UPDATING OCCASIONALLY (FOR NOW)

One thought on “544 – Hanker For A Hunker

  1. Dr. Norman (not a real doctor)

    That feels like my life with my eyes these days …
    “These goggles don’t got no magnification on ’em”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

 

544 – Hanker For A Hunker

We'll be at Pasadena Comic-Con this coming Saturday, May 24th. It usually happens in January but was delayed due to the wildfires since the Convention Center ended up being a refuge for the displaced -- fair enough considering our own close call with being displaced!

We should be at D2 in the Main Ballroom section, which is in light pink, under Clint & Dawn Wolf.

https://pasadenacomiccon.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/pmc-layout-colored-2024-sm.jpg

Keeping a lid on your “voice”…

It feels like that to be an artist (which includes writers, yes) is to be constantly second-guessing yourself. To be an artist producing something for others is to be constantly second-guessing yourself but also forging ahead with it anyhow because otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere. To be producing art long-term is to eventually be wondering about that saying of either dying a hero or living long enough to see yourself become the villain. All those sins and pet peeves that drive you crazy when you’re a consumer… can you truly say you’ve avoided them now that you’re on the production side? Would you even be aware if you had slipped? If you do notice, are you guilty about it or (perhaps worst of all) do you now just shrug your shoulders and embrace the dark side? These are the kinds of thoughts that… well, they don’t keep me up at night, and perhaps that’s it’s own sign of degeneration. But I still get them while writing. For instance, one thing that can annoy me is if the author’s voice starts coming through the mouths of every one of their characters in a “samey” manner. Don’t get me wrong, an author’s work should have some mark of style to it, but omnipresent quippiness in dialogue can get old fast. And yet here I am recently wondering if the words coming out of Whitecloud are true to her or is she no different than Rosa’s teasing of Frank way back when? Is Frank himself having the occasional wordy (or at least semi-wordy) retort a betrayal of his character? Basically, am I shoving my own words into their mouths, chortling at my cleverness at the expense of consistency and verisimilitude? But the story mustn’t grind to a halt from artistic paralysis, so eventually the words have to get published. A lot of times it helps to set them down in a draft, walk away and come back later and see how it reads, and if it doesn’t make me cringe I feel better about it. And then there are times I still fret right up to the moment I have the comic locked and loaded. Sometimes beyond that. But hey, Sturgeon’s Law says 90 percent of it is crap anyhow. I’ll content myself with feeling skilled at least 10 percent of the time.