The Johnny Cash Project + numbers

As I near the end of the draft of the novel, I feel like I'm developing tunnel vision. All I can think about is the book. What happens next, and after that? Until I get to the end. Which will be soon. All I really have time for are these bits of Internet flotsam that seem to constitute how I take in the world these days. The easiest of these to post, and those that seem most meaningful to me right now, are the music videos I've been posting. I feel like I couldn't write without music and when I discover that videos exist for these songs that are meaningful in their own right, well, I just have to share them.

A case in point: The Johnny Cash Project. Director Chris Milk (who directed the beautiful video experience for Arcade Fire's "We Used to Wait") has created a site where fans of the late Johnny Cash may contribute to a video of his song "Ain't No Grave." The result is beautiful and moving. I don't want to say too much about it, I'll leave it to you to explore the site, or not. If you click on the link, you won't be disappointed. I promise.

And here are today's numbers.

I was filled with a desire to reach 100,000 words on the novel today. That number, which is nice and round and darts around my brain in a pleasing way, has been floating just out of reach for the last few days and I was determined to put it behind me. Long story short, I did it. Yea, me. Oh, and since this is the beginning of a new month, I'm resetting the numbers. I have a feeling that the novel is the only thing I'll be working on until I reach the end. But I could very well be wrong about that.

Daily word count: 1,970 (which is also the year I was born--more resonance.)

Monthly word count: 1,970

Novel word count: 100,101

Jess Nevins: Hero to the Nation!

Okay, maybe I'm overstating it a bit, but I like his stuff a lot.

Nevins first came to my attention as the man who obsessively annotated Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comics series, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The comic is crammed with more visual references and in-jokes than the casual reader could be expected to know. Nevins took it upon himself to identify them all. This is a feat I find both amazing and scary.

Nevins is, by profession, a research librarian and his affection for data is apparent in everything he does. In 2005 he wrote the exhaustive 1,200-page Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana wherein Nevins maps out the roots of modern Fantasy and science fiction. I still kick myself for not buying the book when I had a chance as it can now only be found used at usurious prices.

His latest project is a series of columns for the science fiction website, i09.com. He plans to trace the history of science fiction publishing starting at the turn of the last century with the rise of the pulps. For anyone interested in fantasy or science fiction, it makes for fascinating reading.

Nevins maintains a personal blog, a tumblr blog and his twitter feed (where, for example, he once expounded on trends in Mexican pulp magazines) is one of the things that makes me feel that service is worthwhile.

And now for today's numbers.

I thought I'd be taking the day off from my novel, but that wasn't to be. I seem to be unable to stop writing the freaking thing. It's a bit scary. To me, anyway. That being said, here are the numbers.

Daily word count: 1,165 (all on the novel -- no words for you, short story!)

Monthly word count: 17,498

Novel word count: 86,758

For your edification

I found two very cool things on Warren Ellis's blog today. If you are at all interested in media, whether it be print, television, film or comics (which, yes, I know are printed), then you should be checking in on this blog. Ellis has an interesting take on things and the items he chooses to post are always thought-provoking. Cases in point:

Here is part one of an essay on the occult written by comics writer Alan Moore. Mr Moore, in addition to being one of the finest writers to have ever worked in comics, is a practicing magician. His insights into the subject are required reading for anyone with an interest in magic.

And here is a thread from Ellis's message board, White Chapel. I'd suggest you read the thing in it's entirety, but for those in a hurry, here's a summary: comics artist Steve Lieber found out that the entire run of one of his miniseries had been scanned and put up on 4chan's comics channel. Rather than demand that it be taken down, Lieber went on 4chan and talked with interacted with them, answered their questions and generally played nicer than I think I would have. The upshot? A big surge in sales of his books through his Etsy page. This is very interesting to me because of my new interest in publishing to the web.

Gear School + FaceBook

The folks at Bamf! have created a presence for the Gear School short film on FaceBook. It's in Spanish, but for those of you who went to public school and can only read one language (like me!) there is some non-language-specific content up there including a peek behind the scenes at the making of the film and some production photos. It's all pretty neat. If you're on the FaceBook, which I hear is popular with the kids, then you should "like" it.

That is all.

Fameish

The Moth Radio Hour, which features people telling true stories in front of an audience without any notes, has a podcast component. I ran across this story by Steve Burns. Burns used to be the host of Blue's Clues. For reasons I don't want to go into right now (I was a sad loser...) I used to watch this show a lot despite the fact that I was not eight-years-old at the time that it aired. Anyway, here Burns tells a story about parlaying his small bit of fame into dating a Playboy model/stripper. It's funny and poignant, like a lot of the best stories featured on the Moth.

Here's a link to where you can listen to the story.

ZWATCH

I think this site is a little piece of brilliance.

And it gives me ideas.

Over the Edge

I remember watching Over the Edge when I was a kid. Maybe ten or so. There are a handful of movies I saw around that time that I feel, and felt at the time, were transformative. That altered me. The Exorcist, Tommy, Altered States, The Godfather, and, of course, Over the Edge. I was too young to be watching any of these people, truth be told, and there's no way I'll let Oscar watch them when he's that age, but discipline was lax at the Gallardo household, I guess.

The movie is a low budget number about rebellious youth, or youth gone wild, or what happens when adults abdicate there roles as authority figures. One or all of those. I just remember that the images of kids rising up against the adults left an indelible mark on me. The fact that the adults deserved it was even more revelatory.

One thing about the movie, however: I've never talked to anyone else who's seen it. Even the biggest film buffs I know seems to be unaware of it. For a while I thought I'd made it up, imagined it completely. So imagine my delight when I found a story on the indispensable BoingBoing.net linking to an oral history of the films production. The article itself resides at Viceland.com. It's fairly lengthy and I haven't made it through the entire piece yet, but what I've read leaves me wanting more.

It also leaves me wanting to watch the movie again. What are the odds it's available on DVD?

Here's the trailer for your viewing enjoyment:

Brief bits of business

Oh, bullet points, how I've missed you!

• A reminder that the eight-page Dalton short story by Todd Demong and myself is still up at Myspace/DHP. If you haven't already, please read it and let me know what you think of it. Thanks.

• Núria, my partner in crime on Gear School has posted some new photos over on the blog dedicated to that book. And let me say once again that Spain is overflowing with beautiful people.

• This seems like a good time to remind folks that I am accessible in other places on the Internet. I can be found on myspace, though I am never on there anymore; facebook (where, besides a personal profile, I also have a group page and a page devoted to this blog); twitter; flickr; and photos I take with my phone can be seen on twitpic. So many ways to enjoy the spectacle that is me.

And after that bit of egotism, I must go shower.

Goodnight, Internet

As you can imagine, we are watching more Sesame Street around our household than we did previously. SOme of it I can take or leave, but some of the older clips featuring musicians really knock me out. Here's one of my current favorites featuring Johnny Cash and, of course, Oscar the Grouch:

Dalton

This is just to say that Todd Demong, my collaborator on 100 Girls (do I have to say that every time I mention his name?) and I have sold a short story to an unwitting publisher!

Dalton is a brand new character from us and should go live in the August issue of Myspace/Dark Horse Presents. Provided we hit all out deadlines. Which we totally will, no problem. I think.

Dalton is something Todd has had in mind to do for a number of years, so we're glad to see it get a shot at some kind of life. In fact, it was an eight-page Dalton short story Todd submitted as a sample that convinced me I wanted to work with him. I remember at the time thinking that if everything worked out between us that I'd like to ask Todd if I could work on the character with him. It's nice when things work out, even if we did have to wait a few years for it to happen.

Now we need to figure out what other new projects we'd like to work on.

More thoughts on the flagpole

First, a big "hello" to everyone who's coming here from WarrenEllis.com. I hope you stay a while.

I received some questions and comments about my post regarding my web comics idea. These comments have led to more thinking on my part regarding the project and I thought that rather than stick my responses into the comments section I'd turn it into a new entry. Am I over-explaining?

Michael, age five, brought up one's inability to control all aspects of production, i.e., those unreliable artists. He says, "But I think the bottleneck comes when you have to talk to an artist to commit to a year or more before they see proceeds, let alone color, letters, logo, etc." Good comment, Michael! I should have addressed this in yesterday's post. Ideally I would work with artists who could color and letter their pages (we are talking about eight pages a month which doesn't seem unreasonable to me), and who would agree up front to stay on board through the life of a title. Even if they could only color, I could conceivably letter the pages as I've been doing with 100 Girls. And I hope that the artist would remain motivated to stay on schedule because they would be co-owners of whatever title they helped produce. Any theoretical profits would be split 50/50 if/when the title started to generate same. This would go for any profits--printed matter, merchandise, and, I know this is a long-shot, media rights. Given the enfranchisement I hope artists would understand that it would be in their best interests to stay on schedule. Does that seem workable? We could also build a backlog of material, maybe a couple of week's worth, before we went live with a story.

Finding agreement, in principle at least, Thomas says, "Cartoons and images are created to sell merchandise (shirts, etc.) that relate to the post via passive sales avenues, i.e., xkcd.com and all the sites you mentioned." Thanks for the vote of confidence, Thomas. I'm considering bringing you on board as CFO.

Finally, Friend of the Blog, Lani brings up a whole crop of good questions. To whit:

"Do you have enough time to commit? What will happen if/when other gigs come up?"

I think I do have the time. For the web comic, I figure I'd have to write eight-pages of material a week (once I get four projects to the point that all I have to do is write them, of course--there would be a fair amount of work getting to that point). Eight pages is something I can do in a couple of days. That would leave at least three days a week to work on other comics projects, and whatever other writing projects might come up.

"There will be a lot of work done before you get any financial return and the financial return may be minimal. Will that feel okay in the long run?"

It would sadden you to know how little money I have made writing comics so far. I am used to putting in a lot of work and having very little return to show for it. I am not in this to get rich quick, I promise. I think it might be difficult selling that truth to any artists I might try and convince to work with me. One of the reasons I want to do this is to get more and varied comics projects in front of people. I hope it would eventually make some money, and, to be truthful, I might need to abandon the project if it became clear that it would never turn a profit, but I am willing to take the long view on this.

"You already have a bit of a fan base to spread word of this around, right?"

Calling what I have a fan base is being generous, I think, but yes, there are folks who read my comics and let me know they enjoy them. And I can reach out to them, I'm sure. I also maintain a presence on several online communities and message boards and would get the word out that way as well. Eventually, if I feel like this is something worth pursuing, I will need to come up with a workable business plan and promotion will need to be a part of that plan.

Okay, there's my new thinking on this. Now, what do you think?

Let's run this up the flag pole...

I've been thinking a lot about new comics projects lately, and ways to circumnavigate the sometimes torturous approval process of the comics publishing companies. I don't fault this process--having been a submissions editor at Dark Horse Comics for about a year, I understood that my role was to act as gate-keeper. And even though I now have (a precious few) contacts, editors to whom I can go directly with new material, the approval process is still cumbersome. I believe I've mentioned that once I turned in the pitch for Gear School, it was more than a year before I was told it was approved and I could go ahead and start writing it.

Now when I sit down to start making notes on a project, I think about that theoretical year-long wait and I become discouraged. For the past few months I've been thinking of a way to produce comics and to get them in front of people in a more timely manner. The answer, maybe: web comics.

Being as I'm not artistic, in fact I have a medically diagnosed case of lack of drawing skills, I'd need to con convince some artists to join me in this endeavor.

I've been thinking that I'd work with four artists on four different stories to minimize the impact on any one artist's schedule. Eight page stories would update on Fridays, with a different story updating each week. Story A updates week 1, story B on week 2, etcetera. Some months are five weeks long and we could build in skip weeks where no stories are updated--this would give everyone, especially me, the occasional week off. Or a skip week could feature a self-contained story drawn by a guest artist. Following this schedule, we (the artists and I) would produce 32 pages, or a floppy comic's, worth of comics every month. And each story would produce a collection's worth of material every year.

One would hope that these stories would be popular enough to warrant collecting, whether it be on a POD site like Lulu.com or to shop them around to traditional publishers. One would further hope that we could merchandise these comics as well--you know, t-shirts and the like.

The inspiration for this came from a few different places. A few years ago, when I worked at Dark Horse Comics, I created and administered something called Strip Search which was a weekly web comic that featured up-and-coming artists. There's Warren Eliis's and Paul Duffield's FreakAngels which updates six pages of new comics free every week and which has had one book's worth of material collected and printed so far. Finally, a whole host of web comics have attracted a wide following and seem to make a profit selling merchandise--Diesel Sweeties, Overcompensating and Penny Arcade come to mind. My reasoning is, of course, "if they can do it, so can I." This may be flawed logic, but that's the kind I like best.

The final reason for this little venture would be to work on a variety of projects, some of which might not be as commercially viable as the mainstream publishers would like, but that might find a niche audience on the Internet.

And it would always keep me working, too, which is a good thing.

Obviously, these are initial thoughts and I'll need to do a lot more thinking before, and if, I move forward with this. But I would appreciate any thoughts anyone reading this might have.

Internet, I await your judgment.

The Price is (Exactly) Right.

A month of silence and then, BAM, two posts in one night. And this one, God help me, is about The Price is Right. There was a time in my life when I watch this show compulsively. For a few years there in the late '90s I watched it every day. If there was a TV nearby, I was watching folks come on down. So you'll understand why this video piqued my interest. These are the final moments of the Showcase Showdown. (I'm going to assume you've never watched the show and write a quick rundown of this segment.) Two contestants are each shown a bunch of fabulous prizes, they each guess what they think their showcase is worth. Normally people are within, say, a thousand dollars of the actual price. If they guess within $100 dollars of the price (without going over) they win both showcases. This happens fairly rarely. What the man in the video does is something that no one else in the history of the show has ever done: he guesses the price of his showcase exactly.



Somewhere, Bob Barker is seething that it was Drew Carey and not him that hosted this episode.

Mr. Ellis does the thinking for you...

One of the many reasons I like Warren Ellis, or at least why I like his writing and his website, is how much he thinks. And he is willing to share with his audience the process of his thinking. In the last two days alone, he has written pieces I like about working for Marvel Comics, Harlan Ellison and the future of the Internet.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go look up Tumblr.

(That photo, by the way, stolen from the flickr page of Gunnar Bangsmoen.)

MUTO

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

This video has been making the rounds on the internet and I'm placing it here mostly so I can find it when I want to. However, if you haven't seen it yet, you should. It's pretty haunting and beautiful in it's way. Muto by the artist Blu.

I really need to learn Japanese

I love the randomness of the the Internet. Tonight, while trolling around, I found this link, which takes you to a preview of a Japanese kid's animated show called, I believe, N.Y. Salad. It looks gorgeous. Please do yourself a favor and check it out.

I think I'm going to watch it again...

That's surprising

Saw this little number on Eddie Campbell's blog and had to see what reading level my own checked out at. Campbell's is "high school" and mine is "genius"? Something doesn't seem right here....

I'm going to Hell for liking this, aren't I?

The Internets can be both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes both all wrapped up into one.

My new favorite thing is a set of photos posted on flickr called stripper_polaroids. Before anyone gets up in arms, please be aware that flickr had provisions about decency so none of these photos is too racy. The set's owner gives this bit of explanation:

"This photo came from a collection of over 400 Polaroid photos of strippers trying out for dancing jobs at a So. Cal club. They were taken from the late 1960's thru the early 1970's. I bought the entire collection for $10."

Many of the photos are hi-larious, as one would imagine, but some really struck a chord with me. Perhaps it's my willingness to read too much into people's facial expressions and body language, but some of the photos in this set filled me with a real sense of pathos. Regardless, the photos should prove interesting and I hope the set's owner posts more.