Daniel Stalter's Blog, page 22
July 30, 2018
THE RED THREADS OF FORTUNE
The Red Threads of Fortune by nonbinary queer Singaporean author JY Yang picks up four years after the events of The Black Tides of Heaven and centers on the prophetic twin Mokoya. Where Black Tides was a coming-of-age story that takes place over several years, Red Threads is a story of grief and redemption told over the period of a few days. The sharp contrast in structure between the two novellas enables the exploration of different themes and accentuates the contrast between the twin prota...
July 10, 2018
BARCELONA 2018
Me at peak tourist, #touristAF.
I landed around noon in sunny Barcelona, and easily found my way to my friends Anton & Sion’s apartment. We went out for a delicious lunch at Dual Cafe. It was nice catching up and talking Drag Race drama. After that, Anton and I wandered around the beautiful labrinth known as the Gothic Quarter. It was difficult to capture on camera so I eventually stopped trying. There’s nothing quite like it in the States, where the old world meets the new in such profound c...
July 2, 2018
LONDON 2018
I’m trying something new here.
In the past few years I’ve had the opportunity to travel abroad for work, and in turn I’ve made the most out of exploring these different parts of the world every chance I get. This is not my attempt to become a travel blogger, but I’m trying my hand at documenting my adventures overseas. This was my third trip to London, and I spent most of the days working long hours this time around. I did however manage to get out and do a lot of walking whenever I could....
December 2, 2016
Reflecting on NaNoWriMo 2016
I wrote on 28 of the 30 days, missing only two days while traveling for Thanksgiving. I will make up for them by continuing to write for at least the first 2 days of December. It’s still my most consistent showing yet in the four years I have attempted NaNoWriMo. My final word count was roughly 13,016 words, covering just over 80 handwritten pages. My goal was never 50k words; it was to write first drafts for final 6 chapters of Dream Crasher. I completed 2 chapters and did a detailed outline...
March 14, 2016
Making Our Own Fate: What Dream Crasher Means to Me
The first sketch of Simon and Amalie (originally named Hope), June 2010. “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” – Neil Gaiman
In the summer of 2010, a conversation between my friend Reed and I quickly turned to our shared desire to make a comic book. Within a month I was sending him story ideas and characters, and he was sending me some early sketches. Before long there was a script and pa...
February 18, 2016
Sometimes I Don’t Mind
I celebrated New Years 2011 with a kiss. I was in love for the first time in my life. Not infatuated, but actually in love – with someone who changed the way I thought about that over-used, intangible word. Blair was poet and a musician. He had a voice that could fill a crowded subway tunnel without a microphone. He had a gift for writing about the heaviest of topics in a way that was strangely uplifting. I was in awe of his talent, and even more so of the person he was beneath it.
When Blai...
October 2, 2015
Dream Crasher: The First Milestone
If you’re don’t regularly back up your hard drive, let me tell you a story about an inconvenience that could have been a nightmare. My laptop hard drive was approaching 5 years old. I knew it had been getting funky and making strange sounds every now and again. It decided to completely shit the bed exactly one month before our June 2nd deadline for releasing Dream Crasher. Fortunately,I religiously backup everythingwith Time Machine, and that goes double forthe comic book. Every page is addi...
September 27, 2015
Flame Con 2015
This one only took me 3 months…
I had originally made plans to get there bright and early before the start of the convention to help set up. However, due to my not being an “official” vendor and the fact that I was still exhausted from the previous weekend at Special Edition NYC, I opted to sleep in a little bit. I got to the convention a little bit after noon.Dream Crasher won’t be printed until (hopefully) sometime in early 2016, so paying for a table when all I have are post cards and one...
August 11, 2015
Special Edition NYC 2015
It only took me 2 months to write this all up, but here goes…
Reed and I stayed up well passed midnight on Friday, cutting paper and using rubber cement to piece together our two prototype prints of Dream Crasher: Chapter 1. We listened to lots of Maria Bamford and Against Me! as wepowered through it. It was labor intensive but absolutely worth it. The same can be said about the whole last five years we’ve been working on this.
Saturday
With our binders and postcards in tow, Reed and I met u...
July 23, 2015
“What started as a whisper slowly turned into a scream…”
July 23, 2011.
My sister and I went to catch a matinee ofThe Deathly Hollows – Part II.As we left the theater, I noticed that you hadn’t called or texted me back. I had grown accustomed to your daily text “Good Morning, Punk,” or some variation. This was when I first realized that something was out of place. I went home and continued packing, loading boxes into every open square inch of my car. I kept calling, but there was still no answer. Concerned about becoming that psychotic significant...
