Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 67
July 4, 2014
Spinner Racks and The Keepers of Post-Industrial Folklore
When I interviewed him for my book, COMICS FOR FILM, GAMES AND ANIMATION, former Batman group editor and writer Denny O’Neil told me of the backlash he faced after readers decided the fate of Jason Todd in BATMAN #428. He said that in that backlash came a realization, that he was more than “just a writer-editor,” he was the “keeper of post-industrial folklore.”[1] The simple truth (and therefore the hardest to see) of neverending, serialized storytelling is that it represents a legacy passed on from one generation to another and perpetuated through the inspiration to create. I fear that mine may be the last generation to feel that inspiration.
Like most kids of the ‘80s, my first exposure to the superheroes of the Marvel and DC Univi was in other media: SUPERFRIENDS; SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS; Tim Burton’s BATMAN; re-runs of the 1960s BATMAN TV show. That same means of exposure has reached a fever pitch today, as movies based on comic book characters become the de-facto entry point for a new generation of comics fans and rake in astronomical gobs of money. However, in my book, I stressed that the material waiting for the new comics reader–for the uninitiated who has become a fan of a character through other media–must be absolutely irresistible and instill in the new reader a burning desire to dig deeper, to explore the world of the story, be it in a single medium or fragmented across media parts, by telling stories that reflect and distill current generational values. This was unspoken pact was understood, though in its twilight years, during my comic book-reading pubescence.
Today, we are in an age of the erroneous belief that legitimacy for one medium, comics, must first be found in the box office draw of another medium, film, and that irresistibility has to do with seams on costumes, brand consistency and nostalgic pangs of iconisism. In its rampant quest for legitimacy, specifically after the amalgamation of the two biggest mainstream comics publishers, Marvel and DC, by large corporate parent companies and subsequent neutering into R&D departments, the comics industry, and DC Comics in particular, has lost sight of the power of irresistibility, bastardized the emotional core and draw of exploration that made their product and characters so exciting to young readers, and in so doing, has hammered yet another nail into the coffin of the long-term survival of comics industry by forsaking their role as keepers of post-industrial folklore and failing to inspire the next generation of storytellers. DC’s own survey, conducted in 2011, right after the roll-out of their “New 52” reboot, revealed that less than two percent of respondents were under 18 years of age[2]. Kids are abandoning comics… but let’s not mince words: comics abandoned kids first.
However, I believe there’s a way to rectify that egregious misstep and set the industry on a path towards redemption and long-term survival.
Returning to my comic book pubescence, my first comic book was GREEN HORNET #3, written by Ron Fortier and published by NOW Comics. I pulled it from a spinner rack at Rite Aid in Millersburg, Ohio. My grandmother bought it for me. We had gone there to buy Peeps or Metamucil or something. When I picked up that comic book off the spinner rack, I had no idea who the characters were, though I vaguely remembered Bruce Lee on Channel 23’s reruns of the 1960s Batman show. The Green Hornet even had a heart attack at the end of the issue. I came in in the middle of a storyline. All I knew was that the story was cool and I wanted to learn more. What did I do? I learned as much as I could about the character – and this was before the ubiquity of the Internet. I learned that the character got his start in radio in 1936, a revelation which began a lifelong obsession with radio dramas and led to my unabashed love of The Shadow, particularly Denny O’Neil and Mike Kaluta’s 1973 series and the 1937 Orson Welles radio show, that has permeated every iota of my storytelling in the 24 years since. Today, that comic book is framed in my office, as much a memory of her as of my first experience with comics and the obsession that wrought.
The newsstands and the grocery store / Rite Aid spinner racks, the vehicles for my physical discovery of the medium – not necessarily the characters – and for most kids of my generation and the generations previous, are a relic of the past. Sure, you may see the odd one at a grocery store, but the contents of most are untouched, lost in the entertainment shuffle to the bright screen in one’s hand; at best, the spinner rack selection might pique the curiosity of shoppers bored to tears with the selection of beef tips and cream cheese.
Where are the Spinner Racks and newsstands now? According to a survey conducted by Common Sense Media,
“among families with children eight and under, there has been a five-fold increase in ownership of tablet devices, such as iPads, from 8% of all families in 2011 to 40% in 2013.”[3]
The study goes on to find that,
“the percentage of all children with access to some type of ‘smart’ device at home (e.g. Smartphone, tablet) has jumped from half (52%) to three quarters (75%) in just two years.”[4]
As their ubiquity increases, tablets and smartphones have the potential to be the new Spinner Racks. They have the potential to be as powerful a vehicle for discovery as corner newsstands were in the cities of the Golden Age and the Spinner Racks born in the suburban flight of the 1950s. But why haven’t we seen that push, that, pardon the Gladwellian term, that tipping point, with digital comics and comics delivered digitally? If my grandmother was tickled pink to buy me a comic along with her Metamucil and Peeps, what’s stopping a parent from letting their kid purchase a comic when they buy the latest app they never use?
I see four ways.
Price & Discoverability
The idea of charging the same amount for print as digital is asinine. An “issue”–a term I use very loosely now–of a digital comic should cost no more than a song on iTunes. At best, ten cents, adjusted for inflation is $1.99; let’s not forget that those 10-cent comics were almost always 64 pages.
With print comics, the page count and paper quality is often the deciding factor in determining a price point. With digital comics, paper quality is irrelevant and page count can be irrelevant. The main transactional currency with digital reading is the time it takes to consume the product, not the number of pages. Examples of this can be found with Medium’s “two minute read” demarcation on new posts and Madefire’s time-based consumption of their motion-comics / digital comics hybrids; Amazon’s Kindle tracks amount of time left in each book. Let me be clear: I neither condone nor decry this “innovation,” I simply state for the purposes of this pondering that “it exists.”
Purchasing a comic on a spinner rack in the days of yore was not a designed purchase. It wasn’t my intention when I went with my grandmother to purchase Peeps and Metamucil to come out with a comic book. I was drawn to the comic book through my own wanderings in a controlled environment on a trip to purchase something else. In short, the guiding beacon of a digital comics purchase has to be the same trigger as in the Rite Aid: there has to be some base appeal, be it covers, content, or the sheer cool factor.
To purchase comics direct from an app designed to sell comics is more akin to the comic shop experience. While this is an invaluable experience, it’s also one where the intent is to purchase comics, not to be invited to purchase through their appearance in everyday life. I’ve often said that the best and most exciting transmedia experiences come from technology already at use in our everyday lives–in other words, expecting someone who doesn’t play video games to go buy a console to get an integral part of your story from the film is counterproductive. The discovery of digital comics should be no different.
But here’s the rub: the Internet and the iPad and all other tablets are a beacon of a culture of push, less one of pull. How can we create that irresistible feeling of pull in a culture designed to push a seeming unending strain of content down the gullets of readers? The short version? I have no idea. As my friend Geoff Long said when we discussed this paper in its talk form back in November, “if you can solve that, you can solve the Internet.” Nobody knows; or, rather, everybody thinks they know. If you figure it out, go collect your billions.
Recapturing Fun Stories
I’ve often said that comics were 70 years ahead of their time when they were first created, and are now 30 years behind it. What made those Golden and Silver Age comics so good, so addictive? They were fun. They weren’t WATCHMEN or THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS – both of which, obviously, have their place, though I would venture that the “mainstream legitimacy” they brought to comics, while saving the industry and readying it for the 21st century was also a Trojan horse that has gone wildly unchecked.
The gateway drug for many of us were disposable reads that could be read and thrown aside for the next thing. They weren’t envisioned as collector’s items or to be handled with white gloves. Their value was directly tied to the content and stories and the value that we, as readers, implanted on those stories–not in the collectible value that publishers, through variant covers and whatever, told us, the readers, to find. Comic books were designed to be entertainments. They were designed to be read on subways on the way to work, in a bleary, pre-caffeinated haze. The great comics creators of decades past, the Kirbys, the Eisners, the Siegels, the Lees, the ones that birthed the medium and fueled its rise understood that they were making entertainment for kids, yes, but also entertainment for adults. There was an outlaw value to their simplicity and fun. They were, quite simply, cool.
The two traits that have always attracted me to Golden and Silver Age comics are their sense of fun and their sense of making it up as they went along. The stories were entertaining and fun, and clearly, the creators were having fun doing it (in some form or another, working conditions notwithstanding). There was always a flair of experimentation that has been sadly lost, replaced with an unflattering self-seriousness that does no one, least of all the readers, any good. Digital comics can recapture that sense of experimentation; creators are free of the constraints of print… so why act like digital comics is the digital delivery of a paper product when in fact, it represents an entirely new medium, one custom-built on a delivery platform that kids can’t get enough of?
New, Touch-based Continuities
Clay Shirky has a marvelous quote in his book COGNITIVE SURPLUS about a friend’s four-year old daughter:
“In the middle of the movie… she jumped off the couch and ran behind the screen. My friend thought she wanted to see if the people in the movie were really back there. But that wasn’t what she was up to. She started rooting in the cables behind the screen. Her dad asked, ‘What are you doing?’ And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, ‘Looking for the mouse.’”[5]
Shirky goes on to say that:
“Four-year-olds, old enough to start absorbing the culture they live in, but with little awareness of its antecedents… will just assume that media includes the possibilities of consuming, producing and sharing side-by-side, and that those possibilities are open to everyone.” [6]
How can we bring Shirky’s postulation into comics? Continuity.
I like to call continuity a series of story links agreed upon in a silent (or not-so silent) pact between creator and reader. Let’s take that link argument a step further, into the realm of possibility: I would love to be able to dig into a fight between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin that happened an issue before, just by touching that little editor’s note star. And who’s to say that I couldn’t participate in that battle if the version in the comic before became a small video game? Or maybe it didn’t even happen in a comic, but rather in an animated short? And then from there, dig deeper.I could see fragments of stories, a panel here, a panel there. I could see how the world fit together, I could move it around just like the pile of photos in my photos app. It’s Wikipedia comics reading and just as comics presents unlimited storytelling possibilities, so can a marriage of comics and touch technology present unlimited opportunities for exploration and the sharing of expertise and excitement. It would be the world’s coolest editor’s notes.
Through the creation of digital-native continuities that are based in currently available technology, comics publishers could create a comics experience for digital natives, not a skeumorphic replication of the pamphlet-reading experience. What if readers could literally touch continuity; manipulate it? What if they could move it with their fingers, open up whole new worlds inside a single comic and choose to share them in an environment conducive to fun? The possibilities are quite literally, endless, and could present a veritable storytelling goldmine for creators and publishers that would bring comics into the 21st century in a way only dreamt of by the mad scientists of the Golden Age.
This approach doesn’t negate the already pre-existing fan and comic-shop based continuities. It can exist side-by-side with the current way of doing things. DC can still make their comics for 45-year olds and do whatever they want. Marvel can keep on now, Now, NOW-ing the hell out of their line. I’m talking about a refocusing of efforts on digital continuities, not half-measures. They can still do their direct-to-digital adult comics, they can do their television continuations. All I ask is a little more thought for their legacy and their place in the history and future of not just comics storytelling, but storytelling as a whole; I ask for a recapturing of the experimental, outlaw spirit that has been lost in a creative culture that rewards storytelling homogeneity and brand consistency in spite of pervasive eclectic posturing.
Tools for Creation & Sharing
When one finds the urge to explore, the urge to create isn’t far behind. I’ve often said that the appeal of the great comics characters and the reasons for their longevity (quote Jenkins interview) is that the characters are so elastic: you can do anything with them and it will still work.
Let’s not forget something important about comics, something made beautifully clear in this quote from the Telegraph:
“At book events around the country and talking with children, I’ve noticed that when they fall in love with comics, they’re inspired to pick up a pencil and make comics, in a way that they very seldom respond to books without pictures. Comics don’t make for passive kids; they’re all about doing and making. The format is wonderfully approachable: if you don’t know how to draw something, you write it; if you can’t write it, you draw.”[7]
Comics don’t make for passive kids; they’re all about doing and making. That’s true, isn’t it? I know it was with me. But I was inspired to do that by the fun stories told in the comics I was reading. I fear we’re not seeing that today.
Along with entertaining stories, digital comics producers should provide readers with a regulated platform for creating and sharing their own stories. Imagine if DC brought back Elseworlds as a fan-fiction arena. Note that I do say “regulated.” These characters are the intellectual property of a corporation, and I recognize that.
A combination of touch-based continuities and built-in creation tools wouldn’t just ensure a future for digital comics and comics in today’s digital culture, it would be absolutely revolutionary: stories brought to digital life that would inspire a new generation of storytellers to create by giving them the means to absorb, create, and share without fear or confusion.
• • •
The best way to understand and, more importantly, to get excited about, any medium is to create within it. If DC allowed kids, the market they seem to have abandoned, to integrate comics more into their lives in a way natural to them, with stories that excite and inspire–in other words, utilize the idea of transmedia storytelling, that the stories meet the audience in arenas that are already part of their lives–the industry would be in a much better place.
Why does DC insist on their current path? It’s because it’s safe. It’s safe for now. It’s far easier to think in the short term than it is to think in the long-term; it’s easier to think selfishly than selflessly. It’s easier to think that ownership of a character is only a legal document. It’s easier to keep making the same mistakes than admitting that somewhere down the line, you went down the wrong path and lost sight of your true role, keepers of post-industrial folklore.
Aside from all the technological jargon and tablet visioning I threw out, it’s worth remembering that all great folklore is passed through sharing. From the first stories shared around a campfire to the immersive tales told through video games, sharing and creating is what makes a folklore vibrant. Digital comics and transmedia storytelling offer a way to do that, and inspire that next generation by speaking to their values and the technological tools they have at their ubiquitous disposal.
But, I’ll admit. I’m too much of an idealist here. The only was major companies will learn is with the power of the wallet, and that’s not going away. As long as something makes gobs of money, the slippery slope into long-term obsolescence will grow steeper and more perilous. As much as it pains me to say this, I fear that the mythologies of DC Comics are beyond saving under the current regime and mindset. Maybe, hopefully, somewhere down the line, new keepers of the post-industrial folklore will emerge and bring DC back to its roots by understanding and utilizing all that the digital world has to offer beyond a new way to cram nostalgia down the throats of anyone who will hazard to read them.
But, in spite of all this talk about cool technology and whatever, the future of storytelling is the same thing it has been since the dawn of time immemorial: great stories that inspire an emotional reaction in the audience and a desire to explore. I can only hope that a refresher course in this lesson isn’t swept under the rug.
SOURCES
[1] Tyler Weaver, Comics for Film, Games & Animation: Using Comics to Construct Your Transmedia Storyworld (Boston, Focal Press, 2012), p. 179.
[2] “New 52 Appealed to Avid Fans and Lapsed Readers.” ICv2, February 10, 2012. Available online at http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/221...
[3] Common Sense Media, Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013 (Common Sense Media, 2013), p.9
[4] Ibid.
[5] Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York, The Penguin Press, 2010), p. 212.
[6] Ibid, p. 213
[7] Sarah McIntyre, “Comic Adventures for Kids of All Ages,” The Telegraph, September 01, 2013. Available online at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...
If you want to keep up with the things I’m working on, get access to exclusive stories and discounts, or learn recipes for candied bacon, I have a newsletter, THE SPINNER RACK, that’ll float your boat. Trust me, I hate newsletters, but I like mine. – TW
March 26, 2014
The Golden Age – An Interview with Gerard Jones
In his 2004 Eisner Award-winning book MEN OF TOMORROW: GEEKS, GANGSTERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE COMIC BOOK, author and comics writer Gerard Jones (GREEN LANTERN, THE SHADOW, BATMAN, PRIME, ULTRAFORCE and numerous others) deftly told the stories of the early comics creators, the writers and artists who were in the trenches of the dawn of the medium and, in a collision of shady business deals, inspiring idealism and ink, created the most iconic characters of the past century. At once a history and a cautionary tale, MEN OF TOMORROW is a defining addition to the comics history lexicon. I’m honored to present a brief interview with Gerard Jones, in which we talk about Siegel and Shuster, Bill Finger, the uncertain circumstances behind the creation of Wonder Woman and a brief mid-90s fanboy sidetrack into “whatever happened with your GREEN LANTERN run?”
In MEN OF TOMORROW, you say, in reference to the success of Superman, that “the great missing piece of archaeology in kids culture is what the kids themselves were saying.” If you had to take an educated guess, what do you think happened to take Superman from last-minute fill-in to cultural phenomenon in the space of less than a year? What was it about him that appealed to kids, or to adults, that touched a nerve?
For one thing, Superman was new. There had never been anything quite like him. That alone can be intensely exciting to a kid. He came with very little explanation and didn’t fit any genre expectations, so kids got to figure him out on their own and met with constant surprises. I’m sure he was fun to talk about and to argue about–even about whether he was a completely good guy or not. He also arrived in a venue that was largely relegated to kids, unlike the newspaper comic strips–there was no question that he was *theirs*, he wasn’t something they were sharing with their parents or older siblings. Finally, he was just so simple, so raw–as close to little kid fantasies as anything they’d seen in print.
Regarding Marston and his, for the time, amazing deal with the creation of Wonder Woman, you say that “early comics publishers would give away a lot if they were pushed.” But, the classic, cautionary image of the early days of comics is of Siegel and Shuster and the $130 check for Superman. First, can you describe the deal that Marston worked out with Gaines, and then comment on business practices of the early publishers and the business acumen of early comics creators? For example, a contrast between Siegel and Shuster and say, Will Eisner?
There are some mysteries about the creation of Wonder Woman, and maybe always will be–but I’m pretty well convinced that Marston and Gaines came up with the character together, and that whole “Marston wrote a column for Family Circle on his own and Gaines saw it and contacted him” is made up. So Marston was in a very good position to make sure that Gaines paid him well, gave him a lot of creative control, couldn’t fire him, and either had to keep the character in print or had to give it back. It’s also impressive that he made the deal applicable to his heirs and not just himself.
As for the different approaches–there were guys who saw it as a business and learned to work the business, like Marston and Eisner and all the publishers, and there were guys who just wanted to tell stories and looked at comics as a way to get their work out there, like Siegel and Shuster. They didn’t put the time or thought into figuring out how things worked, and they got run over. I think it’s largely a personality issue–some very creative people don’t like to have to learn how reality works, which can be both a gift and a curse.
What leads you to believe that Gaines and Marston collaborated in the creation of Wonder Woman?
First, Marston was a hustler. Between being fired from Tufts and selling Wonder Woman (and to an extent while he was still at Tufts), he devoted his entire career to an effort to turn his modest accomplishments into money, usually rewriting his own past and resumé, often in cahoots with movie studio publicity departments, ad agencies, and other less than respectable clients. So any time Marston pulled something off, you almost have to look for the maneuvering behind the scenes.
Second, in the FAMILY CIRCLE article where he proclaims the need for a super-heroine, he (if I remember right) actually names M. C. Gaines and praises him as one publisher with higher standards than the rest. There was absolutely no legitimate reason for anyone to name M. C. Gaines in a context like that. For one thing, although Gaines was well-known in the business, it’s unlikely that any outsider observer would even have been aware of him. Maybe someone would have noticed ALL-AMERICAN COMICS, but not Gaines as a person. And even if they had noticed him, what possible reason would they have to say he did more tasteful work than anyone else? His comics were just inferior imitations of DC. Who’s going to look at a copy of ALL-AMERICAN COMICS from 1940 and say, “This is the publisher who’s going to lift the standards of the medium”?
So it makes no sense–unless we assume that Marston already had a reason to promote Gaines. And why else would he promote Gaines specifically in the context of “the world needs a female equivalent to Superman” unless they were already going down exactly that path?
You called Bill Finger “the one real writer in the business” in MEN OF TOMORROW. With the current surge for recognition of his incalculable contributions to the Batman mythos, what do you see as his greatest contribution? What did he bring to the early Batman stories that has made the character endure for 75 years?
First, Finger wrote complete stories in a way that hardly anyone else in the early superhero days did–that is, he structured them with foreshadowings and twists and all the other stuff of real stories rather than just running from start to finish in a straight line. That immediately made Batman seem like the “smart” superhero comic. Then he followed that up by having Batman himself be convincingly smart–putting him in the detective tradition, not just the strong-man tradition. Which, even though he didn’t really do much with characterization in those early days, enabled Batman to seem like a more complete human being. Overall, he balanced the goofy fantasy of costumed superheroes with almost plausible human stories that brought a new dimension to comics.
(How) has fandom evolved since Gernsbach’s social network of “scientifiction” fans in the pages of AMAZING STORIES versus the message boards and social networks of today? Has discussion between fans always been a cornerstone of comics and kid culture?
Yes–fandoms have always been based on long-distance discussions. It happens a lot faster now, which is, overall, probably better for a vital subculture. Although I have to say, taking it more slowly–having to boil your thoughts down for a letter and then having time to think about what you’re said–can make for a more rewarding conversation that you’re likely to get from the free-for-all of the internet. There are no trolls in a magazine letter column, if nothing else.
What can modern-day comics learn from the Golden Age of comics? What lessons have been forgotten?
I think a little more of that fast, wild, try-anything spirit of the early days would be welcome. When art forms become too sophisticated and self-serious, they can lose something.
As a fan of your run on GREEN LANTERN, I have to ask this from a fan’s perspective: what were your plans for Hal Jordan after #46? Was that your intended last issue, or was your run cut short?
I had written through issue 48 and had plots in for 49 and 50. My basic idea, if I remember correctly, was that the Guardians we saw on Oa would turn out to be impostors and Hal would go “rogue” in order to oppose them. Then, at some point, he’d find the real Guardians and lead them in retaking the universe. Or something like that. The editors were looking for more of a “reboot,” so went with a new creative team and new GL.
What are you working on now?
I’m finishing up a book called THE UNDRESSING OF AMERICA, about the origins of our “culture wars” over sex and privacy in the 19th Century, and I’m starting one, in collaboration with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, about her grandfather, Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, who founded DC Comics.
Many thanks to Gerard for the interview and insight. To find out more about his work, you can connect with him at his blog, http://gerardjones.blogspot.com or on Facebook.
March 12, 2014
Stories I Love: HANNIBAL
A rare installment: a series that’s currently running.
Everything about HANNIBAL works: the deliberate pace befitting the slow elegance of the show’s proto-antagonist; Hugh Dancy’s pitch-perfect portrayal of Will Graham, a man tortured by his own mind; the supporting cast from Laurence Fishburne to Scott Thompson to Gillian Anderson as the modern epitome of Hitchcock’s icy blonde ideal; the fact that you have to watch every frame. There’s no fluff on HANNIBAL. Every frame matters and could be framed as a piece of art (morbid, horrific art, in many cases, but we’re talking beauty here, not pretty). Easter eggs, call-backs and call-forwards abound: “I’m having an old friend to dinner”; the opening chord of Patrick Cassidy’s achingly beautiful “Vide Cor Meum” from Ridley Scott’s 2001 film as the underpinnings of Hannibal’s motif; the piece’s full flowering upon the conclusion of Season One: Dr. Lecter’s visit to Will Graham in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane and mythology-reversing imagery of Lecter free, Graham in prison.
HANNIBAL rewards attention while daring you to watch. The show is a 20th-century French opera with penny-dreadful accents of horrific violence; visceral, the real beneath the person-suit. In shows like CSI or CRIMINAL MINDS, the violence and gore is shock, of no coincidence except to move a pre-ordained plot populated with cardboard cutout characters forward to its inevitable conclusion of arrest or self-inflicted bullet to the head. HANNIBAL casts no such aspersions towards the tolerance and intelligence of its audience: it can be unpleasant, it can be horrific, but it is never thrown in for shock value (ok, maybe a little bit, but that’s the penny dreadful-ness coming through). Murder is an ugly thing, and HANNIBAL dares you to love a protagonist unrepentantly capable of unspeakable acts of physical, culinary, and mental violence; Dexter would be flambéed and served as an amuse-bouche at one of Hannibal’s legendary dinner parties.
The true horror of HANNIBAL comes from the mental torture Hannibal inflicts on Will, on his obsession with his “friend,” and it’s in that obsession, in that quid pro quo, that Mikkelsen and Dancy shine: Mikkelsen is the best Hannibal we’ve ever had, making the most of an opportunity that Hopkins (and Brian Cox before him; we’ll forget about Gaspard Ulliel in the atrocious HANNIBAL RISING) never had: to play Hannibal before he was the Dr. Lecter behind the glass, the caged serpent ready to entrap Jodie Foster or Edward Norton or William Petersen or Julianne Moore in the coils of his mind, to infect them. HANNIBAL is where we see him shape the fascination with mental torment he perfects on his therapist, Dr. Bedelia Du Mauer and on Will, disguising it in a helping hand before inflicting the physical violence of shoving a tube down his throat and dropping an ear down it to frame his “friend,” save his own ass, and see what happens.
The power of Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham is that he gives the impression of one that is helped to be whole by the mental torture Hannibal inflicts on him. His first display of great mental strength, of having his unique abilities in check and in full command of them, comes in prison, in Season Two’s second episode, where he uses Lecter’s weakness–his “obsessively intrigued” fascination with him–to lead Lecter down the road to entrapment; Hannibal gives Will the strength to capture him, for them to be together forever.
There’s an undeniable anticipation to see Mikkelsen’s portrayal of Hopkins’ Hannibal, to see him as the caged serpent, finally free of his person suit. Should the show last for its intended seven seasons, we’ll get to see that. Should it not, let us revel in being the old friend invited for a dinner that never fails to surprise.
•••
If you want to keep up with the things I’m working on, get access to exclusive stories and discounts, or learn recipes for candied bacon, I have a newsletter, THE SPINNER RACK, that’ll float your boat. Trust me, I hate newsletters, but I like mine. – TW
February 14, 2014
Confessions of a Chronic Meditator
Hi, I’m Tyler and I’m a chronic meditator. I have been for 10 years. I sit for 10 minutes, twice a day, and breathe. I watch the thoughts–the clusterfucked cornucopia of emotional states including, but not limited to: crippling insecurity, self-loathing, self-pity, self-congratulation, bitterness at slights both real and imagined and a refusal to accept that I am back in Ohio –flow around my head, like the bats in BATMAN BEGINS, flapping and smacking and screeching. In those 10 minutes, I have a simple goal: watch my breath and hopefully, face my thoughts like Bruce Wayne faced the bats, by rising to my feet and letting them swirl around me, accepting the flapping, screeching, shitting flying rodents for what they are: both part of me and imagined fantasies that do not constitute who I am, rather the author’s instinct to fashion the world in a way he sees fit.
I’ve been reticent to write anything about my practice of meditation and running and yoga, because I don’t want to be one of those self-righteous assholes who thinks what they’re doing is amazing and illuminating. It isn’t. I meditate to see the bats and live with them; I run because I like pizza, beer, bourbon and candy, plus it gets me the fuck out of the house; I do yoga because I want to touch my toes and be, well, flexible. My intentions are simple, really.
I’ll be honest, I don’t remember why I started meditating in the first place. It was probably during one of the nine times I tried to quit smoking (after the ninth try, it finally stuck, because I would rather kiss Katie than orally pleasure a coffin nail (Happy Valentine’s Day)) or during a patented early-twenties “search for self.” Whatever it was, it stuck. Sure, I’ve quit meditating here and there; I’ve faced moments where sitting doesn’t do shit and I get frustrated and then I remember that the point is sitting so I go back to sitting and sit some more and then I quit again and start the whole vicious cycle all over again.
Let me describe the process of sitting and breathing for you, something I feel is sorely missing in all the endless self-help texts, bullshit Facebook inspirational quotes and assorted pablum written about the practice. Here you go:
First, at around 5:40AM, I put the kettle on and grind coffee beans. I sit and wait for that to boil, then depress the plunger halfway and wait for four minutes. I stretch. I depress the French Press plunger all the way. I stare longingly at the coffee, knowing that in ten minutes, the sweet life blood nectar will be flowing through my body. I remove my glasses. I sit down on a pillow, Hildy’s (the morkie, a dog) heart-shaped, leopard-print “Wild Thing” pillow, to be precise, because, well, my ass isn’t that comfortable. I set a timer for 11 minutes. Then, ensconced by two sleeping greyhounds and sitting cross-legged on the Wild Thing pillow, I put my hands on my knees, close my eyes and breathe: In/Out. I visualize In/Out in my head. And then I think about the next sentence I should write. In/Out. And then remember that time that that crab-ass cut me off, stupid idiot winter Ohio drivers? No probably didn’t – In/Out. And I wonder what the Kindle sales of some book I wrote look like; nobody reads it because why the – In/Out. Potty training puppy, can’t believe she shit in the house again, manipulative little OH SO CUTE PUPPY. In/Out. You know, maybe I should write about meditating, and write about how you shouldn’t be a self-righteous asshole because you – In/Out. Stupid cancer and stupid house of empathy and stupid tests and stupid chemo and dammit mom and jesus christ I want my life back and what the fuck everyone I love is dying or almost dying and stupid dog dying on me and please don’t let the puppy shit in the house, what do you need Hildy, it’s my fault if jesus fuck my back want to stretch, need to stretch, have to stretch, have to quit because OH MY FUCK NO I WON’T LISTEN YOU EVIL BELA LUGOSI-ASS-BATBITCHES! – In/Out.
The bat-taming goes on for 10 minutes. And then I have my coffee; it is wonderful motor oil. Do I feel like a freshly-rappelled Christian Bale in the nascent Batcave? Not especially. Over the years, I’m less likely to drown in the waterfall or get rabies from bat-bites to my testicles, but I will say that a clarity emerges, for about two hours, that enables me to get to work and get out of my own way. When I first started, it was a few minutes, now I’m hovering at a couple of hours (on a good day). And when those couple of hours fade into flapping, shitting flying rodents, I engage in the next bit of self-medication, yoga or running, to give myself another few hours before I hit the afternoon uselessness and clean house, do dishes, chop wood, or play GRAND THEFT AUTO V. And then, around 7PM, after a day of who knows what, I do the same process again, only without the coffee.
Look, I’m not going to be one of those pricks who says you have to do this. You don’t. This is what works for me, even when it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean I’m free of my insecurities or terseness and harshness or my loathing of small talk or my moments of self-anger or self-pity or my moments of resentment and hopelessness. It means I can identify those things as the bats they are, and, in my weaker moments, pull myself back from the brink, a precipice I’ve been facing for most of my life. Put simply, it means I’m human and I’m learning to live with that. Dare we forget the prophet George Carlin on religion, a statement applicable to everything in life?
“Religion is like a pair of shoes…..Find one that fits for you, but don’t make me wear your shoes.”
So, pick out your own shoes. If meditation works for you, give it a go. If it doesn’t, let the phrase OH MY FUCK NO I WON’T LISTEN YOU EVIL BELA LUGOSI-ASS-BATBITCHES! stick with you.
•••
If you want to keep up with the things I’m working on, get access to exclusive stories and discounts, or learn recipes for candied bacon, I have a newsletter, THE SPINNER RACK, that’ll float your boat. Trust me, I hate newsletters, but I like mine. – TW
February 12, 2014
Whiz!Bam!Pow! Book Three – Lena
As the bills pile up and letters of foreclosure are hand-delivered by uniforms and suits, Lena, a single mom working two jobs, takes a chance on a journey and a key bequeathed to her by a patron at the Parlor Grille.
WHIZ!BAM!POW! BOOK THREE – LENA available for free, in serialized chapters, here:
CHAPTER ONE – THE SUGAR PACKET TOWER OF AWESOME
CHAPTER TWO – Available 19 February 2014
CHAPTER THREE – Available 26 February 2014
CHAPTER FOUR – Available 05 March 2014
CHAPTER FIVE – Available 12 March 2014
CHAPTER SIX – Available 19 March 2014
CHAPTER SEVEN – Available 26 March 2014
CHAPTER EIGHT – Available 02 April 2014
CHAPTER NINE – Available 09 April 2014
CHAPTER TEN – Available 16 April 2014
Follow the entire WHIZ!BAM!POW! experience at whizbampow.com.
January 27, 2014
From Post-It to Print: Writing QUIET COUNTRY
With every project I undertake or attempt to undertake, my goal is to challenge myself. In COMICS FOR FILM, GAMES AND ANIMATION, the challenge was to write both a history of comics and provide practical information for the transmedia storyteller and deliver 100,000 words in five months. COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY was a unique challenge. The story came to me through my fiancé’s mother, who told me a few stories from her best friend, who owned a bed and breakfast, Quiet Country, down the road from their farm in Nashville, Ohio. I knew Nancy in passing; we had had dinners at Quiet Country and I knew her as the source of the best Asian cooking I ever had, directly in the middle of Amish country; that alone stirred the storyteller in me. But it was when I learned more about how Nancy came to Holmes County that my interest piqued: fled North Korea during the war. Married a GI. But what grabbed me more was Nancy’s reticence to tell the story and the fact that her kids didn’t know the entire story.
The mission of writing COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY was two-fold: one, I needed to get Nancy’s story written so her children and grandchildren could have a better understanding of where their lives came from; and two, I wanted a new challenge.
I got one.
So, for the next however many thousand words (probably more than the finished version of C2QC, as a I acronymanate it), I’d like to provide you some insight into how I tackled my first–and hopefully not last–work of narrative non-fiction.
WHAT IS NARRATIVE NON-FICTION?
Ok, perhaps an easy one, but essential to this article. Let’s get a working definition of narrative non-fiction. Basically, narrative non-fiction constitutes the telling of a true story through fictional storytelling devices. Among the best examples of this are Eric Larsen’s THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY, James Swanson’s MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN’S KILLER and David Carr’s memoir, THE NIGHT OF THE GUN.
While COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY certainly isn’t book length, and certainly not article length, it fits in its own little world. But I’ll get to the length and decisions I made regarding traditional vs. self-publishing in awhile.
THE LENGTH
Why is C2QC so short, and not a novel? There’s certainly enough material for one. The first reason is that, as a writer, I can’t go by word count. I know that’s probably counter to our word-count focused writing landscape, but I can’t say “this is a short story because it’s 7000 words or less.” I can’t proudly say “I wrote 1,368 words today” and rack up statistics. For some, it works wonders; for me, it’s awful, resulting in the worst iterations of self-judgement, self-criticism and self-loathing ever wrought. My writing process is simple: I tell the story in the way I feel it needs to be told and I take however long it takes to do that (unless, of course, I’m on a deadline from a higher power, like an editor or publisher). If that constitutes a novel, great; if it’s a short story, great; if it’s somewhere in between, that’s what self-publishing and the Internet is for.
The great George Saunders had a wonderful insight on brevity when he was interviewed by Stephen Colbert after the release of his stunning collection of short stories, TENTH OF DECEMBER (seriously, go read it, and try to find it in hardback, not the awful blue-tinged paperback). It was something to the effect of, when asked by Stephen about why he didn’t write novels, that would you rather read about someone telling someone they love another over a lifetime, or in the three minutes they have before boarding a train that’s rolling down the tracks?
The short version: I based the finished story on a collection of moments that intertwined with one another and built on each other. When those moments resolved, in whichever way I pieced them together, the story was done. The story came first, then length came from how the story emerged over time.
That said, I’m not ruling out the possibility of turning C2QC into a novel somewhere down the road. But that’s a ways off.
NO QUOTES AROUND DIALOGUE
This one is pretty simple. I rarely use them in fiction to begin with, but with C2QC, because the story was being recounted to me, I couldn’t base the dialogue between family members in evidence and fact; I could, however, use dialogue that I felt was within the person’s character based upon the actions they took. However, I used what some would call dialogue sparingly, as an accent.
This brings up another unusual trait of writing narrative non-fiction: I can’t ascribe thought to characters, again because there’s no way to directly source thought as it was occurring directly within the action described in the story. I could only describe action in the best way I knew how, which was to let the action speak for itself, devoid of flowery language and emotion. I had to let the reader put themselves in the shoes of the Cho family, and I felt that by being dispassionate in my descriptions, the passion would come from the reader during the reading of the book.
I *did* use quotation marks in the coda, set in 2013, where I quoted directly from my interviews with Nancy.
WHY I DIDN’T TALK ABOUT NANCY’S LIFE AFTER COMING TO AMERICA
The crux of C2QC was a journey, and I felt that the particular journey of the story, the one I had invited the reader on, ended in that airport in Tokyo in 1960. The conflict was leaving Korea, both the North and then the South. It was about walking the road to building your own family and taking the steps you need to get where you need to go.
While Nancy’s story obviously didn’t end in 1960, the story of C2QC did (with a 2013 coda).
TRADITIONAL VERSUS SELF-PUBLICATION
Throughout the entire writing, this one weighed on me. I thought maybe I could get it in a local publication, using the Holmes County angle, or the B&B angle, like a profile in FOOD AND WINE. One reader suggested traditional, the other didn’t know what to say.
In the end, I chose self-publication, and it was the absolute best decision I made FOR THIS PARTICULAR WORK. Remember how I said I can’t go by word count? Well, I can only go by a gut feeling that the story is ready to be abandoned (released). That particular instinct played into this decision. I knew the structure of the tale was such that any change would result in massive edits throughout the entire work and that my own minimalist and stark prose style (again, for this particular work) would result in having to add extraneous words to fit C2QC into pre-determined editorial guidelines. I didn’t want that to happen.
Also playing into my decision to self-publish was my experience in publishing. As many of you know, I ran a non-profit for a few years with a publishing wing, where I became acclimated to the publishing process, albeit on a small scale.This enabled me to make certain decisions, like cover design: at the NPO, I designed all the book covers, so I used that experience with C2QC; I understood how to write compelling back cover copy; I knew the size dimensions for a spine and for an ISBN box for a 6×9 book; I knew how to create royalty contracts. All of this fueled my decision to self-publish.
The other need was for print editions of the work. Again, my experience in publishing, and my experience in dealing with CreateSpace for years before I turned to writing full-time, further fueled the decision to self-publish. I live in the middle of nowhere. The story of C2QC has broad local appeal, and not all of those locals interested in C2QC know or care about digital books and Kindles or the future of storytelling. They just want something to read, and, if it’s good enough, they’re willing to pay for it. By creating print copies that are print on demand, and leveraging relationships with local business, as well as using tools like Square, I can more fully control the distribution of the book on a local, small scale, something I couldn’t do with the same flexibility had I gone web-based, #Longread-only or traditional publisher.
Pardon me a brief moment on a soap box: the argument of traditional versus self-publishing is asinine and counter-productive. Self-publishing is not a replacement for traditional publishing: it has to co-exist with traditional publishing. It creates a freedom for the author to interact with an audience and enables writers to try new forms and experiment with serialization and other forms inherent to the Internet. It isn’t a threat, it’s an opportunity.
I’ve been published by a traditional publisher, and I’ve self-published. Both have their ups and downs. The work dictates the publishing route, not the other way ‘round.
•••
COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY was the biggest creative challenge I’ve faced thus far (intermingled with extensive personal ones, which I won’t discuss here).
The most important lesson I learned was one that is the overarching theme of C2QC: the power of listening. Listening saved a family and brought them back together. Listening brings understanding. Listening brings a world to life and gives you the means to dig deeper into it.
The lengthy process of writing it also showed me that I need to have a deep understanding of the world in which I’m working before a story can emerge that entertains both myself during the process and the reader once my end of the bargain is complete.
In the spirit of listening, if you have any other questions about writing C2QC and the decisions I made, or would like me to go into greater detail about any aspect of the writing and/or publication process, feel free to ask me on Twitter, @tylerweaver, in the comments here, or on Facebook, and I’ll update this post as new questions come in.
Purchase COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY:
Kindle | Print | Signed Print Edition
December 11, 2013
@ScriptMag – Fragments
My newest series for SCRIPTMAG dot com, “Fragments” focuses on the potential transmedia storytelling affords filmmakers. These posts function as a deeper companion to both my book,COMICS FOR FILM, GAMES AND ANIMATION: USING COMICS TO CONSTRUCT YOUR TRANSMEDIA STORYWORLD and the book’s companion website, COMICSTORYWORLD.
The series is currently ongoing.
Fragments #1 – Transmedia and Writing Exposition (03 December 2013)
We have almost every storytelling medium known to humanity at our digital (and non-digital) disposal. This democratization of content creation means two things: one, you can make anything you want, whenever you want, and two, like Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. You have all of these tools, but the key to digital and transmedia storytelling is knowing when and where to use them in creative and exciting ways that make your work irresistible.
Before we go further, I’ll note here, as I have in my bookand in interviews, that I will only supply a definition of transmedia storytelling for the purpose of focus. Transmedia storytelling is, at this point, in a continuing state of definitional flux and while this is a detriment to most discussion and analysis of it, it’s a wonderful thing for creative people; it’s the mythical blank slate. It is what you make it.
With that in mind, I define transmedia storytelling as the crafting of stories that unfold across multiple media fragments, in which each piece deepens the whole, but is simultaneously capable of standing on its own, giving the audience the choice into how deep into the experience they go.
Keep reading…
December 10, 2013
2013: The Year That Was
What a topsy-turvy-skull-fuck of a year.
It opened with the loss of my second grandmother on January 27, seven weeks after the loss of my first in December. There were two months between her funeral on January 31st and her memorial on April 9, on what would have been my grandparent’s 63rd wedding anniversary. I spent much of the Spring writing a eulogy for both grandmothers.
Between funeral and memorial, I penned two stories:
The most difficult entrant in the WHIZ!BAM!POW! world, BOOK TWO had been my white whale for almost three years. It was a story that grew on me, through numerous iterations and drafts. While I released it initially only for Kindle, I’ve since serialized it and have removed it from the Kindle store. The final installment will be released on December 22nd. It will be available in THE COMPLETE WHIZ!BAM!POW! in 2014.
After the long process of writing my book, COMICS FOR FILM, GAMES AND ANIMATION: USING COMICS TO CONSTRUCT YOUR TRANSMEDIA STORYWORLD and WHIZ!BAM!POW! BOOK TWO, I wanted to try something different, something that would make use of what I like to call the spectator sport of Internet writing. So, I concocted MYSTERY ILLUSION THEATRE, the banner for a challenge I give myself: in two weeks, I have to write and publish, from concept to completion, a story that would fit in the old pulp magazines of yore.
The first tale, written from March 10 through March 24, THE CHIMES OF BAODING, featured a story about a pickpocket with a fear of touch who had to save her partner-in-crime. I also included an exclusive STORIES I LOVE segment on MIT’s namesake, SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE.
THE CHIMES OF BAODING is currently available on Kindle devices for $1.99, though it’s free for Spinner Rack subscribers.
Which reminds me, I also started a newsletter called THE SPINNER RACK. Feel free to sign up.
•••
In May, Katie and I went to the Cleveland Zoo, where I took a picture of her niece’s spontaneous fear at the animatronic dinosaurs which would go on to win me a second place prize and a kick-ass $15 dollar Drug-Mart gift card (along with other prizes). Here’s that picture:
When we got back to the house that evening, I asked Katie to marry me with my grandmother’s 50th anniversary ring. My grandfather wanted Katie to have that ring. At our wedding this coming year, my grandfather will be my best man, just as he’s been for my entire life.
In fact, two of the life stories my grandfather liked to tell eventually became two of my short stories (with significant dramatic license), the first, A PERFECT FAMILY, was written in December of 2012 and the second, JUNE, the story of a cross dog’s last chance, told from the point of view of a dog, during the Spring of 2013.
I followed up JUNE with two other short stories, the “written in two hours on a Saturday morning for a lark” BEDTIME, about my door locking OCD and THE THREE JESI(I?) TURN WATER INTO WINE, a fictionalized account of the true story of a psychology experiment in the 1960s where three schizophrenics who believed themselves to be Jesus Christ were put in a room together to work it out. THE THREE JESI were not one of my grandfather’s midwestern folk tales.
•••
After a brief respite from death over the spring, we learned that my mother had breast cancer. Fortunately, we caught the cancer in time and she’s on her way to a full recovery. While I’ve vowed to not write non-fiction about cancer through the duration, I do need to share the oddest incident of the entire journey thus far: her 11th-hour reprieve from her first chemo treatment on September 30th and the decision to go with surgery first. This was what she had wanted all along, and as my mother will tell you herself, things usually work out in that outcome.
That same evening, Katie and I took Orson, the anything but standard poodle and my best friend, to the vet. He wasn’t eating. We thought he had something in his stomach, a sock or something he ate. The next day, I learned that it was stomach cancer throughout 75% of his stomach, and, on October 1, at 3:57PM, I had my best friend, exactly six and a half-years old, put to sleep. His ashes are in my office, in a place of honor, below what I think is a fitting epitaph, a quote from Ray Bradbury:
Treasure this day and treasure yourself. Truly, neither will ever happen again.
Indeed.
•••
After Marley, Katie’s greyhound, and I won a blue ribbon at the Loudonville Street Fair on October 5th with this picture:
… and after I made a return to percussion playing (djembe only, so far) in public the previous Sunday, on October 17th, my mother had a double mastectomy and recovered with flying colors in a few days, even though I tried to convince her she had been asleep for two years and that Hillary was president. Once the anesthetic fully wore off, and we found QVC on the hospital TV, the con was up.
Fortunately, she was in a hospital bed and couldn’t do much damage.
In the hospital, once we learned that we were indeed in the present, I designed the cover and, in the two weeks that followed, I put the finishing touches on the work that consumed me for the entire year:
If 2012 was the year of COMICSTORYWORLD, 2013 was the year of COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY. Throughout the entire insanity of the year, I was working on this piece, 40 pages and infinitely more difficult to write than the 300-page book on the evolution of comics and transmedia storytelling.
QUIET COUNTRY is the story of Katie’s mother’s best friend, Nancy Tysl, who owns the Quiet Country bed and breakfast in Holmes County, Ohio. She is a quiet woman with a wonderful sense of humor who, at age 16, escaped on foot from North Korea in 1950. The tale follows her escape from the North and her life in the South before coming to Cleveland and eventually, to Holmes County.
Over the course of the year, from November until September, I recorded four separate interviews with Nancy and spent much of the year staring at Post-It notes, clueless as to how to arrange the pieces. Fortunately, I figured it out and released COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY as a Kindle Exclusive on October 28th, Katie’s birthday. The print version was released last week.
As QUIET COUNTRY was released, I had to to transition to my next bit of work, my speaking engagement at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Museum Festival of Cartoon Art on November 15th. I was part of a two-person presentation on the future of comics storytelling with my good buddy from high school, Geoff Long. It was a bit of a transmedia high school reunion, where Geoff spoke of the wild and crazy things he’s doing at USC with Henry Jenkins (we were Henry’s opening act) and I spoke on how digital comics can become the new Spinner Rack if they take advantage of the unique capabilities of Internet storytelling. A version of that talk will be made available in 2014, though I haven’t quite figured out how to do it.
To add more surreality to the proceedings, I was actually on a panel with Henry, and proved that I was the most old school person on the panel, despite being the youngest. Oh yeah, and right after the panel, I got word that I had won second place with that picture of Katie’s niece and the dinosaur. So that was even more fun than the panel.
My time at the Festival was brought to a close with being in the audience for a conversation between Jeff Smith and Paul Pope, one that gave me creative fuel for the next year… which I’ll jump to in a bit. The short of it: those guys are bad-asses.
While COMICSTORYWORLD wasn’t at the front and center of my mind in 2013, I did release quite a few new things on the book’s companion site, including AN INTERVIEW WITH CAROL TILLEY, and my first – and last – review of Marvel’s disappointing AGENTS OF SHIELD. I also began writing a monthly column for SCRIPT MAG dot com, the first, MORE THAN STORYBOARDS, on comics, the second, FRAGMENTS, focusing more on transmedia storytelling as a whole.
Among the other COMICSTORYWORLD happenings were a fascinating acceptance of my book in education and academia, an audience I had never anticipated when I wrote the tome in five months. The day after Orson’s death, October 2nd, I joined Anna Smith’s TEACHREAD class to talk transmedia and the day before I went to OSU, I joined Ryan Rish’s class to again talk transmedia and how I dislike LORD OF THE RINGS.
After my return from OSU, another visit to the vet was in order.
On November 24th, we had to make the painful decision to put Sarah, Katie’s 18-year-old miniature schnauzer to sleep. She joined the other Sara, my grandmother, in the picture above. The poor girl needed new kidneys and it just wasn’t going to work. The same vet who had to put Orson down, made sure that the Muffin was comfortable. I told him we still appreciated all he did for our babies, but that I wasn’t willing to pay his psychiatry bills wrought by the one-two punch of two dogs in a month from new clients.
As my mother’s appointment with the chemo chair drew near, December 5th, the search was on for a new family member. Marley, Katie’s greyhound, had become my dog by default (and love) and Sadie, the other greyhound, was – and is – an über-princess who blesses us with her affection when she deems it fit, usually between bouts of princess-ninja squirrel killer missions.
On December 2nd, Katie, Siri and I wheeled our way through the backwoods of Holmes County and found our new family member, a maltese-yorkie puppy, who we named Hildy, after Rosalind Russell in HIS GIRL FRIDAY. On Wednesday, the 4th, we took Hildy to her first vet appointment and the vet was relieved that the third time was a charm and that we have a perfectly healthy and happy baby puppy, who, he says, will have an amazing life.
On Thursday, the 5th, my mother began chemo treatment (after falling in love with her newest grand-dog) and made it through with flying colors and understood that my threat to scatter her ashes on a public school playground (she was a teacher for thirty years) should she not get treatment, was worth it. She was hungry and ate everything in sight, but that’s because she’s pumped full of steroids to become a cancer-slaying bad-ass.
To the best of my knowledge, she has not yet turned into the Hulk, though we have three more treatments to go, so who knows. I do know that I won’t try to convince her she’s been asleep for two years, because, you know, ‘roid rage.
While we wait on the outcome of Hulking out, here’s a preview of what 2014 holds.
My first planned release of 2014 is my first short story collection, entitled A PERFECT FAMILY: STORIES/ESSAYS VOLUME ONE. It will contain the final versions of the short stories I’ve published up to this point (I view digital as a beta release, but more on that in another post). The print-exclusive collection should be available in January, and will feature and exclusive short story, which will likely wrap up 2013 in a more satisfying way than this post. SPINNER RACK subscribers *may* get an exclusive digital version of the new short story, though I haven’t yet decided.
Following, or perhaps in conjunction with that, WHIZ!BAM!POW! BOOK THREE will be released, in weekly chapters on Sunday mornings, just as I’ve done with BOOK TWO and BOOK ONE. With BOOK THREE, and the Coda, and the digital-only release of the comic, WHIZ!BAM!POW! will at last conclude in 2013. Following its conclusion, a print and digital version, THE COMPLETE WHIZ!BAM!POW! will be released.
Keeping with the release schedule of COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY, I’m planning a self-published novella to be released in October or November of 2014. It’ll be a crime story, I think. Somewhere in there I’m going to do another MYSTERY ILLUSION THEATRE story, just to keep me fresh and experimental.
What else?
Oh yeah! There might be a new collaboration: a children’s book. Or a comic book. Or an animated short. Or a combination of all three. We’re not sure yet. All I know is that it will be absolutely awesome and I’ve been working on it since September.
And finally, the big one. In my eulogy for both grandmothers, I said that they lived long enough to see me settle into the passion and the role that I’m most comfortable with, that of a writer, a book writer. To that end, I’m writing my first novel, and have been throughout most of this year. Over the course of the year, three were drafted, though I’ve settled on the one I’m going to push down the long road from infinite rewrites to publication
Well, wait. Sure the novel will be the big one of 2014, but there’s a bigger one. By year’s end, I’ll be married to the love of my life. So I’ve got that going for me.
Onward to 2014.
November 22, 2013
X Marked The Spot
As throngs in Dallas gather today to celebrate the life and accomplishments of JFK in the spot where his head was blown off, demarcated with an eerie “X” – an “X” paved over last week, a symbolic sweeping under the rug of the city’s historical dirty laundry – on Elm Street, one group will be left off the remembrances. For four years, from 2005-2009, I was a member of that group, albeit in a position that, in retrospect, was not the ideal. I was not a passionate JFK researcher, but from 2005 through 2009, I worked in various capacities on the day-to-day operations at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization, in the interest of full disclosure, where I am still the vice president of the Board of Directors.
One fateful July in 2005, I answered an ad on Craigslist seeking someone to help with data entry. Having been fired from my job at a wine shop in Boston (long story), I was in the market. The job posting satisfied two criteria: one: it intrigued me; two: it triggered the “why not?” notion. In August I got the job, and on August 11, 2005, I began the process of entering millions of pages of documents related to the JFK assassination into the Foundation’s archive. My role expanded to include filmmaking (it was my film school), early crude attempts at transmedia storytelling, and finally, taking over as Executive Director in 2007. During this time, I learned every skill I apply daily to my writing career, from Python programming to book cover design, to the ins and outs of publishing (I think there was some surprise on the part of my publishers when I negotiated my book deal and found tiny details that needed changing), to the most important skill I learned, one that was never honed in music school: I learned to listen.
Without that lesson, I never would have been able to write COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY. I never would have been able to hear what the characters I create in fictional worlds have to say. It showed me that people are not only their beliefs, but the fascinating combination of all of their interests to little habits to the laugh they produce. And I owe all of that to my time as part of the community non-grata in Dallas today.
It was intoxicating being around such passionate and driven people, such characters. I had wonderful experiences, some not so wonderful: getting to smoke in a bar for the last time with three wonderful friends, one a staggeringly beautiful Romanian woman who spoke fondly of a double feature of THE KARATE KID and CITIZEN KANE; chatting at the bar with various authors and friends, learning of their lives outside of the conference; Texas-sized margaritas; the wonderful shock when I received a beer at an airport with a shot of tequila and being told that that’s the norm; the most horrendous bout of near-pass-out food poisoning from dessert at the Adolphus before my final speech; the pre-keynote shots of tequila that my predecessor and I engaged in as our tradition; the “buy-a-beer” alternating years; passing the butter; seeing CASINO ROYALE on its premiere date in a movie theatre with huge seats and one of my best friends; running across the freeway from one hotel to the next, and encouraging the others trying to cross the road that they had enough time if they just manned up and ran for it; walking through the night streets of Pittsburgh on its 250th anniversary with fireworks shooting from the buildings with a group of researchers, and asking one why he read all of the plaques on monuments (his answer, “if I’m walking on someone’s blood, I want to know whose it is” or something infinitely more profound); meeting someone who became a great friend and inspired me to take stock of my life at the moment; listening to theories and postulations, all delivered with nothing less than the most absolute of conviction and passion; being told by high school students that I really spoke to them in my final speech (during which I was holding myself up to keep from passing out, thank you terribly bad and over-poweringly sweet chocolate cake), one where I called President Obama’s election the culmination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s respective campaigns for an ideal; receiving a handwritten letter from a brilliant journalist stricken with Parkinson’s and our phone conversations about his work on the House Select Committee on Assassinations and most importantly, how much he loved working on his boat.
It was the little stories within the big that moved and shaped me, stories all brought together by one thing:
I remember my first visit to Dealey Plaza in 2005, when I first interviewed people with a camera. I was a nervous wreck, making sure I remembered how to put the lights together. I remember thinking how small the place was, and how much that “X” freaked me out as tourists waited for a pause in traffic to run out into Elm Street for a photo op. I remember the slogans in the fence on the Grassy Knoll. I remember looking up at the sixth floor window of the Depository. But that “X,” man. That “X.”
Every visit since, in 2006, 2007 and 2008 (my final), that “X” haunted me. It clearly still does. “X” marks the spot. “X” is the reason for the passion, for the vitriol, the laying bare of everything that was simmering beneath the surface of this country for its entire existence; “X” represents the idea that you can “believe,” but you cannot “know;” “X” represents a distrust of government, that “the greater good” functions only as a perception on the part of those claiming to work for it; and with that “X,” history made its final plea: stop with the shit and live together, a plea that hasn’t been realized and I fear won’t be as the 50th anniversary passes into the annals of history and the day after meets with something new, some listicle, some new distraction, a cat video, a manufactured hyperbolic outrage on the vaudevillian stage of modern political discourse, mountains out of molehills and molehills out of mountains.
But then again, the “X” was paved over, swept under the rug when inconvenient, to smooth out “tripping hazards.”
Indeed.
My youth – I wasn’t even a glimmer in my 10-year-old mother’s brain as she played tetherball in Killbuck, OH at 1:30PM (Eastern) on November 22, 1963 – doesn’t give me the visceral, personal connection to JFK’s assassination, but it does grant me a perspective on the happenings in the 50 years since, one that I hope is free of the myth making, one instead grounded in reality, in its shades of grey, where history is of a whole cloth, not a pretty one, but a necessary one, a window shade of experience with which to look at the present and hope that we learn from the mistakes of the past and grow as a people beyond the myth and the vitriol into the best ideal we can hope for: agreeing to disagree.
On that note, I’ll close with a quote from the man himself, one that we would do well to remember and keep with us, no matter our beliefs, so that the lesson of the “X” never goes away, no matter how many coats of asphalt may lie over it:
“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
X Mark(ed) The Spot
As throngs in Dallas gather today to celebrate the life and accomplishments of JFK in the spot where his head was blown off, demarcated with an eerie “X” – an “X” paved over last week, a symbolic sweeping under the rug of the city’s historical dirty laundry – on Elm Street, one group will be left off the remembrances. For four years, from 2005-2009, I was a member of that group, albeit in a position that, in retrospect, was not the ideal. I was not a passionate JFK researcher, but from 2005 through 2009, I worked in various capacities on the day-to-day operations at the Mary Ferrell Foundation, an organization, in the interest of full disclosure, where I am still the vice president of the Board of Directors.
One fateful July in 2005, I answered an ad on Craigslist seeking someone to help with data entry. Having been fired from my job at a wine shop in Boston (long story), I was in the market. The job posting satisfied two criteria: one: it intrigued me; two: it triggered the “why not?” notion. In August I got the job, and on August 11, 2005, I began the process of entering millions of pages of documents related to the JFK assassination into the Foundation’s archive. My role expanded to include filmmaking (it was my film school), early crude attempts at transmedia storytelling, and finally, taking over as Executive Director in 2007. During this time, I learned every skill I apply daily to my writing career, from Python programming to book cover design, to the ins and outs of publishing (I think there was some surprise on the part of my publishers when I negotiated my book deal and found tiny details that needed changing), to the most important skill I learned, one that was never honed in music school: I learned to listen.
Without that lesson, I never would have been able to write COMING TO QUIET COUNTRY. I never would have been able to hear what the characters I create in fictional worlds have to say. It showed me that people are not only their beliefs, but the fascinating combination of all of their interests to little habits to the laugh they produce. And I owe all of that to my time as part of the community non-grata in Dallas today.
It was intoxicating being around such passionate and driven people, such characters. I had wonderful experiences, some not so wonderful: getting to smoke in a bar for the last time with three wonderful friends, one a staggeringly beautiful Romanian woman who spoke fondly of a double feature of THE KARATE KID and CITIZEN KANE; chatting at the bar with various authors and friends, learning of their lives outside of the conference; Texas-sized margaritas; the wonderful shock when I received a beer at an airport with a shot of tequila and being told that that’s the norm; the most horrendous bout of near-pass-out food poisoning from dessert at the Adolphus before my final speech; the pre-keynote shots of tequila that my predecessor and I engaged in as our tradition; the “buy-a-beer” alternating years; passing the butter; seeing CASINO ROYALE on its premiere date in a movie theatre with huge seats and one of my best friends; running across the freeway from one hotel to the next, and encouraging the others trying to cross the road that they had enough time if they just manned up and ran for it; walking through the night streets of Pittsburgh on its 250th anniversary with fireworks shooting from the buildings with a group of researchers, and asking one why he read all of the plaques on monuments (his answer, “if I’m walking on someone’s blood, I want to know whose it is” or something infinitely more profound); meeting someone who became a great friend and inspired me to take stock of my life at the moment; listening to theories and postulations, all delivered with nothing less than the most absolute of conviction and passion; being told by high school students that I really spoke to them in my final speech (during which I was holding myself up to keep from passing out, thank you terribly bad and over-poweringly sweet chocolate cake), one where I called President Obama’s election the culmination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King’s respective campaigns for an ideal; receiving a handwritten letter from a brilliant journalist stricken with Parkinson’s and our phone conversations about his work on the House Select Committee on Assassinations and most importantly, how much he loved working on his boat.
It was the little stories within the big that moved and shaped me, stories all brought together by one thing:
I remember my first visit to Dealey Plaza in 2005, when I first interviewed people with a camera. I was a nervous wreck, making sure I remembered how to put the lights together. I remember thinking how small the place was, and how much that “X” freaked me out as tourists waited for a pause in traffic to run out into Elm Street for a photo op. I remember the slogans in the fence on the Grassy Knoll. I remember looking up at the sixth floor window of the Depository. But that “X,” man. That “X.”
Every visit since, in 2006, 2007 and 2008 (my final), that “X” haunted me. It clearly still does. “X” marks the spot. “X” is the reason for the passion, for the vitriol, the laying bare of everything that was simmering beneath the surface of this country for its entire existence; “X” represents the idea that you can “believe,” but you cannot “know;” “X” represents a distrust of government, that “the greater good” functions only as a perception on the part of those claiming to work for it; and with that “X,” history made its final plea: stop with the shit and live together, a plea that hasn’t been realized and I fear won’t be as the 50th anniversary passes into the annals of history and the day after meets with something new, some listicle, some new distraction, a cat video, a manufactured hyperbolic outrage on the vaudevillian stage of modern political discourse, mountains out of molehills and molehills out of mountains.
But then again, the “X” was paved over, swept under the rug when inconvenient, to smooth out “tripping hazards.”
Indeed.
My youth – I wasn’t even a glimmer in my 10-year-old mother’s brain as she played tetherball in Killbuck, OH at 1:30PM (Eastern) on November 22, 1963 – doesn’t give me the visceral, personal connection to JFK’s assassination, but it does grant me a perspective on the happenings in the 50 years since, one that I hope is free of the myth making, one instead grounded in reality, in its shades of grey, where history is of a whole cloth, not a pretty one, but a necessary one, a window shade of experience with which to look at the present and hope that we learn from the mistakes of the past and grow as a people beyond the myth and the vitriol into the best ideal we can hope for: agreeing to disagree.
On that note, I’ll close with a quote from the man himself, one that we would do well to remember and keep with us, no matter our beliefs, so that the lesson of the “X” never goes away, no matter how many coats of asphalt may lie over it:
“The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie–deliberate, contrived and dishonest–but the myth–persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
