Reflections and Projections on Writing

In my previous post I mentioned that I am reading The Crow’s Dinner by Jonathan Carroll. As an author he is difficult to describe. At bookstores I have seen his novels filed with Horror, with Science Fiction and Fantasy, and with contemporary literature. Magical realism probably comes closest to defining his genre, but even that doesn’t quite get it right.

The new book is different than his others. It is a collection of short, some very short, essays that he used to publish regularly on Medium.com. I read them pretty regularly at one point but over time I had gotten way behind. The book is 500-plus pages of one to two page essays. He wrote a lot of these. I kind of love them.

Carroll brings a number of things to all of his writing. He had tremendous observational skills allowing him to capture the tiny moments of the every day that brings verisimilitude to the worlds he builds. This applies not only to the physical world, but also to people, their behaviors and motivations. It all feels very real, places and people we all recognize from our own experiences. Then, when something fantastic or magical occurs, it seems as real as everything else. He finds the magic in the mundane.

That seems even more evident in his essays where he deals pretty exclusively with the real world. He is attentive to it, relating anecdotes with clarity and vision. He is compassionate about the human condition in all of its flaws and wonders. With a concise economy of words he conveys moments of everyday magic.

If you can’t tell, I am envious of his skill.

This morning I had a conversation about writing, specifically the merits of brevity versus longer works. There’s a place for both, obviously, depending on what your goal is. This conversation was specifically about writing for comics, and how many words on a page are too many (because in comics words equal space), and how much the art should tell. It’s a fine balance and there is no right answer. That seems to be the one place where my style leans toward the more sparse and concise. But then Alan Moore of Watchmen fame puts a whole lot of words on a page and it works.

There’s a reason that my fiction tends toward novels instead of the short story. The same is true of my reading habits. To paraphrase, I like big books, and I can not lie. Big books that comprise trilogies, or more. But excessive word count isn’t always necessary. A good haiku says everything it needs to. In the current era when we’re bombarded by too much information word count can be a detriment. I’m certainly guilty of scanning web pages instead of reading them thoroughly. How much time can I spare? While I can’t deny that Twitter is powerful, I feel that much of it lacks context. Some topics simply can’t be critically addressed in 140 characters.

But there has to be a happy medium between a tweet and tl;dr.

I have a lot to learn from writers like Jonathan Carroll. In this spirit I plan on trying some new things with this blog. I won’t entirely give up my longer pieces, but I want to try my hand at shorter posts. Using his style as a guideline, without completely aping it, I want to tell smaller stories. A side effect of this, I hope, is that I will write and post more often, because I often psyche myself out with the need to write about something more in depth. I want to observe the world around me a little more closely and report what I find. I want to look for the magic in the everyday. The post that immediately precedes this one was an attempt. There will be more.

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Stay tuned.

Recapitulations

“Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of consideration.”

– Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse

I have started a project that probably has no end, and no real immediate goal other than the process itself.

Because I don't have enough to do, apparently.

I recently read an advance copy of The Sculptor, the new graphic novel by Scott McCloud (of Understanding Comics fame). My main thoughts on the book will appear in a review for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, so this blog isn't meant as an examination of the book. But The Sculptor was a springboard for thinking about a whole lot of stuff, primarily the nature of memory and how we construct the story of our lives.

The main character in the book, David Smith, is a sculptor. Most of his work is an attempt to capture the small moments of his life, to immortalize his memories in stone so that fleeting impressions will not be lost. The story is also about the reality that death awaits us all sooner or later. The classic idea that when you die your entire life passes before your eyes is used to great dramatic effect in the narrative. I think the essence of this notion is that in that last moment we will find some kind of clarity as to what all the small events and memories of our lives meant. What was the structure and theme of this life I've led? What did I learn from all of this?

Which got me to thinking about my own memories and life. Parts of our lives “flash before our eyes” every time we have a memory. So, I thought to myself, why wait until I die to try and see the whole picture and see what I can learn?

In the series of books written by Carlos Castaneda, books that were very formative to me at one time, he introduces the idea of Recapitulation (The Eagle's Gift, 1982). Recapitulation consisted of “recollecting one's life down to the most insignificant detail.” The purpose of this was to engage the past in an effort let go of the things that held you back, to escape the demands of ego. Recapitulation is “genuine laughter upon coming face to face with the boring repetition of one's self-esteem, which is at the core of all human interactions.”

In short, it is used to heal. This idea isn't new or exclusive to Castaneda. It's part of most forms of psychotherapy.

I've been watching the Showtime series The Affair this week. No real spoilers here, but the conceit of the show is a “He Said, She Said” sort of dialectic. Both of the main characters are relating the memories of what took place, and the differences are significant, indicating not that they are lying (though they may be), but that each of them perceived the events through their own subjective filters (what some friends of mine have been referring to as Reality Tunnels). Events had different meanings and significance for each of them, based on their own experience and perceptions. They are both unreliable narrators.

Memory is the most unreliable narrator we know. Any given event is a moment in time that passes, only to be relived through the subjective memories of those who experienced it. No two people ever remember things exactly the same way. The difficulty in getting to the truth from eyewitnesses is evidence of this. What we end up with is a consensual reality, a version of the world we can all agree on even when it doesn't really mesh with what we remember. Over time, the story, if told well enough and often enough, replaces the actuality, often in the face of overwhelming evidence. The historical reality is always replaced by the story we tell about it.

And we all tell different stories.

I'm fascinated by this. It's one of the themes in my Arthurian novel, Bedivere: The King's Right Hand. The tale is narrated by Sir Bedivere in the later years of his life, and he is very aware of not only the failings of his own memory, but of how the stories and legends of King Arthur have already supplanted what he remembers as the truth.

I've read that our memory of an event is an ever-renewing process as well. When we have a memory of something what we are actually recalling is our previous memory of it, like rewriting over an already existing file. Each time we have a memory we are different people than the last time we remembered it. So now it is filtered through different layers of understanding, changing its meaning, therefore changing the actual memory every time.

So, that project I mentioned... Yeah, I'm trying to log all my memories. All of them. I know. It's impossible. That's okay. There's no deadline. This isn't for public consumption or any kind of project I ever intend to put out into the world (though some of the more interesting or funny stories may make it into a blog or a Facebook status update occasionally). This is navel gazing at it's finest.

I'm trying to be somewhat organized with how I do this. I do just jot down random things as they come to me. Not everything, of course.There's simply not enough time for that. It's amazing how many little memories you can have in a single day when you just start really paying attention to how you think. I've created files organized into various categories, like specific school memories, broken down by grade, or describing everything I can about the house I grew up in. I'm working on a list of every concert I've seen (I've seen a lot), and trying to track down dates and venues and who the opening bands were. I have some old ticket stubs and of course the internet helps. I have specific memories of all of these, some more vibrant that others.

The process is a rabbit hole, of course. When I focus on one topic, say first grade, it's amazing how many things come back that I haven't thought of in years, like snow forts and head wounds and the time the teacher broke the paddle on Kathy's butt.

So why do this? To get a better understanding of my own story and look for the recurring themes. To let some of it go, I suppose, though I don't have a lot of regrets. I'm one of the lucky ones who had a pretty happy childhood. To get ideas for stories. To enhance my creativity. To record my memories before they're gone (for whose benefit after I'm not sure).

One of the problems that David Smith has in The Sculptor was that he was so invested in capturing his past that he had problems living in the present or making new memories. I don't think that's a problem. My recent bout of hibernation and introversion aside, I have a pretty full life, and will hopefully continue to have one.

In the meantime, Once Upon a Time, that reminds me of a story...

Chutz-POW!: The Comic Book

In June I blogged about my involvement in an ongoing project called Chutz-POW!: Real Superheroes of the Holocaust. You can read my blog post introducing the project HERE. I wrote another post about my research and experiences doing a piece of art based on the story of Sophie Scholl (HERE), and another about the whole museum exhibit portion of the project that premiered at the 3 Rivers Arts Festival (HERE).

This blog is the first of several where I will talk about the part of the project I had the most involvement with; The Chutz-POW! comic book.

The steering committee decided that it would be a good idea to produce an actual comic book in conjunction with this project. My experience as a writer and a comic book creator, as well as my background in research, made me the obvious choice to be the writer on the project. I also know a lot of the local comics artists and have good working relationships with them, which is essential in a project like this.

This is the cover for the comic. Artwork and
design by Marcel L. Walker. You can read
his process blog about this cover HERE.

The comic tells the stories of five local Pittsburgh Upstanders. From the beginning we knew that in spite of using the term “superhero” and the metaphor that represents we didn't want to present these stories as superhero tales. We never considered giving super powers to these real life people. Their stories are heroic enough. The goal was to be true to their actual histories.

The Holocaust is a really heavy topic and so much of the focus has been on the atrocities that were committed. While these atrocities should not be forgotten and need to be confronted, we wanted to focus on the aspects of this history that aren't talked about as often; the acts of heroism and selflessness, the spirit of those who did fight back, the tenacity and heart of those who had this experience. Early in this process someone said that “the act of survival was an act of heroism.” That was a guiding principle.

The five Upstanders we chose were also people who continued to serve as inspirations throughout the rest of their lives. They were educators and active in the community, sharing their stories in an effort to help the world understand. We make no claim that these people represent the most important or the only stories. Everyone who lived through the Holocaust has an important story. But for this first volume we chose five people.

Les Banos was a well-known Pittsburgh sports photographer who served as a double agent in the German SS. Moshe Baran was a partisan resistance fighter in Poland. His wife Malka was a survivor of the concentration camps. Dora Iwler escaped from the concentration camps, twice! Fritz Ottenheimer witnessed Kristallnacht as a boy, immigrated to America with his family and then returned to Germany as a member of the U.S. Army.

Les Banos, Malka Baran, Moshe Baran, Dora Iwler and Fritz Ottenheimer

I will talk about each of them in slightly more detail in individual blogs. I don't want to tell their entire stories here. I want you to read the comic.

I left the Holocaust Center one cold February morning with stacks of file folders containing information about each of these people. They had all been interviewed countless times and given first hand reports of their lives. There were newspaper articles and DVD documentaries. I was given a book called Flares of Memory, published locally containing the first person accounts of many Pittsburgh survivors. Both Les Banos and Fritz Ottenheimer had written books. It was a mountain of information to assimilate. The part of me that is a historian loved it.

My challenge as the writer of these stories was to find the moments in these lives that told a complete and meaningful narrative without doing damage to the totality of their experience. And, I need to do it in 4 to 8 pages.

No pressure.

I had a lot of information but much of it was out of context... various interviews and articles with no clear linear history. I spent a lot of time reading through the research, making notes, and constructing timelines. As I narrowed down the moments I wanted to use I began to look for the themes and ideas on which to structure the narrative. I wanted each story to have its own feel. Each artist had a different style, so I thought the stories should all be structured a little differently.

And even though I tried to do my best, the truth is there is a lot of information, a lot of great moments, left out. Given the constraints of page count I had no choice but to cut and condense large portions. These stories are snapshots, important moments, but not the whole story. I say in my writer's note in the book that each of these people deserve an entire graphic novel and it's absolutely true.

I approach writing comics from an artist's perspective. To structure the narrative I need to make my own thumbnails to go along with my script. It's how I figure out pacing and story beats. Unlike prose, comics exist in space, bounded by the page. This constraint helps determine the storytelling and reading experience. It helps me to visualize the final page in a rough stage before I ever type a line of description or narration.

The next step was to send the scripts to the artists. They all had valuable feedback. A comics page done in this fashion is a collaborative effort. Though I wrote my script based on my thumbnails I didn't show these to the artists. I didn't want to limit them by my vision of the final page. They are all professionals who are more experienced at laying out a comics page than I am. The information was in the script. As long as the story beats were respected they were free to play with the script in whatever way they felt best served the story. In each case there were places where ideas and panels were condensed or expanded. Layouts were not what I had thumbnailed, but still told the same story. One artist changed the overall story structure but managed to not only keep all of the details I had written but to enhance the way in which they were presented. In every case the artist's instincts were better than anything I had envisioned, yet maintained a fidelity to the story I had written.

Wherever possible I defaulted to the actual words of the people I wrote about. These are their stories and their words carry more weight than mine. I took my responsibility to them very seriously. There were edits to the final script... fact-checking, some flat-out mistakes on my part, instances where the character's memories didn't match the  historical record.

But in the end I am happy with the result. I believe the stories we told are good representations of their lives. I know I can never really do justice to the reality of their experience, given six pages or six hundred. These are glimpses into their history, a small window on a immense vista. My hope is that these stories will inspire the reader to learn more; about the Holocaust, about these people and others like them, and about their own potential to be heroes.

The release party for the comic will take place on August 14, 2014 at the Toonseum in downtown Pittsburgh. It's a block party with music, food and art. The creators, including myself will be in attendance. Here's the poster;

Come join us at the CHUTZ-POW! Superheroes of the Holocaust Launch Party

on Thursday, August 14th at the ToonSeum!

Writing Process Blog Tour

My friend Leigh Anne, over at her Be Less Amazing blog, participated in the Writing Process Blog Tour. She was invited to do this by local Pittsburgh Poet Angele Ellis (you can read her responses HERE). Leigh Anne made a more general call for anyone to participate. I'm doing the same. If you want to be a part of this, answer the questions below and link back to me. I'm curious to see what other people have to say.

What Am I Working On?

Way too many things, probably. I'm currently working on a paid professional comics project involving the Holocaust in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Holocaust Center and the Pittsburgh Toonseum (this is my first public announcement of this). I serve on the steering committee as a comics historian as well. The overall project involves what will be a traveling educational art/history museum installation called “Chutz-Pow!: Real Life Superheroes of the Holocaust.” The idea is to focus on real people who participated in genuinely heroic acts in the midst of this tragedy. We're using the metaphor of the superhero to do this. Many of the earliest comics creators were Jewish and had connections with European Jews during this period. Many served in the military in World War II.

My primary responsibility is writing a 24 page comic book that will be given away as part of the project. I'm telling the stories of five Pittsburgh residents who fit the description of a “real life hero of the Holocaust.” This has involved a tremendous amount of research. The biggest challenge of this for me is trying to fit these tremendous stories into four to eight page vignettes. I'm lucky to be working with four local professional comics artists. This is shaping up to possibly be the biggest, most important writing project of my life so far.

The installation will premiere at the 2014 Pittsburgh Three Rivers Arts Festival. I will be making more specific announcements about this project as the details develop.

In addition to this project I occasionally blog at two different sites, this one and another one over at Word Press. That ones, called Masks, is the home of my very specific ramblings and thoughts on comic book history and serves as a first draft space for what may someday be a book on the topic. This one is home to a wide variety of topics. I write the occasional book review for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Then there are my novels. I have four complete novels available, and I'm currently about 50,000 words into the next one (though it seems to be taking awhile).

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

In the course of submitting my novels to agents and publishers I was told many times that while they loved my writing style (one agent called it “lyrical”), the problem was that they didn't know how to market it because it didn't fit comfortably in a specific genre. Three of my novels (I leave Bedivere out because it is pretty specifically Arthurian fiction), straddle the line between Horror and Urban Fantasy. The tropes of each of these are certainly present, but it's difficult to pinpoint either. When I was submitting I would craft my pitch either way depending on what the publisher was looking for. I've had others refer to my work as Dark Fantasy, Slipstream, Magical Realism, and Speculative Fiction. Okay...

So what makes my work different? While I deal with elements of Horror my work isn't as dark as a lot of that genre. Even in my darkest moments I am still inspired by heroic fiction, so I guess that's where the Fantasy comes in. There is a message of hope in my work that that is absent from a lot of Horror, without ever slipping into “the hero who will save the world” cliches. I'm not very interested in the classic monsters of Horror (at least in writng about them). It might be more commercial but the world has enough vampire and werewolf and zombie fiction right now, and don't get me started on the overdone Lovecraftian, tentacled horror from beyond. There's way too much of that to dig through. There are so many other mythologies and folk lore to mine for ideas.

Why do I write what I do?

I've always been drawn to the fantastic. I learned to read from comic books, so the idea of heroes living in a world of monsters and aliens and super powers is my default worldview. I like the metaphor that these genres provide. When we write about monsters we're writing about the monstrous in ourselves. When we write about heroes we're appealing to our own better self. Genre fiction allows us to exaggerate these things and explore the ideas in sometimes deeper ways.

And, simply because I enjoy these genres myself, I find them more fun to write.

How does your writing process work?

When things are going well on a novel I sit down at the keyboard and write. I try for at least 1000 words before I will let myself walk away. There's no magic to it other than showing up for work. I usually have spent a lot of time thinking about the project and what comes next, and I will have a few notes, but in general I'm not a big outliner or planner. Within certain parameters I want to be open to let the story take me where it will. Characters frequently say and do things I never planned until the moment I wrote the lines. When that happens it is usually a sign that the story has become a living thing and I need to listen to what it's trying to tell me.

The process works better for me when I have some kind of writing routine in place. Recently I have not been showing up to work as often as I would like, at least not on my novels. As I stated above I have been spending a lot of my creative time on the Holocaust project. I'm also teaching a class this semester and a lot of my energy has gone toward that. These are not meant as excuses, simply the reality of time management at the moment. I made a conscious decision to put a hold on the novel I'm working on because I knew these other commitments would eat into my time and energy. The fear is always that once I get off the novel-writing horse it can be difficult to get back on.

But I write because I write. It's a big part of what defines me.

New Podcast!

I was recently interviewed by Genevieve Barbee for the AP Collector Podcast. You can listen to the whole thing at the following link.

http://www.apcollector.net/ap-collection/2014/3/8/wayne-wise-author-comic-guru

The AP Collector was recently featured as one of "Sixteen Pittsburgh Social Media Mavens To Follow" at Pop City Media.

http://www.popcitymedia.com/features/pghsocialmediaites022614.aspx

4-Star Review for Scratch on Amazon

Another good review of my ebook Scratch appeared on Amazon.

4.0 out of 5 stars Terrific book!, January 26, 2012 By  Daniel Lee "Terry Lee" (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: Scratch (Kindle Edition) I found this book to be well written, with well defined, intriguing characters and a unique premise. Mr. Wise does a great job of keeping the story moving at a good clip, juggling various story lines, and making the fantastic seem entirely plausible. The book is very cinematic in its presentation, and played out in my mind's eye as a gripping film. This was a fun, engaging read, and I'm looking forward to lots more from this author, who reminds me of a young Stephen King. Don't mistake this analogy - Mr. Wise isn't a match (yet) for Mr. King in his prime, but he shows great promise and deals with similar themes.

Book Review!

I received my first review for Scratch on Amazon. You can see it on the Amazon book page HERE.


Or, you can read it here.




5.0 out of 5 stars Good solid entry into the horror/fantasy arena, December 14, 2011

By iloveclones - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scratch (Kindle Edition)

Scratch is my first foray into Amazon's program in self-publishing. I bought it on the recommendation of a friend who knows I like this kind of fiction (horror/fantasy) and because the beginning takes place in a location I'm well familiar with: Pittsburgh Pa, specifically Oakland, the area containing University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon. Anyone who has ever gone to school here will get a kick out of a VERY accurate footchase from Craig St past the Cathedral of Learning and Carnegie library, and into Schenley Park!

Scratch is a story of a town (Canaan, West Virginia...that one appears to be a fiction, if Google Maps is correct) that is hiding a secret (two actually). It seems some of their ancestors bound a healing angel Gabrielle(and her not so healing brother, Scratch) a century ago. They've been using her to heal their nicks and bruises over the years. It seems a town with a secret like this is prone to some pretty decent nicks and bruises, and would do anything to keep their secret.

The book moves along briskly, but gets bogged down a bit in some dream sequences that I personally am never fond of. The characters are an interesting mix. My one complaint is that I wished that a little more time were spent fleshing them out a bit more. It can be a trick to make "bad guys" sympathetic and vice versa, but I think it was pulled off here.

By book's end, there's a hint of what Gabrielle and Scratch's nature is, and I would like to see a little more. Maybe a sequel.

I'll definitely give Mr Wise's other books a whirl (In fact, the price alone got me to send a digital copy to my friend, another ex-Pittsburgher living in LA)

Cover Story

One of the challenges for the self-publisher of Ebooks is being responsible for everything. This includes coming up with a striking cover image. Luckily, I have a modicum of artistic talent and design sense. Even luckier, I have a vast network of friends who are more talented artists than I am. For my project I enlisted the help of a couple of them.

The first is Marcel Walker. I have the benefit of him being my housemate, so I can pretty much bug him at any time to help me out. For the covers of both Scratch and This Creature Fair I had pretty clear ideas of what I wanted.

This is the doodle I did for Scratch.

This is the image Marcel came up with.

The photo is one of the Union Valley Methodist Church. This is the church I grew up in. My house was a few yards from where this picture was taken and the area around it is intrinsically linked to most of my childhood memories. I found this in a batch of pictures from my grandmother, Ida Wise. Someone had handwritten the date 1929 on it. Family legend has it that my great grandfather, Lon Wise, donated the land this church was built on in 1879.

I want to stress that no one in the book is based on anyone from this church. We never kept an angel chained in the basement. It doesn't even have a basement.

One of the recurring images and motifs in This Creature Fair is that of the bright red lips of the rock star, Morrigan Blue. My protagonist, Nick Chambers, is trapped by her charms and magic. This image has been in my mind since I first started writing the book.

This is my doodle.

This is what Marcel came up with.

My friend Margaret Bashaar, a talented writer herself, was my model for this. And yes, that is me in the photo as well. My original idea involved just the outline of the lips, but I LOVE the way this looks.

For Bedivere I knew I wanted something more traditional. The story is classic Arthurian fantasy, so I wanted something that conveyed that. I wasn't sure who I was going to ask to do this until I saw a post on Dave Wachter's website. Dave is a relatively new friend and an amazingly talented artist. He recently drew a three issue miniseries for IDW called That Hellbound Train (based on a Robert Bloch story. Dave regularly posts his artwork on his website. One day he posted a beautiful drawing of a knight on a horse and I knew exactly who I wanted to do my cover. The drawing I saw wasn't right for my book so I sent Dave some general ideas. I can't ell you how much I love what he came up with. If this epublishing thing is successful at all, and assuming I actually finish the project, there will be two more books in this series with covers by Dave.

Here is Dave's original painting without the cover text.

Thank you all!

King of Summer (Writing Part 8)

I talked about my publishing experience with King of Summer, but I really didn't discuss the experience of writing it. I'm not sure what I have to add. At this point it was around 10 years ago that I began the project, and some of the details and specific memories are hazy. But, it's worth dredging the unconscious to see what I come up with.

Like I said, at some point after seeing the Guardians short stories printed and collected I realized that I was capable of writing at length. That was an important insight and led directly to my decision to once again attempt to write a novel. I had tried this many times before, of course and never got very far into it (the Knight and Armour manuscript I wrote when I was 15 notwithstanding). I'm not sure exactly what it was but KoS felt different from the beginning. I had more actual writing experience under my belt, for one thing. By this time I had had many articles published and paid for. I was a “professional” writer, at least in terms of selling my work. I was more confident when I sat down at the keyboard, and though the articles were different than fiction, through them and the Guardians I had finally begun to hear my own voice in my writing rather than a bad imitation of whoever was inspiring me at the moment.

I think I began KoS with humbler aspirations than previous efforts (if that can truly be said about anyone who sits down to write a novel... there's something inherently a little arrogant about the attempt). Before this I wanted to write something for the ages. I wasn't content to simply write a novel. I wanted to write the kinds of things I loved. I wanted to be Hermann Hesse, or Henry Miller, or J.R.R. Tolkien, or Robert Pirsig or... you get the idea. I was frustrated in my writing because it didn't live up to the impossibly high standards I compared myself to. In Hesse's Steppenwolf he talks about his own efforts paling when compared to those he called “The Immortals.” Hesse had become one of my own Immortals, and his voice, among others, while inspiring, was preventing me from hearing my own.

Writing articles about music was immediate and transient. Writing about the Guardians was fun. Both of these helped me to put aside my aspirations at being an Immortal and let me just write. It was with this in mind that I began KoS. For once, rather than wanting to write the great American novel and being paralyzed by the enormity of that expectation, I simply wanted to tell a story.

I'm not really sure where the original idea came from, or how the story developed. I'm a terrible notetaker and I've always had the bad habit of organizing things in my head rather than writing them down (bad for a writer). I am not an outliner. I get an idea for a story and it just sort of develops in my head. Characters appear and some of them work and some of them don't. I usually “see” several key scenes in a story, and have a general idea of the direction I need to go and the ending. I don't often write any of that down ahead of time. As a result not only am I sure that I've lost brilliant ideas, I also have very little in the way of records of how I work.

In the case of KoS I have a single page of notes.

I knew I wanted to tell a modern fantasy/horror story using kids as the protagonists. I wanted to give it a little more resonance and depth, some kind of mythological underpinning (I said I wanted to just tell a story, I didn't say I had given up aspirations that it would mean something). I have long been fixated on the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. I have read many, many novels based on this, as well as the literature and history and the psychological symbolism involved. One of the things I am fascinated by is how this core story can be reinterpreted time and again and still speak to our modern sensibilities. The symbols, the relationships, the stories, feel universal to me.

With this in mind I decided to use the Arthurian legends as a map for the story I wanted to tell. I knew I didn't want to simply retell the specific tales, but reference the symbols and relationships in a modern context. The challenge was to encode this information into the story in such a way that those who know Arthurian legends would go, “Aha!” and those who don't know them wouldn't be lost or even know they were missing anything. The story needed to work for anyone, not just those in the know. I didn't want to deal with the idea that my characters were specific reincarnations of the knights, or that they themselves would ever know they were in an Arthurian pastiche. They were kids, in a modern setting, who embodied the archetypes without actually being the Arthurian characters they resembled.

This was an idea that Matt Wagner had used in his comic, Mage: The Hero Discovered. It was also an idea borne out of Jungian psychology. There is a book by Dr. Carol Pearson called The Hero Within (and a followup called Awakening the Hero Within), that addresses the idea of embodying heroic archetypes. These were ideas I wanted to play with.

On that single page of notes I have a list of some of the major Arthurian characters and next to each I have the name of one of the kids who ended up in KoS. This was the first attempt to figure out the roles each of them would play. I didn't want this to be glaringly obvious, so other than Artie none of them have a name that directly correlates to the character they represent (though there are some other clues with some of them). Also on the page are a couple of notes about how the classic elements of Arthurian literature would manifest in the modern world. A 12-year-old couldn't very well be wielding Excalibur in small town America.

There are a lot of hidden Arthurian tidbits encoded in the manuscript, and I'm not going to give a list here, though I want to address two of the main ones. I wanted to imbue the everyday with magic. The kids needed to encounter the fantastic in the guise of known items. Excalibur appears in KoS as a pocketknife. This seemed reasonable to me. Lots of young boys, at least where and when I grew up, were given pocketknives very early as a sign and test of responsibility. On a more personal note, my Dad is a dealer in pocketknives (not a collector... he buys them and then resells them for a profit). He knows a lot about the history and other minutia of knives, and I have been around this forever (just as an aside, I don't carry one, a fact that completely befuddles my father who doesn't understand how I can get through a single day without needing one in some capacity).

The Holy Grail appears as a tarnished baseball trophy. The obvious cup-like nature aside, this became an important symbol in the novel of the unity of past generations. When I was little there was an older man at my church named George McNeely. His wife had died and he lived in a small 2-room building near me. A friend and I would go to visit him occasionally and he always welcomed us with snacks and pop and told us stories of his youth. I realize now just how lonely he must have been. In his living room there was a large baseball trophy he and his teammates had won sometime when he was young. It was an item of great pride for him and he told us many stories from those games. In my mind, this symbol of his youth and a better time in his life became the Grail of my story (and George became a character in my story as well).

So, armed with these few notes on paper and a larger story in my head I sat down to write.

I don't know exactly what was different this time, other than some of the vague notions I have outlined here, but for some reason this time I wrote. And wrote. And stuck with it and wrote some more. My goal was 1000 words per day, and I wrote almost every day. There were slow periods, of course, and days when I didn't write because the rest of life got in the way. There were days when I wrote well over my daily goal (one magical Saturday when I was writing what would become the final chapter of part one of the novel when I topped 6000 words, to date my record, and they were all pretty good words).

The story took on a life of its own. It's cliché to say that, but it's true. The outline in my head grew, Characters began to say and do things I never had planned. Vivian in particular, simply wouldn't shut up and made me write her a bigger role than I intended when I introduced her (and as a result she is the character most people have commented on when all was said and done).

One of the problems I had before this was second guessing every sentence. I would write one and then immediately attempt to polish it into perfection. I would introduce a minor character, one who played no role beyond set dressing, and then become paralyzed by the need to find just the right name for this nobody. My internal editor wouldn't allow my writer to write. Somewhere during the articles and The Guardians and Grey Legacy I had learned to differentiate between the voices of my internal editor and my writer, and when my writer needed to work I simply didn't allow the editor in the room. His job isn't creativity. If anything, he is a detriment to it. His job is to clean up after the writer is done. It's an important job (and one he's more lax at in this blog, given the number of misspellings I find when I reread my posts), but only after the writer does his part.

It's a little schizophrenic, but I find this division of labor essential.

I wrote the first draft in about 5 or 6 months, then spent considerable time with the cleanup. In the end I was very happy with the results. I reread it in its entirety recently when I got the rights back back. I'm still happy with it, though there are some edits I would make. I'm a better writer now, but I'm not embarrassed by my first book.

At the top of this page there is a link to a King of Summer specific page. There you will find the back cover book description and a collections of online reviews the book garnered. As time passes I will update this page with any new information or reviews I receive.

And if anyone reads it and wants to know more about the specific Arthurian Easter Eggs, ask me. I'll be glad to bore you with them.

Writing Part 7: Roleplaying and Fanfic

Continued from my previous blog...

So, the Grey Legacy experience was over (at least that phase of it). We both took a break from producing comics. Fred moved to DC to pursue a career that had nothing to do with art (a career he's been very successful at). I was still doing the temp routine. This was around the time I started writing articles for In Pittsburgh (as detailed in a previous blog) and other freelance jobs. A couple of years later I was hired by New Dimension Comics in Cranberry and said goodbye to my temp career. A year after that I was hired by Phantom of the Attic and have been there ever since.

But I didn't stop writing or drawing. I still had the need to create, whether there was any practical or financially-rewarding goals in mind or not.

Like a lot of people involved in my hobbies, I started playing roleplaying games in my teens. I'm old enough that Dungeons & Dragons was a new game when I was a teen. I received the box set for Christmas in the late 70's and a small group of my high school friends played for a couple of years (until my friend Tom Hanks went crazy from the experience and got lost in the sewers looking for real goblins... but that's another After School Special). These were the basic “find a treasure” and “kill the monster” type of adventures. We really weren't experienced enough to turn these sessions into the genuine storytelling, character-driven games that real roleplaying can be. I played a couple of times in college, but that was the end of it for nearly a decade.

When I moved to Pittsburgh in 1990 I met a group of people who were really into roleplaying and joined in. The first campaign I played was called Circle of Iron and the gamemaster was David Fielding (who went on to be the face and voice of Zordon on the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers). It was everything I had ever wanted roleplaying to be. He had created a sprawling and complex world, utilizing mythology and history to give weight to his setting. Instead of simply looking for treasure our characters were placed in a story, with very specific goals. We spent far more time engaged in character development than we did rolling dice and fighting monsters. One New Years weekend we spent hours and hours surrounded by the remnants of our carnage food: bags of chips and Twizzlers, take-out pizza, take-out Chinese, and a never-ending supply of a Kool-Aid we called the Blue Elixir. There were three distinct major story arcs that took place in this world.

From there my roleplaying experiences expanded, usually with variations of this same group of people. We moved from D&D into other game systems. We spent a summer in the world of Shadowrun.

Somewhere in there, based on my lifelong love of comics, I joined a Marvel Superheroes roleplaying campaign. If memory serves, this was a game that had been started by my friend Jerry Scott when he was in middle school (maybe before that, maybe after... well before his college years anyway). Jerry played the Circle of Iron campaign with us and is now a Professor of Theater at Case Western. It was group of superhero characters that he and his friends had been playing for years. Several of us from Circle of Iron joined the fray. Set squarely in the long, convoluted history of the Marvel Universe we all created original characters and fought many classic Marvel villains, as well as new ones we created.

“Original characters” may be overstating it. Like many people who create superheroes, a lot of ours were variations on established characters, at least in terms of powers and backgrounds. It's easy to do this when you're young, and many people who work in comics professionally do the same thing. After 70 years of history and literally thousands of superheroes it's difficult to be completely original.

But we had fun, and somewhere along the line, Jerry decided to write short stories based on our characters.

It has become a cliché in the world of fantasy novels that many of them read like someone's D&D campaign, and it's true. Far too many writers have taken their tabletop adventures and attempted to convert them into prose. I have no doubt that some of these efforts have been successful. A tremendous amount of creativity can go into establishing a roleplaying world. Major publishers have released very successful book series based on most of the popular roleplaying games.

There is also the convention of Fan Fiction, or Fanfic. People who are fans of something, be it a comic, or a movie or a TV show, want to tell new stories set in their favorite world. This is especially true when a series comes to an end. So, they write their own adventures of their favorite characters. There are thousands of Star Trek fanfics out there, and Star Wars, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Doctor Who, and... Pick any show you know of and Google it with fanfic and you will probably find something (be careful... a lot of these take Spock and Kirk in, let's say romantic, directions that were never on the original show). As long as you don't attempt to sell your work and infringe on copyright laws, it's all good.

Of course many, if not most of these, are poorly written drivel. But not all. Lots of serious writers get their start with fanfic and are able to eventually turn this into real careers in writing. Like the roleplaying companies, the copyright holders of any of these properties have produced thousands of legitimate novels based on their product as well. There have been countless novels and comics set in these worlds, and sometimes the authors of these books got their start writing fanfic.

I once had a coworker who said he just didn't get the concept of fanfic. Why would anybody be interested in writing someone else's character? At the time, he was in a punk band that, in addition to original material, played covers of the Ramones and the Dead Boys, among other Punk classics. Fanfic is the same thing. There's something you love that has insired you and you want to perpetuate it. Unless your band is doing a radical reinterpretation of a cover song I'm going to say that fanfic is more creative. At least the story is a new one based on someone else's work instead of a simply faithful rendition of a story already told.

Anyway, Jerry started writing stories based on our Marvel roleplaying game characters. They were meant for fun and he never really intended for anyone to read them other than the handful of us who were in the game. Four or five stories in I asked him if I could write one. He said sure, and so began a two or three year ongoing collaboration between us.

Our superhero team was called The Guardians (and yes, pretty much anyone who ever created their own team of superheroes has named them The Guardians... Jerry was young when this all started). I would write a story, then Jerry would write one. We never really overtly collaborated on any single story, but we kept each other in the loop about what we intended, while still trying to surprise each other. We both had a mutual respect for the characters and each other, so neither of us ever introduced anything that completely changed the world. If we wanted to do something huge, like killing off a character (poor Tenebrae), we talked it over ahead of time. There were some characters, like Mindbender and Lightwave, that were more Jerry's province than mine, simply because he had created them. Others, specifically Auracle and Totem, were my characters and I felt like I had more autonomy with them than others.

Of course, I did costume designs and drew pictures of all of them. Oddly enough I never attempted to do full-fledged comics of any of our stories.

In the end we wrote about forty short stories between us. These were never published on the internet (and probably won't be). One year for Christmas Jerry printed and bound two volumes of these to give to our friends in the game. These were pretty thick tomes and my initial response was “Wow... So I can write long extended works.”

This was an important insight, and led pretty directly to my confidence and ability to embark on a full-length novel. Not long after that I began work on the manuscript that was to become King of Summer, my first finished, and first published, novel.

The fanfic experience was really important to me as a writer. It was low pressure. This wasn't meant for publication or for the eyes of an editor. It was writing simply for the fun of doing so with a product that had no larger intent. We were never going to submit this work to Marvel, or anywhere else. I was writing to please myself and a small handful of others (though myself and Jerry primarily). That was tremendously freeing to me. I had the tendency to over-think my writing prior to this. I would sit down to begin the great American novel and become far too concerned with every word being perfect to ever get very far into any project. The Guardians allowed me to simply write.

This was during the same time frame when I was writing articles for In Pittsburgh, so the two forms of writing, and the rewards of actually being published by the newsweekly, both reinforced my habit of writing.

I'm sure that a lot of that work would seem very clumsy to me now, in terms of language, plot, story structure and character. I learned a lot of those skills while writing those stories. There is a definite progression in writing ability, on my part and on Jerry's, that can be seen in The Guardians. The short story format of these (though some probably count as novellas, based on word count), allowed me to develop structure and forced me to be more concise (believe it or not), while the serial nature of them gave me the opportunity to work on long-term plots. Simply seeing the bound versions made me realize that I had written more than enough words to count as a novel or two.

Every once in awhile Jerry and I reminisce about The Guardians, or throw out a inside joke about them that only he and I in the whole world would appreciate. It's another friendship and collaboration that that has changed due to life (though Jerry is still my friend, and I'm very proud of what he has accomplished). We both miss Mindbender and Auracle (the characters he and I played respectively, and the obvious focus of most of the stories), and the fun they brought to our lives.

But remnants of The Guardians still remain in my work. One story of mine in particular, Fire and Flood, had a lasting impact on me. When King of Summer was finished and I was making notes for future novels I realized that I could strip all of the superhero elements out of that story and still have a world and a core concept for a modern fantasy/horror novel. The idea stuck and after a lot of reworking it became the basis for my second completed novel manuscript entitled Scratch. Though the prolog chapter has been rewritten and polished many times since, the base flow of it and the ideas introduced, is still the chapter I wrote for The Guardians.

Scratch has not yet seen print, though there are some stories about it.

Next time...

Writing Part 7 (Comics Part 4)

Continued from my previous blog...

I'm a little fuzzy on the dates of some of the following, but the general sequence of events is correct.

In the summer if 1991, I believe, I was reading an issue of The Comics Buyers Guide, a weekly newspaper dedicated to comics fandom (one of the first and longest running mags about comics). There was a brief, two-paragraph article announcing the formation of the Xeric Foundation. Peter Laird, artist of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and multi-gazillionaire by this point had formed Xeric to fund charitable organizations in his home state (Vermont at the time, I think, but don't quote me on that), and to give money to comics creators for the purpose of self-publishing. There wasn't a lot of specific info but there was an address to write to for more information.

We literally had a letter in the mail the next day. Within a few days we received a packet of information giving us the guidelines. Essentially, we had to write a full grant proposal. We needed to submit a publishing plan, a proposed budget, story outlines, artwork, a marketing plan... the whole bit. The deadline by which all of this had to be turned in by was the following January, I think. We were good to go with the story outline and artwork, but the rest of that stuff was a little out of our area of expertise. I had had a grant-writing class in undergrad, but remembered very little of it. We asked around for some input, but essentially we figured a lot of it out on our own.

Let me stress again, this was pre-internet, so the option of typing a few questions into a search engine or sending emails simply was not an option. I'm not even sure how we figured some of this stuff out. We wrote to several of the comics distributors (this was in the day when there were several distributors, instead of just Diamond), and received packets of info from them in terms of what they needed from a new publisher. After talking to a couple of local printing companies we discovered none of them had the slightest clue of how to print comics. Somehow we found out what printer Fantagraphics used to print their books (we had decided on a black and white magazine-sized format like Love & Rockets was printed). I don't know if there was an article someplace, or if the printer was listed in some of their comics, or if there was an ad, or if I simply called information and got Fantagraphics number and called them. I was much better at doing that sort of thing in those days. I spoke directly to the guy who printed L&R and he knew exactly what we wanted. He sent us paper stocks to compare, both interior pages and cover stocks. He explained what he needed for the color covers. He told us what a print run would cost and how much they would charge us for shipping to the various distributors.

So we wrote the proposal, using all of this information to come up with a budget and a plan. After a lot of sweat we sent it in. We included copies of our mini-comics to show what the final product would look like. Then we waited.

I honestly don't remember if we found out through the mail or a phone call, but sometime in 1992 we were told we had been awarded the Grant.

Xeric has funded eight projects a year (two sets of four every six months or so) starting in 1993 and continuing up until this year. In July, 2011 it was announced that the Xeric Foundation was officially coming to an end. Some figures say they awarded over two and a half million dollars in the course of their existence. I know of two other Xeric winners in Pittsburgh. Tom Scioli won in 1999 for Myth of 8-Opus. Tom has gone on to work for the major publishers, most notably on Godland for Image. Rachel Masilimani won in 2000 for RPM Comics. Many of the recipients went on to regular comics careers.

We were one of the first four projects funded. Now all we had to do was publish the book.

Our contact person at the Xeric Foundation was a lovely woman named Kendall Clark Engleman. We never met, but she was amazingly patient and helpful in every phone conversation we had. She let us know that since this was the first time the Award had been granted they were all completely new to this process and were learning what to do the same time as we were. It made the experience less stressful somehow, knowing that they were, at times, stumbling for answers as well.

Fred and I actually filled out the paperwork to become a Limited Partnership. We got a tax ID number, a business bank account, and a giant checkbook. During this time we were both working as temps, and doing freelance art and writing, as well as this business endeavor... our taxes were a giant pain in the ass the next year.

Around that same time I started teaching a class on Comics for Kids through the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC). I answered an ad looking for people to teach various specialty courses. The proposal I sent was for an adult class, but I think someone there just couldn't imagine that comics could be for adults. Imagine my surprise when I showed up for my first class and it was a room full of ten-year-olds. This was not the class I thought I was teaching and I was simply not prepared with appropriate material at all. But, the class was scheduled to run for 12 weeks or so, and they were paying me at a time when those temp check were spread pretty thin. So I improvised. I improvised every semester for the next three or four years. It was a good experience. One of my students was Eddie Piskor, who has since gone on to a career as a professional comics artist. He has worked with Harvey Pekar on American Splendor, The Beats and Macedonia. He has created his own series of graphic novels called Wizzywig, and did the character design for the Cartoon Network Adult Swim series Mongo Wrestling Alliance. I'm incredibly proud of Ed, and happy that now he is an adult we have developed a friendship.

Anyway, back to the Xeric experience...

The size we had published the mini-comics was proportional to the magazine format we wanted, so we really didn't need to change the art (that was planned from the beginning for just this reason). We planed on using the first two stories we had published, You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and Wild Universe for the Xeric issue. It would have been easy to simply use the already finished pages. But no, we had to make life difficult for ourselves. By this time it had been a year or two since we had drawn that minis and we knew we were better artists. So we redrew the entire first story. When that was done we redrew the entire second story.

Madness!

But it was worth it. We really were better artists the second time around. We didn't change the layouts or page design or elements of the storytelling at all, but Fred re-penciled and re-lettered, and I re-inked every bloody page. If you compare the two versions side-by-side you can see the difference. We can, anyway. We added a couple of new intro pages, as well as a couple of chapter headers, wrote an editorial, designed and produced the front and back covers and we were ready to go.

While we were doing that we were also doing the business end of things. We wrote to the distributors again to see exactly what we needed to do to solicit a comic through them. There were very specific guidelines from each company. In the end I believe we were carried by four distributors: Diamond, Capitol City, Heroes World, and Styx Publications, a Canadian distributor. Diamond was the least helpful of them all. The others sent very professional packets of info to us with everything we needed to do business with them. Diamond returned our original letter with brief answers to our questions hastily scribbled in the margins. As a result our info got to Diamond a couple of days after their deadline (which they hadn't bothered to tell us). Were still included in the catalog, but were in the “other comics” section in the back instead of an alphabetical by company listing in the main part of the book. Capitol City and Heroes World both hooked us up. At both companies someone on staff really took a liking to the packet we sent them. Not only was our listing in the main catalog but in both we received little promo boxes as one of their Indy picks for the month.

Styx solicitation page.

This has the solicitation for issue #2 as well, which makes me think

we solicited through them a little later than the others.

Heroes World solicitation.

Diamond solicitation.

Capitol City solicitation.

At the same time, Comics Buyers Guide was running sample pages of indy comics in their weekly paper. We sent the entire first story and they printed it. I have to believe that got us some notice and sales.

Finally, we sent it to the printer. It hit the comics shops in June of 1993 (it was drastically overshadowed by the same-day release of the first Batman/Grendel crossover by Matt Wagner). The Xeric Foundation paid all of the bills and we got to keep the profits from whatever we sold.

You can read the entire issue at Drunk Duck, as well as see a whole bunch of other Grey Legacy related artwork.

We didn't exactly light the 90's on fire. If you know anything about the comics scene in 1993 you know that small press, black and white books from unknown creators was not what was hot at the time (Jeff Smith's Bone notwithstanding). We weren't Spawn or Youngblood, and we hadn't killed Superman in our pages. Our book, while I believe in it, was never going to be the biggest thing in the comics market, but man did we pick a bad year to be Alternative.

We did signings at several local comics shops, including my current place of employment, Phantom of the Attic. We appeared there with artist Steve Lieber who was drawing Hawkman at DC at the time. He's done a ton of stuff since, including the art on the comic Whiteout which became a movie. We did a few conventions, this time with an actual book in our hands. We met Wayno (he was in Wavemakers with us) at a Pittsburgh Con and discovered he lived here too (I still see Wayno on a fairly regular basis at comics events). In 1994 we were among the dozen or so publishers at the very first Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, along with Dave Sim, Steve Bissette and a small handful of others. SPX still exists. The last time I went there were dozens and dozens of publishers represented (take a look at this year's enormous guest list here).

We went to a huge Philadelphia convention to promote the book. We weren't official guests, just attendees, but we had a book and a lot of flyers, and we wanted to show it to some people. Peter Laird was there, so we got the chance to thank him in person. He told us he thought we had a “really good book.” Scott McCloud was a guest in Artist's Alley. This was the year that his acclaimed Understanding Comics was published. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for us, far more people were interested in getting their picture taken in the Spawn-Mobile than in talking to him about comics. So while the line for that wrapped around the convention center we pretty much had Scott all to ourselves. I had been a huge fan of his book Zot! and Scott was one of the creators who had always written back to us offering encouragement and support. While looking through Grey Legacy he paused at what was then, and is still, my favorite page from the book. He said, more to himself than to us, “Wow... this is really strong work.”

My knees went a little weak. We gave him a copy of the book, but he bought a t-shirt from us.

Given everything we had going against us we did pretty well. We made some money, some from the distributors, some from selling our books by hand, some through the mail. More importantly, we received a lot of feedback, most of it overwhelmingly positive.

We started production of issue #2. Two-thirds of it had appeared in the mini-comics. But, we were burnt out. One of the lessons we learned is that there was no way we could produce a book of that size on anything resembling a regular schedule. Fred and I, for the first time, started to get on each others nerves. The deadlines and pressure to produce, coupled with the need to promote our work, and the need to pay our bills (still working as temps and living check to check at this point, even with the bump in our finances from the comic), really started to show. I want to stress that even with this, he and I never really fell out or fought. The friendship was and is more important. He hit a fairly major artist's block that I know frustrated him far more than it did me. It took him a long time to work through it. He did though, and these days is working pretty regularly as an artist for Topps Trading Cards doing Wacky Packages and Garbage Pail Kids (check out his stuff here). I'm sure I brought my own issues to the table as well.

I'm sad to say Grey Legacy #2 has never seen the light of day. To save our sanity and our friendship (though, really, that part was never in question), we backed away from it. We still have the pages, and periodically we both talk about finally finishing it. I would like to, and so would he, and if the time is ever right it may happen. But it's not as important to me now as it was then.

In the meantime, we didn't come close to selling the entire print run of Grey Legacy #1. Someone else paid for it, and after the initial set-up costs of the printer additional copies were negligible. So we way over-printed. Fred and I both have unopened boxes of the first issue in our basements. Someday I'll figure out a way to sell them online that doesn't involve more envelopes and stamps than I want to deal with (though a SASE with cash in it would be a return to the starting point of all of this).

Other than random drawings here and there it would be the fall of 2009 before I produced another full comic book, this time on my own. I wasn't idle all those years. My art took a back seat to my writing.

More on that next time.