Singing And Crying

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta. Dunno about you, but I’ve turned all my news notifications off and I’ve gone back to just reading the morning and evening news. While reviving my fancy pens gifted at Xmases with gel refills. I’m going full rustic. You should see the notebook I just ordered. Let’s see what I’ve got here, while I wait for the parsnips to roast.

In this letter:

• Escaping the prison of the writing desk

• More weird shit with comics grids and compression

• The News

• Lights Out

OPERATIONS

THE EXPECTATION OF WRITING

Here’s the thing. You’ve got your writing space. Your office, desk, side table, lapboard, whatever. And you have to write things today. So you sit down, turn on your writing machine, and… nothing happens. Three hours later, nothing has continued to happen. It’s just not coming out today. It’s in your head, the story, but it’s not making its way to your fingers. Or maybe the piece is just a jumble of fragments and intents and it’s not coming together in any pleasing way.

Sitting down at your writing place creates an expectation of writing. And guess what? Sometimes you’re not going to meet that expectation. But it’s the expectation that keeps you pinned in your seat, doing nothing.

Arthur Conan Doyle had a writing shed at his home in East Sussex, but it seems he would occasionally bop over to Groombridge in Kent and get some work done in the Drunken Garden there. There used to be a structure on the Groombridge grounds filled with paraphernalia from his visits. I once sat at the desk and wrote a note there myself, just to try and make a connection.

Obviously you and I don’t have friends with manor houses and a thousand acres of garden.

The usual advice is to go for a walk. But not all of us have access to that. Nipping out for a stroll is a whole different task if you need to get the wheelchair or walking aids out. And then, if inspiration strikes, you have to find someplace where you can write it down. It’s awkward ask. But underlying it is the useful notion: change where you are. Get away from the place that asks its expectation of you.

Change places. Go and sit outside. Sit in a different room. Keep a notebook to hand but keep it closed. Don’t create expectation, just keep it handy in case something comes to you. You could always get a notes app for your phone, or use one that’s baked in, but I generally find them a bit janky. You don’t have to get a notes app, though. You’ve already got one on your phone. It’s called your email app. I send emails to myself all the time. The letter I sent about nine panel grid the other week? I threw most of that down in an email, in around thirty minutes of frantic thumb-typing while sitting downstairs with a cat in my lap.

Sometimes I go and sit outside, or in a different room. I’ll clear a room, clean the kitchen, do the dishes, maintain the garden a bit, read a book. Productive, but not bound to the demands of writing. Writing will creep in around the edges.

Everyone develops their own process from escaping the expectations of the writing desk on a crap day.

And don’t treat it like a defeat. 99.999% of us have those days. Listen to Haruki Murakami:

That’s most of us.

ORBITAL

PEAK GRID AND COMPRESSING LIKE JASON BOURNE

I thought about this right after I sent the last newsletter, so I want to slot it in here.

Comics gridwork imposes a steady beat, that can then explode into an action or climax beat by breaking the grid or kicking out its walls to make a big panel. Walt Simonson’s STAR SLAMMERS graphic novel from 1983 (same year as Frank Miller’s RONIN, I think) did something different.

Here’s the setup. The Star Slammers, a race of warriors with limited telepathic ability, are being hunted by a great space fleet of bastards, and the only way the Slammers can win is to attain the possibly mythical state of “Silvermind,” where their entire race becomes a fully telepathically connected gestalt mind. And here we go:

See that grid appear? A multipanel grid is the herald of a gestalt state. There has been pretty much no grid work in this book up to this point.

Boom. The grid is the climax.

The book proceeds in grid to the end of the battle, and then reverts to Simonson’s usual quirky off-grid panelling. An utterly unconventional approach to grid work that fully serves the story.

While I’m on the subject of Walt Simonson, I want to show you one of my favourite things, which he did early in his career with lovely Archie Goodwin, the first person in American publishing to hire me. This is from MANHUNTER, a sequence of 8-page pieces from 1974. Some of you have seen this before, but what the hell. Here’s the setup:

Now, they’ve only got eight pages, they have a bunch more story to get to after this event is resolved, and they’ve set up the situation, the environment, the players and got a big splash panel in there to capture your attention. Here we go:

Completely clear storytelling. See how you follow the three panels in the bottom left down, then follow the line of burning petrol to the explosion, which takes you to the sound effect above it, which is on the same horizonal line as the first line of dialogue in the final, bottom-right panel. That in itself is clever engineering.

Now consider how completely fucking unfilmable the top half of that page would be. And how that jumping sequence of cuts makes THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM look like it wasn’t trying hard enough. It’s a remarkably stylish and elegant piece of compression, and in times past I have used it as a tool to explain just how much you can do on a page, especially if you detach yourself to any notion of comics as cinematography and just embrace what the medium can do for you.

Now: THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast. Forthcoming 2024: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, FELL: FERAL CITY new printing. 2025: THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition

This is available as a print from the lordess.io store.

OTHER

LIGHTS OUT

The crowdfund campaign for LIGHTS OUT is still going. Contains new work from me and Kody Chamberlain, and a short by Dean Haspiel that is flat-out awards-worthy.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

• Are Traveler’s Company notebooks the stealth-wealth notebook?

• Or is it ROTERFADEN?

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Me again. Honestly, newslettering has probably never been easier for me than with Beehiiv.

And relax. As we used to say over here, keep calm and carry on. Sit by the light, listen to some music, and take care of yourself first. See you next week.

W