Tweet

So, now I've got Twitter. I couldn't decide whether to sign up as "jakejesson" (so obvious!) or "redwinggreen7" (my old screenname - so awkward!), so I took a third option.

You can find me here: http://twitter.com/thedeadlymoose

Anyone else do le Twittre?

Update: I am now following Barack Obama, Neil Gaiman, and John Cleese. Of these Neil is by far the most interesting, as he appears to "tweet" constantly. Addict!

This... I ... Gwah?!

I just watched the newest Battlestar Galactica episode, and can't post about it here because it would be an outrage to subject random unsuspecting people stumbling on this blog to such spoilers...

Luckily, that's what LiveJournal is for, with its "lj-cuts" and such.

So, thoughts after the jump (warning: emoticons!):

(Click here to jump to the post!)

But They Didn't Mean To

(Warning: Analysis Post! If you don't like Reading Stuff (maybe Too Much) Into Things, then read no further!)

Open thread by Jennifer Kesler at the Hathor Legacy (or: "The Search For Good Female Characters"), asking the question: "Does intent matter?"

"Intent", in this case, refers to whether or not an author meant to stick elements that could be seen as racist/sexist/homophobic/etc into their work. (And if you've had any involvement in race/gender/queer/etc studies, such elements are more obvious, and if not, well, take my word - or Google's - word for it, they're common than you might think.) If the nonwhite people always die while the white people survive*, if women are all simpering weaklings next to male Adonises, if all protagonists ever are white males for no apparent reason, well, something might be off, some would say...

But wait! This is a book you like! Or a show you watch all the time! Racism? Sexism? You assholes! My show's/book's creator wouldn't entertain such a thing! In fact, he/she's a proud feminist, too!

There. You see? You were just talking about intent.

Yeah, that's how it goes. I've done it plenty myself, especially since certain shows I love can be particularly bad about this. (That's a post for another day, though.)

Kesler argues, in short:

...I believe a creator’s intent doesn’t matter. Sexism can occur without the presence of a sexist person, therefore we can talk about sexism without being asked to prove that the people behind the sexism are sexist.

My opinion, tangentially: I'd argue that always putting Straight White Males front and center is as much an artistic issue as it is a social one; I imagine (and Kesler acknowledges in her post) that many or most creators just do this because it doesn't occur to them to do otherwise - a lazy adherence to cliche more than anything else, and as such, something that ought not to be done so freakin' much.

Creator intent should matter to discussion in terms of the goal of pure social change; attacking a creator and branding them as 'racist' (or, I dunno, calling an avowed feminist creator a rapist) isn't gonna get them to listen to you. (This is certainly not Kesler's standpoint, but it's certainly out there.) In terms of pure analysis? It matters only a little, I suppose, and then only so much as you care about analyzing where the author is coming from as part of your critique. From an artistic standpoint, the same also holds true (though obviously with lower stakes, but more pertinent to the supposed point of my blog!).

* For your amusement value, also check out the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality over at TV Tropes. Sorted by age, sexual orientation, love interest (by genre), race, role, race, aesthetics, personality, flaws, 'virtues', species, and occupation! (Yes, I love my TV Tropes. Even if it does ruin your life.)

Dungeons and More Dungeons

I like 4th Edition.

There. I said it.

But I don't JUST like it. In fact, I think it's my favorite D&D edition so far.


If this is a WoW clone, then bring on the WoW clones.

Making Friends In Fiction

It may not surprise you to learn the following: people are more likely become friends with people they bump into often. Social psychology calls this propinquity, and it goes like this: if you're Bob's next door neighbor, and you pass each other all the time going in and out of the place, odds are you and Bob will become friends. If you and Bob have different schedules, it's less likely you'll become friends. If you and Bob live on different floors, but you both live near a stairway, you'll more likely become friends. You're more likely to stay friends if you're around each other more. Anyone who's moved has experienced the downside of this - that even if you're pretty close friends with someone, you may well fall out of touch if you don't easily run into each other often.

(A personal aside, for a moment: Of course, this has happened to me. I've just got off of Facebook (if you don't know what that is, type it in Google search or get off the Internet before you hurt yourself), after messaging a couple of relatively close friends from UC Berkeley, friends whom I have not spoken to in months. I graduated mere months ago; and already I've fallen out of touch with most of my friends there. Even those I was closest to - for the time being at least, I talk to them only sporadically.

Ah, guilt. It's so much fun.)

In fiction land, I rarely see this concept at work. Characters are more likely to become fast friends, and remain so barring a dramatic falling out) after bumping into each other once. This sounds perfectly logical - why wouldn't you want to be friends with someone you obviously get along with well? - but in Real Life, you may never really connect with that awesome person you met on the bus that one time, because even though you've got their phone number, you'll never run into them in your daily life.

It's an open question whether this is really a problem. For one fiction tends to depict the interesting rather than the everyday; 'propinquity' is firmly of the everyday. Becoming longtime friends with someone you hardly see happens in real life all the time; it's just that more of your friends than not will probably be people you run into all the time.

However, if/when this doesn't hold true for characters in fiction, I'm not sure anyone would notice. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this trope operating if I didn't watch so many sci-fi/fantasy ensemble shows, genres that aren't known for their psychological realism. In the TV series Angel, for instance - a series I love - sometimes you get the idea that Los Angeles is empty of all people except the main cast, demons/vampires/monsters, and victims. That goes for its parent show Buffy, too, depending on the season. These two shows are giants of the genre in the televised field.

So, how much should a fiction writer take propinquity into account? Is this the sort of thing that can safely - even happily - be ignored?

Existentialism, Dirt Cheap

(I wrote this post on June 16, 2008, about six months ago. I just rediscovered it, and decided to put it up, before it gets any older. Oh, Blogger, saving all my drafts - I love you so!

WARNING: The following post may contain trace amounts of whining, and jobless-college-graduate angst. Read at your own risk.)

***

"Life. Don't talk to me about life."
- Marvin the Paranoid Android (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams)

"What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action."
- Søren Kierkegaard

What does one type about in a blog, eh? I've had a blog of some form or another for years now, yet I don't believe I've quite got the hang of it. I'm starting to believe that perhaps worrying about this is, in itself, part of Missing The Point.

So I am, indeed, going to talk about life. After all, is this not a hallmark of my fledgling generation - the habit of laying bare everything for the entire world to see?

I am a college graduate, less than a month out of one of the most prestigious universities in the nation (I'm still wondering how I managed to sneak in!), and like so many other recent college graduates, I have not yet found a job.

It's not as if I didn't anticipate this uncomfortable scenario. I'd long realized I wanted to "create" - to write, to create art, to work on films - and I figured yes, but twenty billion other people would like to do the same thing, and a good percentage of those probably are getting degrees as we speak. Somehow, through hubris or - "something", I felt I had to be "different".

I chose to take a "unique" route through college; I designed my own course of study. I studied psychology, literature, anthropology, social theory, art, writing, ethnic/gender/queer studies... etcetera, etcetera. This selection of classes was chosen with the goal of finding out as much about how the world works - what makes people tick. I figured that would be my "edge".

So did it work?

(I left off the post here, amusingly enough. Since writing this, I've gained an excellent internship, but still no paying job. So, uh, we'll see, eh?)

Terminator, Genre Movies, and "Standards"

This may qualify as being a little late to the party (okay, it does qualify), but the hype machine behind the latest Terminator movie has been building, from action figures that spoil plot points to a shiny new movie trailer.

The first two Terminator films, particularly the second installment, are generally thought of as action films with brains behind them (okay, not as much the first one, though it's a solid film). I won't go into the plot behind them; in case you've been living under a rock for the past twenty-plus years, there's always Wikipedia. They're notable in particular for having one of the most well-drawn female characters this side of the science fiction ghetto, Sarah Connor. (Talk about a character arc, too - she goes from damsel-in-distress waitress to badass warrior hero in the space of two films. But I digress.)

After those two movies came Terminator 3, a 'meh' movie with some great action scenes, boring characters, mediocre writing, and the complete absence of the central character of the first two films, Sarah Connor. (She's killed off by cancer offscreen.)

After that came a still-running TV series, which, as if to thumb its nose at the mistakes of the third movie, calls itself "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles". Awkward name, but straight to the point, no? Ironically, recent episodes of the show have occasionally suffered from too much subtlety and experimental writing and a dearth of good action sequences. More on this in later posts, as I'm still following this show.

The newest Terminator movie, weirdly titled "Terminator: Salvation", is set in the post-apocalyptic future the first three movies lead up to. After the sheer disappointment of Terminator 3, exactly no one was interested. So the producers and director pulled what TV Tropes calls a "Cue Cullen", which is when the people involved in a blockbuster flick with bad buzz "bring out the one person that makes you go, 'Holy crap, this is going to be awesome.'" They cast Christian Bale, rare combination of Action Star and 'Real' Actor.

There was just one problem, which brings me to the point of this post, a problem I read all about in a months-old interview with pretentiously named director McG.

"Initially (Bale) told me to 'f**k right off.' He said it had to be about character, not explosions. He said, 'If you can get it too a place where it can be read on a stage like a play, with no action or special effects, then I'll do it.'

A few drafts later, Bale signed on.

I still have no idea whether or not "Terminator Salvation" will turn out to be either well-written or entertaining. Either way, this situation is an interesting sign of the times. Once upon a time, I hear tell, genre films only needed a cool idea and neat special effects (or the written equivalent, in plain ol' prose fiction land). That's still the case now, but standards are rising across the board - make no mistake, if Terminator Salvation is a success, it will be because people expect great things out of Bale, not because of the explosions in the trailers. I don't think it's a coincidence that two of the most popular sci-fi/action films of last year were Iron Man and The Dark Knight; Iron Man had a great director and a well-written and well-acted central character, and The Dark Knight... well, I hardly need to add to the critical gushing over that film, do I?

If this is becoming an era of higher standards for genre fiction, then I wholeheartedly embrace it. I love pretty special effects and spiffy fantastical ideas, but I love good plot, character and writing even more - and I hardly think I'm alone.

UPDATE: After watching Terminator Salvation, I have to wonder how bad McG's original drafts were if that was supposed to be a character-based script. I mean, I enjoyed the film on balance, but seriously.

On Wand Decay, Part Two

I was running through my old blog posts, wondering why I don't update more (and resolving to do so, once again), and I realized that back in July, I missed a fascinating comment by one Luke Maciak of Terminally Incoherent. My original post was questioning why Magic Items Of Magicness never break down in stories in the fantasy genre. Luke's response merits its own (if very, very late) post.

Luke points out:

I'd imagine that in a world where magic would actually exist an enchanted sword would sometimes need maintenance or recasting of said enhancement - especially after heavy use.

Most RPG's both pen and paper or computer based do have some restrictions on magic items that zap things, or cast spells themselves. Wands and staves usually have "charges" and once you drain them you either have to wait till they recharge or the item is simply spent and must be re-enchanted or discarded.

Additive or buffing items (like the Mighty Sword of +1 Strength) usually never get depleted however. They probably should.

There's an interesting counterpoint for these statements: since magic is itself imaginary, why does it have to follow a particular set of rules? Who are we to say that magic power requires maintainable? Some would argue, further, that magic doesn't need to seem real in fantasy fiction - after all, isn't that missing the point?

To me, it's a question of believability. Magic isn't real, of course. If an author wants to go for believability, created a feeling of this-could-really-exist, then drawing real-world parallels is more important. So a magic sword running low on batteries, so to speak, can be more believable than a magic sword that never runs out of power. Everything in our world is governed by rules - magic should be the same, to a certain extent. (All fiction bends real-world rules to serve the plot, as necessary)

The importance of believability depends highly on the story; in epic fantasy (along the lines of Lord of the Rings) treating magic from a perspective of realism is a bad idea, but in contemporary fantasy this is more important.

Luke comments further:

As for cast spells many systems require skill checks before casting and have miscast effects which work similar to "fumble" rules for physical skill checks.

In most games I played the duration of spells that can be cast by PC's is strictly defined and the caster must periodically renew the spell to keep it in action.

Spell 'durations' are something familiar to anyone who's played a fantasy videogame or tabletop role-playing game; they exist because strict boundaries on character power are required to make the game fun. (Fumble rules - rules for what happens when someone screws up casting an in-game spell - are there primarily for entertainment value.) This is a principle generally ignored in fantasy fiction itself, though; usually the writers just "handwave" how the magic powers of magicalness actually work. If someone is unaffected by a spell, for instance, it's because he or she is "too powerful". If someone fails to accomplish something with magic, it's because they "weren't powerful" enough".

Certain fiction series attempt to establish "power levels" for characters, which are inevitably fudged or ignored soon afterwards. Notably, in books based on RPGs, rules for spells are generally ignored as convenient for the plot.

I've yet to see an effective set of (non-mystical) rules governing magic outside of fantasy games. The closest we get is the Midichlorian Explanation (also referred to as Doing In The Wizard - warning, clicking that link may ruin your life), where the question of Where Magic Comes From is answered using technobabble, science fiction style. All this usually does is annoy readers/viewers (see fan reaction to the new Star Wars movies explaining that the Force comes from "midichlorians"), and rarely affects how magic is used in the story anyway.

Doomy Doom Doom

Now that we know, thanks to the Pope, that nontraditional sex - gay or non-procreative, for instance - is destroying mankind (and also the rain forests), David Isaak tells us all exactly how much ecological damage we can expect to do with the rampant non-procreative sex we all may or may not be having.

...On a completely unrelated note, I cannot stop listening to "Super Trouper" as sung by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, a film which I've not even seen completely. My family's been playing it in the background for the last few days, and... well, draw your own conclusions. (And now, thanks to Wikipedia, I now know more about 70's-80's "pop supergroups" than I ever expected to...)

It's 2009!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Boom De Yada, Boom De Yada

Tomorrow is Election Day, and also the close of the most intense, twisty, weird, entertaining and dreadful presidential campaigns... possibly ever. People are saying we're on the verge of a turning point in our history. Maybe we are, or maybe it's all hyperbole. But no matter what happens, remember this...

Not Schizophrenia At All

I've spent the past few days alternately working on job hunting, and writing. I ended up writing three completely distinct opening chapters for three completely distinct novels. The word "schizophrenic" seems to be one that comes up a bit when I mention this. But as I mentioned in my last post, I am totally not schizophrenic.

Totally not. Not even a little.

Really.

Somehow, all three of these chapters ended up smack dab in the fantasy genre, more or less. Clearly I've been immersed in nerd culture for far too long. Or just the right amount of time, depending on your perspective.

I've got plenty of short story ideas that are perfectly Mainstream and Literary and have nothing to do with the fantasy genre, but somehow all my more novelistic ideas tend to be either fantasy, sci-fi, or a strange mix of the two. (Okay, not really so strange: it stopped being strange when Star Wars did it. But still, Star Wars never had elves, and it didn't have real honest to goodness dragons.) This may say something deep and insightful about my personality, or it may just be how my mental processes happen to be going at the time.

Just so long as I don't become one of those sf/f writers who uses the genre to disguise the fact that they had shitty plots and no real characters at all...

Anyway. Back to job-hunting.

Schizophrenia

Not so long ago, I was teaching a DeCal class at UC Berkeley on comics. (DeCal classes are student-run classes, one of the many unique features of UC Berkeley. Link!) It was the first lecture of the semester, which is always the most awkward because no one knows you and you don't know them, and half the people in there are ambivalent about showing up anyway and will probably drop the class by next session.

I gave a very rambly lecture on the history of comics. Somewhere in there I mixed up my topics; silver ages and bronze ages tend to twist your tongue when you aren't sleeping much. (Fact: UC college students never sleep much.) I looked across the classroom at confused faces.

"Sorry for the schizophrenic lecture," I said, or something about that. Then I ad-libbed a Humorous Joke to Defuse the Situation. "It's because I'm ... well ... schizophrenic," I deadpanned.

Silence. Students gave confused glances at each other while I blithely leaped to the next topic. I didn't even realize the significance of the confused glances until someone asked me after class: "Are you really schizophrenic?"

"No!" I replied, astonished.

"Because you said you were, and everyone thought you were serious..."

So let me just clarify: I am not schizophrenic. Schizophrenia, according to the infallible Wikipedia, is "a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality" which "most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction." While I'm sure that fits most people who might read blogs like this one (har, har), I've never experienced an auditory hallucination (that's like visual hallucination, but with your ears), my paranoid and bizarre delusions are confined to the imaginary people who live inside my head, and I prefer to think of my speech and thinking as not so much "disorganized" as "creatively reorganized".

I ... er, just thought I'd mention.

Was I supposed to be doing something? I can't remember. Uh-oh.

I Keep Wanting To Call It "The Axe"

I just finished reading Donald Westlake's The Ax, one of my many acquisitions from Berkeley's mah-vel-ous used book stores. The book's the kind of piece of work people describe as "hard-hitting"; it's about a guy who gets downsized right out the door from his company, can't get a new job, and finally finds his dream job after getting increasingly desparate over a couple years. The problem is that someone else already has his dream job. Our narrator decides that the solution is to kill that someone else - but first, he's got to kill the other people on the market for a job who have a better chance of getting his dream job than him.

It's a good book, very tightly plotted - in non-buzzword lingo, the story gets right to the point - and it really is difficult to stop reading once you've started. Unless you've got a repulsion for rooting for an effective serial killer. I did wonder why, on the Character side of things, would someone like this think to resort to killing. The fact that he kills is reasonable (as much as it can be) within the story's context, but it's not super clear what gave him that idea in the first place. It's not like crazy murderous ideas don't happen to Joe Average Ordinary Person, but we tend to bend under the iron hand of Social Tradition and put those naughty thoughts right out of our minds. Then again, worrying about this is kind of missing the point. The book's clearly in the realm of social satire, in all its bitter pointedness. The ending is rather surprising in that he neither gets caught nor 'redeemed' in the way these tales usually go. And being surprising is always a plus.

I've got a question, though: [SPOILER ALERT!] Would someone like this really THINK to resort to killing - and do it so well?

Square Peg, Meet Round Hole

I hate academic writing. I loathe it. I'm in love with the colloquial. I like swearing for effect. That's a good way to get university teachers to hate you. Don't get me wrong - I love academic theory, and I'm a huge nerd. I just hate the writing. Why, oh why, must good theory be tainted by practices like using twenty billion words where one would suffice?

Of course, I also hate academic writing because I'm not very good at it. When I'm forced to do it enough, I find myself developing new and interesting writing problems to overcome. For example, a strong inclination towards the practice of utilizing an egregious number of unintelligibly lengthy phrases to - oh dear, there I go again. I meant to say, I find myself using too many words to explain things. Hell, I've done that on this very blog. I'm probably doing it now!

I just wrote two 30-page papers on a couple subjects I find fascinating: a senior thesis on nontraditional stories in contemporary graphic novels ('comics', if you will), and how queer sexuality is dealt with in fantasy fiction. I keep looking them over and thinking about how much more I'd like them if I'd written them as blog posts. True, there's no way I would've spent hours, days, weeks on research on a blog post, but still...

On a side note, I've discovered the Blogger saves all your drafts. All of them. Ever. Which means that I officially love Blogger, because I'm constantly doing about 500 things at once, and often can't just sit down and write a journal post all in one go. Problem solved! Maybe.

Now Anticipating Co-Writers' Block

My sister text-messaged me a couple weeks ago with a message that said, basically, that "We need to get together sometime and right a book" about our childhood. (She meant "write", in case I needed to point that out.) This isn't a new idea; in fact, my brothers and sisters and I have been telling each other that for years now. Looking at the text message, I got the distinct feeling that the time, as they say, had come.

Pretentious? Presumptious? Everyone's had a childhood, right? Why is ours so book-worthy? Allow me to present a short version of the case, in bullet point form:

• There are nine children in my family. (I'm the oldest.)
• My father and mother were religious fundamentalists (well, are, though my mother's lightened up since then - I'm betting the bitter pill of getting an outside-of-religious-law divorce helped) who decided the best solution to the Dangers of the Heathen World was to ensure that we had as little contact as possible with it.
• I was twelve before I met another human being close to my age. Before this, the number of children we'd previously met was four, not counting a couple cousins, who we saw about once a year.
• Until I was twelve, none of us had a life outside our home. We were homeschooled, knew no outsiders, and weren't allowed into the front yard. (No fences to shield us from neighborly eyes.)
• My father developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder over the course of the years, making our strange situation even stranger. We led a strange, ritualistic life within the four walls of our home - not counting the years we were homeless. One juicy detail: In the last years, our house itself was wired with cameras!
• Everything, of course, went dramatically to shit, in the kind of story that sounds like you'd made it up If It Hadn't Really Happened. (Adding drama: the fact that most of this story takes place smack dab in the middle of Orange County, for an added dose of "It Could Happen Here"!)
• More, uglier details that are a little too unpleasant for this particular blog post, but very dramatic nonetheless.
• And, of course, there's the dramatic story of how we were introduced to The Outside World, and thereafter incorporated ourselves into it.

I've graduated from Berkeley this very week, and I'll be living down in Orange County again after two years, where the rest of my family still lives. Perfect timing. And, as for writing a book... hey, I'm already writing a book! I've taken writing workshops, I can edit, my style is marginally passable (read: no longer makes readers want to claw their eyes out).

I won't be writing it alone, though, even if I can form the skeleton of the book. The three oldest of our family were the most affected by it, so we'll write the majority of the book. And the rest of the family might contribute. (Not all of them are old enough to even remember the crazy years; I'm 23, and we're all two years apart - do the math.) We'll see how that goes!

An interesting thought: Since our names all begin with J, that could make an interesting "by" line: "J. Jesson, J. Jesson, and J. Jesson, with contributions by J. Jesson and J. Jesson. Special thanks to: J. Jesson, J. Jesson, J. Jesson, and J. Jesson." Of course, my mother's initials are C. Murphy, which screws the whole thing up, but what can ya do?

My current thorny questions number two:

1. Shall we use our real names? Or pseudonyms? (I plan to use my real name, but I'm not sure about everyone else involved.) If real names, then do we change the names of our brothers and sisters, particularly the ones not writing this or old enough to understand? (Using middle names would screw up the whole "J" theme.) What about - and here's a thorny question - our semi-estranged father?

and 2. What do we call the book?

Perhaps I should read other memoirs - I'm sure others of this kind exist - and see how they handle this...

Why Don't Wands Break Down?

From the Turkey City Lexicon (an entertaining dictionary of writing terms which I've run into several times in the past, most recently via David Isaak's blog):

• AM/FM
  Engineer's term distinguishing the inevitable clunky real-world faultiness of "Actual Machines" from the power-fantasy techno-dreams of "Fucking Magic.

I'm pretty sure this bit of the lexicon refers to the habit of certain sci-fi books to feature Futuristic Technology that never fucks up, always acts perfectly. In essence, it's Magic.

But hey, why should Fucking Magic always work so perfectly, anyway? In fiction I've read, guns jam. Cars break down. Pipes get clogged, tires go flat, doors creak, metal rusts. But I can't remember the last time I read about a magic item suffering the effects of wear and tear. This is especially noticeable in Aar Pee Gees (role-playing games) that bother to implement the effects of slamming a sword into giant rats and creepy fucking monsters but work perfectly if you're using that sword to zap something with frost magic. Even if it's completely broken (unusable, in game terms). Magic mechanics are usually limited to 'mana' or 'magicka' bars; in other words, treating magic power like batteries. (Or, as in D&D, you get a limited number of 'spell slots'.)

Outside of the RPG world, in fiction, these limitations are usually ignored. Even the books based on D&D rarely if ever pay attention to 'spells per day'. (I admit I've not read many of these books, as they're often... well, terrible.)

In the world of books, the last time I remember seeing magic breakdown appear was the second Harry Potter book, where a character breaks his wand, and it spends the rest of the book making spells rebound, blowing bubbles and making someone barf slugs for a couple hours. But this wasn't wear and tear, note, it was the result of being snapped in half. I can't think of an instance where a wand stopped working because of, say, a faulty magic spark plug.

Now, sure, it would be a little silly if Sauron's One Ring ran out of battery power if worn too long, but what about the many, many modern fictive magic worlds that are less Epic and Mythic and more down-to-earth? Something to dump in the idea pool, at least...

A Minor Euphoria

I just rewrote the first scene of the novel manuscript I’ve been working on for three and a half years now, not counting the last year and a half in which I barely touched it. (Stopped at page 130.) I’ve rewritten this scene a billion times, and never liked it. I’ve kept coming back to it, over and over, and it was always painful.

This time, though, it was a breeze. I mean, it just flew onto the page, and I’m completely happy with it. ‘Course, I may reread it tomorrow and hate it, but for now, I’m a little euphoric.

The difference, I think, is that I now “know” the character, after having the whole thing in the back of my mind for that break. Her character makes more sense to me. I have a basic idea of her history. To be honest that’s what I never bothered to do with her, through the two years I workshopped the manuscript – give her a life. She was based off of a strong idea I had of her in a moment of time, over halfway through the novel’s story. I figured rewinding her wouldn’t be a problem. It was.

How much does one need to know about their characters? Some people have recommended that you write little biographies, fill out forms with details. But those feel artificial and when I try them, they tend to come off as unreal. Or stuff that really doesn’t matter to the character. But then, knowing some of the most mundane details about a fictional (or real) person’s life can be terribly illuminating. So what do you need to know?

Some authors, I'm told, just stick a character into a scene and they click, click, click. They don’t know where these characters come from and don’t care. What’s up with that? What’s going on here?

An addendum: It occurs to me that through all the times I painfully rewrote this scene, I cared more about the situation than the character. Until now, when I found a lot of it was extraneous – the scene is now under 6 pages. (Some version pushed 20.) Was I just making her jump through hoops? Was that the problem?

New Characters

The first scene you write with a new character (or, heaven forbid, new characters) is probably going to be shit. I never seem to realize that.

This Post Is Not As Long As The Last One (A Webcomic Primer, Part II)

...but the title is.

Something I should have mentioned in the Webcomic Primer two posts ago were two specific, significant differences between print comics and webcomics.

One: "Infinite Canvas". It's said that the first thing done with a form of new media is try to approximate what is done in the old media. A good example would be the first Bibles, printed to look like handwritten manuscripts. Another good example would be the adherence of most webcomics to the page or strip format. After all, they don't need to fit on pages, or anything for that matter! The computer screen is an infinite canvas, and webcomics can be of any shape, size, or form. But old habits die hard. (If you want to see some good examples of 'infinite canvas', go check out the website of the man who coined the term, Scott McCloud.)

You wanna know the real reason webcomics look like "real" comics, though? Most webcomic authors really want to be published in print, eventually. You can tell because most of the popular webcomics are.

Two: Webcomics are typically published one page, one strip at a time. Some (who are crazy) have daily update schedules: readers get a page a day! More common is the Monday/Wednesday/Friday format. I'm not sure why that is, exactly; maybe the acronym works out better. (Those two "T" days and the two "S" days are excluded.) Other, lazier artists (like me) use a weekly update schedule. Again for unknown reasons, the day is usually Monday. (Like mine.)

And that's how Internet comics are different from comics in 'the real world'. If you want to learn how the rest of the Internet is different from 'the real world', I can't help you. Go watch this.

Oh, and yesterday was Monday. Go read my comic.