to be certain, so I did the work, and it took me two mornings, but be damned if the thing wasn’t tighter in the final product for it.
My wife said it well - people would prefer something thicker to read than something thin. I agree.
So each issue looks like it will have more pages, more space for me to build the tone of it all, and I’m excited to dive into scripting with this new plan.
Thankfully, also, there’s no rush on this project. It’s gonna be written around one of the craziest teaching years I’ve had in ages, so I can’t guarantee anything in regards to turnaround times, but the publisher was also cool with that. Winner!
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Fight. Comics.
I haven’t even started turning the wheel that activates my hype machine for [THE LADY KUNG FU PROJECT] with Louie Joyce, but you can expect me to tease more and more panels and joy from this forthcoming release pretty soon.
Until then - follow Louie on Twitter and Instagram and feast your eyes.
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ASD&D.
Continued DMing a campaign for my mates last Tuesday. Had some noticeable moments where I had laid some traps or issues along their path but they would roll in a way that would save them.
Example: Investigation check is a 19 - feels good enough to spot a hint of the mimic, but not so bad that they’d lay their hands on it while sniffing about. So now they know, but they haven’t fallen prey yet. The group then quickly intuited it, and absolutely annihilated it with a spell scroll one shot. Pretty funny.
I’m trying my best to really flow with where they want to go, and be reactive in the moment. Making some things up completely on the fly as a response to a turn taken, or a good roll. It’s going well and is fun, and that’s the kind of fortnightly distraction my brain appreciates.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
Brian K Vaughan interviewed on Cartoonish Kayfabe - a great chat with a master of writing comics. I love how open he is about the struggle of it.
AXE WIELDING PRIEST, a solo writing rpg - Ken Lowery over at Bannerless Games is at it again, this time with a one page solo writing rpg about being a kick ass priest with a mammoth axe, and the hunt is on!
Story AI bot site thing - I’m sure everyone is already playing with this, where you put two words together [names or concepts/themes] and the AI poops out a little paragraph of “story.” It’s not always great, AI rarely is, but I’m interested to use it as a prompt in class. Especially because the writing style is nothing worth copying, so it’s not cheating there, but it could give students a spark to then start writing with. Hopefully.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT - hmm, this was just a ‘god show.’ Nothing transcendent, but also not completely bad. Perhaps watching it with tweens skews my viewing, because they’re all in and loving it, and perhaps having come after The Mandalorian hurts it because that show felt top tier. But this was an enjoyable show, and I’m just so happy to see Temuera Morrison getting a pay day. Good on him.
*spoilers* for the show.
I did reflect on the fact this one was structured like a Western, too. Fett goes to live with the Tusken Raiders, he comes to understand them and be accepted by them, and then they are all wiped out in an attack. It has a very Dances With Wolves vibe to it, and then this is meshed into the main story of criminal factions warring over the gap left behind when Jabba the Hutt died in a very Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest kind of way.
While I can see those two lofty aspirations in the rearview, the show itself is more concerned with having fun - and damn well, why shouldn’t it? When you set up a scene of Fett riding a rancor into a battle, you should enjoy the fruits of those labours.
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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
People are nice.
I should never be shocked by this. But I’m always hugely pleased.
I’ve got these two solo writing rpgs up on itch.io and they’ve now been there a while, the first one quite a while, but be damned if they don’t just keep getting downloaded. Mostly it’s free peeps, but every now and then someone drops $1 in, and I think that’s so awesome. It doesn’t tell me who each buyer is, so sadly I can never ever thank them, but I think it every time.
Then yesterday, randomly, someone just buys one for $6 - I mean, what a legend. These slices of passive income mean so much to me, and I don’t have anyONE to thank, so I guess I should just say - thank you. To the world, for being a rad place sometimes.
If you’ve not jumped onto my one-page writing rpgs that are insanely fun and creatively fulfilling to create, then here are two links you will need :]
Check out Welcome To Faraday now for some suburban horror
And
Check out The Seven Islands of Qoy for some wild arcane kung fu madness
And stay tuned for The Lighthouse at Kindred Rocks - coming soon :]
I should make some kind of ad featuring all 3 titles. I should do that. I should be able to do that. I should get better at doing that. true.
I hope you enjoy writing and having written these updates even half as much as I enjoy reading and having read them, because that means you’ll definitely keep doing them for a looong time.