Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1149 - Throwback Thursday 1902.07 - pic from 1970 a sense of doubt post #1448
Hi Mom, How are you doing wherever you are? Are you connected to everything and part of the great unity in a way that we mortals cannot even imagine? I like to think so. I recently participated in a discussion with Theologians on the "nature of Heaven" and I am fascinated by the way Christian religions have characterized the after-life. It makes more sense to me that it would be a thing (and "thing" is not even the right word) that we cannot imagine or even conceptualize with our limited mortal human brain pans.
Hi Mom, it's me again. I had a profound moment of missing you this week.
Hodge podge again.
Let me walk you through it before you dive in.
Hey, thanks for being here.
First off, some more Bowie stuff because.... well, have you met me? If not, check out my Bowie category or better the DAILY BOWIE, which I did for about 80 days after he died. Plus it's Paul Cornell (great author) writing about Bowie's influence. What could be more grand?
That bit and a bunch of other bits are from Kieron Gillen's newsletter. Kieron Gillen is a comic book writer via music and gaming journalism, whom I have written about many times on this blog, for instance, in my review of his recent project DIE and his end of year music reviews, for which I like 2016 better than 2017. Theoretically, I am doing his 2018 mix on Monday, but you know how it goes here in the SENSE OF DOUBT blog world: there's always a sense of doubt. So, we'll see.I am writing these words on Saturday morning and sending them back in time, and so I can report that I read Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt last night, and I loved it. I took these newsletter bits from a few weeks back when the Peter Cannon comic was due that week, so, you get the connection. Here's an INTERVIEW with Gillen about it.
It's GREAT!
Mostly a hodge podge of comics stuff this week. I have been work intensive and then I got an infection in my left elbow, and so that and the course of anti-biotics has really messed up a lot of scheduling, though I did teach all my LCC classes and managed to work on the rest as best as I can with extra time for rest and even two naps, which are completely outside the norm.
So no photos and social media stuff this week. There's not much if anything to share as I have been inactive.
We have snow, finally, though remember, I am writing two days after the posted date of this entry.
I am hoping to finally finish out my entry on Eerie and Creepy for Sunday. Again, see above, you know, DOUBT.
I curate some more as we progress, scroll on...
- Paul Cornell writing about Bowie's influence at him around Christmas was striking, in terms of creative people take inspiration from creative people in completely different fields, and then bring it to their own work. This is something I'd advise a creative to cultivate. Frankly, a lot of my career has been based upon entering a room with expertise from another room which is not common in the room I've just entered.
- This piece on Waypoint by Austin Walker Learning To Break A Perpetually Tied Game, which is about chess, turn-based-strategy-games and political change was great.
  Hullo.
I write from a house of plague. Do not approach. Do not inhale. Wear gloves to interact with the screen. Wear protective glasses. Wait, you're suffocating. I didn't think this through at all.
Contents!
I find you uncommonly pretty DIE 2 2 Pompey The Great Links Doing It To Yourself Byyyyeeee!!!
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The only book out this week, which is the end of the main part of THE ESCAPE. It's structured as a six issue arc, with an intro and and epilogue drawn by Andrea. As I've said before, the arc's details came into being when I was walking down a hillside in Scotland, towards a noble house and thinking "I'd love to see Luke and friends deal with this sort of environment." So, Bronte Star Wars mash-up.
We had fun with this. Hope you like it.
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 DIE 2's going to a second printing. Press release here. Astounding cover above. Out Feb 13th. Code DEC188162 if your shop needs it.
Occasionally you get a piece of art which makes you rethink plans in your series, and this is one of them. That Stephanie literally painted it overnight due to insomnia makes it even more astounding.
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I accepted the lovely invitation to to Portsmouth Con on May 4th for the con. First one was last year, which I heard so many good things about, I decided to pop along and skip the FOMO.
I haven't been to Portsmouth since my childhood, where it was a regularly family holiday destination. I forget if it was one in Portsmouth where my Brother and I were led around a fairgound wearing identical blue outfits in the pouring rain, which I think may be the origin of my BLACK AND NOTHING ELSE wardrobe.
Hi, Mum! Only joking.
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Lots of press!
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I may have been avoiding work this morning, and answered some asks over on tumblr. Here's a couple of the downloady ones....
A: Starting the day with this. Excuse me if I’m rusty.
This question is making me muse about how Hemingway’s “Writing is rewriting” interlinks with Vonnegut’s Bashers versus Swoopers. I suppose it would make Hemingway a swooper, but I can’t picture him as one. I digress.
Like most things in writing, there’s various modes and various scales. Let’s go from biggest to smallest.
(I immediately question my order, of course.)
Biggest is just throwing it all out and doing it again. Total rewrite. This avoids structural problems by simply rebuilding from scratch. This is a lot of work, but occasionally necessary.
Then there’s localised throwing out and doing it again. What purpose does this scene serve? If your write a scene that serves the same purpose, you don’t need to touch the rest. I talked about an example of this in The Wicked + the Divine 24. My first draft had Persephone leave a fancy party, then Amaterasu followed and a kiss. The core information was identical. It was dead and terrible. I came back to it later and re-did it, and worked out more connective tissue. Persephone’s already outside the party (remains the same) on a ledge (obviously loaded, but also adds to the aura of otherworldliness) smoking (back to the worldy) watching a display of fireworks shaped like her dead friends (theme and visuals). Amaterasu leaves the party, we have a similar conversation, and a kiss in a much more interesting sort of situation. Structurally, these are the same scene.
I also think of one of my very early gigs at Marvel where Warren Simons got me to rewrite the first scene of my Beta Ray Bill comic for him three times. First time basically Bill turned up to Thor and tried to talk him into hunting down Galactus. Second time Bill turned up to Thor and tried to talk him into hunting down Galactus, except this time it’s on some kind of thunderous mountain. Third time Bill turned up to Thor and tried to talk him into hunting down Galactus, during them saving a coastline by punching a tidal wave (which as well as being obviously a superheroic beat, also set up the theme of What To Do About Natural Disasters and as they saved a whaling vessel What About Unintended Consequences Of Good Acts). I don’t think Warren asked me to do a rewrite that like after that. I kind of got the point of the genre I was working in.
I would also note if you’re thinking structurally, you can both collapse and expand scenes. If the point of the scene is “they go somewhere and have an argument on the way:” you could do that as a whole scene or you could do that as a panel of them driving and a single caption, and a single expression. Less can be more, especially if you’re working in a form (like 20 page comics) where space is a zero sum game. To have one scene longer, you need another to be shorter. Choose your poison.
(If I were to guess, It sounds like that you’re having trouble separating your specific execution of a scene from the structural purpose of a scene. I may be wrong, but this may be a useful line for you thin to think along)
The use of the word “break” is also interesting. There’s no problem in breaking things. Broke things can be fixed. Rewrite a scene? Great - what else needs to be reworked to do what the story requires? And, just as importantly, you can decided to change what the story requires. Maybe the element you liked is actually a darling that has to die for the better purpose of the movie?
(DIE 5 had a rewrite where I inserted a thematic scene at the opening at the cost of some detail about a different part of the backstory. Both scenes actually the same purpose in the issue, but coming from completely different and contradictory angles. I decided that the information in the original take could come to the reader down the line, and saved it for the second arc.)
You know people say “film is made on the editing table”? Basically the argument is that it’s only be selecting and arranging the specific shots that the specific movie you’re watching exists. It’s also worth noting that shots can be taken from whenever, re-arranged whenever. Hell, record new dialogue. Hell, in the modern say, you can fix it in post, tweaking lips, etc.
By which I mean, if they can do that in film with a medium far less mutable than the prose we write stories or scripts in, clearly that sort of editing is much easier for us too. Tweak a panel. Does this increase the meaning I want? Great. If not, don’t.
Your first draft is your most obvious draft. A second draft can tweak to make it less obvious.
And, finally there’s just a basic second draft which is just a surface polish. Punching up dialogue. Increasing clarity or whatever. Shine the script!
Oh - it’s also worth noting that comics have a unique advantage as a medium. As in, you can do a lettering draft after the comic has finished. If a panel is clear just via expressions, you can cut dialogue. If it’s not, you can add them. If an artist adds something in the art (or inspires in another way) you can add something that nods towards it. Put it like this: all comics are dubbed.
(It’s also worth noting some artists object to rewriting after the pages have drawn. Check in with them before you do it.)
That’ll do. I’ll post now, in first draft state, as I am, SHAMELESS.
A: Will talk Publishers when I’m able, but regarding the other half? Well, as Thom Yorke once put it… 
(The Radiohead song I think of most often, for the record. It’s easy to think of this as you look at the pile of books and know that people would probably like the book more if you just based it off a skim of the Wikipedia page.)
This is the sort of thing you end up arguing with your Therapist about. Why does it have to be so hard? It doesn’t have to be so hard?
Part of it is just thinking if given an open stage you should do the best work imaginable. If you have things to say and the freedom to say them, to not take that opportunity is almost a crime. Have you read Hicksville? If not, do so. It’s incredible. The concept is an isolated town where there’s a library which includes all the works of comics those masters of the form wanted to do, but weren’t able to due to the commercial realities of the time. All those “what I’d love to do…” books those people said in pubs, on the shelves. It’s a library of what comics could have been.
That we now actually have the freedom to do the books we want, it feels an absolute betrayal of the medium’s potential to not take it. I was aware that in my first book, Rue Britannia, I was able to do something more personal than some people who had worked in the industry their whole lives. We live in blessed times and to use those blessings lightly is selling all that out.
So there’s that.
(”Ambition makes you look pretty ugly”)
There is the other half of it though - that WFH is by definition lighter. The work can’t support that level of the hard stuff. It’s the Alan Moore “I wanted to do stories about environmentalism but this big green mud monster kept on getting in the way.”
I like to do a mix of work. I couldn’t do four books like DIE or Phonogram or WicDiv. I don’t have it in me, or at least, I wouldn’t have it for more than six months. So if WFH is, by definition, the lighter side of what I like to do, then parts of me I don’t get to tickle are the biggest, messiest most personal stuff. So if I’m only doing one or two creator-owned books, they’re going to be the bigger, darker ones.
However, if I’m doing DIE and WicDIv, if I do a third book, it’s not going to be like DIE and WicDIv. It’s going to be something else. You can likely see where something like OH CAROLINA comes from. If you’re not doing WFH any more, what I’m not getting to do is the explodey smart-dumb Ramone pop genre stuff. So I am more likely to build something of my own which I get to tickle those urges.
And I am, as I suspect anyone who’s read my twitter stream knows, something of a buffoon when I’m not trying to clobber you to death with an academic textbook (and sometimes when I am.)
I’m actually starting OH CAROLINA 2 this afternoon, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s not actually buffoonish - it’s playful, in a darker but less amoral Aphra-y place way. Funnily, the silliest thing I’m doing is Thunderbolt (out next week) which as it goes on basically exists as a natural collision between Watchmen and NextWave.
But I am having fun. For a certain value of fun.
In passing, it’s also worth noting “fun” is a word that, as an ex-game critic, I’m always a little suspicious of. “Fun” tends to flatten experience. “Satisfaction” is something I have a lot more time for, and there’s many ways to be satisfied. Missus.
Alternate take: I suspect it’s just guilt over the artist having to spend so long drawing it. I have to make it more work for myself or I feel shame.
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https://www.comicsbeat.com/bendis-teases-batman-beyond-the-possible-return-of-the-legion-of-super-heroes-omac-and-more/
Here’s the biggie: what is clearly a piece of the Legion of Super-Heroes logo. Now, this is a property that has laid dormant since the most recent Paul Levitz-scripted series was cancelled at the end of 2013 to eventually be replaced with Justice League 3000 (more or less). Since then, fans have clamored for its return and given Bendis tossing out his share of hints about the current Superman story, “The Unity Saga” setting up the United Planets, and Saturn Girl’s appearances in Rebirth, Doomsday Clock and Batman, the time is right! It’s just a matter of where. 2019 definitely looks to be the when though. Long Live The Legion!
I need to get this book -
https://www.comicsbeat.com/emil-ferris-wins-the-fauve-dor-for-my-favorite-thing-is-monsters/
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WHAT?????
Good thing I bought this annual and it's in my huge stack of comics to read. And I do mean HUGE. I had to move the bulk of the stack to the Fantastic Four SMALL box.
But I may skip ahead to read this one.
I always like the kissing.
| Behind the scenes of JUSTICE LEAGUE ANNUAL #1 with Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV |
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NEWSY BITS!
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/02/05/2119222/as-magnetic-north-pole-zooms-toward-siberia-scientists-update-world-magnetic-model
As Magnetic North Pole Zooms Toward Siberia, Scientists Update World Magnetic Model (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR:Earth's geographic north pole is fixed. But the planet's magnetic north pole -- the north that your compass points toward -- wanders in the direction of Siberia at a rate of more than 34 miles per year. That movement may seem slow, but it has forced scientists to update their model of Earth's magnetic field a year earlier than expected so that navigational services, including map-based phone apps, continue to work accurately. The drift results from processes taking place at the center of the planet. Molten iron and nickel slosh and spin in the planet's core, essentially serving as a metallic conductor for Earth's magnetic field. Changes in that fluid flow lead to changes in the magnetic field. As a result of those changes, the accuracy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's World Magnetic Model (WMM) -- a mathematical representation of the magnetic field -- slowly deteriorates in the five-year periods between updates. The next update was due in 2020. But "unplanned variations" have degraded the quality of the WMM so greatly that NOAA published an out-of-cycle update Monday. It was delayed from January by the partial government shutdown.
https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/02/05/2244224/the-shape-of-the-milky-way-is-warped-and-twisted
The Shape of the Milky Way Is Warped and Twisted (abc.net.au)
Necroloth writes:You probably thought that if you were looking at our galaxy from the outside and at a distance, you would see a thin disc of stars that orbit around a central region, but the further away from the inner regions of the Milky Way you are, the less the pull of gravity. At the outer disc, the hydrogen atoms that make up the Milky Way's gas disc are, as a consequence, warped into an S-like shape, no longer pulled together in a thin plane. A group of astronomers from Australia and China have built their "intuitive and accurate three-dimensional picture" by mapping 1339 classical Cepheids. There's a quick animation of the galaxy on the @NatureAstronomy twitter here.The study has been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Using a sample of 1,300+ Classical Cepheids, Chen et al. have probed the extent and the warp of the Galaxy's stellar disk, finding that it follows Brigg's Law for spiral galaxies. https://t.co/GFeD9xY8uV pic.twitter.com/xrMdhCgj2F— Nature Astronomy (@NatureAstronomy) February 4, 2019
Thanks for reading.
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.
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- Days ago = 1314 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1902.07 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.
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