out of a variety of nowheres

That's where the writing gets done, largely.  The writing and the thinking.

Your Warren Ellises of the world will talk up their gear and their precious rituals for genius and the albums they were given as gifts and the live shows they saw and the meals they ate and the booze they saturated them with and the gardening they struggle over.  They will blog.  They have blogged.  They are blog.

Yet I am blog, and you can too.  Because you do not need the frills & the fripperies of a content hound to triangulate the origins of inspiration.  You can pick up those signals... anywhere, everywhere, and in my case, most readily, in a wide variety of nowheres.

Of late I refer to them as Woods Offices.  I have two Woods Offices--  the first so designated is nice in spring but utterly inaccessible by summer.  It consists of a log thrown across some other fallen logs, by a fence, right next to the Evanston channel trail.  Woods Office number two is technically a River Office, as it's beneath an overpass, but the woods are also right there.  These are places I habitually hang out in the hour(s) before my actual job begins.  I'm a compulsive tidier, so when I head out it's with plastic bags & vinyl gloves at hand, the better to clean the world with.  Usually I average one to two commercial grade trashbags.  This past couple weeks I've pulled gallon cans of paint outta the woods, found a cop's lost maglite, cleaned a burnt-down homeless encampment, et cetera.

I may often be found at the beach, picking up.  You would wrinkle your nose at the things I've picked up.  Just rest assured I do so with a great many precautions & barriers between myself and worldly filth.  The upshot of this compulsive behavior, while distracting, is that it calms me and leads me to Notice all kinds of oddments.  The cleaning has rewards built in, as well.  My new Leatherman multi-tool, for instance, came from a beach clean, as did my new collection of novelty cocaine spoons.

The point I am making here, painfully slowly, is that one may find inspiration in the world, in a wide variety of nowheres.  The cocaine spoons are useless to me, practically & personally, but it's a lovely character note to append somewhere within A HERO OF THE FEVER.  Because...  the sort of personality that would collect coke spoons?  That's something I couldn't have brainstormed.

It takes being in the world.

Warren Ellis might have been able to conjure the cokespoon collector.  Because himself is a poseur and a degenerate who quite enjoyed cocaine.  I also imagine that, though he was once as scrawny and gutter-oriented as myself, he only hung out in curious out-of-the-way overlaps of urbanism & opportunistic nature as a hipster flex in his twenties.  Carousing, like.  Doing his weekend warrior bit with the lads, getting into shit, desperate to pull some bird.  

Whereas I've always been the guy who needs to avoid humans.  And if you need to avoid humans, you explore.  Now I know how to access the Metra rail corridor.  Like, there's a great deal of mapmaking that gets done, just walking around.  Because people take walking for granted.  North American urbanoids rely on their cars for virtually every sojourn and consequently never get to grips with how their city is constructed.  It's very, very useful to know every square inch of the places you live & work.

Anyway, recon:  It's how creation gets done, as much as any of the Art or Craft shit I usually drone on about.  I've written four going on five books by being absolutely nowhere, writing at fucking dumb hours, in conditions of relative-to-absolute dark, cold, and rain-- by being persistent, prepared, and pathological.

Try it.

Tracing Gould - o17

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

The dialogue first emits from the mouth of a child, in Wild Palms, installment 3; and concludes the chapter as a button from the hapless protagonist and father of the same kid.

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

The child is running a fever when he says it.  The father is having a panic attack as his life collapses into weirdness.

Bruce Wagner is The Weirdest.  He's been an influence on my life longer than David Lynch, possibly, if one discounts Dune.  I first encountered Wild Palms in the back of Details magazine, reading it in the hair salon my aunt Edwina (remember her?) used to attend every Saturday.  I fell in love with the art immediately-- not least for its "adult" content.  There was a perverse thrill to reading about sex around all these adults spending most of their time pretending sex doesn't exist.  That Wild Palms had an absurdist, grotesque fascination with violence didn't hurt, either.

And then Twin Peaks happened, and Details didn't serialize Wild Palms with regularity, so I never got to finish it.  I remember there being a trade paperback on the shelves in bookstores at the mall, and I'd leaf through it, scrying for the slightest suggestion of fucking-- but I didn't read it.  I honestly knew more about the plot of Wild Palms from its teevee incarnation, than its origin as a comic book serial.

My teen PTSD was such that cause & effect kind of didn't exist in relation to one another.  Unless directly addressed, I couldn't make certain connections on my own.  I didn't recognize that the Wild Palms teevee miniseries 'Movie Event' was an adaptation.  I remember being excited that Ernie Hudson was in it, because the black Ghostbuster was my favourite.  I knew Jim Belushi from the movie 'Real Men'.  But as a comix-cultural moment, Wild Palms didn't register.  The cast was too insanely large and the plot was half-there as something a casual viewer could isolate & identify.  There was something about teevee tech, Cronenbergian vibes, and there were occult themes (an occult brotherhood, abductions, enigmatic tattoos) but as to what was HAPPENING, it was all over the place.

Which is why I couldn't really trace the comix incarnation in Details, honestly.  Because it ran in two-page instalments, and anyone who's ever been in a hairdresser's salon knows there aren't three consecutive months of *any* magazine in the house.  But that art, that art, that art...

"Hey, Dick Tracy, I just wanna die."

writing around death

As with every time a script hits the Finished pile, the ritual resets.

Mornings begin with the commute.  I'm on day four of a twelve-day stretch at work, so an essential element in the morning ritual is recharging.  Find a space to Be In, a place to walk, pace, think, sit, stretch, do yoga, listen and focus.  Focus is precious.  There's not much else one can do at my job BUT focus on the immediate.  So I need a recharge space.  There are several--  what I refer to as --'woods offices' along the way to my gig.  The current preferred favourite is beneath a major bridge, where cliff swallows nest.

Yesterday, sheltering there from the rain, as I observed heron and river otters and, yes, beaver, I went through the scripts, from most recent (THE KILL HOUSE) to secondmost recently completed (AZURE PANTRY / DENIZEN) and that put me in mind of the first to be completed in the pile (PAINLESS).  Looking for...  not similarities, so much as resonances?  Because I wanted to reassure myself that they aren't all The Same Book.

And they aren't.  But they aren't unrelated, either.  It's occurred to me that four of the seven major projects on my desk are about Dying.  At least in part.  It never occurred to me before that I'd turn into the kind of writer who writes the same book, essentially, time after time.  First off, I'm Not A Writer.  Secondly, I didn't think not-dying had been that big of a knock.  But, faced with the facts?  It's obvious that I'm trying to work through something.

Because all these books are about one's relation to mortality.  One's proximity, if nothing else.

A couple years ago, one morning in a burst of basic arithmetic, I tallied up the number of times death buzzed my ass.  It came to three, officially.  Surviving the murder attempt.  Surviving the suicide attempt.  And surviving the accident.  I'm sure there were other close calls, or at the very least WAKE UP calls, but of the times death was close enough for hugs:  three.

I have not done therapy for that.  Unless one counts four scripts.  Do these count as therapy?  Clearly I wrote them for that purpose.  Technically they were written because the OCD demanded their invention.  I don't write because I want to, I write because crazybrain commands.  Anyway, they're all plainly of a piece.  They're very different (or at least arguably different) approaches to the High Seriousness of that practical jester, mortality.

Maybe that's why the next book is just about sex.

cue the endless edits & amendments & revisions

This phase of things shouldn't be too bad.  Usually, after completely scripting a book (Painless, Denizen, Azure Pantry), I'll go into reread & edit line by line; testing the rhythms of dialogue, the pace of exchange, and fix all the Real Obvious Fuckups.  Chop.  Fill in.  Until the thing has defined itself satisfactorily, when I really Hear the words spoken, without reading them aloud.  The persistent problem with this stage, I've found, is the abundance of really obvious mistakes spellcheck doesn't get-- where there's an automatic linefill, some kind of substitution situation where you didn't mangle the word, you just mistyped so the processor can't hang any red lace on it...  A completely nonsensical sentence will sit there for weeks of revision with a Bad Error which I can't see because my brain's glazed over with all the other work that must be attended to.  It's embarrassing and a real argument for having an independent editorial voice, a reader who isn't the author, but at this phase in my professional personality as an Artist I'm no longer interested in sharing unfinished work with others, and I certainly don't want to hear "I'm going to read it, I swear" used as an excuse by ANYone, let along a friend, so why put people through it?  I'm not using fucking AI to read my scripts, so it's down to me and my OCD to find all the goofs and fine-tune the troofs I wrote while wearing my SmArt Faggot hat.  I don't think this one's gonna be too much of a problem because if I fuck up continuity between chapters it's only going to enhance the final effect THE KILL HOUSE is going for.  Art house is where it's at, and aggressive unconcern with a reader's comfort only becomes more attractive to me as I grow ever further estranged from John & Karen Q. Public.  I like Refn movies with no dialogue, and 800-plus page books about imaginary cities written with the structural conceit of a geometrical puzzle, whose primary Plot is fucking and who does who where.  So this book shouldn't be any surprise to anyone familiar with my psyche.  It's more cluttered & up its own ass with theory than this blog.

using every scrap

Never throw away that first draft.

I never throw anything away, actually.  There's usually a rolling frontier in any document in process, a place marked by five asterisks, where the roadwork is being done and things are being steamrolled and, yes, built.  After those * * * * * there will be cuttings:  any line that felt too good to destroy, but had to be excised, any passage where The Writer went off the rez and scripted something bizarre, any bit of bad indecision or fumfering that couldn't be finessed.

The first draft of The Kill House, it seems, was done in 2023.  I don't remember it being that far back, but then I don't remember writing 3/4s of this draft, so what the christ.  It wasn't a very good script, but there were some ideas, and there were some skits that could be salvaged.  And there was an ending.  An ending that came out of nowhere, really, that felt legit because it was a betrayal of audience.  I didn't know where the instinct came from but it felt right, so that's where I ended it.

And that ending was very probably why I couldn't forget The Kill House, or put it aside.  So today, after some thorough hard drive archaeology, I finally dug up the original 2023 script and copypasted the verbatim scene & stage directions into the finished Kill House.

Now it's fuckin' done.

Time to draw the bastard.

writing an ending / writing ONE ending

The blog goes live.  The blog goes dark.  The blog goes live again.

It should surprise all one of you that I have mental problems.  Not least of which is feeling coherent, or explicable.  I do not feel like a Complicated person, or a particularly difficult mind, yet--  ego being what it is, a cockleburr (poisonous, clingy, and a staining agent)  --it pains me to feel misperceived.  Often I feel as though my manner of speech, or the ways in which I express myself, annoy others, despite their (seeming) annoyance being completely beside the point.  The "point" being, well, conversation.  With the ones who get annoyed.  And if they get annoyed, I just stop talking to them.  I do try to keep it simple.

Which is to say, it shouldn't matter how people respond to my existence, as I don't really try to press my points.  Being neurotic is my problem, nobody else's.  When I say "I'm not a writer" it's honestly felt-- I write as expression, not profession; from compulsion, not financial motive.  Writing is something of an agony, to be honest.  I don't feel particularly creative or innovative even at my best.  But it's a trellis, isn't it?  Hang the words in the correct order and a Scene emerges from a sentence; Dialogue unveils itself as a cadence of call-and-response establishes itself.  I have to write to know what I'm going to draw, you see.

TL:DR is something I've been hearing people say for decades.  It's like "wall of text", or a therapist who's asked for a sample of writing responding with "You wrote a lot."  It's leading with a preference.  The preference being brevity.  Commendable, certainly.  But it isn't as though reading takes all that much time or effort, and there's a distinct sneer to the majority opinion that A Lot is Always Too Much.

When reading my own work, I sneer rather constantly.

All that said, it's been a hard time in my skull this week.  Upshot is, after straining to complete the script for THE KILL HOUSE for months, the whole thing arrived in two easy parts, across two mornings.  It's only the final chapter, and it's only eight-ish pages, but it took some struggle.  Partly because the whole book isn't contiguous-- all the chapters kind of hang on their own.  There are no straight lines or clear joins between sections.  It's the first time I've really tried to work this way with a piece of fiction.

And as with all the sections, it wrote itself.  I don't say this sarcastically, or as a handwave toward Process.  It's fair to suggest I am the editor and the final authority on whether the writing Is What I Wish It To Be, but as to creation it's dodgy where some of the bits emerge from.  The Bill Moseley lines lifted from 'Psychoreal', off OhGr's 'Devil In My Details' were in my notebook for months, waiting for ideal placement-- but where did the Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas riff, or the Keith Giffen-esque / Dave Sim page-of-word-balloons interior monologue emerge from?  Why did those impulses emerge where they did?  Why was this, 56 page, 8 chapter script, the final incarnation of all the impulses & snits of "inspiration" that clutter my notekeeping?

And why was THIS version the superior?  Superior to its initial "skit" form, or its abbreviated middle draught?  Why did it expand itself into this?  And why--

Why this ending?  Why not (any of!) the other endings?

THE KILL HOUSE is built of endings.  Some chapters contain more than one.  The whole damned book is Ending things, themes, characters.  As to why it worked out this way, I cannot clearly say.  Each ending is its own tune.  All the tunes, whistled together, end-to-end, forms the libretto.

Why?  Why?  Why?  I keep asking.  The answer, insufficient as it seems, is sometimes it's the art that calls the shots.  Not the shootist.

writing by accident

Yesterday was one of those where I committed a scene without meaning to.  I was writing something else, hacking bits together--  in this compositional phase of a script I refer to this as "roadwork", where patches get steamed out & fitted into a sequence  --when a morbid thought hit me.  A morbid thought adacent to personal experience.  So that was given room to grow, and next thing, three extra pages.  Going to hack at that today.  THE KILL HOUSE is now at 56 pages, pre-formatting & editing.

Some of "writing by accident" is discipline.  Write a little every day, whether intended for posterity or greater purpose or just farting around.  Eventually bits happen, whether intended or not, or accrete material as a result of scale & gravity, and next thing one knows:  writing.

In the midst of the unplanned Bit, comedic instinct appears.  Gestates, as the lines are honed, then breaks the surface of the roadwork.  Now these bits have to be shaped.  Line edits happen.  Read, re-read for flow.  The Bit has become a Sequence.  Toward the end of the sequence, unbidden, a joke flowers.  A pun, sobconsciously conceived & thrown into the mix.  Too much?  Or just right?  Where did all these jokes come from, anyway.  Weren't we just writing something serious?

This is where it's most important for me to trust instinct.  There was no outline, but there's a rise & fall to the action & dialogue, one I can sense the shape of now.  The verisimilitude I'm after requires human response, and a vital impulse in this craft, I've found, is making room for jokes.  Leave room for response.  The jokes grow all on their own.  Some of it may be the Editor's Mind, taking shots at the Writer's Tendencies-- the editor, with his red pen, can cook like it's open mic at an improv club  --but then there's the Writer, who's just trying to break tension with the Three Stooges (my Script Idiots, known as Motive, Plot, and Post-hoc Justification (patches plot holes)).  The writer just wants to sit all his little freaks together in the front row and run through the lines.  He didn't set out to make a big production out of it.  He needs his creatures to co-habitate, profitably.  The quickest way is to get 'em giggling.

I keep writing horror, because I've experienced enough of my own to need an outlet.  Part of writing horror is needing breaks to vent tension, deflate things, break it down and build it back up.  So there's a lot of dumb comedy in my work, and it would (I'm confident) be considered surplus to considerations in terms of page count or runtime.  But it's my shop.  I'm the letterer, too.  So I get to do whatever I fucking want.  And mostly I don't want to run a by-the-numbers, Serious shop.  I want to keep it moving, keep it organic.  The only way to get there, in my experience, is by trusting Accidents.

i know things about chicago

and it doesn't require an audience.  anymore than the things i now know about chicago require an audience.  i see a lot.  always have.  it's a runaway thing.  having my degraded vision restored by glasses makes it possible to study an entire nightworld which, for a decade plus, was receding into fog.  chicago is a marvelous vista in the dark, the vast accordioned silhouettes with their rave-pastel windows grown from obsidian coral, and the roustabout gloam below, with its shadow circuits...  i go chasing police torchlights and trolling nervous patrolmen, who can't seem to find the crime they're after.  returning i see:  swift as cliff swallows cruising cyclists stop and organize a threeway with a willing benchsitter, kneeling as i pass.  the giver presses his right hand on the kneeling recipiant's shoulder, signaling not to stop, as his riding partner traces the small of the giver's back from latissimus dorsi to heavy rhomboids.  the trio pick up the pace as i leave them in dark tangles of overlaid park bench slats & inky whispering eruptions of brush, and i think of the thin young thing who preceded the threesome-- sauntering with the lip of his pants tugged beneath his iliac crest, signifying with his eyes and sniffing loud.  men like them number in the unknowns, as infinite as the number of nights that have incubated in this centre of teeming industriousness and accomplishment, as up against itself as it is against the elements

i can't say i know these people or know anything about them:  but i know me, so i can extrapolate the endless varieties of explanations, and i know need like few may imagine.  it's decent material.  the stuff from which life is built, though it's rarely said as plainly and openly as these minor demonstrations.  chicago never sleeps, like some aquatic mammal alternating autonomic activities between lobes of the brain; forever in motion, negotiating currents and avoiding obstacles, as some fathomless aspect of itself dreams deeply of kindnesses alien to light and the smoke-reddened eyes of john and karen q. public

on the other side of the smudged chalkmark of the horizon, in ontario, there is fire.  i do not know it, but the fog that has seeped between my eyes and the dim beach is thick with toxins.  the air has taken on a pervasive flavor of dried, salted meat.  a trio of friends-- two dykes and a skinny male  --caper in the tide, and i balance my ass on the steel cable guidewire in the center of the pier, sketchbook angled on my knee toward the floodlights.  felt-tip nib dancing in imitation of life.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will have a cough, and a persistent flavor in my mouth, and my chest will feel heavy.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will worry about the way the particulate count has shifted the refractory index of light toward the red, and how the vacant beaches echo high desert.  (yesterday) the next day i will wear a mask, and curse myself for heeding the call to adventure, and the seven-to-eight cigarette hangover coating my lungs; and the-today-after [earlier than now] i will contemplate the couples swimming, heedless of the white and khaki film of ash scumming the tide.  i will not speak to these daytimers, maskless, dapping their cans of coca-cola together, who cannot see the flaccid, eyeless, carrion-white bass with the hole torn in its back, lolling against the rocks.  death does not require an audience.  merely opportunity.  it will occur to me that these maskeless daytimers should be warned, but-- surely they were.  i know things about chicago.  and so must they

us

 

& our 60 new friends

the burroughs folio: kammerer (1) dots & lines

Back to the OCD.

Line placement is key.  So too balance.  The first rendering of David Kammerer did not go well.  I got impatient with my own process.  This time has turned out significantly closer to the mark.

Brushwork next, INKluding fills, then lay on the tones.  This is the fifth of the eight portraits.  First in the actual series, as it will be printed.  I'm pretty close to satisfied.  I'm hoping the bubbles look right...