TWO FISTED HOMEOPAPE May/31 - The Alchemy [and Emotions] of Writing
EVERFROST #1 is out this Wednesday! :]
♫ I applied for a rescue dog,
But if I get you dog,
You're rescuing me ♫
-------
2021 -- beyond.
EVERFROST #1 is upon us. Praise.
Okay, this is a big week.
Everfrost has been so long in the making, I’m now wildly excited to see it finally hit the shelves, and there are all kinds of emotions coming to the surface. The usual excitement mingled with fear is natural. Relief, pride, maybe even contentment. I’m really proud of this book, and it coming out heralds another new complete story I’ll have put into the world.
Getting the chance to tell a story is no small feat. I don’t want to brush over this, I never want to brush past this. Creating a full world, populating it, and finding some moments worth a damn that you want to share - that’s the alchemy of writing. I forget sometimes just how much a feat it is to get anything released. So many people say they have a story; so few sit down to write it. Those who do write it, might never finish it. Then it has to be released. Along the way, delays can happen, creative teams dissolve, collaborators drift away, Covid ruins publishers or whole business models.
There are so many possible barriers between an idea in your head and your idea in someone else’s hands, and it hurdle, explode, dig under, and punt into the sun each and every one of those barriers is in itself something to be celebrated. I don’t ever want to lose that feeling of awe and excitement.
The first novel I ever wrote and completed, I walked to my local bakery and bought myself a little blueberry crumble I’d been eyeing off for months [not the one singular item, I hope, but just that flavour of treat]. It was delicious. And that was a novel I never even released, but the act of completion felt huge.
Later, I’d written so many scripts, so the first comic I had completed was FATHERHOOD, and the chance to hold it and sell it and see other readers love it was a huge moment in my life. As far as debuts go, it was a success not just because it did well, but because people liked it and it became the fuel that burned for me through the subsequent half a decade of grinding away to make comics.
Since then, I’ve released - *checks my shelf* - 7 complete minis/graphic novels, and so EVERFROST will be #8. This is still a huge deal for me, and considering how close I felt to losing this one a few times, I should celebrate its arrival. I should celebrate all arrivals, I don’t ever want to work in my office through strange hours on something where I just toss it aside into the world and move on. These are all labours of love as I’ve bled myself into them all.
I really hope you like Everfrost, but honestly, I hope any of you get a chance to love it as much as I do.
Comic shops will have their copies this week - whatever day you head in, I hope you find a copy on the shelf [or you wisely preordered so they’d put one aside for you and you have no risk of missing out]. Buy it with a smile, tell your comic shop retail magus how excited you are to read it - I bet they love hearing that kind of thing. Comic shop peeps aren’t in it for the millions of dollars, either, they just love seeing stories connect from one human to another.
This sci fi heartbreak is full of passion and creativity and hope and lived experience and desire and energy and I could not have asked for a better team than Sami Kivela, Lauren Affe, Jim Campbell, Dan Hill, and Matt Pizzolo at Black Mask Studios to help bring it to the page.
Thus begins our 4 issue miniseries, each issue packed with fun back matter pages, and our whole walking hearts. Keep your eyes out for this cover, and if you get a chance let us know what you think.
---
Writing is rewriting is writing is rewriting is writing is rewriting is writing is rewriting is writing is rewriting is writing is rewriting, etc [edit this title, please].
I have now finished Draft 2 of the script for SHE Vol. 2 - which is actually the fourth draft, because my brain is stupid, and doesn’t do anything in a clear fashion.
This volume is going to be a huge step up from Vol. 1 - I’ve really pushed myself in a lot of areas, and I think this reads real fine. It’s currently sitting at 72 pages, which is up from Vol. 1 and even up from Draft 1 which was 66.
The new pages came about because I realised the whole Act V was just...lacking something. There was a beat and then a reveal which landed super soft on the page. So I spent a week waking early, getting the morning work done, and setting aside about half an hour to stare into the infinite void of my SHE notebook and just hope I’d figure it out.
I spent a lot of time lost in the ruled lines, but I eventually emerged with a whole new structure for this specific reveal in which it would pop and actually matter. The feeling of getting that breakthrough was great, and then scripting it and finding out it worked was another big victory.
The only problem was, the new plan added about 6 pages, and rewrote another 10 or so, so it was a decent rewrite, but it drew from a lot of the existing matter, so I was able to knock it out a lot quicker than just staring at the blinking cursor.
The result is this script which I’m dearly in love with. We shall see what the timeline looks like moving forward.
After this, I decided to script a set of pitch pages for [THE SHARP INK PROJECT]. The first publisher didn’t need complete pages, but I wanted to flesh out my knowledge of this world and the players on this stage, and if the publisher passes then other publishers may like to see script/completed pages, so I didn’t think it’d hurt to get this done. It’s only 5 pages.
I planned them out and wrote them in my project notebook. They came out pretty well, so I let them sit a few days, came back to them, and added a few tweaks before typing them up. It was in the typing that I finally addressed the elephant in the room - I’d written about 4 different ways to drop the final page, and I’d done that because I couldn’t find one that popped.
So 4 different versions where none work is really close to no different versions, because I’m gonna scrap them all. Typing it all was a joy, as the words came into me and back out, but then the final page, Page Five, the lock page...I needed something.
Again, turn the chair, away from the monitor, and stare into the void of the ruled lines.
Stare.
Despair.
Then, a light. It took a lot of typing, deleting, moving, cutting/pasting, deleting, typing, and despairing. But I finally got there. The final page locks us in, it sets up world, character, conflict, and story moving forward. I am happy with it. For now.
Now that these plates are spinning, I turn my attention to other things in the coming week, and give each plate a little whirl and see if it’ll last another week.
---
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.
The script, however, kicks off tomorrow, so I hope you dig it.
---
ASD&D.
We had a long weekend, so my kid asked if he could play D&D with me, and then he invited his best mate around. It finally happened - I was needed to step up to DM for my kid and a mate so I needed to bring my A game. As such, I enlisted the help of Big Tim Stiles’ latest creation, the GORILLA WARFARE Zine:
I took two encounters from this awesome zine he recently Kickstarted, and took these two fine young gents through a fireside encounter along the way to help a gorilla village restore their security perimeter.
It went pretty well. My kid rolled a Natural 1 so I made him land face first into some strange animal poop - always a good laugh. Later he rolled a Natural 20 on an attack so, in the form of a crane through the magic of his druid’s Wild Shape, he swooped in to attack a plant-created peryton and tore it in half - completely epic.
His mate rolled a Natural 20 on a Perception check so I let him know exactly what he was looking at, and a fear he could exploit, which he instantly knew how to do, causing the villain in question to spontaneously combust in fright - a very funny outcome.
They ate a weird pig-rabbit hybrid, and cast many spells [sometimes on each other when things didn’t go well], and laughter and thinking were both had, which made me smile.
I ended on a cliffhanger of epic 100 foot tall proportions, and then instantly wanted to play on, and then asked to play the next day, so I guess it was a success if that’s the outcome. I look forward to coming back because the chance to help build a great memory for your kid is always a great Sunday afternoon.
-------
PERHAPS YOU'D CARE TO SAMPLE
A GAME OF DOUBLES on Kickstarter - this one-shot, with alternate endings, looks pretty damn awesome. Love something doing it a little different with the writing.
-------
GRIST FOR THE MILL
MCFARLAND, USA - a Disney movie about a cross country running team in a mostly Mexican school in California. You can pretty much script it yourself from that logline, but that doesn’t stop this being a charming piece of cinema. I think the fact it pushes a narrative that teachers really can make a difference is something I found really rewarding on a personal level. But ultimately, it’s an enjoyable piece of fluff that got me choked up a few times.
Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.
POST CREDITS SEQUENCE
We have created the next month’s Bullet Journal tracking page. The prophecy of pedantry is completed. We are mildly concerned about the amount of columns to track, but we have studied the brain in question and understand this to be an accurate and true reflection of how it can [and doesn’t always functionally] work.
Behold, and despair.