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kmclaude · 3 years

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Forgive me Father, I have no awful headcanons for you, only a general question on comic making. How do you do it, writing-wise/how do you decide what points go where, how do you plot it out (or do you have any resources on the writing aspect that you find useful?) Not to get too bogged down in details, but I attended a writer’s workshop and the author in residence suggested I transfer my wordy sci-fi WIP into graphic novel script, as it might work better. (I do draw, but I don’t know if I have it in me to draw a whole comic—characters in motion? Doing things? With backgrounds? How dare, why can’t everyone just stand around looking pretty)

I was interested but it quickly turned into a lot of internal screaming as I tried to figure out how to compress the hell out of it, since novels are free to do a lot more internal monologuing and such compared to a comic format (to say nothing of trying to write a script without seeing how the panels lay out—just for my own sake, I might have to do both concurrently.)

As an aside, to get a feel for graphic novels I was rereading 99RM and was reminded of how great it was—tightly plotted, intriguing, and anything to do with Ashmedai was just beautifully drawn. I need more Monsignor Tiefer and something something there are parallels between Jehan and Daniel in my head and I don’t know if they make sense but it works for me. (As an aside, I liked the emphasis on atonement being more than just the word sorry, but acknowledgment you did wrong and an attempt to remedy it—I don’t know why that spoke to me the way that it did.)

I thought Tumblr had a word count limit for asks but so far it has offered zero resistance, oh well. I don’t have much else to say but on the topic of 99RM, Adam getting under Monsignor’s skin is amazing, 10/10 (about the Pride picture earlier)

wow tumblr got rid of the markdown editor! or at least in asks which means the new editor probably has no markdown....god i hate this site! anyway...

Totally! So first, giant thank you for the compliments! Second, I have a few questions in turn for you before I dive into a sort of answer, since I can give some advice to your questions in general but it also sounds like you have a specific conundrum on your hands.

My questions to your specific situation are:

did the author give any reason for recommending a, in your words, "wordy" story be turned into a graphic novel?

is the story you're writing more, like you said, "internal monologuing"? action packed? where do the visuals come from?

do you WANT it to be a comic? furthermore, do you want it to be a comic you then must turn around and draw? or would you be interested in writing for comics as a comic writer to have your words turned into art?

With those questions in mind, let me jump into the questions you posed me!

Let me start with a confession...

I've said this before but let me say it again: Ninety-Nine Righteous Men was not originally a comic — it was a feature-length screenplay! And furthermore, it was written for a class so it got workshopped again and again to tighten the plot by a classroom of other nerds — so as kind as your compliments are, I'm giving credit where credit is due as that was not just a solo ship sailing on the sea. On top of that, it got adapted (by me) into a comic for my thesis, so my advisor also helped me make it translate or "read" well given I was director, actor, set designer, writer, editor, SFX guy, etc. all in one. And it was a huge help to have someone say "there is no way you can go blow by blow from script to comic: you need to make edits!" For instance, two scenes got compressed to simple dialogue overlaid on the splashpage of Ashmedai raping Caleb (with an insert panel of Adam and Daniel talking the next day.) What had been probably at least 5 pages became 1.

Additionally, I don't consider myself a strong plotter. That said, I found learning to write for film made the plotting process finally make some damn sense since the old plot diagram we all got taught in grammar school English never made sense as a reader and definitely made 0 sense as a writer — for me, for some reason, the breakdown of 25-50-25 (approx. 25 pages for act 1, 50 for act 2 split into 2 parts of 25 each, 25 pages for act 3) and the breaking down of the beats (the act turning points, the mid points, the low point) helped give me a structure that just "draw a mountain, rising action, climax is there, figure it out" never did. Maybe the plot diagram is visually too linear when stories have ebb and flow? I don't know. But it never clicked until screenwriting. So that's where I am coming from. YMMV.

I should also state that there's Official Ways To Write Comic Scripts to Be Drawn By An Artist (Especially If You Work For A Real Publisher As a Writer) and there's What Works For You/Your Team. I don't give a rat's ass about the former (and as an artist, I kind of hate panel by panel breakdowns like you see there) so I'm pretty much entirely writing on the latter here. I don't give a good god damn about official ways of doing anything: what works for you to get it done is what matters.

What Goes Where?

Like I said, 99RM was a screenplay so it follows, beat-wise, the 3-act screenplay structure (hell, it's probably more accurate to say it follows the act 1/act 2A/act 2B/act 3 structure.) So there was the story idea or concept that then got applied to those story beats associated with the structure, and from there came the Scene-by-scene Breakdown (or Expanded Scene Breakdown) which basically is an outline of beats broken down into individual scenes in short prose form so you get an overview of what happens, can see pacing, etc. In the resources at the end I put some links that give information on the whole story beat thing.

(As an aside: for all my short comics, I don't bother with all that, frankly. I usually have an image or a concept or a bit of writing — usually dialogue or monologue, sometimes a concrete scene — that I pick at and pick at in a little sketchbook, going back and forth between writing and thumbnail sketches of the page. Or I just go by the seat of my pants and bullshit my way through. Either or. Those in many ways are a bit more like poems, in my mind: they are images, they are snapshots, they are feelings that I'm capturing in a few panels. Think doing mental math rather than writing out geometric proofs, yanno?)

Personally, I tend to lean on dialogue as it comes easier for me (it's probably why I'm so drawn to screenwriting!) so for me, if I were to do another longform GN, I'd probably take my general "uhhhhhh I have an idea and some beats maybe so I guess this should happen this way?" outline and start breaking it down scene by scene (I tend to write down scenes or scene sketches in that "uhhhh?" outline anyway LOL) and then figure out basic dialogue and action beats — in short, I'd kind of do the work of writing a screenplay without necessarily going full screenplay format (though I did find the format gave me an idea of timing/pacing, as 1 page of formatted script is about equal to 1 minute of screentime, and gave me room to sketch thumbnails or make edits on the large margins!) If you're not a monologue/soliloque/dialogue/speech person and more an image and description person, you may lean more into visuals and scenes that cut to each other.

Either way this of course introduces the elephant in the panel: art! How do you choose what to draw?

The answer is, well, it depends! The freedom of comics is if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You have the freedoms (and audio limitations) of a truly silent film with none of the physical limitations. Your words can move in real time with the images or they can be a narrative related to the scene or they could be nonsequitors entirely! The better question is how do you think? Do you need all the words and action written first before you break down the visuals? Do you need a panel by panel breakdown to be happy, or can you freewheel and translate from word and general outlines to thumbnails? What suits you? I really cannot answer this because I think when it comes to what goes where with regard to art, it's a bit of "how do you process visuals" and also a bit of "who's drawing this?" — effectively, who is the interpreter for the exact thing you are writing? Is it you or someone else? If it's you, would you benefit from a barebones script alongside thumbnailed paneling? Would you be served by a barebones script, then thumbnails, then a new script that includes panel and page breakdowns? What frees you up to do what you need to do to tell your story?

If I'm being honest, I don't necessarily worry about panels or what something will look like necessarily until I'm done writing. I may have an image that I clearly state needs to happen. I may even have a sequence of panels that I want to see and I do indeed sketch that out and make note of it in my script. But exactly how things will be laid out, paneled, situated? That could change up until I've sketched my final pencils in CSP (but I am writer and artist so admittedly I get that luxury.)

How do I compress from novel to comic?

Honest answer? You don't. Not really. You adapt from one to another. It's more a translation. Something that would take forever to write may take 1 page in a comic or may take a whole issue.

I'm going to pick on Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo spent a whole-ass book in Notre-Dame de Paris talking about a bird's eye view of Paris and other medieval architecture boring stuff, with I guess some foreshadowing with Montfaucon. Who cares. Not me. I like story. Anyway. When we translate that book to a movie any of the billion times someone's done that, we don't spend a billion years talking at length about medieval Paris. There's no great monologuing about the gibbet or whatever: you get to have some establishing shots, maybe a musical number, and then you move tf on. Because it's a movie, right? Your visuals are right there. We can see medieval Paris. We can see the cathedral. We can see the gibbet. We don't need a whole book: it's visually right there. Same with a comic: you may need many paragraphs to describe, say, a space station off of Sirius and one panel to show it.

On the flip side, you may take one line, maybe two, to say a character keyed in the special code to activate the holodeck; depending on the visual pacing, that could be a whole page of panels (are we trying to stretch time? slow it down? what are we emphasizing?) A character gives a sigh of relief — one line of text, yeah? That could be a frozen panel while a conversation continues on or that could be two (or more!) panels, similar to the direction [a beat] in screenwriting.

Sorry there's not a super easy answer there to the question of compression: it's a lot more of a tug, a push-pull, that depends on what you're conveying.

So Do I Have It In Me to Write & Draw a GN?

The only way you'll know is by doing. Scary, right? The thing is, you don't necessarily need to be an animation king or God's gift to background artists to draw a comic.

Hell, I hate backgrounds. I still remember sitting across from my friend who said "Claude you really need to draw an establishing exterior of the church at some point" and me being like "why do you hate me specifically" because drawing architecture? Again? I already drew the interior of the church altar ONCE, that should be enough, right? But I did draw an exterior of the church. Sorta. More like the top steeple. Enough to suggest what I needed to suggest to give the audience a better sense of place without me absolutely losing my gourd trying to render something out of my wheelhouse at the time.

And that's kinda the ticket, I think. Not everyone's a master draftsman. Not everyone has all the skills in every area. And regardless, from page one to page one hundred, your skills will improve. That's all part of it — and in the meantime, you should lean into your strengths and cheat where you can.

Do you need to lovingly render a background every single panel? Christ no! Does every little detail need to be drawn out? Sure if you want your hand to fall off. Cheat! Use Sketchup to build models! Use Blender to sculpt forms to paint over! Use CSP Assets for prebuilt models and brushes if you use CSP! Take photographs and manip them! Cheat! Do what you need to do to convey what you need to convey!

For instance, a tip/axiom/"rule" I've seen is one establishing shot per scene minimum and a corollary to that has been include a background once per page minimum as grounding (no we cannot all have eternal floating heads and characters in the void. Unless your comic is set in the void. In which case, you do you.) People ain't out here drawing hyper detailed backgrounds per each tiny panel. The people who DO do that are insane. Or stupid. Or both. Or have no deadline? Either way, someone's gonna have a repetitive stress injury... Save yourself the pain and the headache. Take shortcuts. Save your punches for the big K.O. moments.

Start small. Make an 8-page zine. Tell a beginning, a middle, an end in comic form. Bring a scene to life in a few pages. See what you're comfortable drawing and where you struggle. See where you can lean heavily into your comfort zones. Learn how to lean out of your comfort zone. Learn when it's worth it to do the latter.

Or start large. Technically my first finished comic (that wasn't "a dumb pencil thing I drew in elementary school" or "that 13 volume manga I outlined and only penciled, what, 7 pages of in sixth grade" or "random one page things I draw about my characters on throw up on the interwebz") was 99RM so what do I know. I'm just some guy on the internet.

(That's not self-deprecating, I literally am some guy on the internet talking about my path. A lot of this is gonna come down to you and what vibes with you.)

Resources on writing

Some of these are things that help me and some are things that I crowd-sourced from others. Some of these are going to be screenwriting based, some will be comic based.

Making Comics by Scott McCloud: I think everyone recommends this but I think it is a useful book if you're like "ahh!!! christ!! where do I start!!!???" It very much breaks down the elements of comics and the world they exist in and the principles involved, with the caveat that there are no rules! In fact, I need to re-read it.

Comic Book Design: I picked this up at B&N on a whim and in terms of just getting a bird's eye view of varied ways to tackle layout and paneling? It's such a great resource and reference! I personally recommend it as a way to really get a feel for what can be done.

the screenwriter's bible: this is a book that was used in my class. we also used another book that's escaping me but to be honest, I never read anything in school and that's why I'm so stupid. anyway, I'd say check it out if you want, especially if you start googling screenwriting stuff and it's like 20 billion pieces of advice that make 0 sense -- get the core advice from one place and then go from there.

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: many people I know recommended this. I think I have it? It may be in storage. So frankly, I'd already read a bunch of books on comics before grabbing this that it kind of felt like a rehash. Which isn't shade on the authors — I personally was just a sort of "girl, I don't need comics 101!!!"

Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate: this has been recommended so many times to me. I cannot personally speak on it but I can say I do trust those who rec'd it to me so I am passing it along

the story circle: this is pretty much the hero's journey. a useful way to think of journeys! a homie pretty much swears by it

a primer on beats: quick google search got me this that outlines storybeats

save the cat!: what the above refers to, this gives a more genre-specific breakdown. also wants to sell you on the software but you don't need that.

I hope this helps and please feel free to touch base with more info about your specific situation and hopefully I'll have more applicable answers.

#writing #making a graphic novel #writing a graphic novel #tutorial #writing tutorial

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seductivejellyfish · 3 years

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Musings

The first English translation of Homer’s Odyssey was completed in 1615, by classicist, dramatist, and poet George Chapman. He begins:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way

Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;

The first time I read the Odyssey was the summer before ninth grade. I had applied to a bougie private high school that I later chose not to attend, but as an acceptance gift they sent me a beautiful golden book, the Robert Fagles 1996 blank verse translation of the Odyssey. His first line:

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

driven time and again off course,

At the time I had only the vaguest notion of the plot of the epic. I knew, or I thought I knew, that it was the story of Odysseus and his journey home, punctuated with an endless series of wild monsters and treacherous encounters. When I opened the book I was shocked to find that the Odyssey begins not with the adventure of the titular hero, but back home in Ithaca with his mopey abandoned son. My second shock came shortly after, when the goddess Athena descends to earth to inspire said mope, and does so in the form of Mentes, a man.

I reread the lines to make sure I hadn’t missed anything in the confusing clamor of ancient verse. Athena disguised as a man? Surely that couldn’t be right. But it was. Every single disguise of Athena, sans one, was a man. Not only that, there were multiple scenes where mortals recognize her for her true nature and yet still regard her in her guise. In those moments she existed as goddess and mortal, female and male simultaneously. It was almost too much to handle.

400 years after George Chapman, Emily Wilson became the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. She hurled a book through a millenia’s glass ceiling and when it landed it opened to:

Tell me about a complicated man.

Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost.

At age 14 I wandered from a tiny private Jewish middle school into Boston Latin Academy and was promptly lost. Trapped in the practices of the past 300 odd years, every student was required to take 3-4 years of Latin. The first year was relentlessly boring. We bumbled our way through the textbook, memorizing endings and grammatical rules as though the language was a series of mathematical formulas and not something to be read and spoken and learned.

In tenth grade I cut my hair. For years I had kept my waist-length hair in a thick side braid and in a day it was all gone. I can’t for the life of me remember what was it that made me do it, or when I got the idea. At some point I started telling people that I was thinking about it, and then I started telling people that I was going to do it, and then I did it. Anybody who has gone abruptly from long hair to short knows the miracle of the first shower: the giddy lightness that moves from your neck down through your whole body.

We started reading real Latin in class and suddenly the language became alive. I wrestled with the text to produce a messy grammatical translation at the bottom of my page and then neatly rewrote a more pleasing version alongside the columns of poetry. I doodled all across the back of the pages--beautiful Greek men with flowing hair, columns and bays, Icarus, wings outspread, falling into the sea. Aphrodite descends to earth in disguise as a young huntress. I search between the pages for Athena.

Near the city of Crete lived an unremarkable but blameless man and his unremarkable wife. So scared was he of the pain of raising a daughter that he delivered the ultimate warning to his wife: if their child should be born a girl, she must be killed. Only a boy should live. We all know the story--with the dropping of the ultimatum, the course of the tale is sealed. The mother will have a baby girl and she will be unable to destroy her. In this tale there are no babies in baskets, or foundlings left in the woods. Instead, instructed by a goddess, the mother conspires with a nurse to raise the child as a boy. The father names the child Iphis, after his father, and the mother is happy because the name suits a boy or girl and it removes part of the burden of the lie. The child grows up fine and beautiful, with all the best features of the male and female. Their disguise is unquestioned, and they grow up happy, sharing their childhood with a friend, Ianthe. We know this story too. Young love blossoms, and soon the two are engaged, to the delight of father and the despair of mother and child.

I read this story properly for the first time, in Latin, in the summer of 2020, with the help of my Greek professor. At the beginning of our Greek class the year before we had each chosen Greek names. I was fascinated by the gender play in this story, and so I stole the name Ianthe from it. I am drawn much more to Iphis, of course, but I find the name Ianthe more lovely. And perhaps it is fitting that I embody that fascination with the choice of the name of the character so in love with Iphis, whatever gender they may be.

Burning with love and chafing at the equal ardor of Ianthe, Iphis cries out in despair to the gods.

“If the gods want to spare me, then they ought to spare me already! If not, if they wish to destroy me, then at least deal me some regular harm, according to the laws of nature! Never has love of mares consumed a mare, or of cows a cow: sheep love rams, and stags chase after does, the females of their own kind. Thus too birds couple, and amongst each and every type of animal, no woman is seized by feminine desire. I wish I were no woman!”

We reach this part of the poem and I am compelled to stop and reach through the text, to try in vain to comfort the grieving lover. You’re not broken at all, poor girl. You’re not alone.

My professor asks me if I knew the story when I chose my name, and I tell her that I did. I am always aching to be recognized, to be seen, but at the same time I want to reassure her that this angst of Iphis’ which dominates the text is not a pain I have had to bear. Blessed by my circumstances, I have never once resented who I am. I have never been made to feel unnatural, and I have never felt alone. Again, perhaps it was right that I chose to become Ianthe, the unwitting and undisturbed bride who manages to never hear a thing about the anguish that surrounds her betrothal.

The end of the story offers a neat resolution-the goddess hears Ianthe’s prayers and transforms her into a man. Light the marriage torches and sound the bells! I am torn in every direction. I don’t know what’s more important--the love of a woman for a woman, the ability for a character to straddle the line between gender, or the transformation from woman to man. Despite knowing that the social construct of gender in Roman times is far from the one I exist within, I can’t help wondering about Iphis after the curtains close. Are they happier as a man? Are they a man at all, or a woman in the body of a man? Was gender ever anything for them other than a weight around their neck, or a performance to play? I translate and translate and wonder what pronouns to use, reading the word woman again and again.

Iphis leaves a gift in the temple, dedicated to the goddess with an inscription:

DONA: PVER: SOLVIT: QVAE: FEMINA: VOVERAT: IPHIS.

A boy pays this gift, which a woman had pledged, Iphis.

I take a spoken Latin class and think of using neuter endings for myself and then I don’t. I go from “she/her” to “she/they” to “any pronouns.”

O Muse, instruct me of the man who drew

His changeful course through wanderings not a few,

Trans. John William Mackail, 1903.

Athena comes to earth as Mentes. Aristophanes jests with his tale of the original third androgynous gender as pretty boys vie for spots on the ground next to Socrates.

Tell me, O Muse, of the Shifty, the man who wandered afar.

Trans. William Morris, 1887.

The goddess commands that Iphis live as a baby girl until she can grow into a man. I bind my chest with medical tape and stick socks in my jeans and write my first original ancient Greek poem.

Tell me the tale, Muse, of that man

Of many changes,

Trans. Herbert Bates, 1929.

Telemachus strings up a line of women like caught bird for the crime of being sex slaves and translator Fagles kills them again when he calls them “sluts” and “whores” where the Greek says “sleeping.”

This is the story of a man, one who

was never at a loss.

Trans. William Henry Denham Rouse, 1937

I’m letting my hair grow out again, in an undercut this time. Quarantine has seen me take at last to the clippers, shaving the sides and leaving the rest to grow. It’s long enough now to tuck behind my ears. I’ve spent my Saturdays chanting the Odyssey in a sing-song up and down my house and yard. I’ve memorized over 50 lines by now, but none as powerful as that eternal first. Someday I’ll translate it too. I imagine how appropriate it will be to have a little “trans.” before my name.

The first word of the Odyssey is Ἄνδρα, Andra-man. I take the man inside of me, right next to the woman and the thing which is neither, and I work on translating myself.

#classics #original #my writing #ancient greek #latin #translation #gender and sexuality #long post #here have an essay i wrote for class #iphis and ianthe #ovid #the odyssey #homer #translating homer #gender

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survivingacademia · 5 years

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Open mic night + trip to Aarhus

August 16th

Kristian brought a guitar for Bridget to use tonight, and somehow it’s found its way to the breakfast table.

We had a bunch of Danish classes today. We were with Robert in the morning, and he made us write stories about some random people at a bus stop. It was quite a difficult task, given that half of the group was still asleep. We then mixed up with the others, and we had to discuss morals and choices. The Danes sure love to discuss sex and anything involved with it. The story we were given involved cheating, a break-up, and being forced to sell your body. Quite a start of the day.

At 2 Tina was organising Danish quizzes, and my group and I had to think of 5 sentences which best describe a certain job. We did that for 7 jobs in total, and then other people had to come and try to guess the job.

I stayed at the library before dinner in order to finish my comic book, and I actually did! I drew 4 squares, describing the poem I translated for class yesterday, and they’re horrible. Not that I care, I don’t like drawing anyway.

Marti and I decided to go to Fenger’s Hus for the open mic today, and I am so hyped. Bridget performed with the Lithuanian girls, and they were all lovely! After that, she and Jodi sang Zombie (and totally blew the roof away). And last but not least, Bridget’s two solos, one Danish and one Latvian, both awesome. People here are just so talented.

Also, I had my first two Danish beers.

August 17th

We have a trip to Aarhus today, but everyone is tired, and the girls are especially grumpy, since we’ve all synced.

While on the bus we passed Denmark’s highest point, Ejer Bavnehøj, rising at the impressive 170 m (I know, wow). We also had a glimpse of the Vejle fjord. Once in Aarhus, we visited Den Gamle By, an open-air museum with houses and buildings from the 19th and 20th century. The place was huge. We visited a garden, a barn, a goldsmith, an old bookstore (with a seller dressed in period clothing); we saw a man fish, another one ride a horse, and yet another one – sail. There was a bakery, a barber shop, a photo atelier. The highlight of my day though has to be the flock of geese I saw, who then proceeded to chase me in a small backyard.

The more modern part of the museum was dedicated to the 70s, and we visited a super cool music shop that sold vinyls and old cassettes. I was on the verge of buying some Pink Floyd, but I had to stop myself because of airport restrictions. There was also a poster exhibition, a collection of vintage watches, a student dorm, and an original house from the 20s.

A quick lunch and coffee break.

At 2 we headed to ARoS Art Museum. The building itself was a work of art, it was enormous, 8 or 9 floors, and a rooftop terrace, which also included a 360-degree rainbow panorama. The current exhibition was about art and porn, celebrating 50 years of free speech in Denmark.

We spent about 2 hours at the museum, looking at some beautiful paintings of Jutland, a statue of a boy, stories about people’s homes, and, well, porn. We spent quite a while at the panorama, as well, and the view from up there was breath-taking.

Marti and I were so tired of all those new impressions, that we headed to the bus and Lars, our driver, was kind enough to offer us some oat biscuits and coffee.

We were home for dinner. Marti and I are staying in, since we’re emotionally drained. The others are probably having a party, Victor managed a beer pong tournament. Kristian is playing football with his daughters.

#friday night #aarhus #weekend trip #introverts

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admesser · 5 years

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Hello everyone!

To kick off my new series of interviews with authors, artists, and creators, I want to introduce you to Seth Greenwood and Angela Zhang. I have been following their work for a couple of years now, and find the story intriguing and the artwork incredible.

Seth Greenwood

Angela Zhang

1) Please discuss your creative background. Who are you, and how did you get involved with your art?

SG: I would love to tell you some quirky little story of how I got involved in writing comics. But I am afraid the answer is very simple. I was a dreamer, a poet, and a blogger when I traveled to South Korea to live for a year. One of my co-workers kept telling me about all of these ideas he wanted to make into comics. At that time I was 27 or so and I didn’t know the first thing about comics, and to be honest I had never even read my first comic book. I was always into reading novels and watching films. You might even say that I was disinterested but I believe I finally decided to do it because a friend needed my help and I felt I had the ability to make it happen. Stories are stories, right? So when I said yes, I jumped into research head first. I learned how to write, and format scripts. I started reading many comics from the past and present, and ultimately I started writing my first script for a P.A. piece called “Covenant”.

AZ: While I didn’t realize it back then, I was making wordless comics on the back of my mom’s PhD thesis drafts since I was 7 years old. When I grew up, I thought academia and teaching were the only viable career paths for artists. So I ended up going to art school and then completed a master’s in Art History. I realized that reading theory and writing about art really wasn’t my thing. I ended up working in administration full time for a while. It was during this time that I discovered there are people who will pay you to draw if you were good enough. So I kept working on my art on the side. (I spent a whole year waking up at 5AM before work to practice drawing and I am NOT a morning person hahaha!) In 2014, I quit my job to pursue freelance illustration. It’s been hard, to say the least, but no doubt creatively rewarding. So far I’ve done storyboards, concept art, architecture illustration, product design, book covers and of course comics!

2) How did you two meet and collaborate on the Gale Project?

SG: Long story short? “Covenant” never happened. I decided to try my hand at screenwriting since I had such a bad first experience. I realized quickly that even with the best of friends, partnerships can be very difficult to maintain. One night I posted a snippet from one of my screenplays on a blog and tweeted the link. I never expected to get a reaction but that script reeled in one of my favorite artists to this day! Angela Zhang tweeted me and said that she liked my style and to contact her if I ever wanted to do a noir style comic. I didn’t know if this was an empty gesture, but I immediately replied that I knew just the story for us. The rest is history. Angela and I have known each other for a little over 3 years now and we have been moonlighting Gale ever since.

AZ: My big dream has been to make a long-running comic series. But I’m not a writer. As an adult, I really got into comics through the works of Craig Thompson (Blankets) and independent creators like Rich Barrett (Nathan Sorry), Lora Innes (The Dreamer) and Jason Brubaker (reMIND). The first comic that I posted online was a realistic, drama that focused on character acting, mood and atmosphere. I didn’t think anyone else would be into this kind of story until I came across Seth’s writing online. He has a knack for natural dialogue and I can imagine his character’s emotions through their words. I honestly didn’t think anything would come out of our tweets. But it was his persistence and speed that convinced me, yes, this guy wants to make a comic as much as I do.

3) What is the inspiration for Gale?

SG: Oh wow! A lot! The idea of Gale, whether I knew it or not, first started to form in 10th grade when I wrote a free verse poem about a man at his father’s funeral who had obviously been murdered for some mysterious reason. The rest of the story comes from my experience with the world that I grew up in. The things I noticed that were beautiful on the outside were actually rotting on the inside. I started writing about those things you don’t introduce yourself with and immediately start talking about. Politics, civil rights, class consciousness, you name it. It’s all in Gale, in a quasi-dystopian alternate reality. I don’t intend to present my solution to these issues in Gale. In the end, it is a fictional story that will hopefully both entertain and inspire.

AZ: In terms of art, Seth and I met over Skype where he would describe his vision. Gale’s world is a mix of the old and new in American culture. The vehicles and architecture are based on 1940s design and they coexist with our everyday technology, like cell phones and laptops. When we visit Ned Norman’s mansion, there’s a touch of gothic horror. I researched Hollywood movies between the 1930s and 1950s. My library has a collection of classic films. I would rent Hitchcock and Dracula to see how directors in those days composed dramatic shots, knowing that the output would be in black and white.

4) Please describe the visualization process from script to screen. How do you imagine it as a writer, and how do you imagine it as an illustrator?

SG: Would it sound too unreal if a lot of what Angela does is almost exactly how I see it in my head. It’s almost as if she downloaded my brain onto a Wacom Tablet. But the process is much harder than that! It’s why I am the writer and she is the artist. Every once in a while she will suggest something and most of the time it makes it better or translates better to the comic medium. One thing that I had a problem doing at first, was getting out of the habit of writing scenes and getting into the habit of writing still panels. Angela did a wonderful job showing movement and expression.

AZ: I’m grateful that Seth trusts me and gives me a lot of creative freedom to put his words into comic form. We have over 50 posts on our Patreon blog detailing the process from script to panel (collecting reference, thumbnailing, layout, word bubbles etc.) To be honest, these days I don’t even think about my process, because drawing Gale has become more intuitive for me. I think what lead to this magical understanding between Seth and I is that we’ve built a solid friendship. If you get to know Seth, you will see that he’s truly caring and generous. We chat almost every day. Seth sends me photos, writing and videos related to Gale and we talk about life too. The more that I think about it, our conversations allow me to have a better understanding of where Seth is coming from and deeper insight into the characters and the world of Gale.

5) Talk about the heart of Gale’s storyline. What challenges does it face?

SG: Angela may want to elaborate, but I believe this sums up the storyline.:

Gale is a drama, mystery and suspense story that draws inspiration from film noir. Rookie attorney Gale Norman is determined to seek out the truth behind his father’s mysterious death. As Gale’s suspicions grow, buried memories of his mother’s disappearance resurface and he refuses to hide from his dark past. With the help of his childhood friend, Laurie Gambill, Gale attempts to solve a seemingly ordinary mystery that may eventually lead him in a downward spiral. Will he uncover the truth to his parent’s demise or will he become further entangled in a web of lies?

As far as challenges? Well here recently my life has been unpredictable. Being a full-time soldier in the US Army and trying to write, update social media and maintain a valuable connection with our audience has been hard to say the very least. We have had to try to remain very flexible. I have had to re-dedicate myself over and over again. It’s something that plagues me but at the same time it is something I can’t and won’t leave.

AZ: Making the characters relatable is one of the challenges that Seth and I are always thinking about. At first, I had a hard time describing Gale to people because the story has many layers. Gale also comes from a wealthy upbringing which is pivotal to the story but I can’t relate to it. After I completed the scene where Gale kisses his childhood friend Laurie, I started relating to them in a real way. I thought about how the 20s is an interesting period to explore the loss of innocence. Unlike adolescence, the loss is more of intellectual awakening. In Gale’s case, it’s about dealing with death, discovering the truth about his past, getting friend-zoned by the only one he trusts and feeling alone in the world. As the series progresses, Gale gets caught up in more and more unbelievable situations. I think as long as we’re grounding the story in an emotional truth we’ll overcome the challenge of making the characters relatable.

6) What are some difficulties you have experienced with the project and how did you overcome them?

SG: I’m glad you said “some”! Let’s see here. The decision to publish Gale independently was not always considered. We did that when we realized the publisher would really not have much more to offer us and we wanted complete freedom for the project.

Angela had issues with me not being patient and almost jumping the gun a couple of times before we were ready. That is just me. I am a little too ambitious at times. She was always the voice of reason when it came to the business side of things. A lot of times she had to pull my head out of the clouds.

We have had to push back launch dates because of our day jobs and we have had to cancel convention appearances for the same thing. The way we overcome obstacles is to keep pressing on, remain flexible, and continue to create this wonderful story that’s brought so many people together. It’s persistence, more than anything, it is always persistence.

AZ: I think Seth and I have an interesting dynamic that I’ve come to appreciate. In the beginning, we had a bit of friction because we didn’t understand our working styles. I have to think things through from all sides, create a plan and put a process in place to execute. Seth, on the other hand, will act immediately when he gets an idea. I don’t think Gale would have the following it does today without Seth’s fearlessness, tenacity and enthusiasm to try new things. However, self-publishing a comic to our standards of quality has a lot of finer details that require time and planning. What I love about Seth is that he’s open to feedback, he’s always willing to improve and that inspires me to do the same.

On a personal side, I was very slow at drawing Gale pages in the beginning. It would take me a month to finish a page. Seth probably worried at some point whether I was cut out for this job and he’s been really flexible and patient with the project. Some people told me I should simplify my art for comics. But I pushed myself to keep going in the style I have for Gale and I reinvented my process along the way. I’ve learned that just because you have an ounce of talent, it doesn’t entitle you to anything except hard work. Now I can produce 3-4 pages a month alongside my full-time work.

7) Please discuss your creative process. Do you follow a schedule? Set deadlines? How do you get the creative juices flowing for your project?

SG: I am chaotic! Ask my wife. Despite my military experience, I can be somewhat all over the place. The reason why Angela is much more than the artist and she carries the title co-creator is because she keeps me on point. She keeps us on schedule. I write when I am inspired, I send notes to Angela and forget to save them in the shared file so she does it for me. If it was not for her I wouldn’t have come this far. No other artist would have taught me how to maintain good order in this line of work. As for creative juices? I read books, watch some character driven NETFLIX shows, and study people and cultures. I love Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology. One thing that is most important in this process, however, is reading. To be a great writer, you have to be a reader first!

AZ: I actually have a militaristic approach when it comes to creativity. If you’ve ever read The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, you’ll get where I’m coming from. In the past, I’ve struggled with time management and it has a lot to do with fear and procrastination. I now manage and track my creative time through a pomodoro app. It’s basically an interval timer that alternates between a work and break period. When that whistle sounds for the work interval I’m not checking email or rummaging through social media. The app allows you to export an excel spreadsheet so you can see how long you spent on a task or project. I base my schedule and deadlines around the data and strive to be more efficient over time.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think it’s important for artists to recharge their creative juices to prevent burnout. Although I’m rigid and structured during projects, I’m the complete opposite when it comes to downtime. I like going for aimless walks, cooking, watching movies, reading manga, and comics and playing video games with my fiancé (who by the way has been super supportive of Gale).

8) What is in store for Gale? When will it be released?

SG: I don’t want to steal Angela’s thunder. Most of this is her brilliance. I will let you take the reigns for this, co-creator!

AZ: As Seth mentioned, we’re going the self-publishing route and playing the long game of making a series one page at a time. Instead of releasing Gale when it’s all done, we’re inviting people to follow our journey of making comics by sharing the process, what we’ve learned through trial and error and how we’re constantly striving to improve. I think that’s more fulfilling for us creators to relate to readers every step of the way then just popping up one day and saying ‘hey here’s our product, buy it.’

Last fall we completed Chapter 1: The Calm and launched it on Webtoon and we’re also currently posting it panel by panel on Instagram. We’re halfway through Chapter 2: Storm Chaser and aiming to finish it by the end of this year. Next year, we’re going to explore Kickstarter as well as comic book conventions.

9) Do you have anything you would like to add to the article?

AZ: I want to thank anyone who took the time to read our interview. Although we’re small and at the beginning of our journey, I’m super grateful and touched by all the support that Gale has received. I also want to give huge thanks to the Savannah Quill for having us and putting all of this together. I deeply appreciate this opportunity to share our thoughts and process

SG: Same as Angela, thanks! Also, look out for Gale on Webtoon and make sure you stay tuned for a short we have contributed to Red Stylo Media’s newest upcoming anthology; a collaboration of artists and writers paying tribute to the band, Forence + The Machine entitled “Cosmic Love”. The Kickstarter for the main print run will launch sometime this Fall. Just look for the announcement on IG “Stories” or on Twitter!

www.thegalecomic.com

IG: www.instagram.com/thegalecomic/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thegalecomic

Webtoon: http://tiny.cc/mnwrxy

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/galecomic

Inside the minds of The Gale Comic creator and artist. #indie #author #comicbook #artist #adammesser #sethgreenwood #angelazhang #thegalecomic www.adammesser.net Hello everyone! To kick off my new series of interviews with authors, artists, and creators, I want to introduce you to Seth Greenwood and Angela Zhang.

#angela zhang #authors #indie author #publishing #seth greenwood #the gale #writer #writing

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janetoconnerfl · 7 years

Text

John Ashbery, celebrated and challenging poet, dies at 90

NEW YORK — John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.

Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press file

In this Sept. 29, 2008, file photo, poet John Ashbery interviewed at his apartment in New York. Ashbery, widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest poets, died Sunday, Sept. 3, 2017, at home in Hudson, New York, of natural causes, according to husband, David Kermani. He was 90. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” was the rare winner of the book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry.”

Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.

“No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in The New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us. ”

But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning. Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music.” Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.

“I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”

Ashbery also was a highly regarded translator and critic. At various times, he was the art critic for The New York Herald-Tribune in Europe, New York magazine and Newsweek and the poetry critic for Partisan Review. He translated works by Arthur Rimbaud, Raymond Roussel and numerous other French writers. He was a teacher for many years, including at Brooklyn College, Harvard University and Bard College.

Starting at boarding school, when a classmate submitted his work (without his knowledge) to Poetry magazine, Ashbery enjoyed a long and productive career, so fully accumulating words in his mind that he once told the AP that he rarely revised a poem once he wrote it down. More than 30 Ashbery books were published after the 1950s, including poetry, essays, translations and a novel, “A Nest of Ninnies,” co-written with poet James Schuyler.

September 3, 2017 Steely Dan co-founder, guitarist, Walter Becker dies at 67

September 3, 2017 7 sensational fine arts events around Denver to check out this fall

September 3, 2017 PHOTOS: A Taste of Colorado 2017

September 2, 2017 Anxiety about politics, hurricanes and nuclear war adds extra spark to annual burning of marionette in Santa Fe

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His masterpiece was likely the title poem of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” a densely written epic about art, time and consciousness that was inspired by a 16th century Italian painting of the same name. In 400-plus lines, Ashbery shifted from a critique of Parmigianino’s painting to a meditation on the besieged 20th century mind.

____

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

____

Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927 and remembered himself as a lonely and bookish child, haunted by the early death of his younger brother, Richard, and conflicted by his attraction to other boys. Ashbery grew up on an apple farm in the nearby village of Sodus, where it snowed often enough to help inspire his first poem, “The Battle,” written at age 8 and a fantasy about a fight between bunnies and snowflakes. He would claim to be so satisfied with the poem and so intimidated by the praise of loved ones that he didn’t write another until boarding school, the Deerfield Academy, when his work was published in the school paper.

Meanwhile, he took painting lessons and found new meaning in Life, the magazine. An article about a surrealist exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art so impressed him that he kept rereading it for years. At Harvard University, he read W.H. Auden and Marianne Moore and met fellow poet and longtime comrade, Kenneth Koch, along with Wilbur, Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara and Robert Creeley. He would be grouped with O’Hara and Koch as part of the avant-garde “New York Poets” movement, although Ashbery believed what they really had in common was living in New York.

His first book, “Some Trees,” was a relatively conventional collection that came out in 1956, with a preface from Auden and the praise of O’Hara, who likened Ashbery to Wallace Stevens. But in 1962, he unleashed “The Tennis Court Oath,” poems so abstract that critic John Simon accused him of crafting verse without “sensibility, sensuality or sentences.” Ashbery later told the AP that parts of the book “were written in a period of almost desperation” and because he was living in France at the time, he had fallen “out of touch with American speech, which is really the kind of fountainhead of my poetry.”

“I actually went through a period after ‘The Tennis Court Oath’ wondering whether I was really going to go on writing poetry, since nobody seemed interested in it,” he said. “And then I must have said to myself, ‘Well, this is what I enjoy. I might as well go on doing it, since I’m not going to get the same pleasure anywhere else.'”

His 1966 collection, “Rivers and Mountains,” was a National Book Award finalist that helped restore his standing and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” raised him to the pantheon. In 2011, he was given an honorary National Book Award for lifetime achievement and declared he was “quite pleased” with his “status in the world of writers.”

His style ranged from rhyming couplets to haiku to blank verse, and his interests were as vast as his gifts for expressing them. He wrote of love, music, movies, the seasons, the city and the country, and was surely the greatest poet ever to compose a hymn to President Warren Harding. As he aged, he became ever more sensitive to mortality and reputation. “How to Continue” was an elegy for the sexual revolution among gays in the 1960s and ’70s, a party turned tragic by the deadly arrival of AIDS, “a gale (that) came and said/it is time to take all of you away.”

Reflecting on his work, Ashbery boasted about “strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion,” but acknowledged that “I grew/To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew/Those few paces from the best.” In the poem “In a Wonderful Place,” published in the 2009 collection “Planisphere,” he offered a brief, bittersweet look back.

____

I spent years exhausting my good works

on the public, all for seconds

Time to shut down colored alphabets

flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It

draws like a rout. Or a treat.

____

from Latest Information http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/03/john-ashbery-dies-at-90/

0 notes

jimblanceusa · 7 years

Text

John Ashbery, celebrated and challenging poet, dies at 90

Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press file

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”

September 3, 2017 Steely Dan co-founder, guitarist, Walter Becker dies at 67

September 3, 2017 7 sensational fine arts events around Denver to check out this fall

September 3, 2017 PHOTOS: A Taste of Colorado 2017

September 2, 2017 Anxiety about politics, hurricanes and nuclear war adds extra spark to annual burning of marionette in Santa Fe

September 2, 2017 Your dance studio’s biggest problem? Needing foreign workers

____

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

____

I spent years exhausting my good works

on the public, all for seconds

Time to shut down colored alphabets

flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It

draws like a rout. Or a treat.

____

from Latest Information http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/03/john-ashbery-dies-at-90/

0 notes

jackdoakstx · 7 years

Text

John Ashbery, celebrated and challenging poet, dies at 90

Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press file

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”

September 3, 2017 Steely Dan co-founder, guitarist, Walter Becker dies at 67

September 3, 2017 7 sensational fine arts events around Denver to check out this fall

September 3, 2017 PHOTOS: A Taste of Colorado 2017

September 2, 2017 Anxiety about politics, hurricanes and nuclear war adds extra spark to annual burning of marionette in Santa Fe

September 2, 2017 Your dance studio’s biggest problem? Needing foreign workers

____

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

____

I spent years exhausting my good works

on the public, all for seconds

Time to shut down colored alphabets

flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It

draws like a rout. Or a treat.

____

from News And Updates http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/03/john-ashbery-dies-at-90/

0 notes

laurendzim · 7 years

Text

John Ashbery, celebrated and challenging poet, dies at 90

Bebeto Matthews, Associated Press file

Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery,” it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people.”

September 3, 2017 Steely Dan co-founder, guitarist, Walter Becker dies at 67

September 3, 2017 7 sensational fine arts events around Denver to check out this fall

September 3, 2017 PHOTOS: A Taste of Colorado 2017

September 2, 2017 Anxiety about politics, hurricanes and nuclear war adds extra spark to annual burning of marionette in Santa Fe

September 2, 2017 Your dance studio’s biggest problem? Needing foreign workers

____

I feel the carousel starting slowly

And going faster and faster: desk, papers, books,

Photographs of friends, the window and the trees

Merging in one neutral band that surrounds

Me on all sides, everywhere I look.

And I cannot explain the action of leveling,

Why it should all boil down to one

Uniform substance, a magma of interiors.

____

I spent years exhausting my good works

on the public, all for seconds

Time to shut down colored alphabets

flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn. It

draws like a rout. Or a treat.

____

from News And Updates http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/03/john-ashbery-dies-at-90/

0 notes

rueur · 7 years

Text

Morning Pages #31 (10.02.2017)

Friday 10th February - 11:02 a.m.

So Malith called me yesterday asking if there was going to be anything on for tonight. Friday night! Our plans to go out have been postponed again and again over the past month, essentially since those nights I went out on my own in Northcote. So hopefully Malith is definitely coming out tonight, and Daniel said that he might too if he’s not super tired from work today. I hope he does though, because I have also been meaning to go to Laundry with him, considering that was originally his scene anyway. I also got in touch with Lauren and Jacob and they said they’d love to come too, and that they’d try to make it after Lauren’s photoshoot or something. I had no idea what that meant, and Jacob didn’t say anything else about the photoshoot, so now I guess I’m just hoping that they come out tomorrow.

I have to renew my phone plan today too, and I am afraid that I’ll need to break another $50. I have exactly $700 left to live off of this year and it’s absolutely going to be impossible, unless I never eat anything at all and never leave the house (aside from going to class). I will definitely need a job. I don’t know if they will, but if my parents or my grandpa at least lets me borrow some money for my school books, I might just be able to get by for one semester. But certainly not for the entire year, that would not be possible. I mean, it was fine for first year, but third year will see me tackling longer contact hours and a heavier workload too. I have three full-on days and I’ll definitely need to be treating myself during my lunch break, I mean otherwise I would not have any academic motivation. Uni can be quite indulgent, definitely if you also happen to be studying what you love. You are basically dedicating three years of your life to passionate study that fuels your own personal development rather than contributing to society, and...sorry. I just got a text. My plan was renewed. I checked my balance, and apparently I have enough money for the next two months? Was this my dad? This is very odd. See, I’ve been anxious about where I’m going to be getting my money to pay for this plan from after I donated so much to Lentils, but I couldn’t help that. I know it was probably a stupid thing to do considering my financial situation, but I just felt really bad about the fact that I’m really hoarding my savings. I need to though. I know it’s more socially conscious to share the wealth, and I have generally been doing that with what I have on my card, but I refuse to eat into my savings. I think everybody is the same way, to an extent. Anyway, I’m at least glad that I don’t need to stress about this anymore. I have too much to deal with right now, but then again it feels like I always have too much to deal with. That’s what Malith said to me on the phone yesterday too. Right before he put me on speaker to talk to his sister through their bathroom door as she took a dump. The poor girl.

I’m waiting to Skype with Courtney too. It’s been a while so I figured it would be fun for both of us to properly catch up. I keep thinking about who would want to come out to Laundry, and the only girls that I think would actually fully enjoy the scene with me are Courtney and Jay, but Courtney’s on the other side of the world. And Jay’s not getting back to me, because she rarely does. I have no boisterous female friends, aside from Rhiannon and Lauren, really. But I don’t know if Laundry is Rhiannon’s kind of place, and honestly I don’t really know if Lauren will like it either. I was hoping to just kind of meet girls when I go out, just kind of start dancing with them and then maybe like exchanging numbers or something, but every time I’ve gone out I’ve ended up dancing with some guy for the entire night. Of course, I had no grievances with Evan and I actually am quite happy I did get to meet him, but every other time I’ve gone out has felt somewhat unsuccessful because I didn’t get to meet any interesting women, who would take me out again ideally. Who would take me out a couple of times for the rest of this year and I’d build up a fantastic rapport with them and establish what would quickly become quite distinctively long lasting friendships. Toni and Sam have kind of moved from both me and each other. They’ve become their own people, as have I. And now I’ve found myself in a place where I can’t say I have any real close female friends. I am hopeful with Lauren, but I also know that Lauren and I are going to mess around a little. It will be a friendship, but there’ll also be some fleeting sexual element to it that...actually, that might make the friendship stronger rather than diminish it when you consider how chill Lauren is.

Tonight though, I’m only interested in blowing off some steam: a month’s build up of steam. I am tempted to send Evan a message but I’m just so nervous, I’m too fucking nervous. I was hoping that these pages wouldn’t lapse into journal entries painfully reminiscent of my high school years, but I fear that this has already happened considering I have mostly been talking about boys and friends. To be fair though, I am also on holiday right now, and I will be for the next seventeen days. So I am making the most of this time, spending it being social and revelling in the fact that I have a social life now, rather than working. Even though it would probably be worthwhile to do a little more independent script development, and to refine my slam poem whilst I still have the time to focus on these things. I know that when uni starts, I’ll be spending all of my time on that work over anything else.

It’s 11:34 a.m. now. My plans for the morning were to bike to Westfield and sort my money out at the bank before biking back home and topping up my phone, but now that that’s apparently all been sorted for me (by some generous spirit, or by my father who sounded perhaps too unperturbed on the phone, because I called him as soon as I received the text notification), all I need to do today is eat and workout and then maybe clean my room, just manage myself. Courtney said she’ll be home in an hour, so I think that I can have a quick shower and actually eat some breakfast before she calls and then during the call, I can do a little tidying and also talk to her about what’s been going on with me too. I have been meaning to speak to her for a while, just because talking to her on messenger can become pretty exhausting. I don’t know how she manages to type so much so fast, but it’s actually such a trial trying to keep up with it. I feel bad every time I literally am emotionally incapable of replying to her, and then just end up ‘ignoring’ her messages for a couple of days. I don’t ignore them, I read everything as soon as she sends it to me, but it’s just very hard for me to process everything that she throws at me at once. It’s like I’m living my life but in the background, I have the lives of other people playing at double speed and I have to sort out my life but also sort out all of those lives too. To be fair, this feeling has lessened since I don’t speak to Ikaros as much anymore. That’s certainly helped. And Evan has been taking up a portion of my head space too, I don’t know why really. I’m trying not to place any pressure on him or on me, because it is just the weirdest time for us to have met. Valentine’s Day is next week, and both of our birthdays are only a stone’s throw away. What are we supposed to do? Do we get each other gifts or do we just leave these days of significance be? And miss these first days of significance we’d be having JUST because we don’t know what we are yet, and end up having to wait a whole other year (if a whole other year does pass us by) in order to actually celebrate those days for the first time. Is he even thinking about this too? Or is it just me? What the fuck does he want from me? Why did he tell me that I made his day!? I mean it made me so so happy, I mean you could say that him saying that to me really made MY day. Sometimes I wonder if he’s found this blog and has read my morning pages. If he knows all of this and thinks I’m insane. I know it’s pretty stupid to essentially be posting my DIARY online for everybody to see, but this is supposed to be more of a disciplinary daily activity rather than a place for me to sort out my thoughts. I’m learning more about my voice, about my concerns and how to translate these real-life concerns of mine into my fiction in order to strengthen that sense of individuality and signature in my authorship. It’s like being a linguistic auteur, I guess.

I’m so caught up in this boy, it’s actually making me want to listen to The Script. Science & Faith: the ultimate album when it comes to relationships and deciphering the secret language of I want to say love for the sake of making this sentence sensical, but perhaps ‘relationships’ is more an apt word for me to place here in my given situation. I also just took a massive break from writing (well not ‘massive’; it’s 11:56 a.m. now), to check Facebook and once more scroll through my contact list looking for people who might want to go out because I have actually been a social recluse for the past year and I haven’t really caught up with that many people, which can also explain why I’ve been feeling so lonely lately. Because I spent most of my last year either at work or at uni or with Ikaros. I only really have creative writing friends or old high school friends, or old PRIMARY school friends, but no boisterous friends. Isaac is still overseas, but he’ll be coming back next month, and I don’t even know if he would want to see me because he really hasn’t made any efforts to stay in touch. I know he’s been busy though, and he’s probably been talking to many other people rather than me. The last couple of times we’ve met up have been kind of lacklustre. I don’t know if we can be friends. Okay, it’s 11:59 a.m., and there’s one more minute of morning left. But I am on my fourth page now, so I’m going to go and have a nice, warm shower. Or a bath!

#morning pages #31 #10.02.2017

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