red light by night

This morning, in the early hours, doing my yoga & watching a bat belly sail directly overhead, picked up the faintest red thumbnail paring of the new moon.  I say "picked up" when fact is my eyes could not directly perceive it.  If I looked at where the moon was supposed to be, every star & satellite in its vicinity was brighter than the narrow band of spectra the moon threw.  Something red-- something around, above, below red --radiated when-ever my eyes were on other targets.  An eclipse from any other angle is a new moon, I guess.  But I like to think I saw something special.  Inasmuch as it was visible.  Which it was!  Just not in any way that I could actually draw or render, coherently, in print.  Abstractions of light are especially appealing to me but I know nobody sees what I see in such things...  Anselm Kiefer could do a motherfucking massive barn door painting of it and get the feeling of it exactly right.  But his trick is scale.  My medium being comix, it's hard to evoke that sense of scale where everything in the world is larger than your equipment is equipped to take in.  Nighttime and lakeside are Big Feelings, and I fret, frequently, that my approach to composition and pagination are too micro- to encode the macro-cosmic correctly.

And, shit, anyway, how do you push the concept of "red" in strict b&w, or even b&w + graytone?  Been grappling w/ ink & print for 32 years years & that riddle is still too zen for my blood...

philosophy, or what passes for it: three quarters here & three raccoons in a trenchcoat

I'm only about three quarters here.  In relation to the rest of "normative" humanity, or what a Standard Model Human is meant to be.  I mean, I'm present.  I am In The World.  But I'm about a quarter-step back from what "most people" perceive as Reality.  Not in the sense that I hallucinate, or am subject to invasive thoughts--  those things have happened, and are easily recognizable as such  --simply that, I'm not engaged with this bullshit the way everybody else is.

I am pretty sure part of that is due to having experienced survival panic & the threat of death, and having a (very Jungian) crisis of mortality at an extremely formative age that spiraled out into delusion & mental illness & PTSD and finally metastasized as my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which I manifest as in the practice of my art.  I relate to my body, my mind, and my world differently than other people.  And I don't take medication for it.  * Unless one counts the weed, which one truly must.  But putting aside that bad habit, the window I have on consensual reality is pretty One Step Back from everyone around me.

I don't grapple with status or class or race or gender or sexuality the way everyone around me seems to.  I know who I am and I know what that's worth in this world and I've got some pretty nihilistic views about all of it, fundamentally speaking.  I'm pretty materialist.  I've had my three brushes with death and my feelings about death are that it is Full Stop for me.  It's left me with a little permanent fuckedness and I just can't, with nationalism and racism and sexism and all the motherfucking Othering all the time, and how important Othering is to being an American in the 21st century.  Bitch, please.

None of this means a goddamned thing.  None of it could be more important--  to everyone but me.  Because I'm three quarters here.  I do care.  I care about human beings.  And I care about the environment, and life, and all that.  Rah rah.  I love life.  It's incredible and ineffable and every moment is incredible, even the dullest grimiest most gray shit is precious--  yet when it's done it's done and I'm not very worried about the state of my soul.  I know I've done my best the whole time.  I'm not going to peace out with Sins on my conscience.  I don't have the judeo-catholic wiring for any of it, ultimately, because I wasn't raised that way.  I was a gay white kid in the south with reactionary hippy parents reacting to their lace curtain irish world in a shitty not-"segregated"-but-not-integrated southern town.

The world told me what it didn't want me to be:  a pervert or a monster or a murderer, and also not gay, not leftist, not humanist, not interested in women's rights or, shit, i dunno, saving the world?  Like, there's a lot of self-hate involved in just getting through the contradictions we have to eat just to get up in the morning.  I don't have any scales over my eyes about any of it.  I do what I can.  I walk up and down and to and fro in it and when I die, none of it's gonna stick to me, because--

There's this joke I have, with my co-workers.  It's my three raccoons in a trenchcoat.  The top raccoon, that's Mind, me, the dolt steering the entire clumsy enterprise.  There's the second racoon, my Central Nervous System, the one stuck in the middle, completely covered by the coat, the interlocutor between the idiot on top and the poor indentured raccoon on bottom, Body, the feet on the ground and the guts to get around in all this tsimmis.

Mind, brain, and being:  those are the three raccoons in my trenchcoat.  

Sometimes one to two of the raccoons show up to work.  The best days, all three are in attendance.

Those guys are why I'm only three-quarters here.  Because I think about them, individually and in pairs and collectively, about as often as I'm contemplating the futility of caring about any of the shit-shit-shittiness happening because it took me fifty years to remember all the names of all the alpha morons responsible--  

when all I want to do, in this life or any other, is create art & love my husband.

Anyway.  No big existential taffy-pull.  I just realized earlier the best way to phrase all this, as I was walking, and I stopped to move a freshly-emerged cicada to a nearby tree.  He seemed quite content to accept the help and climbed his happy way to tonight's metamorphosis.  Yeah, little fella, you do it.  

So.  I'm only three-quarters here.  I'm a step removed.  I think I've been this way since coming to in the hospital, watching myself be sewn up.  It doesn't bother me.  It just is.  I don't think my top raccoon was in good shape before the crack to the skull; maybe he was four-fifths or five-sixths of a percent Present to begin with.  Now he's Bueller--?  Bueller--? over the hills and far away, on the best of days.

Today could be the best of days, though.  That cicada was pretty cute.  And yoga on the beach was good.  I think I'm healing from the fall at work, and the shit in my lungs is being coughed out a bit at a time, and I feel fundamentally more embodied & sexier than probably ever in my whole life in the South, so that's basically two raccoons out of three to start the day with.  If we get three raccoons in this trenchcoat then hey, Senor Droolcup got his shit together enough to crack a smile and pass the middle raccoon a brush to dip in the ol' inkwell.  What day is better than that, I ask you?

Time to drink this tea and crawl back into bed with my husband.

"one day a man will read... and then it will all start again"

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.