TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE June/28 - Turning the work of your life into an algorithm.
Seems like a healthy thing to do.
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
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2021 -- beyond.
I am on holidays.
Two weeks off, and nowhere to go because while I’ve usually got clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right, this time it’s Covid to the north, and down to the south. But, thankfully, I’m stuck in the middle with my family, and there is no other way I’d do a little ‘self-containment.’
Plans are afoot to get through the No School Times by engaging in many/all of the following: reading quietly, building Lego, hopefully tricking the kids into doing a science experiment with me for school, playing in the backyard, gardening, refurbishing a “table,” board games, D&D, going for walks, and many tv episodes and movies on streaming platforms. Probably even try a few new meals out because I’ve got a captive audience to eat it.
Thankfully, we can also mooch about in our territory, there’s no Covid here, but we’ll most likely keep that to a wise minimum just in case. You never know when marauders from the north have passed through and touched a few door handles. But we can actually visit friends and live a “normal” life, and for all of that I am thankful.
I’ve also got plans for the two weeks that I’ll slowly mosey through:
SCHOOL: I need to prep some work for my class that involves some marking with feedback, some lesson planning, and then setting out the first week of lessons. I need to watch two different professional learning workshops that are online and take my notes from them.
LIFE: I want to donate plasma, because it’s been a few months. I want to do some reading and gardening for general joy and relaxation. There are a bunch of mates I wanna schedule a coffee/beer with, so I’ll see what the schedule looks like. I’ve also booked my first appointment with a new counsellor; something I’m going to commit to for the rest of the year because 2022 is bringing a big change and I want to be as mentally prepared for it as I possibly can, and I recognise external help would be the best solution for this one. I’m generally able to muddle through my own self-care of my collapsing brain, but I think a professional in the mix is going to help considering what’s coming down the pike. Nothing terrible, but I can recognise it as the kind of time my brain would completely roll into a pit trap and then unhelpfully stumble around as loudly and blindly as possible, so the aim is to be at “Peak Mental Fitness” for this - if that’s even a thing. If not, well, I’m sure I’ll get other chunks coughed out of my brain and surely that can’t hurt, right?
WRITING: Hopefully finish the SHE Vol. 2 script. Keep pitching the next stuff until one lands. Prepare whatever I can for the release of 5 issues between now and September of EVERFROST and BLACK BEACON.
But, also, and this is important - remember it’s only a two week break, I can only do so much, and I should use as much as I can to be with my family who I normally miss while I’m at work, and just generally give my brain a chance to cool off. I can definitely do the first, that second one is always elusive.
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Amendments.
I wrote all of the above, and then a few hours ago half the country seemed to go into lockdown. My territory has gone Masks Up for most experiences outside of the home, and it’s pretty much reframed everything for me, and yet nothing at all.
Mostly: I’ll still be relaxing at home, etc.
But now: I need to really prepare myself juuuuuust in case something happens requiring schooling to go remote. Thankfully, after last time we did remote learning, I was certain we would go into it again so I prepared a few new things, and I continued to train staff, and I thought long and deep about how I’d improve things next time around. I feel ready for it, I honestly do, and I also think it’s an unlikely chance to occur. But I still want to be ready.
And the other thing: I need to consider how I feel with this happening. Having been lucky enough to be in Australia, where Covid hasn’t run rampant, and we’ve been proactive enough to usually get on top of it, I have been able to feel “fine” through most of this pandemic. But like most situations, you don’t rank the context of your problems against the worst in the world, but just against your baseline, and so right now it feels...shaky, uncertain, concerning...to have all of this Covid news jump up in the last 48 hours.
Most of my two week plans won’t change, but my feelings about them might, so I need to be conscious of this.
I wonder if it’ll leak into my writing? I recently realised a new story I’m breaking is being influenced by Covid, and I didn’t consciously make it so. I just looked over the story and was like: Oh, that part is definitely a response to a pandemic.
I doubt I’ll ever write a comic “about” Covid, but I think I’ll start to see it woven into what I write. And it’ll be interesting to see how that come out.
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EVERFROST Script Pages on my Patreon
For the month of June, to celebrate the release of EVERFROST #1, I released 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 read it all because they are all live now.
It’s been interesting to go through the pages, and then discuss them with KillaCam in the comments each day as they drop. If you’re looking at writing comic scripts, this is a good place to start.
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ASD&D.
Caught up with a mate and ran his completely homebrewed game system, with both our kids, and it was awesome. Different dice mechanics, different character builds, and it changes the way you think about things just enough to make it pretty exciting to be new and thinking in a new way. We also got to slay a hydra in a battle that was genuinely full of tension.
Ooh, and if we enter lockdown this time I’ve had time to set up my D&D club so we’d be able to continue online - that would be interesting!
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PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
Very indicative of my online reading lately. Nothing to share.
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GRIST FOR THE MILL
THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY - This is a very good show. It’s based on some kids books, but the show runs at 50 minute episodes, which gives it a feel like it’s adult drama - it actually has plenty of UMBRELLA ACADEMY vibes, mixed with a healthy dose of A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS. The result is a show that doesn’t feel like it’s ever talking down to the younger audience, and it’s completely engaging for the adults in the room. There are 2 episodes up and I’m completely invested.
I should also shout out - this show really made me strongly think of THE UNEXPLAINABLE DISAPPEARANCE OF MARS PATEL podcast, which is a masterclass of audio drama storytelling./
LATER - I’m absolutely flying through the latest Stephen King, from Hard Case Crime, and I’m loving this single fact about it - the narrative isn’t all that big. If you plot out what occurs in the story, it’s not all that convoluted. The book is all about the central premise, a young kid who can see dead people, and then running that kid through a few loosely interconnected scenarios that build to more of a life than a full narrative. Don’t get me wrong, it builds, and calls back, and is well crafted - but I’m mostly here for the voice and the interactions and the little scenes. Should finish this soon as I cannot keep my hands off it.
Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
Had that thought where I wonder - how much more will I write?
I’ve written 7 miniseries in 8 years of publishing, and also a number of one-shots and short stories. So, let’s take that speed - I write one story a year.
I’m approaching 40. Will I make comics until I’m 60? I mean, even that seems like a stretch, so let’s scale it back - 55. If I write, at this pace, until I’m 55 then I’d add 16 more miniseries to my name.
I already have Everfrost, Black Beacon, and Speed Republic done, so that leaves 13 stories. What will those 13 stories be? I have nearly half of those in pitches right now..but I’ve pitched plenty of dead stuff alongside the published 7 so far, so maybe stories told, and stories dreamed up will be a different number.
But I do know once I lock into writing one story, that story can take up a solid 3-6 months of my brain and time. This always feels like a bug, and not a feature in my system, but I need to consider if that’s true.
I also think about other storytellers - how many stories has Stephen King told? He’s an unfair, and prolific, metric to grade against - what about Michael Chabon? Ondaatje? How many novels do those people put out? What about Tarantino, PTA, Scorsese? What rate do they churn out content?
I’m trained to think comic success is writing 5 different scripts for 5 different books every month, and if most stories are 4-6 issues, then that’s rough maths into ~12 stories a year for those writers. But that looks like the rest of my career to me. Whereas the best and brightest of comics probably have over 100 stories in a decade, whereas I’ll only clock 10% of that.
Which isn’t necessarily a problem, but just a thought exercise to consider. How much more do I have in me, and how will I go about telling these stories? Does this help me allocate my time wisely Y / N ?