Staying focused

So the holidays are upon us. Lots of fun, lots of food, and lots of stuff going on. I find that it is a real challenge to stay focused on writing. I try to keep up my lists and goals. So far this year I’ve been moderately successful. Hopefully I can at least keep it that way as we approach the end of the year.

Happy holidays to everybody! Keep writing!

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October 5th, 2014. 7:37 AM.

October 5th, 2014. 7:37 AM.

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Fall.

Fall.

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September 14, 2014. 3:53 PM. Slight color changes.

September 14, 2014. 3:53 PM. Slight color changes.

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September 1, 2014. 7:52 AM. Labor Day.

September 1, 2014. 7:52 AM. Labor Day.

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Let’s Make Stuff!

One of the things that I struggled with for a long time (and that I feel I’m good at now, but still not great) is making stuff. It’s a funny thing - a lot of folks say that if you want to do something creative, artistic, or whatever, the most important step is to simply go do it. See:

I apologize for reposting this video, but it’s one of my favorite…things (video, whatever)…and not just because Neil Gaiman is my favorite writer. When he says, “Make good art,” it really is as simple as that. You make the art, and the rest, even if it is difficult will follow along behind the work.

Well, maybe it’s not so simple. You do have to have a bit of spare time, but most everybody does have a little spare time. You just may not be able to watch two hours of TV in the evening if you want to do whatever it is that you want to do. You might have to make a to do list (I have a boring, daily to do list and a Dream to do list [this blog post is on the dream to do list]) and stick to it. Make it a habit.

I definitely get a sense of satisfaction from completing a to do list. Then again, I’m a weirdo who’s already liked completing lists. You do whatever works for you. The moral of the story is, go out and do your thing! I’ve been getting much better at it, and I find that when I what I want to do (write), the other parts of my life, even those that aren’t related to writing, feel great; better even than before.

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August 21, 2014. 5:29 PM. A change of perspective.

August 21, 2014. 5:29 PM. A change of perspective.

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August 19th, 2014. 7:03 AM. Garbage day

August 19th, 2014. 7:03 AM. Garbage day

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August 18, 2014. Stupidly humid.

August 18, 2014. Stupidly humid.

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Photo

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August 12th, 6:55 AM. It feels like fall. It also feels like...

August 12th, 6:55 AM. It feels like fall. It also feels like football.

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August 8th, 2014. The evening. The weekend. Possibility.

August 8th, 2014.

The evening. The weekend. Possibility.

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August 8th, 2014. 7:26 PM.

August 8th, 2014. 7:26 PM.

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August 8th, 2014. 7:18 AM.

August 8th, 2014. 7:18 AM.

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August 6th, 2014. 5:58 PM.

August 6th, 2014. 5:58 PM.

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August 5th, 2014. Good afternoon.

August 5th, 2014. Good afternoon.

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Good morning. August 2nd, 2014.

Good morning. August 2nd, 2014.

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Tonight is one of ever elusive, oh-so-perfect summer evenings. It’s not humid, it’s not...

Tonight is one of ever elusive, oh-so-perfect summer evenings. It’s not humid, it’s not too hot. The temperature is in the mid 70s. It really doesn’t get much better than this. It seems like everybody’s outside, doing yard work, going for a jog, or just being out and enjoying life. It’s a beautiful thing. Kind of makes you forget how gnarly the winters are here in Omaha.

After work, I went for a long walk through Elmwood Park near our house just to get out and get moving, as I felt mighty sluggish. I did that dumb thing where I didn’t bring enough food for lunch, and then ate way too much as soon as I got home. So…yeah. Not good for your energy level. Feeling much better now, though.

I find that I want to be outside much more than I want to be inside writing. (Although if my laptop was full functioning, I could write outside, but that’s another story.) But, for now, I am inside. The sprinkler is going on the lawn, the laundry is folded, and I am theoretically getting down to some editing on a short story. So let’s see how bad it actually is.

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July 29th, 2014.

July 29th, 2014.

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July 29th, 2014.

July 29th, 2014.

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Photo

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Run your own race.

Run your own race.

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migrating to Tumblr

I have moved! Specifically, to jlawler8.tumblr.com. You should be automatically redirected after a few seconds, but in case you are not, click that there link for all kinds of sweet content.

Free Comic Book Day

Tim and I attended Free Comic Book Day at Legend Comics and Coffee in Omaha last Saturday. They were kind enough to invite us to sit at a table and bring copies of our comic for sale. It was a great time, AND we also got to help raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which was fantastic. Tim did sketch cards for a donation, and I even did a few short writing commissions. I wasn't sure that anybody would be interested in that, but a few were.

I don't know how many people came through to pick up free comics, but it was a lot. I never was able to get up and go outside to look at the line, but I'm told that it wrapped around the building for several hours. The flow of people didn't really let up from 9:00 AM until some time in the early afternoon.

It was a long, tiring day, but well worth it. People still seem to be responding well to The Anywhere Man. There were a few people who stopped to talk to us that had already purchased it at the shop, and told us how much they enjoyed. So that was a very rewarding experience.

Ultimately, I can't thank Legend Comics enough. The book wouldn't have happened without them (thanks to the Creator's Workshop), and they've been incredibly supportive as Tim and I have worked through the comic making process. Hopefully this will all continue!

Spring time

This post is not even remotely related to writing or comics or TV shows or Neil Gaiman. I hope that's OK. I'm OK with it. You should be too. Anyway. This is a post about spring time.

Spring is my favorite time of year, for a variety of reasons. I live in Nebraska, which has fairly distinct seasons, especially compared to the good ol' Pacific Northwest where I grew up. The biggest, and quickest, changes always seems to be from winter to spring. There's a tree in our neighbor's yard that blooms earlier than most other trees, and it flowered over the weekend. We spent most of the weekend at home and it seemed like every time we looked out the window there were more and more blooms. And now it's pretty much in full bloom.

And when spring comes along, that means that there's yard work to be done. The mower started up on the second try after sleeping through the winter, so that was a more than pleasant surprise. Evened out the grass and all the usual stuff. I also began my annual battle with creeping Charlie. That stuff is all up in my yard, but I won't stand for it.

It's just a really nice time of year, and I always enjoy getting outside, going for walks and that sort of thing. Our house has a nice little porch so we're able to get out and enjoy the weather fairly easily. Much nicer than the third floor balcony of our last place.

Anyway. Not much else to say about it right now, just wanted to say a little something about how nice the weather is and how much I'm enjoying it.

Thoughts on the The Road and writing

I'm reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy right now. I've seen the movie, so I know the basic gist of the plot. I've also read one other McCarthy book (Blood Meridian...holy shit you guys...have you read that? Because...wow...anyway, that's a whole other post). As of now, I'm about halfway through The Road, and if you are familiar at all with it, you know that it is unrelentingly grim. The writing is, of course, excellent. And I've been trying to think of why it's excellent.

I've seen a lot of writing where flaws are somewhat disguised by flowery language, excess words, and the like. I am absolutely guilty of this, but it's something I try to avoid. I think that rule “Show, don't tell” applies very strongly here when thinking about McCarthy's writing. Take this passage:

They made a dry camp in a woodlot not far from the road. They could find no sheltered place to make a fire that would not be seen so they made none. They at each of them two of the cornmeal cakes and they slept together huddle don the group in the coats and blankets. He held the child and after a while the child stopped shiver and after a while he slept.

It's simple, to the point, descriptive. But I think that (especially in the context of the book itself), it paints an evocative picture and also allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the story and what it means.

I also think that this descriptive, spare style can be applied to comics where the “Show, don't tell” rule is especially important. When I'm writing a script, I try to constantly challenge myself about dialogue, plot elements, or even characters by asking the “Is this necessary?” question again and again. If it's not necessary to the story, in my mind it should go. There may be stuff not necessarily related to the main plot, but it is still relevant the story, even if just for setting the tone/mood/whatever.

I tried to keep this approach with The Anywhere Man...I probably succeeded in some areas and failed in others, but that's ok. I can see the problems with the first issue. And I hope to have some of those issues corrected/addressed in the second or third issue so that the story Tim and I are creating is as strong as possible.

So. Moral of the story. At the end of the day, simple, descriptive writing shows a writer's confidence in the quality of the story. And that's what it's all about.  

So, as I mentioned in my previous post, Tim Mayer and I attended Planet Comicon in Kansas City to promote the first issue of The Anywhere Man. It was a really great time, and I think that people seemed to respond to the first issue. We were at a table in artist alley, which basically means that we were in one of many rows filled with tables of creators of various stripes; there were people with comic books (like us), webcomic folks, fan art, illustration, novelists, crafts of all different varieties, and a number of other types of people that I can't recall at the moment. All in all, it was a great variety, and I had the chance to talk with some very nice folks.

Here's a picture of our table with half our nice neighbor Jeff Porter. Check his stuff out. It's very cool:

And of course, the costumes. There were the usual suspects (super heroes, movies, etc.). While this costume was obviously not the most complex, it was certainly my favorite from all three days:

A fun thing about that weekend: the Big 12 basketball tournament was being held in downtown Kansas City at the same time as the con. This made for a really interesting mix of people. Not bad, just interesting. There was a lot of mingling with sports fans and comic nerds. Good stuff, I think.

Another fun thing: both Wil Wheaton and Scott Snyder walked by our booth. That was neat. I geeked out a little both times, but I suppose that was the right venue for that sort of behavior.

Last fun thing: I took an alternate route to my accommodations. Lodging in downtown KC is somewhat expensive, so I opted to use AirBNB. I've done that once before with my wife in Minneapolis. In that case, we had a whole apartment to ourselves. When I went to KC, I stayed at a boarding house of sorts. So the homeowner was their as were a few other short time tenants such as myself. It was a great old house in a neighborhood about three miles south of the convention center, so I just took the bus rather than deal with parking. All in all, a good experience and I highly recommend AirBNB as an alternative to hotels. My wife and I will probably use it again when we go to Denver next month.

So that's my Planet Comicon report. It was a great time. Hope to be back next year!

Update

  

So I haven't posted in a long time. Things have been a little crazy.

Exciting announcement: I've self published a comic called The Anywhere Man with artist Tim Mayer. That's the cover up there! Check out our facebook page. You can buy it at Legend Comics and Coffee in Omaha, Nebraska, and it's also available to order from Tim's BigCartel website.  The facebook page also has a preview of the first four pages.

Matt and Joe over at The Two Headed Nerd Comicast were kind enough to review the first issue on there show a few weeks back. Check it out here. It's a great a podcast; I listen every week.

That's the main thing that's been going on writing wise. Also busy with school and work, yadayada, the usual. I will be better about posting here in the future. Thanks for reading!

The other day I was thinking about why I started writing with (a small amount of) seriousness. I've always thought that the idea of writing, or being a writer, was appealing, but I never did anything about, aside from writing out a few bad sci-fi stories long hand when I was in grade school. (Part of me wishes I still had those, but most of me is really, really glad.) So anyway, I was thinking about it, which I haven't done in a while, or ever really. And surprisingly, I found that I can actually trace it back through a very clear series of events. 

Some would be embarrassed by what indirectly kindled my desire to write. I'm not. It started with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS in internet nerd speak). I am a child of the 90s, but I didn't actually watch the show until a couple of years ago on Netflix. I thought I would give it a spin, and holy wow...I loved it. Great writing, campy vampire action, super 90s...it's pretty much had everything I ever wanted in a TV show. So anyway, that led me down the rabbit hole of nerd culture that I'd neglected for a long time. I also learned that BtVS continued in comic form after season 7. So naturally I had to go read all of them. And that lead me back into comic book reading. 

I also started following more nerd culture type blogs and web channels. One was Geek & Sundry on youtube, which is awesome, and everybody should check out. Felicia Day had a show and talked about a lot of different stuff. One of the things she mentioned on a show was a website called Fan Write Friday where somebody would put up a prompt for a comic script and people would submit short comic stories for members of the group to review. And I thought, "I can do that."

So I started writing short scripts every week. From there I moved on to comic miniseries type projects and short prose stories. So that is in a nutshell why I decided to start writing. It's been fun, and it's incredibly fulfilling. It also drives me nuts a lot of the time, but that's OK.  

Process; or the bane of my existence

"Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose." - Joyce Carol Oates

That pretty well summarizes how I feel about writing first drafts. And it feels like writing first drafts is all that I've been doing for the last couple of weeks. Don't get me wrong, creating something out of nothing can be a magical process. But it can also be a maddening, make you want to pull your hair out sort of process. I'm not sure how others deal with the frustration, but there's a few things I've found that seem to work pretty well to alleviate some of the stress. So, primarily for my own benefit, I'm going to write down my rules for writing, bearing in mind that I tend to break them.

1. Make time to write. This has been a hard one for me, with work and school in the mix. I've recently changed my work schedule to accommodate my writing. I get up at the same time, but once I'm ready for work, I sit down and write for an hour rather than heading straight to the office. I then stay later at work. Having this uninterrupted time for writing helps immensely.

2. Turn off the internet. For the love of God, just turn it off. Facebook is never more appealing than when you're trying to reach a seemingly unreachable word count. The articles on Wikipedia were never more fascinating. Just...turn it off.

3. Turn off the music. I've gone back and forth on this one. Sometimes, I will listen to more ambient/drone type music, and I find that's OK. However, I use Spotify and Youtube for most of my music these days, which takes us right back to rule 2. So...I usually turn off the music.

4. Set a goal. For me, it's word count. You can check the word count on any word processor with ease. My standard goal for an hour of writing is 1000 words. Sometimes it's easy and I get it done in twenty five minutes. Other times....well, just read the quote at the top of this post. But having a goal gives me something to strive for, and I tell myself that I can't stop until I've hit said goal. I (almost) always make it.

5. Know the next step. In most cases, I'm writing something that won't be finished in one sitting. I try to stop at a point where I know more or less what will happen next. That way, the next time I set down to type, I'll be able to get right into it, thus sparing myself from the frustration of staring at the screen wondering what to type.

6. Maintain momentum. I try to follow all of these rules as best I can, and if I do, I tend to write quite a bit. Once I start, I don't let myself stop. It really helps.

7. When all else fails/I'm feeling completely at a loss, I watch this video, because Neil Gaiman is my favorite author and this video is incredibly inspiring:

Deafheaven - Sunbather

Full disclosure: this not an album review. I just wanted to share a few thoughts on this album I've been listening to. And with that...

I like to listen to music. Most people do. (Side note, I've stopped listening to music when I write; I find that once I click on related artists in Spotify, I don't get shit done.) I assume that other people have this experience as well, but every once in a while, an artist/song/album comes along that worms its way into my head and won't get out. And I mean that in the the sense that I frigging dig it and I have to listen to it over and over again until I'm sick of it. (2nd side note: when this happens, I'm pretty sure my wife gets sick of whatever it is before I do.)

So this happened to me on Friday. I am a big fan of metal - screaming, blast beats, the whole deal. I was perusing a variety of year end "Best Metal Albums of 2013" lists, because I find that is a good way to check out new bands. An album called Sunbather by Deafheaven kept popping at or close to the top of most of these lists. It was generally described as a black metal album with some shoegaze and post-rock influences. This is what the cover looks like:

Not exactly what you'd expect the cover of a "black metal" album to look like, right? Well, I had to check that shit out. And it BLEW my mind. The title track "Dream House" is amazing...blast beats, tremolo guitar lines, and shrieks are all there, but it just doesn't sound like most metal. 

Basically, if somebody came up to me and was like, "Hey, pick three genres of music that you love, and then we'll mash 'em up, and it'll be awesome," I wouldn't believe them (that it would be awesome). And yet, here we have a metal album that owes just as much to post-rock and shoegaze, and it is awesome. 

Here's the aforementioned track "Dream House":

Pretty sweet, right? There are four monster main tracks on this LP, with three shorter bridge type songs in between. Some reviewers have pointed out that this long track-short track-long track pattern is a bit "obvious," and it may be, but I think that it works remarkably well. It gives the listener some respite from the intensity of the main tracks and gives them album a nice flow. 

The lyrics are obviously unintelligible and the screams are not at the forefront of the mix. For those of you apprehensive about music with screamed lyrics, I would say give this a chance. And I would say that it's best not to think of the screaming as you would traditional singing, but as an additional instrument or texture within the overall sound that the band is creating. Plus, I the post-rock style crescendos make the sound more palatable to non-metal fans. 

I dig this album, and others seems to as well; oddly enough, it was the highest reviewed album (of any genre) on Metacritic. Whoda thunk a metal album would fill that slot? That's not to say that this album doesn't have it's detractors. I have certainnly seen the accusation that this is "hipster" metal bandied about. Additional, some folks have said that it isn't "real" black metal. Maybe that's true, but...I don't care??? Most of the reviews I have read say the same basic thing: call it post-black metal, call it metal-blaze, call it shoe-hipster-black-post-gaze--rock-metal, it doesn't matter. If you like it, great. If not, that's cool too. 

So, check this out if you have any interest. Might not be for everybody, but I think it's a rewarding listen and one of my favorite new albums. (3rd side note: I'm going to be seeing Deafheaven when they play with Between The Buried And Me here in Omaha in March. I'm super pumped.)

Change by Ales Kot

Change by Ales Kot is my favorite comic mini series of the last couple of years, for a variety of reasons. It may not be for everybody, but if you are even mildly interested in a different take on the comic book medium, Kot is your man.

He's got lots going on right now, and his new series, Zero, has been very well received. It's definitely worth checking out. He's also got quite a bit of high profile work coming this year at Marvel, so congrats are due to him. In my opinion, he deserves it. But I want to talk about Change in this post.

As I said, Change is my favorite mini of the last few years for a couple of reasons. The first is that, unlike a lot of other series, you can reread it. I would almost say that rereading is required for a book like this. There are so many layers to the story and the art is so...difficult at times that I don't think a single read through would really do it justice. The opening words to the comics are as follows:

"Her face was beautiful like drone video footage from Afghanistan. Eyes stuxnet worms, self replicating within his soul. The skin of her cheeks made him think of home."

Wow...just...wow. Maybe some folks think there's no meaning in that style of writing, but even if there's no direct meaning, it certainly sets the tone. That's something that I struggle with in my own writing. I've noticed that Kot's more recent writing is more accessible, and seems to be aimed at a wider audience. As I said, I do enjoy his new stuff very much, but part of wishes for the challenge of this series.

The art by Morgan Jeske, as well as the colors by Sloane Long and letters by Ed Brisson, are fantastic, unique, non-nonsensical at times, and all around beautiful. I mean, just look at this, and it's not even the most bonkers that you'll see in the comic:

Ultimately, what I love most about this mini, and the reason that I've reread it at least a couple of times, is the story. On the surface, it's about a screenwriter, a rapper, and an astronaut. I won't go into any more specifics, but it's a big story, it's a personal story, it's a story about coming back from failure. Ales Kot really takes comic story telling and gets everything out of it that he can, and I love that. I sincerely hope you check it out if you have a chance.