Hello, Blogger. I've missed you.

Speaking with Greig Means this weekend (editor and publisher of the excellent Tugboat Press, about which I need to write, I think) it occurred to me that I hadn't been updating this blog much lately. This is for a variety of reasons, none of which need to be gone into here despite the fact that this is a blog and that's usually exactly the kind of thing that is gone into.

Anyway, it occurred to me what I useful tool this blog was when I was writing my novel. I posted my progress every day and if I had no progress, I posted that, too. The knowledge that people were keeping track of those slowly mounting numbers helped to motivate me. I bring this all up because I seem to find myself writing another novel. What I think will become another novel, at least. (My wife's declaration to this bit of news was something like, "Why would you do that?" Indeed.)

I didn't come up with the idea of publicly tracking my progress. In the grand tradition of writers everywhere, I stole the idea from someone more talented and more intelligent than me. Cherie Priest, writer of scary stories and, lately, steampunk novels does just this. I've also noted that just lately, in the last couple of days, Warren Ellis (Ellis's site is very often NSFW) is also tracking his novel-in-progress's growing word count. So I'm in good company, I suppose.

So let me recap, very quickly, my progress so far, starting with the fact that my goal is to write 1,000 words a day.

On Friday, I wrote 1,026 words. Saturday yielded 1,092. On Sunday I had a full day with Oscar up in Portland and I only managed 317 words, but I made up for that by writing 1,683 words tonight which is 2,000 exactly for the last two days. That makes a grand total of 4,118. There. Starting tomorrow, I'll start having a running total at the bottom of each post until I get to end of the first draft.

I suppose I should write just a bit about the first novel, Zomburbia. I finished the second draft and sent it off to three readers. My first reader is going to give it another once-over and two new victims volunteers are also reading it. Soon I will have even more corrections to make, I'm sure, and I'll be able start on a third draft. After that, who knows. Maybe it'll be time to start finding an agent. As much as I'm able, I'll document the whole process here.

Lucky you.

Pipe dreams

I daydream a lot, and I often berate myself for the ludicrous nature of those daydreams -- so ludicrous that they are elevated to the status of pipe dreams. But just lately, I've had a couple of these fantasies come true. So here's one more:

I used to want Dakota Fanning to star as Sylvia in a motion picture adaptation of my book, 100 Girls. Now that she's too old for the part, I'd like to see the role go to either her sister, Elle, or to Chloe Moretz.

Okay, Universe, you've got your work cut out for you.

Giveaway

Over on her awesome blog, Karen Healey is giving away a copy of 100 Girls. Go here:

Karen's awesome blog

Follow the instructions and cross your fingers! The contest ends in 24 hours, so get cracking.

Astute readers may recognize Karen's name. I first met her after she reviewed the book and made several very cogent points about it. I told her as much, after which she asked to interview me. Our conversation has been ongoing ever since. Karen writes for the Girls Read Comics column for Girl-Wonder.org. In addition to this, she is currently writing her PhD thesis about an aspect of comics that is way over my head. And, because she doesn't sleep ever, Karen has her first YA novel, Guardian of the Dead, coming out next year. Basically we shall all be bowing down before her within the next few years. I for one welcome our new New Zealander masters.

Seriously, she's the real deal. Would she be giving away such a terrific book if she weren't?

I like this

I just stumbled upon a review of 100 Girls written by an individual who, I can only guess, is a Buddhist. They look at the book in the context of Buddhism, and the concept of Dharma specifically. I've re-read the review several times and I can't tell whether or not they liked the book.

This interests me because... well, because I know nothing about Buddhism or Dharma and I never intended the book to be a comment on either. The fact that someone who studies Buddhism can find these connects in a book where none were intended. It's a good reminder about how readers can and will supply meanings to your work which you would never in a million years see yourself. In this instance, the meaning is positive and interesting, but there can be instances where that meaning is negative and hurtful to the reader.

And, no, I'm not going to consider the impact of a given story on every potential reader in the world, but it's a good thing to keep in mind, I think.

This business we call "show"

Culled from this week's Publisher's Weekly/Comics Weekly newsletter, a quote from comics writer Greg Rucka:

"What I learned is that the checks cash just as well whether the movie is made or not. Whiteout was on and off several times since first being optioned in 2000, and I think the secret to all that not driving us [he and artist Steve Lieber] crazy is that it was never our goal to get a movie deal out of this. A lot of people are writing comics or graphic novels in the hopes of getting it made into a movie. That is a recipe for disappointment."

To which I would just like to add: Amen, sir.

Anyone who gets into comics so that they can get a movie made is going to get their damned hearts broken. Hell, anyone who gets into comics for any reason other than to make comics is destined for el corazón quebrado.

I remember a few years ago I spoke to a high school class that was studying comics (although the courses may have actually called them "graphic novels") and one of the things I said, based on a question about how quickly one can become rich as a comics artist, was, "if you get into comics to get rich, you're in for a nasty shock. The only reason to get into comics is because you love comics."

The teacher and the owner of the local comics shop both gave me dirty looks. It quickly became apparent to me that these kids had been told something other than this pessimistic view I was spouting. Maybe they had even been told, as incentive to get them to take the class, that they would become overnight sensations and that people would throw buckets of money at them where ever they went. And here I was saying that comics might have some worth beyond the ability to make you rich and attractive to the opposite sex.

But some people get their comics made into movies and earn money that way, right?" the teacher asked me. His expression said to me that I should not contradict him. And, since his statement was true, I said, "yes." But I didn't go on to say that these kids would be better served taking a class that taught them how to play the lottery than they would be learning how to make comics that got turned into movies. How many comics movies have there been in the last ten years? Twenty, thirty? And how many comics are published every month? Hundreds! Hundreds of comics a month get published and only three or four a year get turned into movies. If Vegas offered those odds, there wouldn't be any casinos still in operation.

So, please, kids, if you want to make movies, do that. Go to film school; buy a camera and go shoot something. Just, please, don't think you're going to make a comic that will be seen by Steve Spielberg and then turned into a movie. It ain't gonna happen.

And no, the recently scuttled deal for 100 Girls has nothing to do with this rant. Why would you even think that?

Shameless, really

A bullet point I forgot yesterday:

• I found maybe the best synopsis/write-up ever of 100 Girls yesterday on a site that, as far as I can tell, is used by librarians and teachers. CMIS? Anyone out there familiar with it? Anyway, the review starts off with the line, "This book unfolds like an origami swan, with intricacies at first hidden, then slowly revealed with a surprising intensity underneath." And it just gets better from there. I'd really like to find the person that wrote this and give them a great, big kiss.

And I think that I'm going to pull out the swan line any time I meet a creator whose book is better known or reviewed than mine. Basically, all of them.

"Oh, yeah, well my book unfolds like a freakin' origami swan, so suck it, Jeff Smith.*"

*Jeff Smith, if you happen to read this, please be aware it's a joke. Bone totally rocked.

The secret history of 100 Girls

I have hinted a few times about our (our being Todd, our publisher, our managers, and me) involvement with Hollywood. I have never more than hinted because if these things are up in the air there's a number of reasons not to talk about them. Some of those reason are legal. So I thought it was interesting to stumble across a brief article on Hollywood North Report dot com mentioning 100 Girls having been optioned by Sci Fi. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. 1) I never knew that any information about this deal leaked into the wild and 2) because the article is dated December 2008 and the Sci Fi's option on the book had lapsed by that time. Had been lapsed for several months if memory serves.

It makes me wonder why this site would report on a deal that was already history at the time of reporting. Hollywood North Report claims it got the original story from another site. This other site doesn't have any kind of search function, so I can't tell what exactly they reported. This little episode may remain a mystery, I guess.

I have always thought that I'd like to write a detailed history of 100 Girls in Hollywood, but only after the matter of its involement there is settled. And by "settled" I mean either 1) Someone actually purchases the writes to the book or 2) Todd and I throw up our hands and decide to give up on the process entirely.

I have no illusions about which of those eventual outcomes will come to fruition.

But for now, marvel at what could have been...

So many murderous girls...

I was tooling around on the book tracking/social networking site Good Reads (of which I am a member) tonight and, because I'm a glutton for punishment, I was reading the reviews of my little book, 100 Girls. Many of the reviews point out the fact that for a book aimed at young adults, it's amazingly violent.

This is interesting to me. My immediate response is, "it's not meant for young adults!" or, at least, it's not aimed at them specifically. Also, a lot of folks seemed to imply that the art's being so violent is somehow Todd's fault. Poor Todd Demong! I have to take the blame here and point out that Todd didn't draw anything that I didn't ask him to draw. Todd is actually a very nice man who, as far as I know, has few violent tendencies. He's Canadian!

When I sat down to write the book, I had no specific audience in mind. I was writing it for myself. So, in that case, I guess one could say I was writing it for slightly depressed thirty-something men who'd recently been laid off, but that's kind of a niche market. I took the story exactly where it wanted to go without worrying about who might be reading it in the future. I figured that if people didn't like it, for whatever reason, then they simply wouldn't read it. A not unreasonable assumption.

I remember the first time I had a little mental "uh-oh" about the book's content. I found out that some friends with an eight-year old girl were giving it to their daughter to read because it was comics, which the girl liked, and it featured a strong female protagonist. All good enough, but while she sat there reading the comic, all I could think of was Sylvia's tearing the arm off a wolf creature. And her implied killing of a man. And so on.

When the book was originally published by Arcana, it was released sans any kind of rating or age recommendation. It was only when the book was picked up by Simon and Schuster that that publisher placed it at its young adult imprint, Simon Pulse. When I learned what their target market was for the book, I gritted my teeth and wondered what they'd say about the violence.

And (I hope I'm not telling tales out of school here) they never mentioned the violence. The one thing they asked if we'd mind removing was a bit of (in my mind, very coy) sexiness between the adult characters Tabitha and Chase. This actually left Todd and I a bit flummoxed. Sylvia does many terrible things in the course of the book, both on-screen and off, and a shot of Tabitha in her underwear and Chase's bare chest is what they didn't like. Todd and I had our agent tell Simon and Schuster we'd rather not alter or drop the offending scene and nothing more was ever said about it.

Back to the violence.

I always assumed that if people questioned the violence, that they would assume I had an overall plan, or goal, in using it. And I do. I totally do! It's important in the story. Really. Of course, I'm not going to tell you what the purpose of the violence is right now, but rest assured it's not merely gratuitous. I say "not merely" because I am aware that it may very well be gratuitous. I'll expand on that purpose someday when either Todd and I finish the story we've set out to tell or when it becomes apparent that we'll never be able to finish it. For now I hope raders will trust me.

One last thing: the title of this post come from a review from a comics web site wherein the reviewer called me to task for the brutality in the book. We later had a one-on-one conversation where I believe I assuaged his concerns. Would that I could do that with everyone who is put off by poor Sylvia's behavior.

Writing update

Long story short: Good progress, then crushing setback.

Long story long: Using what I have come to think of as "the Doctorow method" I'd been making pretty good progress writing-wise. In a week-and-half or so, I'd written 17 pages of script. Considering that I generally got 45-minutes a day to write, I felt good about this. That's probably a page-and-a-half or two pages a day.

And then tragedy strikes.

I use a piece of freeware for my word processing for two reasons. 1) Because I'm cheap and 2) because I'd rather not give my money to Microsoft. I may need to rethink both of those reasons. The software has always been a little glitchy and slow, but on Friday evening the software closed out of nowhere as I was finishing up a three-page sequence. And, of course, as is my wont, I hadn't saved any of that work. As I was coming to grips with this (I swear these two things happened one after the other) I saw that I had received a new email. It was Todd Demong, my collaborator on 100 Girls who was just getting around to reading the script for chapter eight and two pages seemed to be missing for the script. I opened up the script I'd sent him and, sure enough, there was a gaping hole exactly two-pages big. Two pages I'd written and saved prior to send them off to Todd.

This really was a blow to me. To feel like I'd gone from 17 pages down to 12. And, even worse, having to recreate work I'd already done just left me deflated.

Deflated enough that I took most of the weekend off from writing. But I figure that I should jump back on that horse and recreate the pages I need and then finish the current script. I'm also in the market for good cheap word processing software if folks have a suggestions.

That is all.

Back in action?

This week I seem to have regained something that I set aside for a while. Anyone who reads this blog regularly--well, anyone who reads it regularly would know that it's been a while since it was updated on anything resembling a regular basis, and that was part of it. "It" being an unwillingness to take the time needed to maintain my writing.

I don't want this next bit to sound like I'm blaming my son for this lack of drive, because that's very far from the truth. But I did exchange the writing drive for a willingness to observe Oscar and all of the changes he's been going through for the last few months. I've been able to watch him go from a bundle of cuteness who seemed undifferentiated from other babies his age to a little person who is starting, in a very rudimentary way, his likes and dislikes, desires and preferences.

I'm figuring out, with his help, which games, toys, and songs delight him; and which he could do without. It seems like just a couple of months ago that his movement was limited to rolling over--and sometimes he got stuck on his belly and needed a helping hand to return to his back--and now he's crawling backward with pretty impressive speed and can crawl forward with a lot of effort using the arm-over-army Army crawl method.

I feel so lucky. I know that for one reason or another, most dads don't get to see this evolution in their kids. And my new-found devotion (or is that newly re-found?) to writing isn't going to take away from my watching it with Oscar. Where a lot of my free time went to reading or trolling the web, I've lately been using that same free time to actually working. To that end, I had a good week: I got three proposals into shape (enough that I felt comfortable sending them off to one of my managers to read and critique), I started notes on an idea that's been kicking around in my head for a couple of years, and I got a start on the next chapter of 100 Girls. For those keeping score, I wrote chapter eight a couple of months ago and sent it off to Todd; Today I started in on chapter nine.

All in all, not a bad bit of business. I really hope I can keep it up.

Auction action

Mr. Todd Demong and I gave several items to Girl-wonder.org to help them in their efforts to raise money. Todd contributed a page of art and a signed copy of the book, and I gave a signed set of all my books. If you'd like to look at these items or learn more about the auction, please just go here. Girl-wonder is a great organization and they could use your help.

The Creative Conference talk

The Creative Conference was a lot of fun despite a case of the jitters right before I went on. I was feeling sick so I got up there later than I'd have liked and only saw two other speakers. Both of these speakers had multimedia presentations, which I did, but then I decided that I'm a writer and anything I could show wouldn't be very exciting anyway. "Yeah, so there's another shot of me at my desk. You know, writing..."

The talk itself, I'm told, seemed to go well. I say, "I'm told" because I sort of blanked out after I started the talk and only came to after I said the last line. Honestly. I was mostly aware of the fact that my mouth was really dry, I had a cough drop stuck to the roof of my mouth and, despite having water that I kept picking up and setting down, I wasn't actually drinking. But a lot of people came up to me after the talk and told me that they liked what I had to say a lot, so I'm going with, "it went well."

For those of you who wanted to know what I talked about but couldn't be there, I'm going to paste in the essay I wrote and used as a guide through the talk. I know I went off script on a few occasions, dropped some portions,added others, but this is everything I meant to say. If anyone who attended the conference is reading this, maybe you can tell me how close the talk was to this essay:

Hi. My name is Adam Gallardo and I'm a comics writer from Salem, Oregon. Just to give you an idea of what I've done professionally and why I'm standing up here talking to you: I've written Star Wars: Infinities—Return of the Jedi for Dark Horse Comics; I've also created and written two creator-owned series: Gear School, also from Dark Horse Comics; and 100 Girls which just came out this Summer from Simon and Schuster's Young Adult line, Simon Pulse.

When I was asked to speak about my creative process, I had two reactions: the first was sheer terror because the last time I spoke in public was back when I was in speech in high school. The second feeling was a new wave of sheer terror, but for an entirely different reason: it was because I have never examined my creative process. I always just trust that it will work when I call on it. And I worried that examining it might cause it to stop working, like when you dissect a frog—you might figure out how it works, but it's not going to be in any shape to hop around. Thankfully that hasn't happened.

I'm going to address a question I get fairly often, as I'm sure does anyone who works in a creative field. At any signing or convention I attend, I get a few people asking me where I get my ideas. I think this question has an underlying supposition. That being: “If I know where you get your ideas, I can go there and get my own!” The answer to that question is probably frustrating since it's either very mundane or so esoteric as to be nearly unreproducable.

Not to keep you in suspense: Here's the short answer to where I get my ideas. They come to me in one of two ways. Through lots of hard work, or from a very nearly religious blast of inspiration. I suppose it's easiest to say that I approach ideas and creativity in general as a problem solving proposition. In just a minute, I'll give you examples to show you what I'm talking about.

But first, I think it'd be worth it to give you some personal history, set the stage a little bit. And, trust me, this will pay off later.

Unlike more than 90% of those currently working in comics, I didn't read comics as a kid. To me, comics were things you got when you went on a road trip with your family—distractions meant to shut us up for the ten hours it took to drive to my parents' hometown every Summer—or they were something I got on days I stayed home sick from school. I always enjoyed them, I don't want to give any impression otherwise, but apart from those two very specific circumstances, I never thought much about them, even though I can recall specific issues I'd read: Captain America and the Falcon, Uncanny X-Men, Thor, The Avengers. It was always a crap shoot, whatever my parents brought home with them. Also, I only read them singly. It never occurred to me that the stories in them continued in other issues of the same title, or even in other titles altogether. Continuity was a foreign concept to me and that may explain my disdain for it today.

The point here is that while I was aware of comics, they didn't really figure into my development as a story teller. By the time I started to read comics with a passion, I'd already fallen in love with sci-fi novels, with movies of all types, and with TV dramas. The memories I have from my formative years are all related to these media. This is another way of saying that they had their hooks in me long before I ever thought about writing comics, and even before I thought about reading them.

In fact, I never thought about writing them until I was in my early 30s and working at Dark Horse Comics for the second time. The first time had been a job to get me through my years at community college and I worked in production there. It would take my leaving, getting my degree, discovering that the real world of employment sucked and returning to the fold to figure out that I wanted to take a stab at comics writing. Up until that point, I wanted to be the new Raymond Carver, writing introspective, literary short stories in which nothing much happened. But the short stack of rejection slips I carried around with me for a time told me that the world liked the Raymond Carver it already had and didn't really want a new one. It was only after reading a lot of comics scripts that I had one of those "eureka" moments. In my case, the moment came when I was reading yet another comics script and I thought, "I can do this, too!" I really haven't looked back since then.

My first published comics work was for Dark Horse Comics and it came out in 2003. Star Wars: Infinities—Return of the Jedi is part of their Infinities series which can best be described in geek-speak as similar to the old Marvel What If...? series, but set in the Star Wars universe. What if you changed one aspect of the original Star Wars story lines? How would that one change affect the rest of the story? Dark Horse had already done series based on A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and there was a considerable lag following the second series.

Now, at the time I was working in the Internet department at Dark Horse and one of my responsibilities was to read all of the incoming email from fans and readers and either answer it myself or else pass it along to someone who could answer it. For a while, the question we got most often was to ask when Return of the Jedi would be given the Infinities treatment. For the most part I just forwarded those email to Randy Stradley who was the Star Wars editor at the time. After a while, however, I started to become curious myself about where the next series was. So I marched myself downstairs and I asked our managing editor, Davey Estrada, "People keep asking about Return of the Jedi, Infinities, what should I tell them?" And he told me to tell them that as soon as Dark Horse received a story idea they liked, they'd get it into production. I asked a few more questions and discovered that Dark Horse had solicited stories from several professionals and the editors hadn't liked any of them ( I never found out how many or from whom—knowing that at the time would, I'm sure, have scared me so much that my next move would have been unthinkable).

I'd been itching to write comics for a little while, and had even started to put together the concept that would eventually become 100 Girls, but I hadn't yet pitched anything of any kind to an editor. But after that talk with Davey, I went home that night and I sat on the couch and thought. And for the benefit of the uninitiated, that's part of the hard work. Sitting and thinking. Staring off. Reading a magazine in a listless manner. All of these are weapons in the writer's arsenal. It might look like goldbricking, but it is work. Anyway, I sat there and I played the movie back and forth in my mind. I'd seen it easily half-a-dozen times so that part was easy. And as I watched it play on the screen in my mind I actively worked on the problem of what moment exactly would be the best to depart from the original. And I should point out that since I didn't know what any other writer had turned in, I had no way of knowing if I'd strike on the same idea as someone else. Some time later, I hit on what I thought was the perfect moment, and then I fleshed out how that one alteration would change the rest of the story.

For the sake of this talk, I'll give away what I came up with, though I'm usually loathe to reveal it to anyone who hasn't read the comics. The scene happens early in the story, Leia is disguised as a bounty hunter and confronting Jabba the Hutt. C-3PO translates. In the film, The negotiation ends amicably, if somewhat tense, but in my version, I had C-3PO become incapacitated, With no one to translate, Leia must reveal herself and the scene devolves into chaos which results in Boba Fett escaping with the still-frozen Han, and the deaths of both Jabba and C-3PO. I thought that was a pretty neat little turn.

The next day I walked into Randy's office and asked him if he still had no story for the next Infinities. He said they didn't and I asked if I could pitch him a story. He regarded me for a minute—and I should mention here that Randy is a big, imposing guy, and he has this way of fixing you in his gaze that is very nearly reptilian. I was already nervous, but being appraised by those half-lidded eyes made me shake. He told me to fire away. I did and again he regarded me—that same reptilian stare— then he told me to go home and write up the pitch as a one-page document and bring it back the next day. Which I did, of course. Giddily. I think I was actually giddy. Now, I'd like to tell you that the moment I came back to his office and handed that document to Randy, he told me he loved it, then he gave me the assignment and I was heaped with comics glory. But actually, months passed after I turned in the pitch. Months in which I heard no mention of the pitch. In fact, so much time passed that I figured Randy had decided not to give me the job and telling me that fact had slipped his mind. But one day, as I walked past his office on the way somewhere else, he yelled out at me, "Gallardo! When are you going to write that script?" And that was how I found out I'd been given my first professional writing assignment.

The point of that little story was to show how I approached the problem of coming up with an idea. I had a problem, what's the best possible moment to have the original Return of the Jedi story go off the rails, and what would happen after it did? And I worked hard at finding a solution. Of course, after I had that initial idea, Lucafilm got their hands on the story and had their continuity people go over it, which meant that I had to rewrite the original pitch several times before they were happy with it. A lot of people assume that I must have hated working with the continuity people at Lucasfilm, but to be honest, I never had any problem with them. I recognized that they had a very valuable property to protect from the likes of me. I mean, honestly, I was an untested, first-time comics writer who wanted to get my hands on one of the most recognizable properties in the world. If our roles were reversed, I'd be a little nervous, too. I didn't resent any of the changes for which they asked as an imposition, I just saw them as new problems to solve. I'd say, "Okay, if Lucas doesn't want me to have Leia fighting Vader in issue 4, what else can I do that makes sense with the story I'm telling and is a satisfying plot point?" In this way, I could move from beat to beat until I had a completed story.

This is, admittedly, a pretty unglamorous means of getting ideas. It means an awful lot of sitting in front of your notebook or your computer and just pounding away at a given problem, but that's how it's done. I should also point out that one needn't wait for a problem to drop in their lap like I did to get to work. You can create your own. Maybe there's an artist you want to work with and you know they like a particular type of story. Maybe you want to find a way to talk about a given political or social situation. Maybe you want to explore an episode from your past, but you want to find a way to fictionalize it to make it a bit more bearable for yourself and a bit more palatable for an audience. Or maybe you just notice that the market is lacking a certain kind of story that you'd like to see more of.

My comic, 100 Girls, was a solution to that last kind of problem. I'd noticed a dearth of comics that featured strong central female leads and I set about creating one that I wanted to read. Honestly, that's my favorite kind of problem to solve: what do I want to read that isn't currently out there? Great, why don't I go and write that?

Okay, one more example, and then I'm going to switch gears a little bit.

A couple of years after I stopped working at Dark Horse Comics, I was visiting the offices and stopped in to talk to an editor buddy of mine, Dave Land. I think I was giving Dave a current issue of 100 Girls because Todd Demong, my collaborator on the book, and I had put a caricature of him in the issue. Anyway, Dave and I were talking for a while before he started telling me that he wanted to start up an informal line of sci-fi comics in the same way that editor Scott Allie had done with an informal line of horror comics. I told him that sounded like a good idea, which was the truth. Sci-fi has always been my favorite genre in comics. He then asked me if I had any ideas I would be interested in submitting for a comic. I told him I might have a few.

The truth is that I have notebooks full of ideas, most of them in the sci-fi genre. Keeping some kind of notebook counts as part of the hard work you need to do to be creative. I try and capture every idea that flits into my mind. It doesn't matter if I like the idea, or if I can immediately see the potential of an idea. None of that matters. Just get it down. No matter how dumb it may seem at the moment. Armed with your notebook, you can respond to an editor asking you if you have any ideas with an unequivocal "yes." And the notebook also represents a less specific, very general type of problem solving: it's solving the problem of what kinds of ideas you want to work on. The good ideas, the ideas on which you want to spend a lot of time developing into a full story will eventually make it out of the notebook while the ideas that aren't as good will just sit there, forever trapped between it's pages. I don't know of a single creative person—and I'm lucky to know quite a few creative people—who doesn't keep some version of a notebook. What the diary is to the junior high girl, the notebook is to the creative personality.

Anyway, I went through some notebooks and this very short entry jumped out at me. It read: Gear School—Harry Potter meets Mobile Suit Gundum! Since writing it down in the notebook, I'd forgotten about it (that's one advantage of the notebook—once you write down an idea, you can forget about it and free up some mental space for other things), but that line intrigued me. I eventually changed that tag line to Degrassi High meets Mobile Suit Gundum and that one change seemed to allow for the emotional depth and the interpersonal relationships I wanted to explore. I feel compelled to say that normally I don't generate ideas in so crass a manner—pop culture reference A meets pop culture reference B—but in this instance it did help me get in touch with the emotional flow of the piece. Basically, it would be a melodrama set in a high school where kids were taught to fly giant fighting robots. And, frankly, whatever helps me work my way into a story is what I'm going to do. Crassness be damned!

My notebook also yielded four or five other ideas. Four or five out of a lot. There's always a moment of anxiety as you try and figure out what an editor would like. It's like games theory. Just because I like something doesn't necessarily mean the editor would like it. And even if they might like it, they may not like the way you write it, the exact presentation you give it. But this is just more problem solving. What do I know about the editor? What do I know of the other books he's edited, and how can I tailor my ideas to fit in with his temperament as I perceive it. Once you take all of these factors into consideration, all you can do is write up the piece and hope the editor likes it. And that they had a good night's sleep the night before they read your proposal. That helps, too.

Of the five or six ideas I sent to Dave, Gear School was the one he liked best and he asked me to develop it into a full fledged pitch. The initial story I pitched to Dave was more of a character piece and he asked me to ramp up the action. I did so, but I lost a lot of the character development that had appealed to me in the first place—it sot of became a two act story with the second half being a big fight with a scary alien. Thankfully, I was able to use that original story line in the second volume of Gear School that I just finished writing. That's another thing I've learned: never throw anything away. Just because I didn't use the story for the first volume, I knew I'd use it sooner or later.

The second volume of Gear School differed from the first in a significant way: I had met the artists who are drawing the book and I was able to write it with their personalities in mind. In this day and age, it's possible to work with an artist or an artist team without having ever spoken to them. Oh, we emailed back and forth, but that's different than meeting someone face to face. In the case of Nuria and Sergio, the artists on Gear School, meeting them took some doing. They both work and live in Barcelona, Spain. My wife and I traveled to France last year and, having an American's understanding of geography, I said, "why don't we just pop down to Barcelona for a couple of days to meet the artists?" The arduous train trip was worth it, however. They turned out to be great people and it really informed what I did with the second volume of the comic.

Something very similar, and maybe even more profound, happened when I met and became friends with Todd Demong, my collaborator on 100 Girls. The back and forth I have now with Todd has led to us being compared with an old married couple more than once. It's a comparison I find I'm unable to refute.

Okay. Now is the time when I switch gears.

So, I talked a little bit about hard work, which you'll recall is one of the ways I generate ideas. I said that the other way I get ideas is through flashes of inspiration. These are those instances when an idea just pops into my head, seemingly from no where, maybe from some higher power. I can never predict when these flashes of inspiration will come. I can be working on a grocery list, driving across the country and staring at the horizon off in the distance, taking a shower. I seem to get a fair number of ideas in the shower, actually, as I stand there, washing, and singing off-key. I certainly can't force a flash of inspiration, I just have to capture it when it comes.

So if that's true, what's the use of talking about this? If inspiration is so capricious that you can't predict when it will happen, why even mention it? Because, while you can't predict when inspiration will hit, you can cultivate it. How? Easy—read everything, watch everything and listen to everything you can. And for the sake of brevity, I'm going to say "read" a lot, by which I mean "consume media." Consuming media is how you feed your creative machine. And when I say everything, I mean everything. I try to be as widely read as possible. I don't limit myself to just sci-fi. I read biography, history, literary fiction, mystery. And I make sure that I read outside of my area of concentration as much as you can; that being comics. You never know when something you read will morph into an idea you can exploit. I have to admit that I read very few comics these days. I follow a few writers I like, I check out comics that get a lot of buzz, I read comics that are given to me by zealous friends, but for the most part, I'm off reading prose of one variety or another. And don't even get me started on comic-book movies.

I've been asked a few times by aspiring comics writers what one book I would recommend they read as a text. I always have the same answer: read E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. The look I get is also always the same. They are dumbfounded. Don't I think they should read McCloud's Understanding Comics? Eisner's Sequential Art? Claremont's and Byrne's Dark Phoenix Saga? My reasoning is that if you're into comics, you're going to read those books whether I tell you to or not. Reading Forster, though, is something they wouldn't normally read and something they should. In fact, every storyteller, no matter their medium, should read it for it's insights into how to tell a story. But I digress.

As creators of fiction, we have no primary documents. By that I mean, if I was a scientist and wondered why, for example, the planet Venus sometimes appears to travel backward as it moves across the sky, well I could do a little research. I could watch any number of documentaries, read astronomy texts. I could even go back to the tables of planetary motion kept by Tycho Brahe to discover the mystery behind this seemingly impossible feat. But as a fiction writer, presented with a problem, there are no documents to which I can go for answers. Instead, every document becomes a possible source of inspiration, and so you must read everything you can. Once you read something, it goes into the hopper inside your head and it swirls around with everything else you've read and it ferments. And if you're very lucky, then one day it'll spill out when you really need it and it'll be something you can use. And, more than likely, hopefully, when it comes out of the hopper, it'll be unrecognizable from when it went in.

This is why I mentioned my own history of comics readership earlier. By the time I came to comics, my storytelling sensibilities were already set by other media. I am able to apply lessons learned from writers of novels, films, plays, and others, to my writing for comics. I think we've all had the experience of watching a film and thinking that the people who made the film have never done anything but watch and study other movies. Because of a lack of experience on the filmmaker's part, their film comes across as a pastiche at best, and, at worst, an out and out rip off of some other film. Please believe me when I tell you that I have experienced this phenomenon more than once as I've read comics.

I think that even the experiences I described previously—those of meeting the artists I worked with—fit into this structure. You could expand the dictate "read everything" into "experience everything." Be open to new experiences and adventures and be willing to let those experiences seep into your unconscious and be repurposed in your art. It's through this process that art takes over your life, that you become, finally, an artist.

I think the worst criticism I or any artist can have leveled at them is that they're unoriginal. Especially when it's so easy to avoid.

So, there you go. The answer to the hypothetical aspirant's question from the beginning of this talk. That's how I create, that's where I get my ideas from. I read everything I can. I put in a lot of hours in front of my notebook. And, every one in a while, I get a flash of inspiration.

Beyond that, I'm just waiting for the next problem to solve.

Thank you.

The Onion AV Club likes 100 Girls

The Onion AV Club, folks who generally have very good opinions about all types of pop culture, have given a very positive review to my and Todd Demong's little tome, 100 Girls. Read the review here.

And please ignore what they have to say about my other book....

I know you can't get enough of me

Here is another interview featuring the smartest man in comics! Um... that'd be me. This one was conducted by the reviewer from Mondo Magazine. Enjoy.

What have I been up to? OK, you asked for it...

I've not had much of a presence here of late. One of the by-products of Oscar's appearance in the world, I suppose. Any writing time I have goes toward actual projects and not to maintaining this journal. Though I am still twittering with some regularity. (A digression: I like twitter. Micro blogging; nearly context-free journaling to the tune of 140 characters at a pop. It's easy to dip into and out of the site as my attention wavers from whatever project I happen to be writing at the moment. End of digression.)

Speaking of projects. Here's my attempt to work some stuff out. You can either come along for the ride, or not, as you see fit.

I seem to be seeking out and creating projects for myself at an alarming (to me) rate. I just finished writing the second volume of Gear School (and actually still owe Dave Land a re-write of one scene); I've delivered to Todd Demong one chapter of the next volume of 100 Girls and need to write six more; There's the proposal for a new comic, Dalton, which I've sent off, also to Todd, for him to drew sample pages--if that book finds a publisher, that'll be some more writing on my plate; and, finally, there's the Portland Creative Conference talk I give in about two weeks which I have not yet begun to write.

One would think that was enough to keep one busy, wouldn't one; especially considering the fact that one is now also primary caregiver for a nearly four-month old. But, no, apparently it is not enough.

Ever since I graduated from The Evergreen State College ten years ago, I have thought off and on about attending an MFA in writing program. Actually, for a long time I held out hope that Evergreen would start such a program with my instructor, Bill Ransom, at the helm. If this ever happened, I'd quite whatever I was doing and move back to Olympia in a heartbeat. But, alas, it looks like that will never happen. My enthusiasm for an MFA has waned as I came to the realization that, despite my best efforts, I seem to be a genre writer. I love mystery, SF, and fantasy and would love to write them as well. These are genres that are , from what I gather, frowned upon in most MFA programs. These programs would prefer that students concentrate in more “realistic” kinds of writing. Fair enough, just not for me. It was actually something of a relief to to come to this conclusion a few years ago: I could strike that from my list of things to do with my life.

But (my old writing instructor, Steve Schoen, would call that the “golden But”) things have changes. A month or so ago, I found an interview with Kelly Link. Link is a SF writer who I admire a great deal. She writes fable-like stories grounded in the real world that all manage to be original and startling. She's writing just the types of stories I'd like to be writing. In the interview, she mentioned that she taught at a low-residency MFA program in Maine. And, here's the best part, the Maine MFA offered a concentration in popular fiction. For “popular” read “genre.” Damn. I looked into the program and it looks like exactly what I want to be doing. I am now hip deep in researching other MFA programs that may offer, or at least tolerate, genre writers because, hey, you want to improve your chances of being accepted and apply to a few different programs, am I right?

Finally: I have an insane idea for an on-line comics anthology. Despite the fact that a few folks have told me that it will make no money and be a time sink for the next couple of years at least, I just keep going ahead and working out exactly how I could do it. I really feel that I must be stopped.

Several things seem to have brought this all into focus for me: having and caring for Oscar, my high school reunion (!) and being asked to speak at the Creative Conference. Actually, I've made the joke several times that I feel like I'm going through a midlife crisis and instead of buying a sports car or cheating on my wife, I keep taking on and dreaming up projects to work on. Only... well, every time I make the joke, it feels a lot less like a joke. At exactly the time that I should be slowing down and concentrating on my life, both professional and personal, I crave taking on more and more to do. Is it a distraction I'm seeking? Is it that I feel a need to define myself in some new way? Honestly, I have no clue. But I do realize that I need to come to terms with what's going on and curb, or at least curtail, it. I can imagine a scenario where I try and do everything on my list and end up accomplishing none of it, thereby destroying even those projects that are concrete. Ugh.

I wish I had a way to wrap up this post in a way that would make everything clear, that would in some way resolve it, but I think that as I'm in the middle of figuring it all out, it will have to end in a fuzzy, messy way.

Oh, wait: I could end by also mentioning that I wrote to an editor friend of mine asking to sub,it an idea to him, and that there's always the novel I've been working on for a good two years. Yes, things are looking up!

Stay tuned for updates.

Just like that

Not but ten minutes ago I finished an interview with Karen Healey, the woman who reviewed 100 Girls so nicely a day or two ago, and said interview is already up! Truly this is an age of marvels. I encourage you all to go and read it, then come back here and tell me how damned smart I sound.

Here's another one

Another review of 100 Girls. This one is not as glowing as some I've pointed to recently, but it's interesting. It's on a site called Mondo Magazine of which I was previously unaware, but which might bear exploration. The review's author takes issue with both the pacing of and the violence in the comic. I wonder if he'd believe that I take issue with both of those things, too.

Anyway, please, go and read the excellently titled "So Many Murderous Girls."

Another nice review

I awoke this morning to an email from my editor at Simon and Schuster pointing me to a very nice, very perceptive review on girl-wonder.org. Girl-Wonder is a site that I follow which looks at comics through a -- not a feminist lens necessarily, but certainly through a female-positive one. The tag line on the site is, "Because capes aren't just for boys." Given the characters I write, I'd hoped Girl-Wonder would notice my little comic and think well of it. Mission accomplished!

The review is written by Karen Healey who clues into one of the major themes I want to explore with 100 Girls. She may be the first person, is certainly the first reviewer, to do so. Read the review to see what I'm talking about.

I would play me in the movie

Out of the blue Wednesday night I received an email from someone I don't know. They identified themselves as a producer and asked after the rights to 100 Girls. I followed the link they provided to their bio on IMDb and was impressed with what I saw there. Further, I was impressed with how much effort they put into finding my email address so that they could contact me.

I was struck dumb and immediately referred them to my managers in LA.

The whole episode made me start thinking that I should probably record the tortured history of 100 Girls in Hollywood. I won't do it tonight, mostly because I don't feel like crying, but soon, I think. I'm sure that most people I know have no idea how many close calls there have been with the book and either movies or TV. I almost always play that stuff close to the vest, because I learned early on that the odds are against you and I'd rather not have to tell people, "You know that thing I told you about? Yeah, you can forget that." Over and over. I remain, at the moment, cautiously optimistic.

One quick anecdote as an illustration: Some months ago I had a phone interview with two agents who wanted to rep 100 Girls in a specific market. I took the phone call alone because Todd, my co-creator on the book, has reached the point where he won't even talk to Hollywood types anymore. He just tells me to talk to them and report back to him. If I like them, he's willing to work with them. Anyway, I was on the phone with these folks and one of them asked me if I was excited about this latest opportunity. I thought for a moment, and then I answered truthfully. "If this had happened even two years ago, I'd have been excited," I said, "but we've had so many opportunities almost happen, that I try not to get excited. If this all works out, then I guarantee I'll be excited." My publisher at Arcana, Sean, told me later that one of the agents told him I had a "bad attitude." I just laughed.

No, really, I'm blushing

I just read the most flattering review of 100 Girls. Ever. If I didn't know better, I'd think I had written it. Though I don't think I could be that unrelentingly positive...

Read for yourself and see if I'm wrong.