TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE June/21 - I had a stupid thought.
But if you think about them too long, they all are.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2021 -- beyond.
How much have you written?
I had a stupid thought the other morning. I looked at my list of things I’ve written this year and instantly knew it wasn’t enough. Not for half a year.
I’ve written a single issue script, and a graphic novel script.
This isn’t enough. Or, so it seemed. I mean, that graphic novel is nearly the length of 4 single issues, so really, that’s 5 issues I’ve written this year. Still “not enough” but I also know it takes me about a season to write a miniseries. I wish that pace could be accelerated, but writing a few hours a day, alongside a full time teaching job means I need to be realistic. If I put out two minis a season, they’d most likely be rubbish. I need time to get the quality I’m happy with.
But seeing my writing list have only two things shook my brain for an instant. I can see, now, that it’s not too bad. I wish it was more, but I know it’s about right on track.
Plus - there’s all the other stuff. I’ve launched EVERFROST, which was a tonne of work in a lot of areas. I’ve launched BLACK BEACON in Heavy Metal, starting in single issues next month. I’ve gotten a complete pitch for [THE SHARP INK PROJECT] and story breaking for me is an arduous and mammothly time chewing experience. I’m in the midst of breaking [THE 36 HOUR PROJECT] into a great pitch, and am percolating on [THE BLUEPRINT PROJECT] still.
That stuff, the writing that isn’t a script, adds up. And it’s important.
So, eventually, I talked myself down. But it took time and considered thought. I’m glad I had the headspace for both.
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SHE edits.
Most of this week has been editing the script for SHE Vol. 2 - and it’s slowly coming together.
Dan Hill went through and gave awesome notes, so now I’m trying to action the big ticket ones. This usually means going back to the notebook and scribbling out possibilities for solutions, and playing them out. Kinda like a ‘war games scenario’ but for your story. You write the change, and how it happens, and what happens from it, and you write until you then come back to the rest of the story in the script, or until it becomes a whole new thing.
This is usually floated along on the thought of “why is the character doing this?” Every twist and turn has me answering that question. Are they reacting in character to the story, and to the new beats you are inserting. It’s a funny balance.
But the script is coming along.Hopefully I can wrap it up this coming week. Then I’ll shift my eyes back to some printing stuff for EVERFROST and BLACK BEACON.
Beyond that, I’ve pitched [THE SHARP INK PROJECT] to a publisher I love, and might politely check in on them, as is the ebb and flow we’ve established before. Then I’ll tinker with the story outline some more for [THE 36 HOUR PROJECT] and see how close it is getting to all coming together in a tight little string of knots.
I need to get something new picked up to give me something to script with purpose. I guess I could start in on scripting SHE Vol. 3, as that’s what I want to get up to with that character, but I know I’ll have bandwidth for a new mini now, I just need the damn thing greenlit.
But let’s say I don’t get anything greenlit. I guess I’ll keep cooking up new ideas, pitching them. Alongside that, I want to script a new idea I’ve got for DEER EDITOR and see if Sami Kivela could ever become available for it. I’d keep it tight, probably a graphic novella, and pick a gap in his schedule and Kickstarter it. But to do that, I’d need the script to be ready, so I can tinker on that.
I still have [THE NOVEL PROJECT] sitting and waiting for a new draft, but I also know that’ll be all encompassing, so I need a full break in the schedule. As a sister/mirror to that, I’d love to collect my 300 word flash fic piece from my Patreon and put them out in some form as some of them are really bloody good [I think].
I’m also looking at ZineQuest on Kickstarter, which is each February, and I have one zine mapped out that I want to design/make, and possibly even another one, though it could wait. That would be something I’d need to start setting myself little goals between now and January to get done - especially because I’d want some art for it, and so if it’s getting off the ground would need me to hit up this artist mate of mine to collaborate with, and with plenty of time so we could get it done.
Crazy that it’s closing in on the end of June, so I really need to start thinking about the next 6 months and mapping them out for my brain to start to wrangle into shape.
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EVERFROST Script Pages on my Patreon
For the month of June, to celebrate the release of EVERFROST #1, I’m going to release a page of script a day with annotations so you can see my thoughts behind writing this comic, and compare them to the pages as you read them, and that’ll give me a daily schedule for pretty much the whole month.
You can get in on this for just $1 for the whole month - sign up here and I’ll kick off June 01.
The first week of pages, so up to Page Five, will be free to view, and then the paywall kicks in. We hope some of you come along for the ride and enjoy it, and everything else I post up there. I usually write some process-type stuff, some short fic bursts, some D&D stuff, and the money genuinely helps me keep the lights on in this office.
Pages have been going up for three weeks now, so you can go and get all caught up and be into the tail end of the script.
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ASD&D.
I’ve continued to descend into the rpg journaling rabbit hole. I got some time this weekend to start looking through the ones I’ve got as I printed them up as little zines. I’ve been coding them with a grade letter for how good I think they are, meaning how functional and easy to use and fun they seem. I then code whether they are only solo, only group, or a mix in between. I code whether they are writing only, or some are kind of playing as a game. I write a super short blurb, and then that all goes onto a post it note onto the cover.
Some have a D grade [glad they were free downloads] and one I’ve given an A grade so far. There’s many I could see working in the classroom, and already I can see which style works best for what I know I want to see. I’m after prompt heavy ones, because I wouldn’t want students doing all the heavy lifting, but I also want them left with the scope to create and explore. Every prompt, or prompt table, should be a kind of claymore experience - front toward enemy, but creativity isn’t the enemy, but you get what I mean, right?
I have only gotten through about a quarter of the ones I got, so I’ll keep doing this through the coming school holidays, and I’ll see how many look awesome, and what I can do with them.
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL - this article about how people in film are becoming more muscular, more beautiful, but the flirting and sexiness is all gone is an interesting read. Definitely stuff to chew on in regards to why we exercise, why we strive for “perfection,” and why it’s all kinda bullshit.
THE LUMP SUM SAGA comic on Kickstarter - this sci fi comic looks cool, both the premise and the gorgeous art. 100% check it out.
THE OWL: OSAGE GUARDIAN comic on Kickstarter - another good looking comic you will very likely dig.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
LUCA - the latest Pixar flick is...good. It’s not wildly amazing, or a complete home run in my heart, but it’s definitely enjoyable. And there was something nice about that simplicity. It tells a sweet tale of two sea monster boys who come onto land to live as human boys and what their hopes and adventures are, mostly centred around desperately wanting a Vespa.
I get the feeling this one is aimed at a younger audience than recent releases, and given that SOUL felt like an adult movie in cartoon form, I dig that this one feels like a story even 4 year olds can grasp. The animation is beautiful, and the themes about friendship and prejudice are the right level of depth so as to be available for the young ones, and deep enough for adults to appreciate.
SAFETY - I Enjoyed this. It sits in a weird pocket - too timid to tackle things head on, but a little too dry to fight for engagement with kids, but I think it picked a nice spot. This acts as an entry story for children to see the stress, worries, and inequality around substance abuse. Picking this angle and tone, it offers a new view on this topic, which has certainly been tackled elsewhere in a way not timid, but not accessible to younger viewers. It isn't "fast paced" but kids who sit with it will find plenty to discuss and think about, which I think is exceptionally important.
BLUE MIRACLE - Straight up, I absolutely loved this flick. The tale of an orphanage entering a fishing tournament is based on a true story, but here the screenwriters amp up the drama to 11. You can see the "paint-by-numbers" approach to every little drama line dropped into the water, but that doesn't stop every single one being effective. There is trouble with a bank, someone wrestling with trauma at sea, someone wrestling with their life as an absent father, someone struggling with life on the street, someone struggling to stay away from a life of crime and bad choices, and then the titular fishing tournament.
It's actually a huge credit to the script that so many plot threads get their three act structure, through the conveniently timed 3 day tournament, and you can see every single character and beat gets a seed, a turn, a fall, and a denouement. If you're paying attention, you'll see it all coming, but I don't think that stops them being effective in the slightest because even though they follow a formula, they are still really quite well done.
Shout out to old mate playing the lead character of Omar as he's honestly captivating on the screen, and the cinematography for the water on the ocean and in the dream sequences.
Mild Spoiler: there's a lot of blue in this flick, walls, shoes, lights, etc. The character Dennis Quiad plays starts off hating the orphans, because one stole from him, but you just know he's going to come around to them because that's the formula of the flick. But one thing I noticed was on the first day on the boat, Quaid wears no blue, on the second day he wears blue jeans, and I guessed that the third day he'd wear blue on top and bottom, and lo and behold he's wearing blue pants and a blue shirt [unbuttoned to show a white under shirt to show he's still on the journey, but he's completely on board with these kids now] and I think that level of detail to use colour to map a character's journey tells you everything about the thought and care that went into this flick.
DESCENDER Vol. 1 - I finished reading this 16 issue collection and it’s damn fine comics. Nguyen’s art is captivating, and Lemire knows how to insert emotion into everything he does. This is cerebral sci fi at a real high point.
Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
This article talks about how we need to plant more - like, the size of China more - in the coming decade.
I’m hoping people start to see the small part they can play. It all adds up. Can you, personally rewild a Chinese province worth of plant life? No, but that’s not the point. It’ll be used as a weapon against you, it’ll erode your mind’s resolve, but it’s bullshit.
Everyone should plant something. We should all learn how to tend to things that live in the ground. I certainly want to get better at it. 2020 helped many people discover the joy of gardening, and gave some new skills, and we gotta see the mental health benefits now, right? I know a decade ago I did not care for gardening, not at all. My grass would become a skyscraper horizon for snakes and gnomes, and any proper plants that required care would bellow to the stars when I signed a rental agreement because they knew it was their death knell. I hated gardening - let’s speak the truth. Which is why I find it so fascinating that I dig it now. I’m happy to have pulled a mental 180 on it, and hopefully more people can be inspired to do the same.
I want to do more for this through schools, but for now I’ll take my added brain massage and show my kids, and enjoy what I can. Here’s what I’ve got so far.
THE COMPOST
I love my compost, a stupid amount. I tend to it nearly every day. I don’t always know if I’m doing it right, but I do know I’ve got 2 massive bins absolutely chock-a-block with worms. There’s something stupidly satisfying about turning all the dirt and trash in there and finding it teeming with little worms just going about their regularly scheduled lunch.
We generate a lot of fruit/veg byproduct in the house - feeding two kids their daily vitamins through kiwi fruits and apples, and cooking meals with carrots and capsicums, and making pizza with as many mushrooms will allow it to still be structurally safe, plus my daily smoothie has a banana in it. I put stuff into the compost nearly daily, and it’s taken a solid decade of practice, but I’m finally figuring out how to keep it going. I, personally, manually turn the compost so the new stuff gets covered [which helps keep mice/rats out of it] and autumn has given me an ongoing supply of leaves to dump in when it gets too wet so I balance it out for the slimy critters - you gotta get some brown in with the green, as they say [I don’t know who *they* are].
I’m happy to not send all that fresh stuff into landfill to rot, I’m happy to feed some worms, and I’m happy to let one of the bins settle enough for me to be able to use the compost to fill a vegetable planter, or even just on the bottom of some pots when I plant some seeds.
THE COVERED LEAF PILE
This is a new one. I’d read about how you can collect autumn leaves into plastic bin bags and set them aside for a year and then tear them open to find good leaf mulch, or compost, or soil, or something. We have a lot of leaves, and I didn’t want a pile of ugly plastic bags loitering about, so I tried something I thought was close enough.
I placed all of the leaves, and some grass clippings, into the corner of our property where we’d built a leaf composting structure out of some bits of wood and metal from a decommissioned bed and swing set [separate things, not a bed *&* swing set, that would just be crazy].
The pile was a solid foot tall/thick. I watered the pile a little and then placed a big black tarp over it all and held it down with 4 bricks. That was in April. I plan to crack it open like the Arc of the Covenant in July, but I have taken 2 peeks under the hood so far. One was in May, where I could see it all compacting and starting to turn a little, some signs of worms, it was looking like a fun project, and then once was this month where I unveiled a thriving worm metropolis, the leaves mostly turned to soil, the whole crust of the affair thick and crumbly and delicious to the turn of my pitchfork.
It’s covered again and my hope is to use some of it in the vegetable gardens, and some into the compost bins to give them a little worm infusion and hit of inspiration.
The best part of this is, it required so little effort from me. Just pile it, cover it, and then wait a term - yes, my brain still measures time in school terms.
THE FRESH PRODUCE GARDEN
My wife is amazing, so when we bought this house 5 years ago, she saw the 1 vegetable garden bed this place had and decided we could do better. So, behold, we now have 8 different garden beds in which we can grow fresh produce. Most of them built, by hand, by the wife. A visionary and a hard worker.
When the spring/summer months treat us well, we grow: raspberries at a punnet or two a day, cherry tomatoes at a similar rate, strawberries have had some good years, and eggplants have definitely become a new quality addition to the turnover. We’ve done watermelon with success, and pumpkins quite well. I’ve yet to yield success with capsicum; the one time it grew well it tasted like plastic. Oh, zucchinis usually take hold, both green and yellow, at a rate that’s faster than any human family could consume, so I’ll take spares into work. Or just google random zucchini recipes, like the time I made zucchini nacho floats - my name, not theirs [whoever *they* might be].
In winter, we’ve seen beets and potatoes go well. I really want to try mushrooms, in a separate location. The herbs do well, and I need to get better at working out what fun single season floral stuff I could plant that might help the garden/insects/soil in general.
This garden serves to feed the family, primarily, and ensure we aren’t spending $50 a week on things like raspberries, but instead just invest a dollar a week into their watering - a task I find mindful to do, and really mindful when it comes time to harvest the ripe output at morning or night. And I did do the maths on it, and the watering of a garden really doesn’t cost all that much in the grand scheme of things. Compared to a 5 minute shower, or a family of 4 showering, watering the garden is quite cost effective, and makes you want to cut down your shower times, and you actually get stuff that’ll save you money from the garden. I never once sold anything out of my shower.
I still openly admit there’s way more still to learn than I’ve ever mastered, but I love doing it all with my wife, and hope our kids watch and enjoy and taste and learn from it all.
THE NEW GREENHOUSE
We built a new greenhouse recently, well, I got my son to build it. It’s 2 metres tall, and a metre wide, and it’s an experiment for us to see how we can use it functionally [we’ve never used a good sized one, usually we just slap them over stuff we don’t want the 9 months of frost to kill down here]. We set about filling the greenhouse with stuff we thought would work well.
The first thing, and the inspiration for the possible need of such a contraption/structure, was two kiwi fruit plants, a young lad and lass. Now, they might have died anyway when the temp got down to -6 one time, and I might just be soaking their corpses in the water, but I honestly don’t think we’ll know until Spring arrives and the plant looks alive or starts to rot in the oncoming heat.
Whereas the second thing we put in, a tomato plant that just sprung up out of some composted soil, is definitely dead. It’s still in the greenhouse, I definitely need to take it out and compost it, but that hasn’t happened yet. Because of reasons [laziness].
But the thing that excites me is the success I’ve had planting some seedlings in there. I took some small pots and grew all-season carrots, phlox, and something else. They started as dry seeds, they started to poke up out of the soil, and right now I’ve taken their little soft cardboard pot and put it into a larger proper plastic pot and continued to water them, and take them out for daily sun, and protect them inside the greenhouse every night, and now they’re showing more growth.
I like to believe I’ll later be able to repot them again into something larger, and maybe I’ll be able to make them flower, or something. I don’t *exactly* know what’s going to happen, but for now I’m keeping them alive, they’re green, and there’s the promise of...something...in the future.
MY OFFICE MATES
I have a few little green friends in my office.
I have a beautiful pot plant whose proper name I’ve lost to time, but it has striking red leaves, and they just keep growing up and out. I’m sure I read once that plants indoors create more oxygen, and considering my office is 50% paper, 40% dust, 9% other materials, and I worry 1% farts and carbon dioxide, then I think this plant might be keeping me alive.
I also like to wipe the leaves,and water it daily,and just enjoy the colours. I’m a simple, simple man.
The sidekick plant is a small aloe vera plant that I just nearly killed. I was watering it like a cactus, which it is not, and so it got very frail and almost felt “empty” to the touch. Some water immersion and direct sunlight brought it back to life and it’s looking good now. It’s also apparently a good oxygen producer.
I grew some red basil from seed recently, so that got its own little pot and is going strong. It’s a personal favourite because I like basil, and it’s red - it’s really just that simple.
And this month I planted 4 new seeds I hope to get to a state where I can repot into the greenhouse, like I did the 3 above. These are swan river daisy, which is doing alright. Zinnia, which is going well, as is the salvia. Then the cornflower is going gangbusters, which is the one I have my strongest hopes attached to.
Apparently all 4 of these seed well enough through winter, and should be good to really unleash into the spring sun and climate, which is more likely the time I’ll consider the pot transfer.
These are the trivialities that take up my mind, but they keep me sane, and bring me joy, and hopefully they do just a tiny little thing for the environment. Not much, but even if it just shows my kids how to engage with greenery, then I’m totally fine with that.
All steps in the right direction are, by definition, in the right direction.