#Writing drafts for fan comics is my hobby | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

desultory-novice · 2 years

Note

It'd certainly put Marx into the same boat as all the other Modern 2D era Kirby bosses, because boy did all of them end up eating some bad bargains. Taranza simply wanted a gift for his love. Haltmann simply wanted to find his daughter. I forget Hyness' motives off the top of my head, but his ambitions were also twisted. Even Magolor clearly bit off more than he could chew.

I like this, yes! Considering that Kumazaki invented Marx Soul, it's not out of line to assume he sprinkled some of that Kumazaki-style deep characterization dust on him!

As to Hyness, there's a bit in the "Nintendo Dream" interviews stating that he was always bad. Not to praise him with one hand and cross him with the other, but Kumazaki tells us Marx has an "evil soul" and signed off on Novel-verse Magolor, so I'd say there's room for interpretation on how evil "evil" is in Kirby?

Anyway, looking at Hyness specifically with the same sympathetic lens we tend to view the Wave 3 + Marx gang, we can believe his prayers to Void were originally were about finding a way to help the Jamba diaspora. But that when Hyness thought about the awful hand they'd been dealt for, y'know, SAVING EVERYONE, his mind couldn't help but turn toward bitterness and hatred of those who'd cast them out, and his prayers morphed into a wish for vengeance - to deal that same bad hand to the entire cosmos.

More recent than Hyness even, we have Leon entering Lab Discovera because he wished to harness the power that allowed humanity the Ancients to flourish. And he found it, but THEY were no longer interested in being part of a one-sided bargain - one where they weren't on top. So Leon gets mind-controlled for his troubles.

But yes, I like "his hurt causes him to wish for the wrong thing in the heat of the moment and he gets looped into having to do it anyway and/or die" Marx + Marx Soul.

At least, that would be my "Kumazaki-style Marx."

Speaking of Marx and his ties to the Kumazaki villains...

...I feel the script for a comic* building inside me...! (*that I don't have time to draw)

[Warning for excess sentimentality/everyone bad is good!]

[Comic Draft - "A Better Wish"]

:It starts on Magolor holding the Master Crown:

"That's right! My goal this entire time had been this crown!"

:he pauses: :his hands tighten around it:

"...........but..."

:cut to Taranza, his hands behind him: :holding the mirror wrapped up like a present:

"Joronia? For your birthday...I wanted to get you something you could look at and always see how pretty you are!"

:his nerves are going wild, but he fights them to speak:

"...But...what I actually want to do is... I really want to tell you that I think you're pretty! Because I...I like you, Joronia! And I always have!"

:he sets the mirror down and takes her hands:

:Susie, hand quivering as she's about to drop her visor: :she stops, drops her hands instead, and shouts:

"...Dad....DADDY, STOP IT! You've gone WAY too far! This whole thing has gone TOO FAR! Stop and look at me!"

:Max pauses before donning the controller:

"You can't even remember me, can you?! But I don't care because I remember! I'm Susanna! Your daughter! And I'm TIRED of this life-wrecking machine!"

:He gulps, his mind struggling for some memory:

:Hyness on the altar before the Jamba Heart, in mid-rant:

"I'm-sure-they're-all-living-it-up-on-some-nice- planet-with-friends-and-family-but-when-the- dark-lord-destroys-everything-they'll..."

:His speech slows as he reaches Zan laying in his path: :Looking around, he see the other mage-sisters:

"...Destroys...everything...? Friends and...family...? Francisca...? Flamberge...? Zan...P-Parti...zanne...?? Why are you three laying there, injured...? Was it...me...? Have I become...the dark lord...?"

:Leon and Carol in the hallway before the Eternal Capsule:

"[We made it. We're here at last, Carol... Beyond here is what let the humans grow strong... ...and leave us WEAK! And once I have it..."]

:He looks over at Carol, finally noticing her expression: :She's looking afraid and worried for him:

"[...Once I have it...then what happens? What will I be leaving behind when I have that same power that they did...?]"

:cut back to Magolor, looking solemn:

"...Now that I have it, I realize, when I see the looks on your faces... it's not going to get me what I really want."

:pan over to the group, angry, hurt, wary:

"...I lied to everyone. This whole time. Except that... I wasn't lying when I said that...I wanted us t-to... ...t-that I hoped...we'd stay.......f-friends...!"

:he drops the crown, covering his eyes:

"And-I-know-that-after-everything-I-did-that- there's-no-way-any-of-you-would-actually-forgive...!"

:Magolor stops mumbling as a hand touches his :Kirby's hand:

:Marx in front of Galactic Nova:

"I wish to co-....!"

:Flashback to Marx's life on Popstar: :People walking away from his shows, grimacing: :Everyone laughing and eating with Kirby: :Kirby turns around, offers Marx some food: :Marx, flustered and embarrassed that someone actually reached out to him, sneers and rolls away:

"(....I wish it was easier to communicate. To tell others what we're really thinking. To get the things we really want...)"

:Gritting his teeth, he ditches Nova (who is "???"): :He flies after Kirby, floating in space: :Marx catches his hand in his mouth, pulls him back: :The two orbit each other:

"...You're such an idiot, you stupid puffball! Why did you do everything I said without question?"

"Because I believe in you, Marx."

61 notes · View notes

lilydalexf · 4 years

Photo

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with JET

The first story by JET (Jesemie's Evil Twin) was posted at Gossamer in 1999. You probably remember if you've read any of her stories because she has a unique voice among the many authors of X-Files fanfic. Many of her stories are at Gossamer, but some that aren't there include "Small Lives Awake" and two little fics in its universe, "Imagination" and an Untitled fic. Big thanks to JET for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Honestly, yes. I mean, it's nice, but a little bit surreal. What I feel highly conscious of is that the show premiered 27 years ago; some days that feels like 27 centuries ago. But maybe only because this year has lasted 27 centuries? idk

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I got so lucky finding the group of kind, smart, crazy talented writers I found, and it was sheer dumb luck because I was so incredibly dippy and both underwhelmed by the interwebs of the time (frames! Netscape! whatever was up with Geocities and all those freakin' starscape backgrounds!) and overwhelmed by things like newsgroups (I still have literally no idea how those worked, but there seemed to be 900 kazillion XF fans there). It was great to find a bunch of people who liked the show at the same level I did (cough, A Normal Amount, cough), though in some ways that seems like the bonus to simply having found such a wonderful group of people with whom I am still in contact. The real government conspiracies with hostile extraterrestrials were the friends I made along the way...or something like that.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

A few writers had their own websites (I guess that's what those were?) that I'd lurk around, but mostly I was loyal to a couple of email mailing lists and LiveJournal. Unsurprisingly to anyone who's met me, I was bad at keeping up with them; I did try to, though. (Am I remembering correctly that folks started leaving LJ when Russia got involved somehow? The post-show 2000s are a big blur to me now.)

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

Quite specifically, that poor dude who coughs up a baby fluke in the shower during "The Host". That such a thing -- in retrospect, a nifty and deeply gross practical effect -- had made it onto network TV blew my mind. I did also love Scully and Mulder very quickly. They seemed like such engaging grown ups in all the right ways: intelligent, hard working, clever, loyal to each other, and, if you recall early season two, wearing some of the saddest bureaucrat suits and sporting the least flattering haircuts I'd ever seen on screen. <3

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I have a vague recollection that I had been reading fanfic for something like a year and finally had a story I wanted to try writing. Shout out to Jill Selby for being the nicest, most supportive first reader anyone could have asked for.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

I think of it very fondly! I've otherwise stepped away almost entirely.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

I have been in much, much, much more peripheral ways. Partly that's because Life; I don't in general have the kind of free time I had as a college student and part-time employee (and free time circa 1999 was time I should've been using to study or go full-time at my then-job or whatever). I think perhaps because I had such a special, legit lovely experience with XF fandom -- and because I'm still friends with so many people from that time -- I've never much wanted to throw myself into another fandom at the same level.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

In small doses, yes. I wasn't a casual viewer back in the day and I'm still not, so I watch a few eps here and there when I know I'll have time to really enjoy them but not so much time that I'll become a complete addict again. In an age of ~peak TV~ there seem to be 782 new shows annually, and I maybe watch 1 of them, and they never seem to remind me much of XF -- which either means I've missed the shows that have been influenced by XF or the show has retained a kind of singularity. Honestly, I suspect (or maybe just hope) it's the latter.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I reread Kipler and Penumbra's XF stories every so often and grind my teeth with continued jealousy. But most of my fic consumption these days is in Black Sails (QUEER PIRATES TRYING TO OVERTHROW ENGLAND. PLEASE WATCH BLACK SAILS), Superbat (Clark Kent/Bruce Wayne), and The Witcher. (Have I seen The Witcher? No. Have I read the books? The first one and maybe 1/6 of the second one. Have I played the video games or read the comics? No. Has that stopped me from reading fic? No.)

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Oh man, I have never been able to pick favorites. That said, "Unwritten" was possibly the sparest story I wrote and I still really like the imagery in it.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

Never say never. No plans to write anything else in XF at present. (This does make me wonder, though, if there're any drafts on an old somehow-still-active email account somewhere...)

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

Ha haha ahaha, no. (Well, my mom knows I was in a ~writing group~. Thankfully, she has never asked for further details.) Like. It amazes and charms me that, say, someone who is in high school right now may feel exactly 0 hesitation in sharing their fannishness with everyone, everywhere. Fandom is much more understood and accepted as a hobby/way of life/style goals, I think, than it was 25 years ago. But the whole reason I went online in 1997 to look for XF fans was because all the sweet people in my offline life who watched the show were, hmm-- What's a nice way of saying that talking to them about the show was like chewing tinfoil? Compartmentalization has served me well for decades now. :D

(Posted by Lilydale on July 28, 2020)

#new post #old school x #xfiles fanfic #xf fanfic #jesemie's evil twin #jet #xf fanfic author interviews

123 notes · View notes

aelaer · 5 years

Note

[1/2] Now this is an actual ask as in asking for help. 👀 I have a problem with Steve and Tony. I spent too much time too early on reading anti/not-friendly post-CW fics about 'Team Cap', and because of that I have been unable to see Tony as a flawed human or Steve as a good person. It's a pattern I've become too familiar with, and even recent stories are often going into that sense. I have been trying for some time now to do something about it, but either the method was bad, or I couldn't

(I tagged a couple people in this post – if you were tagged, the question directed to you is wayyyy at the bottom! Feel free to ignore of course.)

You really hit me with a doozy with this ask. I might offend someone for not thinking the exact same way as them with… everything this topic entails… Steve, Tony, anti-fics. Followers from last year know what happened last time I talked about poor and OOC characterization in fanfic, lmao. Beware The Easily Offended! This Is A Critical Thinking Of Your Hobby Zone! I Am Being Critical Of Specific Types of MCU Fanfic!

Please don’t click the read more button if you can’t handle an opinion that might not match yours. Really. I’m fine with discussing different opinions in a mature manner but if you have issues with people saying they don’t like a specific type of plot, this post is not for you. (The read more button doesn’t appear on the original post for followers using the mobile app, but it works on desktop and in all reblogs. If you don’t see a cut and don’t want to read, just skip it, please).

Yeah. Okay. Moving on. Can’t say folks weren’t warned.

I’ve had this in my drafts for several weeks because of the abuse I got the last time I wrote something critical about certain plot points used in fanfic. I was definitely a bit reluctant to look at this specific topic from an analytical and critical look as I remembered that, but hey, it’s really easy for a coward to use a sockpuppet account and throw abuse. It’s harder to be a minority voice with stark opinions contrasting the popular trend. I’m okay with having a minority opinion amongst the MCU fandom.

(PS - you’re welcome to disagree with my opinions, so long as you’re respectful about it. Remember there are individuals behind the screens!)

Concerning Character Flaws

So the thing about really well-written characters is that they are flawed in some manner. Anyone who thinks Tony or Steve exist without flaws – and I mean real flaws, like arrogance, believing they’re always right, short tempers, and other *real* character flaws that both of these characters have – well, if they don’t think they exist with these flaws, how well do they know the character?

You don’t have to know a character well to be a fan of said character – there’s no rules about that – but if you’re going to write fanfic, and that fanfic entails the character you love against a character you don’t particularly like, I’d say any writer looking to do anything resembling a good job would do their due diligence in figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of both characters before writing the characters themselves. These mental lists of characteristics should be equal for both characters. No, “good abs” is not a character strength if you have no physical aspects in the other character strength column. You don’t have to like a character to still write them well.

Even professionals don’t follow this rule when, say, shows get new writers or comics get different writers, so you might consider me silly expecting those dabbling in fan fiction. But yeah, if an author wants me to take a story seriously as something with quality, I expect the characters to resemble themselves in some manner.

(This level of resemblance varies when you purposefully choose for the protagonist to be evil, be in a completely different time period, etc, but authors who do this *well* still get core personality traits solid, even if morality is out the window or the profession is entirely different. I have a lot of examples from the Sherlock fandom of total AUs that pull this off well – haven’t read nearly enough AUs in the MCU to have a good collection here).

But a resemblance of character, of capturing the three-dimensionality of a character, is what anti-fics simply fail to achieve. The characters they’re anti against usually suffer cases of Flanderization, if they’re not completely out of character altogether in showing traits that were never displayed in the canon, ever. I don’t know why anyone would be interested in such stories, myself, and remain baffled at their popularity. Is there some sort of enjoyment in seeing such a 2D rendition of a character in what is otherwise meant as a serious work and provides absolutely no sense of proper conflict between two characters? Not for me; it immediately takes me out of the story and when it gets too much, I abandon the story. It’s just not enjoyable for me. Turning a canon protagonist into a strawman is just lazy writing and offers nothing to the writer’s favorite, preferred character.

Concerning Steve’s and Tony’s Flaws

Every real human being has some sort of personality flaw that is decidedly unattractive. Some people are really good at showing it very rarely (and are some of the best human beings), but with these two characters we see them at their greatest heights and lowest of lows. Ironically, they actually share a lot of the same flaws, but display them in different manners in canon:

Both men believe they are the best man for the job and will do it without consulting someone who could actually fight against it - or go completely against them. Tony with Ultron is the easy example here. He’s the smartest man in the world and can tackle the issue of protecting it on its own. Steve, same issue, and his job is “helping Bucky”. *He’s* the one who can handle Bucky, the only one who can handle him - big thing in both WS and CW. If both of them had utilized their friends and allies a lot more, a lot of issues could have been avoided.

Both men are sometimes hypocritical. Steve promotes teamwork in all his speeches but again with the Bucky situation. Just… everything Bucky, man. Tony signs the Accords and immediately goes against them with what he gives to Peter, who most assuredly did not sign them (tangent: if he HAD joined the Avengers at the end of Homecoming, I have no idea how that would have gone since Peter would have had to reveal his identity to the UN and then there’s the whole ‘still a minor’ thing, and yeah, Homecoming’s end scene just makes me go nuts). But anyway, their occasional hypocrisy is one of the most realistic aspects of them because most human beings are hypocritical sometimes.

Both men are sometimes arrogant. Tony’s self-explanatory with his genius-playboy-philanthropist-billionaire. One thing he does not suffer from is low self-esteem in regards to his abilities. His arrogance comes from his genius. Steve’s arrogance lies more in his deep-seeded belief that he is on the moral high ground – and one reason I think a lot of people dislike him so much, because moral superiority is very much a faux pas in this day and age for some millennials and many Gen Z folk. He has a very, very solid sense of what is right and what is wrong, and that rubs some folks the wrong way. Tony is more morally fluid – but he is not by any means immoral.

Both of them have a really solid list of strengths as well. As this ask specifically is looking to find the good in Steve, I specifically Googled pro-Steve articles for you to click at your leisure (and one with both). If you need to go back to canon, I highly recommend rewatching The First Avenger and The Winter Soldier, which introduces Steve brilliantly and then lets Steve grow further in the second film.

(Note: I actually prefer Tony to Steve in terms of personal favoritism, but how a very loud segment of Tony fans have treated other characters has led me to be more vocal about the strengths of others, especially Steve and Wanda. So Tony might be in my top 5, but mean-spirited Tony fans have moved me to be a champion of other characters, if only to show other fans that there are indeed Tony fans that do like the other characters and treat them – and their fans – with respect).

Bringing Balance (to the Universe…) Fanfic-Style

This addresses the second part of your ask in regards to the fanfics. And this is where I started running into trouble, too, mostly because, well, just how many Stephen and Steve fics are there? Yeah, exactly. Stephen’s my main guy. So I did some research, outsourcing, and reading.

Here’s two I knew of before cuz Stephen’s in them in some capacity:

Identity Theft by KitKat992 - it stars Peter and both Tony and Steve play integral parts from what I recall. Good story too, very engaging.

A Dysfunctional Senior Year (series) by ApolloLoki97 - this also stars Peter and has a large Team As Family aspect, so it shows the entire Avengers team as just decent people. My favorite part is naturally part 3 because Stephen comes in that one, haha.

And to find other stories, I went into the Anti-Accords tag. It was nice to find fics that didn’t have such a love of hypocritical authoritarianism. Aannyyyyway.

Making Sense of Chaos by SparkedtoLife - mind the tags. Seriously, it’s heavy duty. Yet another Peter fic because he’s way more popular than my favorite character, qq. Lots of Netflix Marvel characters too! Anyway, deals with not only Tony and Steve really well (and has a different dynamic with Tony that isn’t IronDad, so that was a nice change of pace), it also deals with the Accords situation very realistically. And none of those are even main plot points. If you can handle the very serious, sensitive subject that is the main plot point, I highly recommended it. It’s a very masterfully done work.

Atlas by nanasekei - Stony. Treats all characters with respect and both Tony and Steve as three-dimensional, flawed humans with some serious self doubts. Also highly agree with the author that Thaddeus Ross sucks and is basically one of the biggest people to blame for Everything Going To Shit.

Homecoming by an orphaned account - Some Stucky. This is a lovely one-shot of things I basically wanted to happen when the team got together again but didn’t. Sigggghhh. Everyone is definitely in character in this one, traumas and healing and all. And look, another person realizes that trusting Ross is a really horrible idea.

Locks Not Replaced by Riverdaughter - first this writer has a Tolkien-based username so yay. Anyway, the fic starts off by Tony realizing that he almost killed Steve during the fight with his repulsors, and it was only Bucky that stopped him. Do people seriously think he’d survive a shot to the face with that power? This is one reason the ‘Steve tried to kill Tony’ people piss me the fuck off. What do you think those repulsors shoot, fucking rainbows? Honestly, guys. Anyway, mini rant over. This fic is great. Author comes in with a Cap favoritism but treats Tony well, and honestly Tony turning a blind eye to everything and ignoring Ross is what I like to think happened in canon (he clearly dislikes the guy). And also I love the Robin Hood parallels. Love love love. I think this fic is my favorite of the ones listed in this section.

Meeting Your Heroes by Riverdaughter - naturally after reading that fic I went to explore more and found this gem. She’s not incorrect in saying Tony wasn’t a good mentor at the beginning - I think he had his own growth after Peter’s actions in Homecoming especially (though even through Homecoming he was trying, just… not always successfully lmao). Anyway love these two together. It’s great.

Photograph by slytherclaw420 - A scene we deserved in Endgame and didn’t get. Sigh. Definite IronDad feels here. Hopeful Steve, rebuilding of a friendship.

And uh, an honorable mention of sorts:

Balancing the Scales by MoonFire1 - I’m not recommending this fic for good characterization or plot. It really doesn’t have either. The fic was written in retaliation for the nasty Tony fans completely trashing Steve’s character. You should only read this if you want to see the argument from “the other side” and if you want to see an anti-Tony fic like you’ve seen anti-Steve fics. Don’t harass the author though. This is presented as a counterargument to anti-Steve fiction, for those interested to read the other sides arguments. I don’t like the nature of the fic, but I loathe that “not Steve friendly” has 30 fucking pages of works with tens of thousands of kudos, so one anti-Tony fic (with a comparatively small three pages under that tag) really doesn’t compare. Ugh. I hate the anti culture in this fandom so much. Loathe it. It’s such a nasty energy! Why would you indulge in such negativity? But as I’ve mentioned before, I appreciate authors aware enough to tag it so I can avoid it. I wish that part of fandom culture didn’t exist, but well, can’t change it. Just can criticize the fuck out of it on my blog. Maybe encourage people to think less one-sided in the process if I’m lucky.

But there’s probably more good characterization Steve fics to be found, so I am forcefully recruiting two people via tag:

If you’re looking to dabble into Stony fics with good-guy-Steve, if anyone would know of any, I’d imagine it’d be @babywarg.

You don’t know this person, but @cairistiona7 has actually known me the longest of anyone here on tumblr (half my life! HALF! She even knows my real name :P She betaed a LOTR work of mine a decade ago I ended up never fully publishing… thanks again for all your help there…). Anyway, she’s a big Bucky fan, and Bucky friendships is the best thing. So if anyone would know any wholesome Bucky and Steve stories, it’d be her. (Or really I’d take any of your recs, Cair, as I’ll probably enjoy them as well).

I hope this was helpful to you md, and that I didn’t piss off too many of my followers in the process of answering this lol.

#mdcbd #tony stark critical #steve rogers critical #meta #the sokovia accords #character analysis #tony stark #steve rogers #peter parker #since he's in a lot of the fics #fic rec #ask #answered #anti culture

63 notes · View notes

morethanaprincess-a · 4 years

Text

@ahogedetective said: 1, 4, and 12!

Asks for Writers

1.) Is there a specific environment you prefer to write in?

Yes! And it’s entirely based on what time of day it is, actually.

Daytime/sun is still up: At the dining table, with a spotify playlist, and with water, hot tea, or a light meal. I take periodic breaks to wash dishes and turn on the kettle, and when I’m being a bit delinquent, I’ll write during work breaks or general lulls in my workflow, too. Sometimes I can write when others are in the room but I don’t prefer it, and I know I can’t when others are speaking to me directly.

Nighttime/after sundown: In pajamas, on a sofa, with a thermos of tea and either a spotify playlist or something streaming/playing on TV in the background. Sometimes it’s inspo for a muse or just a comfort movie or playlist, but I need something going on to temporarily distract me when I’m either stumped on ideas or just can’t fit the right words together.

I used to write over larger meals and alcohol, but I haven’t done that for months now due to health reasons.

In general though, I like being full, hydrated/caffeinated, and in comfortable clothes when I write. Sometimes with various beauty treatments. It feels almost like a spa and an office combined when I’m doing a multi-step skincare regimen and I’m waiting for a serum to set or a sheet mask to work while working on a draft.

4.) Do you like to plan something out, or just wing it?

I try to work with what my writing partners are comfortable with most of the time. Some muns really like to plot and are open to conversation about it (sometimes chatting all night about plans!) and others are very much hands-off, preferring to see how the thread spontaneously evolves. Personally, I’m a bigger fan of the former but it relies upon having a good rapport with a writing partner to make it work.

I will say for many of my romantic ships, especially ones with a lot of AUs and various threads, I’m plotting quite a bit with the muns of those muses. I prefer to do that for those sorts of interactions because I’m not an auto-ship sort of writer and I like seeing how that sort of intimate relationship can and will evolve over time and many threads.

I tend to have more confidence in my writing when some of a story is planned out, too. That’s also a perk, and helps me reply to threads and interactions far more easily. And when I’ve hit a writer’s block or have a question for the other mun regarding their muse and/or verse (especially when it comes to crossovers and OCs I’m not familiar with), it’s far easier to reach out and ask if I’m already plotting with them.

12.) What’s your best advice for someone struggling with their writing right now?

First and foremost, take a break. Sleep, eat a good meal, indulge in another hobby, see family and/or friends. Step away from tumblr and possibly the computer in general. You’re not getting paid to RP. Take some of the pressure off you. Any writing partner worth writing with will understand and will be eager to welcome you back when you’re ready.

Otherwise, I try to follow this advice: write what you want to read. And in order to do that, read the sort of content you want to write. I find that there’s plenty that can inspire writers in their work, their characters, their plots, their content: TV, movies, video games, comics, podcasts, blogs, etc. However, RP is very much a writing hobby. It’s just as much about the actual writing, putting ideas and words to paper or a digital document, as it is reading.

I don’t necessarily mean sticking to the ‘great novels’ or ‘great poems’ or what have you, the sort of thing you may have analyzed in classes in school. But I do mean seeking out the sorts of stories, characters, even general writing styles that inspire you and that you really enjoy reading.

For me, that’s a mix of all sorts of writers, from those who penned some of the worldwide ‘classics’ that have been discussed in plenty of schools and made and remade into plenty of films to contemporary offerings and even some things that...ahem...I’d never admit I read in a public setting (and am glad I can purchase secondhand online!). I like to write about royals/aristocrats/rich people problems, luxury, class divides, romance, thriller, horror, and history the most, so I focus on titles about those topics. I’m less interested in writing fantasy, science fiction, and battles/war/fighting scenes, so I don’t usually choose those to read for fun or inspiration.

#more-than-a-princess answered #more-than-a-princess musings #ahogedetective #(Asks for Writers meme)#(Thanks for the asks!)#(I tried to condense my thoughts on these because I could've easily rambled on)

1 note · View note

b1a4seeyou · 5 years

Text

Eight people I'd like to know better

Tagged by @masatohijirikawas ! Thankies, boo!! ;w;

Name/Alias: Eunhwa/Eun! I like the meaning behind it uwu

Birthday: 15th May (a day before Toriumi's holy heck)

Zodiac: Taurus!

Height: .....165 cm qkwhwlsjdlkc

Hobbies: My hobbies are pretty much everywhere. XD. But I guess singing, gaming and uh... does... cleaning count??

Favourite colours: RED!!!

Favourite books: *stares at my entire comic collection* Can these count? ;w;

Last song I listened to: Not gonna lie, I replayed a few old Vocaloid songs lately but Vocacircus' The Start is pretty much recent! Plz do give it a listen! It's a masterpiece 👌

Last movie I watched: I'm not even sure myself jwpqjskcn

Inspiration: NNGGGGHHHH. I'm not sure but I can say that my best friends are my inspirations! They achieve a lot of higher rank stuff irl and social media, and I really look up to them! Hearing their stories about what they did gives me the boost to keep going for the things I wanna get through so maybe, we all can be in the same level and achieve things together! (o 0 w0)o

Dream career: Umm... haha, Idk yet. *games all scattered* Oops, sorry, I didnt mean to- *writing drafts flying away* No, wait, this isnt mine haha. This is just work- *short game concept ideas all over the place* Okay, okay, but hear me out. This is just temporarily. *code samples sticks to your face* NNGGGGHHH. Okay, okay, okay!! I did plan to be a game developer one day and currently taking a course based on it. ;; But like I said, it's just a temporary kinda target. If it doesn't work out, I'll probably open my own cat cafe and drag my friends into it wosjdonfkc

Meaning of my URL: Once upon a time during my Kpop obsession phase, I was too obsessed with the group and decided to create an account to meet fellow people. Turned out good but didnt expect to be in this phase now wkdbdofjvk. Also 'seeyou' was actually one of the member's fan name, I just feel like combining them. XP

Oh boy, eight people. Mmmmm... Tagging uh @shinanigansen @mewtwo24 @jessrine @mp100 @multipeaceout14 and uh just anyone who hasnt done this! Just tag me as your tagger uwu

#Taggys #IT'S 1AM AND GUESS WHAT I'M DOING #PLAYING A HORROR GAME KNOWING IT WOULD MAKE ME STAY UP :D #And the fact this game allows to make my own main character 👀#Anyways THANKS FOR TAG BOO!!!!

3 notes · View notes

herotting-archive · 5 years

Text

BILL’S TIMELINE:

special note: two ‘years’ for this, as Dad Verse is set in the present/Bill was a kid during the 90′s in it. This is how MY Bill life goes, from age 0-40. These ideas are still kinda draft-ish, so they’re subjected to change. Contains some sensitive content, all of which will be tagged.

1979 / 2002 : Bill was born, along with his twin brother Aaron. (age 0)

1980 / 2003 : Bill’s sister, Jane was born. (age 1)

1984 / 2007 : Bill’s brother, Tommy was born / Bill discovers x-men, then shortly other comic books / Bill's first day at school. (age 5)

1985 / 2008 : Bill watches Star Wars for the first time, shortly gets into other Science Fiction films. (age 6)

1988 / 2011 : Bill attempts to befriend classmates - instantly discovers he picked the wrong group, they show cruelty by making fun of his clothes. / Bill meets Josh after standing up for him to bullies who were making fun of his weight. (age 9)

1989 / 2012 : Bill meets Pete, then Jerry not long after. / Jerry introduces Bill to tabletop games and fantasy. / Pete shows Bill his first horror film, Halloween - Bill loved it, albeit being a little traumatized. (age 10)

1990 / 2013 : The Eltingville Comic Book, Science - Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role - Playing games Club is established. / The club begins to get treated worse at school by peers, because of their ‘nerdiness’ (age 11)

1992 / 2015 : Bill asks a girl out at school, only to get laughed at by her and everyone else / Bill gets beaten up by stronger male peers for the first time. / Bill tells the teachers, they do nothing about his abuse or even express vexation with him / Bill began to feel a sense of sadness, suspects it’s his treatment at school. / Bill’s fascination with comics grow, seeing how fictional characters deal with bad guys/bullies, finding inspiration in it. (age 13)

1993 / 2016 : Bill’s parents’ fighting becomes worse, he tries to drown it out by hiding in his room and reading comics. / Bill’s sadness worsened, developing into a bad depression. He becomes too stressed to do his homework. / Bill began to realize how bad his parents were and what it means that his mother is a drunk, as well as never being good enough for his father and the abuse he receives from him. / Thus, Bill started feeling resentment toward his mother and his father. / Bill’s interests were slowly turning into obsession, as he began to spend more and more money and time on them. (age 14)

1994 / 2017 : Aaron got into the “hipster” scene and eventually picked up drinking, this greatly strained Bill’s relationship with his twin. / Aaron ceased participating in fandom activities with Bill. / The club got into their first big fight / Feeling a lack of motivation and melancholy, Bill has stopped bathing and trying at school, this angers his father. / Upon noticing the fit jocks and the strong fictional heroes, Bill began to become very insecure about his body and even began to harm himself. / Bill’s hatred grew stronger, resenting himself and the world around him. / Parents divorced, his father leaving with Aaron. Bill felt guilty about this and blamed himself for his behavior. (age 15)

(currently/main verse) early-late 1995 / early-late 2018 : Bill is a hateful, self-loathing, obsessed, depressed wreck. / Fights with the club has gotten worse. / Mother grew concern about Bill’s behavior and obsession, hires two men (dubbed themselves “mandom”) to help and steer Bill away from his interests. The tables were turned and Mandom steals nearly all of Bill’s merchandise/collection then left him tied up for days until discovered when mother came home. / Bill’s depression worsen after losing ‘everything valuable’ to him. / Bill’s resentment for his mother is at an all time high because of this, refuses to talk to her. / Obsession grows as he’s desperate to rebuild his collection. (age 16)

underneath is for anything past the current (main verse)

1997 / 2020 : Aaron visits Bill to rekindle their brotherhood after The Northwest Comix Collective disbanded, and Aaron grew tired of his father’s abuse. Bill was stealing from his friends’ collections, they soon confront him about this. The club has a huge fight over this, their friendship greatly tarnished. / The club doesn’t end, but they began to become distant with each other. (age 18)

1998 / 2021 : Feeling lonely, stressed, and displeased with his life, and finding out nothing can bring happiness, Bill attempts suicide and fails. / Bill is put in a mental institute for a long while. (age 19)

2000 / 2023 : After having been put on anti-depressants and continue his years of therapy, Bill apologizes to the club and rekindle the friendship they once had many, many years ago. The club came to a mutual agreement about not taking fandom so seriously, but still having fun with it. / Bill continues college, majoring in writing/journalism. / Because of therapy, Bill’s make more attempts to take care of himself, and works out. (age 21)

2002 / 2025 : Bill meets a woman at college, has unprotected sex with her. / Woman gets pregnant, considers abortion or adoption until Bill promises to take care of the baby. / A beautiful baby girl is born, Bill names her “Jillian Emma Dickey” (age 23 / special note: this changes vastly depending on ship/verse)

2003 / 2026 : Aaron’s comic writing career finally took off, his original work becoming very famous - Bill feels jealous because of this and becomes slightly distant with Aaron. (age 24)

2004 / 2027 : Bill graduates from college / Bill takes anger management classes. / Bill becomes a professional movie critic (age 25)

2006 / 2029 : Bill becomes an occasional boxer in his hometown as a hobby / Aaron’s comic was adapted into a film (which Aaron also writes and directs) (age 27)

2007 / 2030 : Bill writes his first ever literature, it’s an autobiography titled “The Eltingville Club: Dangers of Fandom” The book is mostly famous with nerdy fans who misunderstood and saw it as an attack (therefore they spent most of their time online erroneously criticizing and hating it) and eventually fans of the new famous movie director/writer, Aaron Winkleman. (age 28)

2010 / 2033 : Bill begins to write for Screen Rant. (age 31)

2013 / 2036 : Bill attends Comic - Con with his famous twin, Aaron, instantly regrets it. (age 34)

2014 / 2037 : Bill’s daughter; Jillian establishes The Eltingville Comic Book, Science - Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role - Playing Club: Next Gen. Or otherwise known as: The Eltingville Club 2.0. This greatly concerns Bill, but he doesn’t do anything about it. (age 35)

2018-2019 / 2041-2042 : Jillian greatly reminds Bill of himself when he was a teenager, this exceedingly concerns him but he doesn’t know how to help it. (age 39-40)

#;; member ＃01 / about #pregnancy tw #abuse tw #child abuse tw #self harm tw #suicide tw #// woo! This is longer than I intended #// Hence why I had to put it under a readmore!

15 notes · View notes

duhad · 6 years

Text

Three Pillars of Writing: A Terrible Essay by Duhad

Since I ended up spending way too long writing this in response to a largely unrelated post about fan fiction, I’m going to post this overly long soap box rant about writing on its own in the vain hope the 3 or 4 people who follow me will read this if its not hidden under 3 feet of other peoples text. -

I had a conversation with my friend Kit the other day, where I was trying to sort of argue/define an idea I had about stories fundamentally working on three central pillars. 1. Plot - The story of whats going on. The adventure/mystery/horror/romance/etc as an active and progressing narrative. 2. Characters - The central characters and their internal and interpersonal lives. 3. Setting - A mix of both world building and general attention to setting details, ranging from things as grand scoop as the history and cultures of fantasy and sci-fi worlds to as small and personal as the club scene in a big city or the neighborhood of a small town or the student body and facility of a school.

For comedies you can knock out one of these three to replace it with comedy without losing much, so long as the humor works.

In my original argument I more or less was saying that a story needs at least 2 of these to work in order to function, with one weak link not really unbalancing things, but two going out causing a collapse. But reading this I think I am coming to a more nuanced conclusion, that their are people for whom one or more of these are of much higher importance and who can over look flaws in the other one or two. That essentially each reader/viewer/player is, weather consciously or not looking for one or more of these things and the better or worse its handled, the more or less they like it. But since most people don’t really grasp this notion, they look for broader, more tangible things to explain WHY they enjoyed something or not. So for instance I have heard allot of people dismiss the works of Stephen King because he’s too long winded, to caught up on details and the daily lives of his characters and tends to meander, losing allot of steam in the middle of his books as the terrifying threats take a back seat to ‘pointless’ things like characters falling in love, falling out of love, dealing with substance abuse or stress or school or work or fascinations with silly hobbies. For people who are their for the plot, he’s a bore who needs an editor to cut out about 70% of any given new book. Especially when allot of his books end, not with a thrilling climax, but a chapter or two after that point, with the remaining characters moving forward with their lives. Yet his books sell like hotcakes because for people who pick up the books and fall in love with the characters and the worlds they live in. They get to just indulge in their stories for hundreds of pages before suddenly getting a thrill as these people they have spent the last ten to twenty hours with are suddenly thrust into terrible danger, with the fate of the lived in settings they inhabit, from whole world to tiny little communities, dangling in the balance! For another example “Rendezvous With Rama” by Arthur C. Clarke is a book I am sure about 90% of people here would HATE! Its slow, its uneventful, the characters are all consummate professionals who don’t have any drama with one another or really spent much time getting to know one another. The two most exciting things that happen are when someone we met one chapter ago almost gets seriously hurt while trying to fly a sort of winged bike and then does not and later when the Hermian colony fires a nuke at the Rama ship, but then it gets defused relatively easily with no lives lost. But I LOVE IT because it presents an utterly fascinating look at an empty alien spaceship that is unlike anything on Earth. Its strange and beautiful and endlessly fascinating to explore! And the people exploring it themselves are fascinating, not because their particularly deep characters, but because they represent a human culture that is at once recognizable and yet unlike our own. Its a setting first and for most book in other worlds. The Lord of the Rings is setting first, plot second and characters a pretty distant third, at least in the books. Fan fiction tends to be characters first, focusing on the lives and personalities of characters and their interactions with one another before anything else, though obviously their are lots of exceptions. Finally Sherlock Homes stories tend to be plot first, with the central mystery and how it gets solved being the center piece, with the characterization of Homes, Watson and a few of the central figures getting just enough attention to make us care about them and basically everything else being kept pretty out of focus unless necessary for the plot. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might go into the history of the Mormon Church in “A Study In Scarlet”, but mostly its just their to explain the motivations of Jefferson Hope and he only gets fleshed out to explain why he murdered Drebber and Stangerson, as soon as that’s done he basically just go’s to jail quietly and is never mentioned again. But that’s fine because its a story your reading for the plot, not the setting or the characters, so once the murder is resolved theres no need to keep and flesh out the characters and setting details unless their going to come up again. Which they will not. Hell Moriarty, Homes’s nemesis and biggest recurring enemy shows up in only two stories directly, the second of which he dies in and is only mentioned in a couple others as being basically just a guy who other criminals work for sometimes.

Now obviously these are only broad outlines of major elements that stories tend to work with in less tangible ways and their not the ONLY things readers/viewers/players respond to. Someone who loves plot focused stories might hate Sherlock Homes stories because they don’t like mysteries or prefer more modern characters. Someone who just wants a good character driven story might hate Bloom Into You because they don’t like the leads or just dislike anime as a medium. And someone who likes rich worlds might still hate Dune because its so dark and bloody and fatalistic. That’s fine. But I think knowing what key aspect/s of a way a story is told and where its focus is can tell you just as much about why you do or do not enjoy certain pieces of fiction as more tangible elements like it being a romantic comedy or a sci-fi horror.

And as an addendum for writers, I think knowing what you really love about stories can help you get thru allot of tricky spots. I love setting and character elements of stories, but have allot less patience for plot and so when writing I will breeze thru world building sections, people discussing culture or politics or the way things work in their sci-fi/fantasy/just plain weird setting and breezy banter dialogue. But then when it comes to moving the story forward its like, “Ahhhhhh... They uh... Do the thing and then... Uh... Hm... Time for a brake. I’ll get back to finishing this thing in a month or two.”

Before being able to crystallize by thoughts on this I would often get into trouble by setting out to write plot heavy epics, full of twists and turns and major events I knew would happen at X point in the future, but then never got anywhere in them because I found writing the quick and action heavy scenes that would get me to those big moments where just miserable and felt stilted as hell! Even now I write with my best friend and whenever she talks about these really cool ideas for things that will happen in the futures of the stories I get all excited thinking about how fun writing about how the settings and characters will change and how they will all interact with one another and how many fun scenes I can write in that new environment... And then I remember I need to actually push the story forward to that point and I suddenly get really stressed out because plotting out how that will all happen and then executing on that plot is my least favorite part of writing.

But when I wrote things for my friend’s game where it was like, “Write a history and mythology for this setting.” Or “Write two characters interacting and talking with one another in these short scenes.” Or “Come up with a type of fantasy creature or a culture or a tribe or a cult and then write about how they interact with a group of strangers.” And it was so easy and so much fun that I ended up writing so much stuff I actually got told several times to either stop or slow down because he thought I was pushing myself to hard to come up with this novels worth of setting details and short character interactions. But the truth of the matter was, I was just exhilarated to have a chance to just toss out all of these ideas I didn’t then have to tie together into a tightly constructed over arching plot!

Later I was writing a story for a comic with my best friend and though we had all of these cool ideas, it was not really coming together right. Everything was so detailed, so focused on notes about the setting and expository dialogue and aiming toward setting up for future events that it just didn’t feel right at all. So I took a brake and wrote a RPG based on the setting and spent about 100 pages just carefully building the setting and history for the universe it was set in. Then, months later, I came back to the comic and, now focusing just on the scene at hand and keeping in mind the setting I had built, I rewrote the opening chapter in a way which was SO MUCH BETTER then the first draft! Because I was no longer writing for the plot, but for the characters and the world and THAT was my jam!

Finally fairly recently, while dealing with a bout of writers block, I just for fun wrote something for my aforementioned best friend which was literally just a character looking around their weird room, commenting on some of the dumb stuff she saw and then having a conversation with her best friend. That ended up leading to a 23+ page story I am still writing with her that I find is so fun and relaxing to write I just pick it up and work on it when I am feeling stressed or down and it gets me feeling allot better! And though she is working on some long term plotting stuff for it, the thing I love about it is that, when I am writing it, its basically purely just setting details and characters.

And that’s what I want you writers out their to take away from my TED Talk today! If you find yourself getting caught up over and over again when writing, look at where you keep getting stuck and ask yourself, “Is their a pattern here? Am I getting stuck at random or is it when I try to focus too much on the world or on whats coming next in the story or when I need to write dialogue or back story that I am just grinding to a halt and not knowing what to write next?” Because I think you might well find that their is a pattern and once you know where your just breezing along and where your getting stuck, you can work to either spice up the parts you have trouble with with the things you enjoy or rework your story to focus on your strengths and down play your weakness. It might seem odd at first, but if Michael Crichton can shove long expository monologs about science into a book about a dino theme park going to hell or a Congo safari filled with intelligent apes murdering people and if Andrew Hussie can hold up his story about cosmically apocalyptic happenings to have a couple of dumb kids talk to one another about nonsense for a few thousand words, you can indulge yourself a little. Its alright, it doesn’t make you a bad creator, just one who will appeal more strongly to a particular audience.

Now that I have spent hours writing some dumb nonsense no one will ever read I will go to be- Oh wait its already morning, to get breakfast then work I guess.

As for the rest of you, go enjoy yourselves indulging in or creating whatever flavor of narrative you best enjoy!

@roxthefoxinsox @balile

8 notes · View notes

onyx-archer · 6 years

Text

My Idea for the Future of Comic Books.

I've been telling people in my personal life that like comics (and few that at least like to hear about weird ideas I have) that the current release method for comics is slowly killing the industry, among other things. I've put a lot of thought into how to fix the problem, and while I'm no expert, I think it comes down to a number of factors. All of it will be under the cut, as to not overwhelm you if you don’t want to read it. Keep in mind that this more or less entirely pertains to the Big Two (Marvel and DC), but can be applied to all but the smallest publishers really.

All of the issues I can see with the industry are as follows:

1. Limited Distribution: The Direct Market makes it harder for people to get into comics. Be it because of the hobby's requirement to go to a hobbyist store of some kind, or hope that they can find a copy on Amazon. Digital stuff does help a little, but that leads into the next problem.

2. Digital Prices/Digital Marketshare: From what little we as a community know about digital sales, thanks to a few bits of info that can be gleamed from smaller, indie creators, we know that there isn't a super huge digital market for comics yet. This would probably improve if the publishers stopped charging print cover prices for digital books, but that probably won't happen any time soon. Of course, digital markets come with the advent of piracy, but it's not like that was entirely avoidable thanks to scanning groups.

3. The Release Format: I'm gonna say something a little controversial here: single issues aren't really worth the price at this point. I say this because of how story arcs for comics these days are typically written; stories are very rarely self contained single issue affairs anymore. This also plays into the comics only being available for purchase through extremely limited channels, whereas you can sell a graphic novel or a trade paperback in more easily accessible markets than hobbyist stores like Comic Book stores. The single issues also tend to sit unsold because it's easy to over ship them, which is evident in basically every comic book store in North America.

4. Marketing: This issue is mostly aimed at Marvel, but can be applied universally. A big issue Marvel has is that they launch books with little fanfare, only to cancel them 6 issues in because of low sales. The books basically just get axed because they aren't marketed properly to potential fans. Tent pole titles like Spider-Man get marketed, sure, but for every Spider-Man or Thor, there's a character with a smaller fanbase that's getting snubbed because the big books hog all of the marketing budget, making it harder for them to gain any sizable fan traction.

I could also throw overall quality of storytelling/writing, but that's more of subjective issue in most cases. After all, just because I don't like the writing of recent Spider-Man material doesn't mean nobody does. I could also throw in my problems with people in the comics industry being shitheads on social media, but that’s not important right now.

Anyway, my solution idea attempts to address the 4 big problems. It's basically as follows:

1. Changing Formats: This here's probably going to get me the most flack, but I don't really care. What I'm suggesting is a complete overhaul of the format of comics into something a little more enticing, and potentially profitable: graphic novels. Now, the industry already releases trade collections, but I think given the fact that most comic story lines are written for trade collections already, we might as well just get graphic novels instead. This has a number of benefits, but I'll get into that more as we go. One I’ll bring up now though is that Graphic Novels, over all, have a better shelf life than individual floppies.

2. Dial Back The Number of Releases: A big issue some smaller titles have right now is the lack of marketing, and this suggestion is a pretty reasonable way to limit the issue. What I'm suggesting is, along with the change in format, a company like Marvel only releases, at most, 4 things a week. Preferably, 2-3 books, but 4 is still within reason as far as I'm concerned. This, combined with a format change, will cut down on the ugly look of a pile of unsold issues, and can be stored more efficiently. It will also allow for a more efficient marketing, and less clutter on shelves, and if all companies adopted the practice, less competing for a reader’s attention.

3. Quarterly Release Schedule: Something that would be a byproduct of going to a graphic novel format would come with a release drawback, but at the same time, it would make each release easier to justify purchasing. If I only had to buy Spider-Man 4 times a year, for 20-25 bucks a pop, I'd be happy. Of course, to make sure you don't misunderstand, each volume would have to guarantee a conclusion to the story being told by the time the last page is turned. Sure, an ongoing subplot that ties stories together is fine, but it would make things easier to recommend to fresh eyes, as a more complete feeling story is more satisfying, and is easier to keep up with and/or remember.

4. Writer Rotation: This is a simple thing, but it's basically necessary to ensure a release schedule of graphic novels. The benefit of superhero material is that writers go from project to project with enough frequency, barring a few notable exceptions, so this would be a huge boon for a format change. The ideal number of writers is 2, but it can work with 3 or 4, but no more than 4. This would require a bit of teamwork on the part of the two writers, but it would allow for a more efficient output, giving each writer a window of 3 or so months to draft subsequent releases. I would also have at least 2 different main artists on board, just to make the process less daunting for a single main artist. This would come with the caviate that a writer can only remain on the book for, at most, 4-5 years at a time, to prevent burnout and/or creative stagnation. (I probably explained this poorly, but hopefully this one made sense)

5. A Variety Title: Something to keep things a little less stale, I’m proposing that each week, there’s what’s effectively an anthology/variety type book. It would, hypothetically, be similar to something like Weekly Shonen Jump, only it’d be under specific brandings. Marvel is easily the one company that I can point to an example of: Amazing Fantasy, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish, Tales of Suspense, etc. Basically, these would be weekly titles that focus on a subset of Marvel’s characters for a number of purposes.

Short, self contained oneshot stories to help with the less frequent main title releases.

Test new solo titles for unproven characters before committing to a larger book.

For the sake of showcasing newer writers to the public to gauge reactions before handing them the keys to a bigger title.

The big thing is that these would be released monthly, and wouldn’t count towards the previously mentioned release of only 3-4 books a week. They would also be sold cheaper, and individual stories could be sold cheaply in a digital format.

6. Ship To Non-Specialty Stores: A benefit of a format change would be a wider set of options for the release of books on a more frequent basis. Book stores, or other retailers that have book sections (like Walmart) wouldn’t have a problem with stocking the stories in their book sections, allowing for more eyes to be on the comics. This would have to come with the caveat of either having a rating system like video games in a easily visible place, or simply limiting the more mature stuff to Amazon and more specialist stores. Still, it allows for more potential readers to find the books easier.

7. Lower the Digital Market Price: This one is a harder pill to swallow, but realistically, this would have to be done. Heck, this idea alone can ignore all of the previous ones, and that alone would probably boost digital sales. Most people buy digital goods because it’s marginally cheaper in some cases, and they don’t have to go anywhere. The cheaper price is usually the result of not needing to print actual copies of a product, but comics have failed to grasp this concept. I think it’s a no-brainer if you change the format, but it’s obviously something the current format needs to do too.

So yeah, that’s some shit I probably put way too much thought into, but those are just some ideas I have when it comes to fixing American Comics. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

#Comics #Comic Books #Rambling #Ideas #Ideas to Fix Comics #Graphic Novels #Marvel #Marvel Comics #DC Comics #DC #I'd put indies in here #but it's mostly for the big two #some thoughts #rant?#Fixing Comics #American Comics

1 note · View note

garden-of-succulents · 7 years

Text

Ask I got: So with your post on your writing and Kent its like yeah I usually love a lot of your stuff but whenever Ngozi's line about "Kent getting all he wanted and not getting to grow and Jack getting all he feared and growing" I'm just kind of shocked you agree with that cause I mean you know Kent didn't want Jack to OD and I bet losing Jack in anyway was one of Kent's biggest fears.

plus like here the idea of growth ends up being tied to being out or closeted. Jack's maturity and self acceptance ends up being reflected through how open he is, the high point of his arc and growth as a player ended with him coming out to the world. Which unfortunately bounces back and frames Kent as immature and ties that immaturity to being closeted. [SOME BITS TRIMMED FOR LENGTH] And then make him an antagonist and frame all of his interactions with Jack/Bitty and all of his victories as negative just kind of burn my tongue

even more so when fans intentionally or not run with all that framing and end up connecting all of Kent's issues with his choice to be closeted for his career condemn his choice and point to it as evidence of immaturity or lack of self love or warped priorities, when that choice isn't just the norm but literally the only one any NHL player has ever made at this point and a choice millions of us make each and every day for our own safety, success, and happiness.

My reply: People criticizing the link between immaturity and closetedness are really on point, I think. When I was supporting N's comments about "Kent got everything he wanted, and didn't grow, while Jack got what he didn't want, and grew", I didn't know the full content of 3.26, especially the fact that Jack was going to come out on television and that Kent's teammates were going to be pretty LGBT-hostile.

I mean, I do think that Kent is immature, especially in the sense that his social and emotional development is stunted, and that his immaturity is the result of his decision to go into the NHL and be a professional player from age 18, while Jack's relative maturity is the result of his time in rehab and at Samwell. However, I don't think Kent is uniquely immature in the NHL, and his immaturity isn't linked to him being queer—I think, rather, that immaturity is a result of the incredibly toxic masculinity an NHL career demands, and the effects of that toxic masculinity. Jack's unique because his talent, family history, and financial privilege have given him the advantage of being able to fight that toxic masculinity in the way few professional hockey players have been able to.

So, I'm from Alberta. Small town with a hockey rink and not much else. Major oil-producing sector. Grew up around hockey players. I did part of my practicum as a mental health therapist at a university counselling centre in Vancouver where they had a really strong athletics program, and I had hockey players on my caseload. And the hardest thing for me to communicate to people from elsewhere about hockey culture is how relentlessly, insistently hypermasculine it is. Everything you've heard about a "man box", everything from The Mask You Live In or Men's Work or I Don't Want to Talk About It. That's what gets pushed by coaches, by commentators, by everybody—toxic masculinity is how you play. Dominate, suppress your emotions, overcome pain, win at all costs.

I am honestly saying that the entire feeder system for men's professional hockey is fucked up on a very fundamental level. From elementary school-aged kids getting up at 4am for practice and doing hockey every day and having no social lives outside of hockey, to teenagers leaving home before they're developmentally ready to be away from their families, having substance abuse issues at a grossly disprortionate rate to their peers, shortchanging their educations, and earning very little money. The system produces top players by getting them to focus on hockey at the expense of everything else, which includes their social and emotional development.

I'm talking about basic shit like "realizing when you are feeling an emotion and being able to identify what emotion it is". The inability to do this is called alexithymia, and it often comes from growing up in an invalidating environment where your emotions are never recognized, acknowledged, or accommodated. I'm talking about stuff like "not being able to tell someone about your basic wants and needs"—something that is really hard when the least expression of emotion is seen as "weak" or "gay".

So when I say that Kent "hasn't grown" or is "immature", I mean that things went so bad at the Epikegster because these are skills he hasn't developed. When he spits out, "I miss you," it comes out like it's the absolute limit of what he's capable of saying. His entire sales pitch to Jack has been in terms of money, power, and dominance—You'll be on a great team; you'll earn lots of money; you'll be better than before. It's not until he's at the end of his rope that he admits to wanting Jack back because he misses him. And therefore he doesn't see why he's failing at persuasion; he doesn't realize that Jack has an emotional attachment to the Samwell players, that his priorities for joining a team aren't just about prestige and money.

Because here's the thing about toxic masculinity: there are the things Kent really feels and wants, and the things he is allowed to admit he feels and wants according to toxic masculinity.

Acceptable masculine interests according to toxic masculinity:

Money

Power

Violence

Dominance

Competition

Prestige

Sex

Unacceptable masculine interests according to this system:

Emotional intimacy

Intellectual curiosity

Artistic expression

Play

Authenticity

Personal fulfillment

Safety

According to the system, Kent was only allowed to want to be rich, famous, and successful. Those were the only things he could admit to without being lambasted in international press outlets, because hockey media is sooooo fucked up.

Jack's OD emotionally devastated Kent Parson—and he would have been pilloried for letting it show. In that moment, he wasn't expected to feel anything except humble, grateful, and happy. So that's how he acted. Being closeted is such a secondary concern here.

So in some ways "immature" is the wrong word because Kent is an incredibly mature public figure, polished and good at keeping his mouth shut; he's mastered the art of being what he's expected to be, at being what will let him succeed at his chosen profession. It's kind of like how PTSD is a disease, a dysfunctional set of behaviours, in a peaceful, prosperous society, but it's what keeps you alive in a warzone. It's why I don't counsel hockey bros as a chosen profession: I don't respect their athletic and professional achievements enough to work with them every day. I don't think it's worth winning a trophy if you were never home and ruined your marriage and failed to look after your children, and I'm not good at honouring a belief system that says it is worth it.

But I would define "maturity" as the ability to understand your own needs and fulfill them; to live your own reality and express it in a way that satisfies you.

The ways Jack "grew" were when he admitted that something was wrong and accepted convalescence and treatment instead of skating through the pain. When he got to know himself as an intellectual and artistic person as well as an athletic one. When he made space in his life for empathy and play. Because when you see NHL players being criticized on a personal level, what's it for? For having "big personalities", for being "unprofessional" and "unserious", for being "girly". For celebrating too much, dancing too freely, being political, intellectual, for questioning power hierarchies, and for putting their personal welfare ahead of their teams' success.

(Hockey players' compliance to power hierarchies is valued above all things, but that's a different rant)

Jack's moment of maturity wasn't kissing Bitty on the Stanley Cup ice; it was a year earlier, in his own room, when he understood how he felt and acted on it, and communicated it to Bitty, thereby achieving an emotional intimacy that was more important to him than hockey. In that same room, Kent struggled so badly to understand what he wanted and why, and to express it to somebody else, that he backfired in his intended aim, injured his friendship with Jack more deeply than ever, and hurt the person he wanted to express love for.

So the dichotomy of closeted/out is super new in the comic, and super new to analyses of Kent. A lot of what we've been talking about, and the theories we've evolved, have really not been based on 3.26.

And yes, like you, I'm really leery of letting that be a consistent part of the analysis. We don't know why Kent isn't out yet (my personal theory is that it was strategic) and I'm way more willing to say he's immature because of the way that interaction with Jack went to shit, than to say he's immature because he's doing the smart thing and surviving in a homophobic-as-fuck industry.

And, as always, a lot of my fic about Kent is about him developing those things his industry wants to punish him for having--why I write about him escaping to music festivals with queer pagan poets, respecting and supporting female athletes, caring for helpless animals, developing strong aesthetic tastes and artistic hobbies, finding spirituality, fighting back against his hierarchies, admitting his problems, or quitting to raise a baby. Because I want him to develop too. But I think the draft sent him to the desert in more ways than one, and it’s a struggle for him to thrive.

#stuff i wrote #kent parson #omgcp #coming out discourse

240 notes · View notes

meandmyechoes · 4 years

Text

So I think I’ve done more Chinese writing than I’ve had in the past five years during last month. It was... exhausting, but I also enjoy spinning it a little rewriting the novel in a different language.

Now I’m actually writing a full length prose, one can finally see the trauma left by my middle school teacher. There’s like, at least 30% idioms in my chapters. I just, I’ve been conditioned into stuffing as much idioms as I can UNDER JUST A YEAR, and there’s no turning back. I mean, yes, idioms are excellent to convey ideas concisely, but they could be pretentious if overflown; especially when you write in a language that leans towards colloquialism as Cantonese. I just know a lot of idioms and sometimes it’s difficult not to use these minimalist words? I know where the line lies though. It’d be good to sum up an event, but re-consider if they are superfluous adjectives.

Well, getting into this mess did inspired me to write two poems and a drawing, so I guess it has some benefits in the end?

Onward, I do miss writing English fiction so bad. I wrote a few essays in the meantime, but the last time I wrote a story was what? last summer? I should just sit down and write it like I’m doing now. I’ve been watching a ton of panels & interviews stuff, digging up the gems of Star Wars weekends. It’s hilarious and I want to make a non-show TCW resources masterpost later on. But just combing through that comics list is quite a work, and I have to sort out the download links. yeah.

But like, I meant to talk a little about lunar new year in the diary post. And I actually have something never fully plumbed in my draft regarding some... rumour that I’ve now forgotten. Well, I want to say that it’s been a hectic month. I barely know what I did since the year started. Life’s still shit, but it’s very oblivious, you know. I don’t need to go into details here, it won’t change anything overnight. Just so if anyone’s reading, I’m of sound health, just moody.

Let’s talk about something I haven’t even discussed inside my own head. So the past month, we’ve basically been helping my gramps move and renovating our own house as well. Very often we worked very late and it completely drained me. But I know Mom is working a lot harder than I am and I want to do my best to lessen her worries. In principle, I would gladly help out but it’s this, tcwaw, the translation, and the deadline of making a cny outfit, and mom breathing down my neck to exercise with the fam, plus having my hair cut in three years rather unwillingly, on top of my terrible self-maintenance (and that ever-lasting shadow of my college). phew, it’s a lot. and I got really, really depressed because I couldn’t finish tcwaw. I feel like, I’m betraying a pact or something okay. I know I took this too seriously and well, any day is tcw appreciation day here. but I tried really hard to make something and I really wanted to complete the challenge, to do this together. So at least, I’m letting myself down. and then there’s the fact that the first post didn’t garner as much notes as I wanted... but all of them are quality responses so thank you... (brb crying again)

Next, I’ve bitched about this many, many times but the negativity of the Forum! Like, pal and i are trying very hard to sway it back into some positive discussion and actual content with the translation, but these men are even bitchier than i am when it’s about the sequels. Like, I don’t expect a comment, it’d be a blessing if someone even clicked readmore. I’m doing it more out of my own interest but damn those manbabies! I understand the internal misogyny in Cantonese swears. Yet, it is the user that chose to aim that tool at a very public platform to express their anger. I just, expect, humans to be better-versed? The worst one of them is a father to a little girl! I’m not saying you can’t complain, I’m saying make it count.

THE (COMPLETE LACK OF) READING COMPREHENSION ON THAT SITE. okay, let’s go all out bitch. Like, I would expect my partner to be a little better at this, like he reads, right? but no. not only did he misinterpret a singular question on the forum that effectively brought my intention to raise discussion to a full stop, he often mistranslate lines, and just, he’s just a stereotypical straight guy with a stereotypical view on “women + star wars”. It’s wearing me out and I don’t really find anything to learn from that guy. But I also pity him and it’s just bad practice for me to ghost people and cut off another unnecessary backdoor. It’s like he doesn’t really have anyone to talk to about Star Wars, and his contribution to the local fanbase is objectively admirable. This guy still thinks I’m a fellow dudebro, who might be a little obsessed. He has stepped on my toes before (and our circadian rhythm is just, opposite) and well, I learnt to be patient and ask for clarification before giving the other person a lecture. So I guess I could milk some benefits out of this relationship. It will fade eventually anyway. (For the record, I do not think this is deception. My gender is simply unnecessary professionally.)

And you know what’s really funny, to this day, I haven’t revealed I am a girl either on the forum or privately. But I’ve implied so before. I said, young girls like action figures too but unfortunately *I* personally don’t find them pretty-looking enough to buy as a child. I didn’t want to give it out then and still don’t now, but I thought that was quite easy a hint to read? (Because if I’m not a girl, my personal experience carries no weight, and so the only logical conclusion for the relevance and necessary inclusion of that example, is that I’m a girl) (and this is discounting all the Gina mess before. They are quite reasonable with that. but wonder why no one ever brought up her transphobia?)

I don’t know, sometimes just reading them joke about how women don’t understand star wars, do i laugh or shake my head? Like, of course they won’t talk to you if you don’t contribute to the fandom. Why would anyone choose a whining fanboy over a creative writer? Like, do I charge in and say haha fool’s on you, I’ve been a girl all along and you guys are liking my meta posts like leeches. That’s ridiculous. Like, I wouldn’t mind influencing and slipping awareness on feminist issues in Star Wars, but also what am i to condition these strangers on the Internet? I know I have a saviour complex but I should hold them to the same standard as myself, as a responsible adult, right? I just wanna charge in and write about what it really means to read Star Wars through a feminist lens, and how the “representation” they thought was doing right and where it’s not enough, but I know it will fall on deaf ears. and I just wanna swing a bat and ask them to celebrate Star Wars instead. Otherwise the rational action is leaving that space for good, I’m just too busy. alas, alas.

update: [22/2/21]

last weekend they’ve come to talk/joke about how they’ve never meet a female star wars fan. Given, I haven’t in real life either. It was already a less-than popular hobby than most. But it’s the tone they talk about, without ever realizing there is/could be an ”undercover” agent. It’s an unnecessary complicated way of thinking, but I’m amused, laughing at their oblivious shamelessness. When I wrote this I didn’t know the discussion would turn that way, and what a coincidence. I couldn’t keep it much longer and dm mr. partner. we briefly talked about my concern but the topic was quickly changed into a general grievance about the lack of intelligent communication across local forum boards. I felt better after this, but I wonder if I should still strive to bring content towards it. It’s going to be a wasteful investment, but I do want to write some Ahsoka metas possibly, even if it’s just fact files on her inspiration and how tcw came to be. But I’ll have to evaluate if it’s that important I’ll be dropping off every other WIP for. (It’s not, but no sow no reap)

#echoesdiary

0 notes

mytalkingraccoon · 4 years

Text

different types of writers

this is somewhat serious? somewhat not? im just spilling out some of my thoughts and opinions to help people that think about dabbling into the writing shithole

the short story writer: typically ive noticed they can be pretty scatterbrained. they jump from one idea to the next pretty quickly so its hard for them to stick with one story and turn it into a 100-book series like R.L Stine did. depending on your opinion its either a good or bad thing. if you want to get popular its best to have your short stories in a collection-type book or on the internet. idk why its hard to get your short stories noticed but if your short stories arent going to be illustrated children’s books those are your only two options.

the poet: best. hobby. ever. makes a lot of cash? no, but it sure does pick up a lot of gays. i remember i did some poetry when i first started this blog. i’m inspired by kid’s poems since one of the first books I owned was a poem book.

poetry really isn’t that popular as a money-making scheme but it does have a lot of respect depending on the person. people either love poetry or hate it.

the screenwriter: dialogues. that’s literally how my wips look like in my head is mainly conversations my characters are having. screenwriting is instead of multiple factors make the story move forward you strip it down to the basics and you tell the story by showing how the characters interact in the environment/stage. i remembered how easy it was to write Theo when i wrote it as a movie, and another script would’ve worked great if i had an artist. its a great way to sort of outline what you want in your first draft.

screenwriting relies on others for popularity. first you need to get together a team that will bring your script to life, and then you need an audience to see that team. if your script is somewhat simple you can probably get a local acting group to do a show, or if youre in high school the drama teacher.

the comic person: they have to actually show you what’s happening. they combine their artistic skills with their literary skills to tell a story. sometimes the screenwriters and the comic person are lesbian gfs creating smuts together, so dont try and start a fight between these two.

the novelists: they’re less scatterbrained then short-story writers but not by much. Short-story writers are actually getting work done, while novelists have at least 50 incomplete wips or ideas for a wip.

the series writer: they’re scary tbh. it seems they have no life outside of their wips. their mind is basically a giant sweater/wip that keeps knitting, and knitting, and knitting...

the fan ficers: they can literally be any of the above, but the source material isn’t original, but trust me it might as well be with the shit they can pull. you want johnny to survive the fire and a mortician that discovered he was alive to take care of him and dally became a naked woodland princess? we got you. tired of the queerbait from supernatural? welcome to tumblr. want batman to have a choking kink? take 50 fics.

#writers #writeblr #meme

0 notes

mattsagervo · 7 years

Text

Interview: Tal M. Klein, Author of 'The Punch Escrow'

The Punch Escrow has been a huge critical and commercial success, author Tal M. Klein's debut novel has garnered praise from everyone from NPR to Felicia Day, and with good reason. Set in the year 2147, Escrow combines a compelling story and cast of characters with masterful world-building - transporting the reader to an all-too believable future, constructed from a mix of imaginative fiction, and speculative extensions of real-world science and sociological trends.

It has garnered many favorable comparisons to Ready Player One, which does it a bit of a disservice, since it's a work of breathtaking originality. The only similarities I note are that it successfully integrates, and updates, some beloved science fiction ideas, and that it has been fast tracked to the big screen; a film adaptation is already in development at Lionsgate.

I had the opportunity to interview Klein about the book's origins and influences, what to expect from him in the future, and how he masterfully constructed the world of 2147 - from science, to music and more.

Matt Sager: Like a lot of great science fiction, The Punch Escrow has several themes, and is clearly about a lot more than a future of human replication and teleportation. How would you describe the book's plot and overall themes - or more bluntly, "what is your book about?" Tal M. Klein: I like to say it’s a hard sci-fi technothriller with a love story at its core. Joel Byram, an everyday guy in 2147 New York is duplicated en route to Costa Rica as a result of a teleportation mishap, the company that runs teleportation wants to “fix the bug” by killing one of the duplicates, religious zealots want to use his circumstance as propaganda, and his wife is kidnapped by a rogue scientist. Now Joel is fighting to save his life and in his wife in a world that has two of him. The core elements of the story are rooted in identity: Are we who society says we are? Or who we think we are? Or who those who we love believe us to be?

MS: You’ve attained huge success with The Punch Escrow - you’ve attained massive critical and commercial success, the book has been optioned by Lions Gate, and as of this writing it’s number 1 on Amazon’s Hard Science Fiction charts. Did you envision this level of attention and success for your debut novel? TMK: I set out to tell the best version of my story. That was my criteria for a “job well done.” I’m thrilled people are digging it. The credit for its success is equally shared by my wife, my editorial team of Robert Kroese, Matt Harry, and Adam Gomolin, and Howie Sanders at United Talent Agency.

MS: I’ve been told that the concept for the book came about over an argument over the plausibility of Star Trek transporters - can you elaborate on how that led to a book about teleportation and cloning? TMK: What you’ve been told is true! Back in 2012, I was complaining to a co-worker about J.J. Abrams’ over the top use of lens flare in the Star Trek reboot, when suddenly, our CEO interrupted our conversation by shouting “It’s bullshit!” It turned out he wasn’t talking about the lens flare, but Star Trek’s transporters. He was an expert in quantum physics and went on to explain that nobody in the right mind would ever step into a transporter if they knew how it worked. It was then that I realized that there wasn’t a good origin story for the commercialization of teleportation. The fact is, I initially set out the write The Punch Escrow as a textbook from the future, with scribbles in the margins by a smartass named Joel Byram. That was the first draft. By the time the final draft was done, Joel’s story became the focus on the book, and the “textbook” was relegated to liner notes, explaining the world Joel lived in.

MS: I’m very aware that you're not a fan of J.J. Abrams' lens flare. Cinematography aside, are you a fan of the new Star Trek franchise? Other than the transporter argument, has it had any influence on your writing? TMK: Hah, well, discounting for his penchant for lens flare, I’m a huge J.J. Abrams fan, the first movie of the Trek reboot was great. I didn’t really care for the second or third. MS: J.J. Abrams aside, I know that you’re a huge fan of Star Trek - which is your favorite franchise, and how has it influenced you as a writer? TMK: I’d qualify that by saying I love Star Trek, but I’m not a Trekkie. I say that because I learned my lesson at San Diego Comic Con. If you tell a Trekkie that you’re a Trekkie, they expect you to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire Trek cannon, which I do not possess. So, yes, I am a Star Trek fan. My favorite franchise was DS9, but my favorite season of all time was TNG Season 6. MS: Which other science fiction television shows, films, books and writers would you cite as your biggest influences? TMK: Larry Niven, Scott Meyer, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and, because The Martian undeniably catalyzed me to write my book, Andy Weir. As for television shows, I think it’s fair to credit modern detective shows like Psych and Monk for helping me wrap my mind around Rube Goldberg plot devices. Most influential was my favorite show of all time, the X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. I think they really nailed the technogeek persona. Influential movies run the gamut from The Princess Bride to Donnie Darko and everything in between, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention District 9, Looper, and Gattaca. MS: The Punch Escrow strikes me as a book that's in equal parts hopeful and fearful for the future. There are themes of utopian technology corrupted by corporate interference. How much of that - the good and the ill - do you see unfolding in the present? Is your fictional vision of 2147 similar to your actual view of the future? TMK: To borrow a phrase from The Jester, There's an unequal amount of good and bad in most things. The trick is to figure out the ratio and act accordingly. I don’t think future is dystopian or utopian, it’s just us progressing along our evolutionary path. MS: Music plays a major role in the book. I understand that we have a music industry background in common. What was your career in music like, and how did it contribute to the Joel's soundtrack, and the new genre of redistro? TMK: I never think of anything I do artistically as a “career” — music and writing are my hobbies. I’m very serious about my hobbies, but I pursue them for the sake of pure joy rather than income. MS: One of the most original ideas in The Punch Escrow is the brilliant, if gross, race of genetically engineered mosquitoes. What was your inspiration for these bugs that eat lighting and crap thunder, so to speak? TMK: Everyone loves the mosquitoes! The near-scandal is that I cut the mosquitoes in the third draft of the book because I learned about bacteria that eat methane and excreted oxygen, but my beta readers freaked out on me, so I put the skeeters back. The reason the mosquitoes are there is because I wanted to solve for air pollution but in a very messy, human way. Humans tend to to opt for quick fixes and shortcuts, I think it’s because we are a breed largely driven by the pursuit of instant gratification. MS: Hard science fiction like The Punch Escrow seems to grow more relevant by the day as AI and robots are, to varying degrees, infiltrating the workforce and performing tasks that were once the sole domain of humans. Do you see this as a growing issue, and if so, need it be a threat? Is AI really capable of supplanting people, and is that really what corporations as a whole want? TMK: Will apps and robots take the place of people? Absolutely. But if we look at what happened in the Industrial Age, people were prophesizing similar doom and gloom scenarios, and that’s not how the future turned out. There will be plenty of human jobs after AI, it’s just that those jobs will be different than many of the jobs we have today. MS: How did you come up with the idea of a machine language - that is, a language by machines, for machines, cars talking to one another, etc? How surprised were you when Facebook had to shut down it’s AI because it had created a secret language for itself? TMK: If you’ve ever played with AI, it makes sense that two pieces of semi-intelligent code might form a more optimal method of communicating than our cumbersome language. I was a bit taken aback by what happened at Facebook, yes. But it wasn’t shocking. I also understand why they pulled the chord, but I kind of wish they hadn’t. MS: What do you think machines are saying about us, and if AI continues to advance, do you think that they are going to develop an opinion of us? Do you think it will be favorable, and/or within our ability to influence? TMK: Code will likely always be subservient to its programmer. As such, I think we need to add ethics to the list of engineering core competencies. If engineers exclusively focus on successful code execution without regard for anthropological outcomes in the age of AI, we may very well end up with evil robots. MS: Are there sequels in the works? What’s next for the Punch Escrow universe, and for you as a writer? TMK: I’m contractually obligated to deliver two more books that take place in the world of The Punch Escrow. One of them will likely be a sequel of sorts in that we’ll get into matters unresolved in The Punch Escrow, but the other is shaping up to be a standalone novel with a narrative that is ancillary to that of The Punch Escrow. But who knows, both are at the very early formative stages.

#The Punch Escrow #Tal M. Klein

4 notes · View notes

myth-city-comic · 3 years

Text

*Taps mic*

Hey, everyone.

So, I am so, so, SO sorry to leave my readers/fans high and dry after just starting the comic back up after weeks of nothing, but I’m afraid there won’t be an update this weekend. I...just haven’t been in a good place in general this week, and trying to force myself to work on the next page, especially after doing another pretty big digital drawing, was just making my mental health even worse.

Also, I’ve been doing a lot of internal debating, playing a lot with ideas...and I’ve decided that things are going to change.

Now, before anyone starts panicking, relax, I’m not going to cancel the comic. I’ve got plans, ideas that have been swirling around in my brain for a good while now, and I think it would be nice to still utilize at least SOME of them, in some way.

But I’ve gotta be honest...this comic is no longer the passion project it once was for me.

In recent months, heck, maybe even the last year, I’ve come up with new story ideas and characters I’m really, really, eager and excited to start working on, in some way, one in particular which has changed and evolved enough to the point where it might just be my new favorite passion. Like I mentioned above, I’m not going to just drop Myth City like a hot potato, or try and rush through it so I can do my other stuff--I fully intend to finish the story I started working on, and hopefully give it a satisfying finish.

But the story will likely be a lot shorter than I originally intended--originally, I was planning for this to go about 10 volumes (what were you thinking, past Rhys?!?!?!?), and updates will be less frequent, and more sporadic, going from weekly to likely every other week as I work on other drawings, including concept art for my future story ideas, in my spare time.

And drawing in general I’m going to try and take my time with as well--even before recent events, I’ve gotta say, forcing myself to finish a certain drawing, Myth City or not, within a certain time, was just too stressful and was getting to the point where it felt more like a chore, or something else I *had* to do, than something I was doing as a fun hobby. Especially considering work, and other, actually important, real-life things--if nothing else, this whole thing has been a good lesson in learning balance in my life and priorities.

So yeah, to sum up: bi-weekly updates, I’m cutting the comic down from ten volumes to four (which means I’m looking at like sixteen chapters right now) and, for anyone who follows my Instagram (rhysravenfeather, same as my main Tumblr), you might get a sneak peek of some of my future ideas soon-ish not counting my other old drawings, and even doodles, those don’t count *sweeps them under the rug*.

I’m going to try again with a new Myth City update this coming week, but for tonight, I’m just going to do a little more writing on the draft of one of my future stories. And I guess at some point I might have to do some rewriting for Myth City as well considering the changes...might have to talk to my mom and stepdad, or someone else, again about this thing with Microsoft Word (though considering the changes I’ve already made for already-existing chapters...).

Anyway though, hope you guys are doing okay--I’m going to try and figure this out, take better care of myself, and focus on what’s important, while still trying to create, when I can.

Thank you for your time.

#not an update #announcement

0 notes

ginnyzero · 4 years

Text

The Evolution of the Lone Prospect

Coming up with ideas can be a process. Sometimes you have a setting or a character but you don’t have anything else. And it can take time to build and sometimes after years of having a germ of an idea it can take a couple weeks to come together and start to feel alive.

Back when I was going to college at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, most of my friends were those in the comic or game departments not other fashion design students. We liked D10 role playing, mostly using the old World of Darkness system. Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Changeling the Dreaming and their Solar, Lunar etc Chinese based game. None of our games ever lasted very long due to the fact that we were college students in art heavy programs with a lot of studios and practical work on our hands. I was in the tail end of my “morbid fear of death and dying” period. (Long story.) And was obsessively buying all the Vampire: The Masquerade books I could get my hands on. And then came semester I took Narrative Storytelling as part one of a two part English course requirements.

Claudia Holm taught the class. An energetic redhead who paced the floors and told funny stories. She wrote travelogues. As we went over the syllabus she came to the main thrust of the course, which was write a five page story in three drafts over fifteen weeks. We could write about anything we wanted, be it memoir or fiction. However, she had two personal caveats, no vampires and no ninjas. She’d seen vampires doing everything from eating pizza with the ability to go out into the sun. This was the middle of the Twilight and Naruto craze. But for me it was a bit disappointing and being somewhat of a perverse and petty nature. I decided to write a story about a werewolf instead.

She loved it. She thought it was hysterical.

So I tucked the idea away in my head, maybe a bunch of high school students who liked playing basketball and had to keep up the masquerade. Obviously this never got anywhere because I’m not really a young adult author. High school was also a miserable experience for me and I just can’t figure out how to revisit memories of things I never actually did and make it seem enjoyable. I didn’t participate in sports. I never had a boyfriend. I wasn’t part of any clique or crowd.

My friend and later roommate, Kaylynn Spears loved Werewolf: the Apocalypse and the Lunars of WoD. There was a picture in the old World of Darkness Werewolf source book of a pack of werewolves in a junkyard. They were in different forms, big answer to the chainsaw Crinos, wolf form, human. They were working on cars and just hanging out. I liked the image. Werewolves who were comfortable with each other in every form doing normal things.

When we lived together. We tended to walk to the grocery store several blocks away. Two thin, slight girls with short hair with backpacks going under an underpass of the highway and into SOMA towards the baseball stadium. We kept our eyes open for the homeless and cute corgi dogs. The best way we found to keep people from approaching us was to talk about fandom things and if the people were particularly annoying the conversation always turned to “So about werewolves.” It was entertaining to watch people who were panhandling back away very quickly. And one time, on the way back, we were behind a guy wearing a leather jacket. I think we spoke a bit too loud and spooked him because that is when I had the idea for ‘biker’ werewolves.

But the idea continued to sit in the back of my head. I stubbornly pursued a degree in fashion design and then went to work for my father at his shop not doing fashion. (Another long story.)

One of my co-workers, Jason Bailey, and I would mostly talk about our hobbies, when we were talking to each other. I had a lot of movies I liked to watch and he would in the winter work out and watch television. He knew I liked the Expendables and recommended Sons of Anarchy. SoA wasn’t my usual type of show, I had money to burn and I bought the first season. I plowed through that in a few days. I was hooked. I was getting into the second or third season when one night I was really tired and decided to put in Expendables 2. Expendables 2 isn’t as great as the original, but it still holds the ‘mercenary group with motorcycles’ idea and well, it’s over the top funny.

I got to the end and the ideas began to meld in my head. Expendables, a mercenary group that rode motorcycles, Sons of Anarchy a fictional motorcycle club, and strangely since it was the end of the Twilight period, Twilight, except, remember Claudia Holm. No Vampires! So, werewolves instead.

I think I laughed a good five minutes.

Then I opened a word file and I started thinking about what type of werewolf mercenary biker unit I would want to read about. When was it set, where would it be set. Why bikers? I’m a big fan of Star Wars. My favorite Star Wars series in the expanded universe is the X-Wing novels. The X-Wing novels are typically a bunch of whacky characters who fly the equivalent of F-16s in the distant future. They’re pilots, arrogant, cocky and really, a ton of fun. That’s the type of group I wanted. A group of characters.

I wanted it to be in the future. I didn’t want to be another urban fantasy. But, I didn’t want it to be so far in the future or the technology so far out there that if it was ever optioned for anything visual it’d require a huge amount of CGI work. I’m a firm believer in the success of low budget movies. Thus, a few centuries out from a post-apocalyptic setting. Things are getting better, but they aren’t back to pre- landscape changing, war conditions either.

I researched motorcycle clubs, wolves, werewolves and mercenary units. I put my reasoning together. Motorcycle clubs often work security. Security is something mercenaries also do. Security is important after a big war. Motorcycle clubs need territory. Wolves need territory. Werewolves need packs and a way to hide they are packs. Wolves work together to hunt and provide. Werewolves are going to have those urges. Security is a nice constructive outlet. Sturgis and the Black Hills are an important area for motorcycle clubs. I’ve actually been to the Black Hills.

For a while, a lot of the characters didn’t have gender or names because it wasn’t important to me what their gender was, it was more important what their role was and as the story evolved then the characters were given gender usually based on how funny I found the idea at the time. The only two who had specific gender in the beginning were Savannah and Gideon. I drafted a plot for a “movie” and got to the end and went. “Now wait a damn minute, where did these people come from?”

And that is when the story really started to come alive and gain a soul.

There are methods/gimmicks to writing. And I’ll admit that I used one in the Lone Prospect. I took the view of the outsider, of Gideon, and used him as a way to both drive the story and explain what is going on in the world and in the pack. A reader can relate to Gideon. Sure, he doesn’t know anything about motorcycle clubs. The reader probably doesn’t either. But they both can learn over the course of the story. And giving prospects a hard time is a time honored motorcycle club tradition. (Innocent whistling.)

There were other factors that helped this happen when it happened. There were indications to me that character driven storytelling with morally grey characters was the way the times were headed. That people want stories to uplift their moods and not more gritty, dark, shocking science fiction and fantasy. But those were hunches and my gut.

This is how stories evolve, you’re walking down the street with your friend and you see a tough dude in a motorcycle jacket and you go “psst, biker werewolves” and laugh together because you both have to write stories for an English class that don’t involve vampires or ninjas even if you both really like vampires and ninjas.

And there is a squeaky toy of doom parrot up there on a telephone wire laughing and waiting for a friend. The start of yet another great or not so great idea.

#writing tumblr #book tumblr #my book #writing advice #writing ideas #story evolution

0 notes

criticalotterstudies · 7 years

Link

The clinical psychologist Jon Freeman was feeling burnt out. He spent his days at a corporate office in Manhattan, managing dozens of research assistants as they tested pharmaceuticals on people with anxiety, depression, and insomnia. Looking for an escape hatch, he noticed that his daughter often had nothing to do after school. She would pick up her Nintendo Wii controller and drift “into this world of digital isolation,” Freeman recalled. From time to time, he enticed her back into social existence with board games. “Then I had this idea: Couldn’t we do this on a larger scale? Could we expand this to our neighborhood?” Freeman quit his job, and, shortly thereafter, in 2011, the first customers—initially, his daughter’s friends—arrived at his pop-up board-game club and café, Brooklyn Strategist, a place where children and their parents could sit down and play games, both classic and obscure, over veggie platters and homemade ginger ale. Looking back at his work in the research lab, he paired cognitive-ability tests with the board games that he had on hand, and divided these amusements by brain function—kids worked their way around their frontal lobes a die roll at a time. One day, a child who had grown tired of a sports-statistics game asked if Freeman had heard of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and if they could play it. The game has no board and no cards. Occasionally, players make use of maps. At its best, it’s a story told between the players, who control characters (elves, dwarves, gnomes, humans), and the Dungeon Master, who describes the world and uses dice to determine outcomes in the second person (“You come across a band of orcs, travelling down the road. What do you do?”). Freeman refused for a week or two—the game was too open-ended, and didn’t have a straightforward cognitive benefit—but the customer persisted, so he went up into his parents’ attic, dug out all his old D. & D. manuals, and wrote an adventure. “I tried to give them a little flavor of everything,” he told me, “A little dungeon crawl, a little fighting monsters. They ate it up.” Word got out. A few months later, a parent stopped him on the street with tears in her eyes. “What are you guys doing?” she asked him. Her son was dyslexic and had been role-playing at Brooklyn Strategist for a couple of weeks. Before D. & D., he couldn’t focus on writing for more than a few seconds. Now he was staying up all night to draft stories about his character. “Whatever it is, bottle it and sell it to me,” the mother said. [...] Adult D. & D. acolytes are everywhere now, too. The likes of Drew Barrymore and Vin Diesel regularly take up the twenty-sided die (or at least profess to do so). Tech workers from Silicon Valley to Brooklyn have long-running campaigns, and the showrunners and the novelist behind “Game of Thrones” have all been Dungeon Masters. (It’s also big with comedy improvisers in Los Angeles, but it’s no surprise that theatre kids have nerdy hobbies.) Nevertheless, the image of the recluse persists even among fans. “We’re going to alienate ninety-nine per cent of the people out there right now,” Stephen Colbert told Anderson Cooper last year, on “The Late Show,” as they fondly recalled their respective turns as an elven thief and a witch. “The shut-in at home is really excited,” Cooper replied. “Neckbeards,” Colbert added. The “neckbeards” may be more numerous now than he and Cooper realize. “The Big Bang Theory” is a sitcom about young scientists at CalTech who spend most of their time shuttling between their laboratories and the comic-book store. The show’s protagonists also play a lot of D. & D. In one episode, a theoretical physicist takes on the guise of the Dungeon Master to relieve a microbiologist of her distress over the restraints of her pregnancy. She pretends, for an evening, to live in a world where only men are with child (“Your husband is home trying not to pee when he laughs”), to drink ale out of the skull of a goblin, and to eat sushi made from the meat of a monster that she has butchered herself. Fourteen million people tuned in. [...] Last year, Dan Harmon, the creator of “Community” and an avid D. & D. player, produced and starred in “HarmonQuest,” a role-playing television show with celebrity guests. He offered his theory of the game’s popularity: we have always been geeks, but we didn’t know how to break it to each other. Being a nerd is “not about IQ or different characteristics, it’s all about obsession and focus and taking something seriously,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “The internet really allowed everyone to realize that everyone was a nerd.” Sometimes the Internet reveals these truths even more plainly. In a recent article for The Atlantic, about the rise of white supremacy in the U.S., Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of “eldritch energies” released by an “orcish reality-television star.” When someone on Twitter pointed out his word choice, Coates replied, “Dungeon & Dragons was my first literature—that and hip-hop. Can’t escape who you are.”

0 notes