TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE February/21 - Writing is not maths. Clearly.
Damn, have you read Chaboute’s ALONE?
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2022 -- bounce.
Hey, I’m walkin’ here!
Most of the time, I look back at the week that was and don’t see a whole lot of things done. It doesn’t help that I’ve actually stopped Bullet Journaling for the past…3 months, or so. It wasn’t a conscious decision, one that came about more because of some kind of apathetic laziness, or perhaps a fear of seeing how little I was getting done. I don’t know. But I haven’t been charting each day across the month.
So I don’t have the visual reminder of ink in a journal to show me what I did over the past week. But I also don’t usually get a lot done in one week. My writing career is like I’ve set off to walk to the other coast of Australia [a long ass walk, for anyone wondering, about 3000km] and each week I guess I get about 350kms there. Hell, less, my writing is my side hustle, I give it less time, so I’d be walking about 70kms a week. Compared to the total of 3000, it’s nothing. It looks like nothing, feels like nothing [though still feels exhausting, go figure], and I worry that it is nothing. Perhaps I’ll never get there…?
But 70km will add up. A 10 week term later will see me 700km along, and that’s nearly a quarter of the way, you dig it now? 70km a week is paltry, frustratingly slow, dare I say laughable. But it’s what my feeble frame can accommodate. And it will get me there in the end if I just keep moving.
My entire writing career has been defined by that trait: just keep moving.
So the past week hasn’t looked like much. But I got a publishing contract in the mail. I coordinated some stuff for a preview for my graphic novella with Louie Joyce before we launch later in the year. I completed a text interview that was deliciously chunky and deserved some great responses.
And I planned out the first issue in page-by-page detail for this story I just got a contract for. I’ve got 24 pages, and I plugged the final scene in first, and then slowly worked my way forward from Page One, and I put the final cap on it on Friday, just before a busy weekend, and sat back satisfied as I only had 10 minutes left in that morning’s work session. Before tapping out early to read and exercise, I gave myself a little scroll through the document, just to bask on all my glory, and found I’d somehow mapped out 30 pages.
I sat for about 30 seconds trying to work out if it was worth attempting to start correcting this problem with 9 and a half minutes left in my morning, and I decided it was not. My brain could do this horrible job another day, and it could hate on Past Ryan all it wanted.
30 pages! What an idiot. Guess it’s time to strip out all that mood setting and character development!
Just kidding. Kinda. I really want this one to sing, so I’ll reconfigure and make it work. Right after I send this, in fact.
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The day job.
Usually, I can leave a lot of the day job at work because I’m there a lot and it’ll wait patiently for me. Plus: bringing maths tests home to mark or science posters just wasn’t something I *wanted* to do, so I’d leave it for my classroom.
But I’ve noticed since becoming a teacher of only English, well, I bring more work home with me. This is purely because I like marking English work. I always have. So I’m finding a half hour to log on and give feedback on paragraph structure for one class, or character analysis for another.
I need to get a little better at finding the divide, but I also find I’m not looking at this work like a complete grind. It’s something I genuinely feel good at, and good about, and I guess that feeds my brain in another way.
I’m sure I’ll slowly balance it out, though, only 3 weeks into the new year. It’ll settle.
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ASD&D.
No D&D last week, but will DM tomorrow night. Left the last session on a cliffhanger, of sorts, so will have the next portion set with notes and stats and nastiness set to go.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
How Men became Emotional Gold Diggers - this article looks at men leaning on their partners for intense emotional support when perhaps a therapist or honest mates would help balance that burden. Obviously, there’s no one size fits all answer/solution, but this is an interesting read. It talks about setting up emotionally honest and supportive cultures with your mates [something you don’t always get when just talking about movies/footy down the pub, or when just having a whinge session - helpful as both of those are, though]. It talks about accessing actual therapy - and the example in the article talks about a guy who trashes his bedside table, so it’s an extreme, but I think counselling for problems huge or small [but ongoing] is an important thing.
I think being open and honest about it all is also a helpful thing.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
ALONE by Chaboute - I found this thick ass tome in a secondhand book store, and had marvelled at the beauty of his work in the MOBY DICK adaptation for Dark Horse, so I picked this up. Wow, am I glad I did. A very wordless at times graphic novel, this story is about isolation, and connection, and imagination. It’s truly beautiful and I devoured it over a few nights. Chaboute’s inks are just so easy to fall into, and the motion from panel-to-panel, over many pages, is almost hypnotic. He builds this world, and then worlds within this world, to illustrate the life of a man born with deformities and who has lived on a small lighthouse island alone his entire life. With his parents dead, he’s alone in his own old age, and he’s lost, but he’s still got a rich imagination.
I don’t know how I’d never heard of this one before, but I feel so lucky that I stumbled across it because it truly brought a lot of emotion into me.
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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
My kid asked me: What’s a story you still want to tell that you haven’t yet?
It pretty well stumped me. I don’t have one of those “Ooh, if they gave me a million dollars, here’s what I’d do!” stories still sitting around.
I’ve gotten to tell a lot of those stories already. So much of what I’ve made already has been stuff I’ve been dying to get off my chest. And there are plenty of other pitches that never got oxygen that I guess I’d revive, but many I let just sink to the ocean floor and become fertiliser for other life.
I told him I’d love to do a big Elektra story where I put her into Iron Fist’s seven capital cities of Heaven, that’s something that rattles around.
I have some pitches left with hope still in them. A few, in fact.
The only one that comes to mind now is: I’d work with Eric Zawadzki to make 4 follow up graphic novellas to ETERNAL, each one a different location, culture, and problem, but each of them linked through…well, a secret ingredient I won’t give away here. It’s something I’ve mapped out a little before, and that I guess I would kill to return to.
But beyond that, there isn’t “that one story” or anything, there are just lots of stories, and whatever I can do now that’s exciting me.
At least I can control the 4 story Zawadzki sprawl, to some degree. That Elektra story, as rad as it is in my head, is completely out of my hands so I’ll spend very little time ever pining for it.