Gonna try and use this as a daily log going forward. I don’t think anyone follows this in any case. But this is where I think the “tweet”-y stuff can go, plus I can keep an eye on what I’m doing daily and things of the sort.
Gonna try and use this as a daily log going forward. I don’t think anyone follows this in any case. But this is where I think the “tweet”-y stuff can go, plus I can keep an eye on what I’m doing daily and things of the sort.
I just got done writing a short story on my new typewriter, and the one thing I really appreciate about the experience is how … relaxing it has been.
I don’t know what it is about working on the typewriter, but I don’t feel the usual stress of constantly thinking “Is this good?” “Where should this bit go?” “Am I doing justice to this dialogue between these characters?” while I’m writing my first draft.
You know how people tell you that the first draft should just be about telling yourself the story, just getting it down on paper? It actually felt like that this time, without forcing anything.
I think it’s partly the fact that you can’t really edit anything you’ve already written, so you’re just moving forward. So the editing part of my brain is simply not working when I’m writing on the typewriter, even for the kind of tiny edits I usually make when I write on the computer (like just now when I went back to change “really not working” to “simply not working” to avoid using “really” too many times in this post).
Even when writing a story with pen on paper, I’m usually looking back and making changes or writing little notes to myself. None of that here – the most I’ve done is, when I read the whole thing back this afternoon before writing the final chunk, I made a margin note that I need to add a few sentences between two points early on when I do the second draft.
I think it also forces you to think ahead and hold more of the story in your head while you write, while still not working from a nailed-down outline which (for me at least) saps some of the spontaneity from the writing process.
In sum, I really enjoyed this, and plan to do a lot more of it. I’m not sure it’d work with a comic script, but it might be worth a try.
At the start of the pandemic, I was very happy making coffee with manual burr grinder, using the approximate grammage mark in the grinder itself, and my trusty Aeropress. Right now, I have an electric burr grinder, a specialised coffee weighing scale, and a pourover setup and two favourite recipes.
I’m quite happy with how I got here, though. I used to use pre-ground coffee and a French press. Then, a friend of mine made me a genuinely excellent cup of coffee with his Aeropress, and I realised that for around 10-15% more effort, I could get a minimum 50% better coffee. And I decided to make that my measure for each step I’d take, rather than taking a standing jump into the inevitable rabbithole which can be quite a money sink (if you know me at all, you know that I can get slightly obsessive about new stuff I like).
Same with the manual grinder – I stopped using pre-ground coffee when I realised how much better home-ground coffee is. And in the pandemic, my friend Sahil and I started exchanging notes on coffee, and I started watching a lot (I mean a lot) of videos by James Hoffmann.
So I took baby steps – first I got a cheap kitchen scale so I could brew by weight rather than by eye. That turned out great. Then I got a temperature-controlled electric kettle. That helped a lot. Finally, I took the plunge and bought an electric burr grinder because the cheap manual one had started to annoy me, and the better-quality manual grinders were extremely close in price to the Baratza Encore, which is supposed to be a great budget electric grinder.
Then I started thinking about the difference between pourovers and Aeropress coffee. Same thing happened – Sahil made me a pourover cup of a rather nice Kenyan coffee, and the pourover version was far superior to what I’d been brewing with the same coffee in my Aeropress. And making a good pourover requires a good coffee scale, so I got a nice one which came with a timer.
I think the only thing I’ve got left in this particular step of the journey is to get a nice gooseneck kettle to do good pourovers, and I’m contemplating if I should get a stove-top one or just spring for a good electric one with temperature control like a Fellow Stagge or something.
I wanted to finish writing a graphic novel today. It appeared to me in a blaze one night, and I wrote the outline in around two hours. It was incandescent – apart from a couple of small details (and one thing about the ending), I knew exactly what went where, and why things were happening.
I’m not naturally an outliner – as I’ve written in my newsletter, I generally need to write the story to figure out what the story is. But I think it was partly because it’s a crime book, and partly because it’s largely silent, told through images, that I knew what choices were being made as I outlined it.
So that was last Thursday, and I figured I’d write it in around ten days, retaining the white heat aspect of it. It’s a short graphic novel – around 80 pages start to end – but, sadly, there was just no time to be found.
I did write a quarter of it, though. Finished page 20 today. And I’m very happy with what I have so far – I’ll need to edit the dialogue a bunch, but the images fell into place as I needed them to.
And I’ve narrated the whole thing to a few people, and they all seem to like it.
I’ll admit I’m a little disappointed I didn’t finish the whole thing – “I wrote it in a week” is an attractive proposition, especially when you’re thinking of a short pulp story whose roughness will be part of what makes it interesting.
But I’ll keep plugging at it a few pages at a time, and maybe I’ll be able to say, “I wrote it in two weeks.”
I’ve been trying to watch more films recently – particularly from countries/regions I’m not too familiar. One of the cool things about the time we’re living in is that a lot of artists and institutes around the world have decided to put out their work for free for people to experience, which I feel is the absolute right thing to do in the circumstances.
I posted a bunch of prose and comics available for free in my newsletter, but I’ve been watching both plays and movies that are available right now. The National Theatre put out Frankenstein with Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, and Antony & Cleopatra with Sophie Okonedo and Ralph Fiennes. Shakespeare’s Globe did a live viewing of Romeo & Juliet, currently has The Two Noble Kinsmen and will be showing MacBeth from the 11th. Meanwhile, the Dharamsala International Film Festival has a viewing room with some excellent movies.
On the DIFF viewing room, I watched Turup – a Bhopal-based movie about caste, religion and gender, that’s a bit ham-handed about some aspects, but is admirable as a venture by an entire collective of people from various backgrounds within Bhopal.
The other movie that I found myself intrigued by was Jallikattu, a satirical movie from Kerala about a village whose hidden resentments spill out when a buffalo meant for the slaughter escapes and rampages through the village. It gets repetitive in its themes occasionally, and the ending overstays its welcome (particularly by sliding into a version of blackface was as as needless as it was iffy), but I found myself wishing more of Bollywood was this direct in its treatment of humanity as it exists instead of the innumerable versions of urban wish fulfilment it keeps spitting out.
Since I wrote last night’s post about the webcomic format, I decided to try and come up with an idea for it. Maybe I wouldn’t do three 100-page books, but three 50-page ones (or one 150-page one), but I wanted to keep to the idea of a single story.
The original story I’d thought about for it was fairly episodic, because I’d had this idea that I could have guest artists come in once in a while. The problem with that ended up being that I had a lot of engine, but not a lot of heart behind why the story was happening that specific way.
So this time, I wanted to go for a single continuous story that I could tell with a single artist (though one that could be adapted to multiple artists if it came to that) but for which I knew the whys. I ransacked my notebook of old ideas, but nothing really fit. Then I went to bed, and I lay in the dark going through lots of ideas and combinations of genres and characters to see if anything sparked. I think I went through almost every genre I’ve read, let alone written.
And finally one coalesced into a nugget that I can start work from. It’s still quite rough, but I think it’s reasonably strong – I narrated the setup to a couple of people today just as a “Would you read this?” check, and it passed.
What led me to it was realising that in thinking of genre, I was sort of limiting myself to a framework that’s not helpful in generating ideas. So I started thinking about the visuals. After all, there had to be a strong reason I wanted to make a comic and not a novel here.
So I asked myself – if this has to be a comic, then what do I want it to look like? And I knew I wanted to do something that looked a bit like Moebius, something with that line and that colour, and from there, I started thinking about what I would want to do with visuals like that. I could work on something fantastical, or surreal, but also maybe do straightforward sci-fi.
Funny thing is, every time I read Moebius, the stories never give me the same thing I’m getting from the visual style. I want something solid, something grounded but strange, and the stories are mostly philosophical babble, abstracted from any kind of reality. Which is fine – those are the stories he wanted to tell.
But that’s one of the most fun exercises for a writer – you see something that has some interesting aspects, but you feel it doesn’t entirely work. And then you think – How would I fix it? You ask yourself enough questions, and you have a story completely distanced from your inspiration.
So that’s what I have for now – I’m obviously not going to tell you the story here. But I might use this log for more engine posts as I get going.
Borrowing from Ganzeer’s (and Warren Ellis’s before him) concept of the Comics Engine – thinking about delivery formats for a comic.
This is one I’ve had in mind for a while – years in fact – and the fact that it still appeals to me implies that it’s a reasonably robust one. I kinda have a story for it too, but it’s been three years and I haven’t written that story, so it might be time to find a new story for the format.
Anyway, here it is:
You make the comic either at standard comics size or, if you’re feeling a bit expansive, at European size. I was going to make it at A4 size, which is only slightly off European size.
Anyway, take the size of the page, and cut it in half vertically. You have a half-page of the sort that used to be published in European comics magazines. In fact, that’s where I got it from, after observing that most of the early Asterix comics were quite neatly split halfway down each page.
Anyway, you do a comic that runs four half-pages a week. That’s two full pages a week. And because you’re composing to half-pages, each of those full pages will end up fairly dense. And you have beats to write to – there’s the half-page, then the full page, and then each set of the weekly two pages.
At the end of a year, building in two hiatus weeks, you have 100 full pages – that’s a graphic novel.
My idea was to do a webcomic for three years that’d end up a trilogy of graphic novels.
As I said, I still really like the format. Just needs a story.
I haven’t been able to write since the lockdown began. Oddly enough, unlike some of my actual writer friends who are having trouble engaging emotionally with their writing while the pandemic goes on, for me it’s been a matter of logistics. There’s a lot I’m eager to write – I just can’t find the time.
I end up spending somewhere between an hour to two hours cooking, dishwashing and keeping the house (and shopping once a week), since I’ve given my cleaning lady a couple of months off. Other than that, I refuse to compromise on the things I need to keep me going at this time – movies, books and conversations. I haven’t met a single person I know in a month (I have met the people running the shops and the security in my building, but that doesn’t count, really) so I know that I need to stay in touch with the people I care about so I can stay on an even enough keel, emotionally.
And, weirdly enough, I seem to have more lettering work than before rather than less. Comics people seem to be taking the fact that they can work from home quite seriously, and I’ve been taking up a few genuinely interesting new projects. This added with the fact I’m working at around 80-90% of my usual efficiency because of the summer heat and the … waves at everything … means my hands are pretty full with work.
So I haven’t really had any time to write – at least any productive time to write. I’ve come up with a few new short stories that I’m hoping I’ll get to write soon, and my big projects – revising SAWBONES and finishing Draft 1 of STRANGER – are also waiting for the next batch of free time I might have.
I’ve decided for now to abandon my usual strategy of writing for an hour a day – I don’t really have that hour. Instead, I’ll be trying to figure out an extra free day a week, or maybe every couple of weeks, apart from the weekend, and try and write then.
I read The Love Bunglers a few days ago, by Jaime Hernandez, previously serialised in Love and Rockets like most Los Bros Hernandez stories. It’s a beautiful hardback, with a great debossed cover and quality paper.
It’s also one of the very best of the Hernandez stories. It centres on Maggie and her ex Ray (the titular love bunglers) and it portrays their story with the richness and depth it deserves, with vignettes and scenes accumulated over the decades, told non-linearly, reflecting the way love is usually experienced in life.
I think my favourite thing about it is how the choice of scenes almost seems arbitrary at first – entirely slice-of-life – but going towards the end, it gathers the momentum of a singular story, while never losing its acknowledgement of all of its characters’ humanness, and not just that of its principals.
As a comics reader, and as someone who’s now made them for more than a decade, I’ve been thinking about my limitations.
The first and foremost is obvious – I can’t draw. All my various attempts over the years have taught me ways to appreciate other people’s art, and lettering thousands of pages certainly gives you a glimpse into how pages work on a basic level. But that’s a big lacuna – not being able to actually do the thing that makes a comic a comic.
Second, I’ve had a blindness towards other kinds of comics than American. I’ve definitely dabbled in European comics (grew up on Asterix and Tintin), I have my favourite webcomics and manga. But push comes to shove, these are not media I have an attachment to – not nearly as intense as the American variety.
I haven’t been able to pinpoint to myself why that is. There are some webcomics that are investigating the format of comics in a way paper comics never could,* there’s manga that’ll give you an emotional ride of a depth and breadth that most American comics can only dream of. And European comics have some of the best, most laboured-over art. And yet, I love individual examples of all of these, but the media themselves evoke no passion.
* The Webtoon vertical scrolling feels like something that should fire up my imagination, but I’ve read a bunch and … nope.
I’ve tried to tackle this a few times over the years, and it’s introduced me to one of my favourite comics ever – Pluto – but I suspect this is something I’ll eventually just have to make my peace with.