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.

Jerry Robinson

Tonight I was privileged to host an appearance/book signing at the Toonseum by legendary comics creator Jerry Robinson. For those of you who don't know, Mr. Robinson was one of the original artists on Batman starting in 1939. The creation of Batman is usually credited to Bob Kane (some smart legal wrangling on his part back then guaranteed that his name appeared on every appearance of the character), though most comics historians agree that Bill Finger was equally involved. Jerry was hired by Kane's studio as an artist and worked initially as an inker.

If that was all he had done he may have been forgotten, but Jerry contributed at least two elements to the Batman mythos that are essential. He designed the character of Robin and suggested the name (inspired by Robin Hood, not the red-breasted bird), and he created the Joker.

This is his original concept drawing.

There are many online resources that tell his story better than I can. A new book from Dark Horse called Jerry Robinson: Ambassador of Comics would be a great place to start.

In his lifetime Jerry has been a comic book artist, a book illustrator, a comic strip artist, and an editorial cartoonist. He has worked in advertising and fine art. He has formed and presided over several organizations of illustrators. He was a scholar of comics long before anyone else was taking this art form seriously. He published a book on the history of the comic strip in the 1970's (it has recently been reprinted with new sections added to update the content to the present, all written by Jerry). He has been a lifelong champion of creators rights, most notably in the 70's when he helped spearhead the effort to get money from DC Comics and Warner Brothers for the creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (two men he had worked with and been friends with for years).

Jerry is 89, and though a little frail, his mind is still sharp. He gave a slide presentation and regaled us with stories and anecdotes from the entire span of his career. I was supposed to interview him but I ended up asking very few questions. Though I asked him to elaborate on a couple of points for the most part he covered everything I wanted to ask in the course of his presentation. At the end, when I did ask him a couple of things he gave long, wonderful answers.

He was, quite simply, an amazing presence. Rarely do I find myself in the company of someone who awes me. I did tonight. His career, and more importantly his life, embodies so many of the things that have given my life meaning: art, writing, scholarship and integrity. It goes so far beyond his connection to Batman and any fanboy reaction I may have had (and I did feel a little fanboyish). At 89 he embodies a life well lived.

Thank you Joe and Rob and whoever else it was at the Toonseum who allowed me this honor and thought I would be the right person for the job. Thank you Jerry Robinson, for...

Thank you for living your life well, and sharing it with all of us through your art. You are an inspiration.

Alice Cooper – Generation Landslide

I saw Alice Cooper last Friday night at Stage AE in Pittsburgh. Alice is the first rock star I ever really got into, and the act I have seen most often in my life. I'm not sure what my first real exposure to Alice was. My parents were older and listened primarily to country music radio, so I wasn't hearing rock in my home very much (though we did watch a lot of variety shows like Ed Sullivan, so I did see a lot of them on TV). I remember a poster of Alice, a picture of him hanged, on the wall in the record section of our local G.C. Murphys department store in Waynesburg, PA. I can't imagine how this was allowed in our little provincial town, but the image was both shocking and alluring to my ten-year-old mind.

This was the inside of Alice's 1971 album Killer. This may have been the image on the poster. It seems likely, but I'm not sure.

The first Alice song I remember is School's Out (and to this day the opening riff makes me 12 again). I don't really remember hearing it on the radio, though I probably did. There was some sort of Greatest Hits of 1972 album in the band room at school and School's Out was on that. The only other song I remember being on this album was Summer Breeze by Seals and Croft. This was seventh grade for me, 1973 and 74, so it was a while after these songs came out.

I remember seeing him on the Phil Donahue Show around this same time (the internet tells me it was in 1975, so actually a little later than this). Donahue was a daytime talk show. In my memory the audience was full of middle-age to older women who were fairly hostile to Alice when he first came on stage. Alice was charming and well-spoken and by the end of the program he had won most of them over.

At the end of seventh grade we had some sort of end of the year school program. The chorus sang a couple of songs, the stage band performed, and somehow I talked the teacher into letting a couple of friends and me end the show with a lip-synched performance of School's Out. I played Alice, of course. I had applied Alice's signature makeup, wore a long, brown wig, and carried a large rubber snake. I stood in the back of the auditorium while the rest of the “band” set up. The principal, a man I would later have a few philosophical conflicts with, walked in and saw me. I don't think I imagined the look of disdain from him. When the opening riff blared through the sound system I ran down the aisle and leaped onto the stage, launching into my performance. Pretty silly, in retrospect, but I had fun and the kids loved it. There's a reason this song was, and still is, an anthem everyone relates to.

And no, there really aren't any pictures from this event that I have ever seen.

As I've said on this blog before, I'm pretty sure a lot of my early musical tastes were influenced by my love of comics. Alice is a prime example of this. He wasn't a superhero, but he wore costumes and was definitely a larger-than-life character. His stage shows were full of spectacle. Monsters and giant spiders and various instruments of death. He took the darkest elements of our psyche and put them on display with a sense of humor and incredible panache. He was an EC Horror comic come to life, and when Marvel Comics did an Alice Cooper issue of Marvel Premiere the cover was an overt tribute to EC.

Fred and I took the name of our comics partnership,

The Fragile Elite Studio, from a lyric on Alice's From The Inside album.

I bought the single of Only Women Bleed. It was getting a lot of radio play at the time, and showed a softer side of Alice. There was the obvious and taboo double meaning of the title (a little lost on me at the time... I was fairly naïve about the physical ways of women at the time), but wrapped up in the lyrics was an overt message about the nature of abuse. The b-side of this sensitive megahit was Cold Ethyl, a song about necrophilia. Coupling this with Only Women Bleed was an amazingly seditious act. The single sold in the millions to unsuspecting teens like me.

I was happy to see these two songs performed back-to-back last Friday.

I didn't see Alice live until 1986. Alice had taken a few years off to get his act together after a life-long battle with alcohol. He hit the road on his Constrictor tour, stronger than ever, and hasn't slowed down since.

I've seen him perform his giant, full-theatrical stage shows, and I've seen him stripped down with only a band and a few props. The Pittsburgh show was somewhere in between, but it didn't disappoint. He is still a charismatic performer, and while maybe not as shocking as he once was it pays to remember that the whole concept of rock theater began with him. I was thrilled when he and the rest of the original Alice Cooper Group band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this spring. It was long over due.

I've written a couple of articles about Alice back in my journalism days. Both are actually still available online. The first one originally appeared in In Pittsburgh. If I still have a copy it is buried in the deepest archives. Luckily, some Alice fan out there has seen fit to include it on a site dedicated to articles about Alice. You can read it here.

For awhile I wrote DVD reviews for an amazing site called Fulvue Drive-In. I reviewed Alice Cooper Live at Montreux. If you poke around the site you'll find a number of my articles on various things.

Alice and his songs allowed me to look at the dark things in life in a safe and fun way. But he also taught me lessons. For those of you who didn't immediately go read my old articles, the recap is this; Alice's shows are, in the tradition of classic Horror, morality plays. The character of Alice does horrible things on stage, but he is eventually caught and punished. Alice has died by Guillotine and by hanging and by electric chair thousands of times. He pays for his crimes. After this bloody climax to his show he reappears, usually dressed in white, reborn and purged of guilt. Alice is the son of a Methodist minister and a Christian. The extremes of his imagery is not about embracing the darkness in society, but exposing it, and by doing so, bringing it into the light where it hopefully cannot survive. Alice is a Rock and Roll villain, but by his ritual sacrifice at every performance gives us hope that good wins out in the end.

More Grey Legacy Promo Stuff

Back in the mini-comics day we released an 8 page introduction to the characters and setting of the Grey Legacy universe called the Grey Legacy Primer. None of this info was essential to understanding the comic, but it gave some insights into our plans and where we were going.

None of these are available for sale any longer.

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...

Magnus Rex

For those who don't know, Batman: Dark Knight Rises has been filming in Pittsburgh for the last couple of weeks. I went to the giant mass casting for extras in June but never received a phone call to be in the movie (though I did get an audition for a local commercial that I didn't plan on. I went, but didn't get the part).

Friday night at 9:30 the phone call came. They needed lots of extras for a long day of shooting at Heinz Field for one of the big scenes in the movie. They needed a stadium full of Gotham City football fans. So, I got up really early and spent the day on the set.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here (I signed a non-disclosure agreement, and I'm sure you can find images and other details all over the web from other people if you really want to. I didn't take any pictures. We were asked not to, though some have already cropped up, and I didn't even take a camera with me (my cheap cell phone doesn't even have one built in).

But here are a couple of other images, just for posterity. These are wrinkled and sweaty from spending the day in my pocket.

This is a 4-page promotional flyer we made to promote the Xeric-funded publication of Grey Legacy #1.

We repurposed this image a number of times. It was the cover of the first mini-comic. A color version of it served as the back cover of the actual comics. The characters on top were our main cast. The ones on the bottom pointed to stories and ideas that would eventually expand our universe. I mentioned that Brix was seen in the background of a single panel of the first story and completely forgot she was on the back cover in full color.

The last page was our vanity page of quotes and reviews.