Category: creativity

Route 3: The Movie

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Remember when Wizard Magazine would do their dream movie casting feature for comic book movies? It was one of the sections of the magazine that I honestly got hyped about, with the hope that these flicks might one day see the light of day.

Sure, these features were probably little more than staff writers having their chance to play a little bit of fantasy casting. But at the time, when casting news wasn’t available at the drop of a dime, this was a big thing for comic book fans like myself.

So following in the footsteps of Wizard Magazine, and my fellow Tessera blogger J. Edward Neill, I’ve decided to do my own fantasy movie casting for my creator owned project, “Route 3”.
Route 3 Logo

 

These are the actors and actresses that immediately jump to mind when I think of the “dramatis persone” of the epic tale of Sean Anderson and company. As the story expands in future issues, I’ll come back and add more actors and actresses.

But for now, think of this as my big Comic Con announcement for the casting of next summer’s blockbuster, “Route 3”.

 

Sean 3

Sean Anderson: For our main protagonist, it’d be a toss up between Donald Glover (“Community”) and  Tyler James Williams (“Everybody Hates Chris”)  I know Sean’s age would have to be adjusted for the sake of the flick in Glover’s case (maybe make him a senior in high school), but heck, if Toby McGuire can play a high school student in his early 30’s, why not Glover? Childish-Gambino

 

Williams would also make a great Sean Anderson, as we’ve already seen him play a down on his luck teen in Chris Rock’s “Everybody Hates Chris”. Add to this, such roles in “Dear White People” and an upcoming stint in “The Walking Dead” I think Williams could put on an awesome performance.

Tyler+James+Williams+bLQBrZrrfnLm

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sean 2

 

316 2316: If Marvel or Star Wars won’t have him, “Serenity’s” scene stealing actor, Chiwetel Ejiofor, can join the Route 3 ranks as Sean’s main nemesis.

 

 

CE1I loved this guy in “Serenity”, and “Inside Man”, and would love to see him do his thing in this epic flick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Richard Nathenson: Adding to the list of Sean’s list of antagonists, comes the puppet master himself, Richard Richard Nathenson 2Nathenson. He would be played by Neal McDonough. McDonough is a guy that you’ve seen in just about everything including “Terrier’s”, “Captain America: The First Avenger”, “Walking Tall”, and “Minority Report”.

 

Neil M

 

 

 

 

He can bring definitely bring it when playing the Washington D.C. power broker, who makes Sean’s life a living hell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Punching

Charles Reily: No one, and I mean nooooo one would fit this role better than Mr. Liam Neeson (I almost pulled a Key & Peele and called him Neesons). Neeson would be able to bring the kick-assery of “Taken”, with the TAKEN 2dramatic gravitas of “Schindler’s List” to the mysterious, and lethal figure at the heart of Sean’s tale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Samie 1

Samie: Sean’s potential love interest would be played by the talented KeKe Palmer. With such credits as “Akeelah and The Bee”, and “Grey’s Anatomy” she’d be a perfect fit for the Route 3 universe. Just imagine this scene between Palmer and Williams. Box office gold.

 

 

KeKe Palme

 

Khenan & Salma: Rounding out 316’s covert ops force would be Malcolm Jamal-Warner and Michelle Rodgriguez. Sure, most folks remember Malcolm Jamal-Warner from “The Cosby Show”, as Theo Huxtable. But K S 1he had a great leading role in the post-apocalyptic television series “Jeremiah”, and other roles in “ Community”, “Sons of Anarchy”, and even “Dexter”.

Michelle Rodriguez personifies bad-assness in everything she does. “Resident Evil”.  “Girlfight”. “SWAT”. “Avatar”. “The Fast and The Furious” series. You’d be hard pressed to find a more epic action movie actress than Ms. Rodriguez.

 

MJW

 

MR2

Khenan and Salma 1

 

 

Larry Anderson:  Idris Elba. “Pacific Rim”. “The Wire”. “Luther.” “Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom”. “Thor.” Lenny 2Dude is a talented, talented, ta-len-ted actor, and he’d be able to bring a set of supreme acting chops to “Route 3”, playing Sean’s father.

 

 

Idris

 

 

Shane 1

Shane Watkins: The head of the Watkins drug cartel, Shane would be played by who I think would be a wild card to most: Dule’ Hill (“Psych”, “The West Wing”).

Hill was a hilarious straight man on “Psych”, but it was on “The West Wing” as Charlie Young where his dramatic acting skills shone. I think he’d be able to pull off the business minded, ruthless antagonist who gets caught in the wake of the epic “Route 3” story.

 

DE2

So Hollywood, look how easy I just made your job. I’ve done the casting, and have given you a template for a script.

Just need you to cut a check so we can make some magic.

P.S If you want to read the book before seeing the potential movie, head here to pick up the current three issues of Route 3.

Sean 1

Of Dreams and Steam… and Great Engines of Power

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Last week’s blog made mention of how little moments can change a direction for a person. Something small can knock you onto a completely different course than anything you expected even an hour earlier. This is another one of those stories.

BeyondtheGate

A few months ago I decided to participate in a Kickstarter campaign. Not the strangest thing to do, but the result of that one act has allowed me to interact with a bunch of writers that I might never have had the chance to do. It has garnered me a couple of interviews, an appearance on a podcast, and an appearance in an anthology released yesterday. If you haven’t checked out my post from Tuesday, you can read a sample of my story… and best of all, the anthology is free at most places (and eventually will be on Amazon as well). My blog from yesterday is here.

That most recent interview is here.

One of the outcomes of the Kickstarter (which was watching the Self Publishing Podcast guys write a book from start to finish in 30 days) was that the world they were creating during June would be an open source world. Which meant that anyone could write in the world and not have to worry about sending money to someone else. That Kickstarter became The Dream Engine…

And with that, the anthology became this thing. Slowly, over the next month as we waited for the finished product, gears shifted into motion. Authors began to say that they’d like to join in and submit something. I mean, the chance to have your work appear in something else is never a bad thing. Maybe one person reads your short and checks out the rest of your work. You just never know.

So I signed up, not having a clue at all as to what I might be writing about. And then the book was released and I started reading The Dream Engine hoping that something would spark inside my mind. Something would direct me to explore it. I needed something to inspire me.

And the days crept by, and I kept reading, and while I was enjoying the book I still had no idea what I could write about. What might fit in the world they were weaving. I believe I was 2/3 of the way through the book when that lightning finally struck. Something finally triggered. Suddenly I had ideas.

Notes

This is what happens when I’m not near a computer and I need to get the information from my brain before I lose it. This is the part of writing that I wish I could bottle. I wish that I could figure out exactly what the switch is in my brain that allows me to – out of nowhere – come up with an idea that was almost… maybe 90% there. I knew the various beats, I knew the two main characters and what their voices were like, and I even knew why I was writing the story.

You see, in the Dream Engine, the pilots of Altera are rock stars. They get to see the world and when they return to a city they always have more than their share of tales about what they had seen. They might be complete lies or they might be the truth, but that’s why you listen… they are the original water cooler talk where you could dissect their stories and try to figure out where the lie begins and the truth ends.

And that’s a question that might be worth answering… why do these Ruddermouths tell these stories?

I think it took me about 3 days to actually write the short. Then one more day for some self-editing. However, that wasn’t the end of it. All the writers were asked to swap their stories with another writer and do an editing pass. Then take those comments, tweak, overhaul, whatever needs to be done on the stories. Again, at that point  we had an editor who looked at all the stories and gave her notes. Then it would be onto our Beta Reader for the project with that last second look at things and make sure that nothing slipped through that might have been confusing on the reader’s side of things.

What was amazing about this project is how people came together to create this something out of nothing. From Eric Pierce wrangling all of us in one direction, to Amy Schubert providing the free editing, to Kayla Halleur doing that last minute reading… I was reminded how so many times as writers and artists… we’re alone, banging on the keys at 2 in the morning. And how lonely that can sometimes be. Yet this project was a true meeting of people to contribute to something that had inspired them in some way. From various countries and backgrounds, all working towards a singular goal.

And yesterday saw it finally come out. I’m happy to have been able to contribute something to it.

If you haven’t already checked it out, it is available free at most bookstores, and will be free on Amazon soon enough.

Amazon | Apple | Nook (Barnes & Noble) | Page Foundry  | Kobo

To learn more about The Dream Engine and the various books being written in the world, check out Blunderbuss World.

To learn more about the writers of The Dream Engine… the guys that started it all, check out Sterling and Stone.

***

John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program.

His second novel, Hollow Empire, is now complete. Each episode is only $0.99. But you can go ahead and purchase the full novel (all 6 episodes) right now for $4.99 with the above link!

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.

 

It’s the Little Things

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Hunter and DrusillaLife in the Makepeace clan is better than where it was a month ago, but not where I’d like it yet. This means I’m still following Hunter to the litter box room, just not quite as often, to ensure things are going smoothly (<- worse pun ever). It also means life is slowly returning to normal. Hunter has begun playing with Drusilla. He hasn’t felt like playing for over a month. Our frisky, lovable boy is making a comeback.

This is when reality taps me on the shoulder. It’s November. Two months have passed since Dragon Con. On the outside, I’m pushing forward, getting things done. On the inside, I’m slightly panicked and a little weary. What have been doing all this time besides caring for Hunter?

  • Working on a big commission (it’s in the final stages)
  • I put together a GoFundMe campaign to help with Hunter’s Vet bills.
  • I’ve been sketching pets as part of the GoFundMe campaign.
  • Helped my daughter put together a portfolio and helped her prepare for an interview for the Governor’s Honors Program.
  • I helped reseed our backyard and then managed the daily watering of baby grass.
  • I blogged for Tessera weekly.
  • I blogged twice weekly here.
  • I tried to blog weekly here.
  • I blogged monthly here.
  • Posting daily here.
  • I create the exhibit banners each month here.
  • Shipping orders from my Etsy shop.
  • Photographing my framed originals from Dragon Con.
  • Planning next year’s conventions. I’m going to be the Jordan Con Art Show!
  • Planning my next painting projects.
  • Revamping my website because it wouldn’t behave.
  • Catching up on every episode of One Fantastic Week.
  • I escaped from a room with a zombie. Seriously.

Should I go on? I could probably add more to this list… You get the idea. Some of these things are stress relievers and others are a bit draining. One turned out to be just what I needed. My creative friend Jane Gould was one of the generous contributors to my GoFundMe Campaign. Jane doesn’t have a pet, so she let me have free reign. However, she did plant a seed–dragon eye.

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Thanks for lifting my spirits, Jane! The little things are often the best remedy.

Bookmarks for the Fantasy Artist Part I

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I’m a tab collector. As of this minute I have twenty-seven tabs open in Google Chrome (including this one). They range from Kickstarter campaigns to Art Show info for various conventions. Some of these tabs have been open for more than week because they need somewhat immediate attention and I don’t want them to get lost in my bookmarks. Others I will bookmark for later. I have a lot of bookmarks, more like a museum worth. I imagine I’m not the only creative person with a bookmarks folder like this one–folders within folders.

My Library of Bookmarks

 

Yeah. I might have a problem. At least it’s organized (for the most part). I thought I’d share some of my most valuable bookmarks in an on going (no where near regular) blog series. For this first post I’m going to share one of my smaller folders.

Informative BlogsInformative Blogs

I don’t follow a lot of Art or Fantasy/SciFi Illustration blogs. If I followed all of them I’d spend all my time reading blogs instead of painting. Some of these I’m subscribed to and others I rely on either myself to check them or Facebook to let me know there’s new content. Two of the sites I have bookmarked are open in my browser tabs right now.

The ArtOrder – Jon Schindehette’s fab website. “ArtOrder is a community of artists dedicated to the education and mentoring of the art community.”

His blog posts cover creativity, portfolio tips, business guides for artists, illustration goodies and more. He also conducts challenges/contests. That’s how my little phoenix painting ended up at Spectrum Fantastic Art Live this year.

One Fantastic Week – A weekly web show hosted by Sam Flegal and Pete Morhbacher.

Most weeks they have a guest artist that joins them in talking about fantasy illustration, conventions, marketing, and of course, their week. I’ve been catching up on the previous episodes and learning a ton! I’ve also started blocking out one hour on Tuesday mornings to watch the show live.

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The other websites in that folder are just as information, but I’m going to leave that up to you to discover.

Muddy Colors – There’s an incredible Game of Thrones painting in today’s post.

Kelley McMorris – Kelley’s blog has supplied me with many excellent convention tips.

Gurney Journey – Doesn’t this need an explanation? It’s James Gurney’s blog. The creator of Dinotopia!

PACT – Professional Artist Client Tookit. This is a subscription site, but they do have free articles you can read.

CtrlPaint.com – I’ve mentioned this site in the past because of the amazing video library, but the blog is a great too!

Kiri Østergaard Leonard – If I was a better blogger my own blog would look more like Kiri’s. I’ve gleamed some valuable information from her posts.

As I mentioned, I can’t read all the blogs. But I do sometimes wonder, am I missing out? Is there a blog I should add to this folder? If you know of one, share it in the comments!

amandamakepeace.com

 

A Day in the Life (GIF Edition)

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My fellow guild mates thought a look into my typical day would make for an interesting blog post. Maybe. I wasn’t convinced. What if I put you all to sleep with my boring life? So I decided to spice things up, just a bit.

06:00 – I’m not a morning person. My alarm clock, a.k.a. my iPhone, sounds like an alarm you might hear if a nuclear reactor was in danger of meltdown. It’s the only digital alarm capable of wrenching me out of my slumber into the land of the living, but even then I’m not a happy camper.

Destroy Everything

By this time cats are already at the door in danger of becoming feral if I don’t heed their need for sustenance. Since adopting Drusilla I’ve had to shut my door at night if I want sleep. If I leave it open she pesters me almost nonstop. Her favorite ways to pester include, pawing my face, biting my nose, biting my toes, and burrowing under the blankets to attack my legs. Since she and Hunter have become best friends I don’t feel bad shutting her out and she doesn’t seem to hold it against me (she follows me everywhere).

Demon Cat

06:10 – Coffee is the only thing on my mind. The cats have been fed. The dog has been fed and put outside. Now is Coffee Time – Phase 1. I love coffee and I drink a ton of it, but I wouldn’t say I’m addicted. My coffee intake during Dragon Con was almost nonexistent and I functioned just as as well. On a typical day I drink my coffee out of a large travel mug and I drink 2-4 of those. I like to leisurely drink it throughout the morning, oftentimes when I’m painting or writing blog posts. During Phase 1 I usually check my emails and read the news headlines.

Coffee

06:53 – Coffee Time Phase 1 ends. I go downstairs at this point to make lunch for both my daughter and my mother. Yes. I make my mother’s lunch. I’m a good daughter. But I’ll be honest, it’s not my favorite task of the day especially before I’ve had my full caffeine intake.

Cooking before I've had enough caffeine.

07:45 By now my daughter is on her way to school and my mother has left for her job. I’m still in my pajamas, drinking coffee (Coffee Time Phase 2), and updating various social media sites. It’s a necessary evil but nonetheless draining.

Tumblr

08:30 – 15:00 My creative time is a mixed bag of nuts. Every day is an adventure.

I can paint anything!

I can paint anything.

This isn't working how I imagined.

This isn’t turning out how I imagined it in my head…

Everything I paint is crap!

Everything I paint is crap!

I don't let those negative thoughts stop me.

I don’t let this stop me. Paint, paint, paint!

PerfectMy masterpiece. Muahaha!

Doubt

An hour later…

15:00 I try to switch gears around this time. I have an hour before my daughter arrives home, so I do some typical domestic chores.

Cleaning

18:00 – Before I know it, it’s time for dinner.

khaleesi

20:00 My evenings are spent watching a couple television shows we’ve DVR’d and then I head to bed to read, usually for far too long.

Reading

If you’ve made it this far I salute you!

amandamakepeace.com

Hollow Empire – Lessons Learned

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My second novel-length project made its first real steps this past weekend. Hollow Empire’s first Episode came out on Friday night to a Kindle reader near you for a whole $0.99. For that you get to meet the characters, get immersed in the world, and get left on one heck of a cliffhanger for… another 2 days. Because that’s when Episode 2 comes out. And then a week later Episode 3 comes out. And so on for 6 straight weeks.

HollowEmpireEP1

Check it out on Amazon here!

Last month I talked about how the project began (in the various emails sent back and forth between Mr. Neill and myself). You can find that here.

The thing about this project was that while we had a bit of a road map, this was different than the way I normally write. Typically I’m working in solitude, late into the night, trying to hit my goals for the night. But even before that I have an outline of some sort set out. It might not have all the twists and turns laid out, but it gives me enough road signs that I know where I’m heading.

It’ll be months working on that 1st draft. A draft that no one else can see (not even Courtney). It is in this draft that I become unafraid to suck. Unafraid to write down everything that my brain might only be tangentially trying to tell me. It all goes in… because I know that when I sit down for Draft 2, I can easily cut the chaff from the wheat.

Or something.

Hollow Empire worked a little differently. Initially we set up goals of turning around the episodes every 3 weeks. At that point I’d send J my 3 chapters and he’d send me his 3 chapters and I’d spend a night or two on edits (and he’d do the same).

Let me say right now that J got the short end of that stick. Especially at the beginning. His chapters were pretty clean overall. A few grammar things, a misspelling or three, and maybe a tweak of some plot (mostly that was me asking questions like this: “Wow, this thing you introduced was cool, how does that work?”).

Editing

Mine were a little rougher. Mostly because, while I did give them a writer edit before sending them on, they were probably closer to 1st draft form than 2nd or 3rd draft form. I can only imagine what J thought when he read that first chapter.

Hopefully it wasn’t a “what have I gotten myself into” situation. 🙂

I believe that by the 5th and 6th episodes I’d cleaned up some of the bigger mistakes, crutches, etc. that I was using (or he’d given up by then).

I’m fairly new at this, but I have to believe that even the JK Rowlings and Steven Kings still learn things with each project they write. Maybe they aren’t the HUGE things anymore, but I have to hope that there are still techniques to figure out… an envelope to push.

And I’m still at the point where everything is HUGE realizations. Writing Hollow Empire, getting that instant feedback, and then doing the edits immediately showed me a different perspective on how my work… worked.

I wasn’t expecting that when I agreed to the project.

The other big thing I learned was that 3 weeks isn’t as long as you think when you have a day job. You see, I was under the assumption that since my nightly goal is 1250 words and our portion of each episode was about 7000 words… well, you do the math. That should be only 6 days. Figure 2 more for any edits. Even if I only write 5 days a week, that’s only half the time.

time slipping away

Well to mis-quote Top Gun: My brain was writing checks that my body couldn’t cash.

I hit the first deadline, no problem. Heck, I had a whole spreadsheet set up with due dates and how long edits would take and so on. By Episode 2 I only barely hit the date, and I’m pretty sure by Episode 3 I was a little late. And so on.

That being said, I would set up the same schedule the next time (3 weeks). Some of the delays were from not knowing the characters quite yet. Some of it was trying to  make sure that I hit the goal posts I’d set up in our initial story meeting. And some of it was vacations and work. At 3 weeks per episode we’d still be done in 4 months. Which leads me to the 3rd thing I learned.

The speed of the project made me a faster writer. More pure. I wrote my characters into corners in one episode and then had to figure out how in the world they were going to get out of that situation. And while that made for some longer nights than I would have liked, I’m hopeful that the end result of not agonizing over every last sentence captures a feeling with the readers.

What I’d like to know now is whether this experiment worked. How do the readers react to those moments and cliffhangers and everything else? Can we make it so they are hyped for a new episode to come out on Friday night?

I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

***

John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program.

His second novel, Hollow Empire, is currently in week one of its 6-part release. Each episode is only $0.99.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.

 

A Few of my Favorite Things (in the Studio)

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We all have a favorites. How many times in the span of your life have you been asked, what’s your favorite color? Or favorite season? I love coffee, lattes are my favorite. That doesn’t mean I only drink lattes. But creative individuals take it a step further, especially when it comes to the tools we use to create. I think we tend to have favorites for life, favorites so tied to our process they cannot be substituted. For example, if I’m drawing in pencil I only use these:

Derwent Pencils

I’ve been tempted by others and then cringed as the graphite scratched across the surface of my paper. No. No. No. Derwent pencils are perfect. I know exactly how much pressure to apply to make them glide and become one with the paper. They are my zen. Seriously.

Now you might think I use Derwent for everything then. Nope. When it comes to colored pencils I only use these:

Prismacolor

My love of Prismacolor Colored Pencils was the result of supply and demand. I required specific colors and their pencils were the only one in my art supply shop that could be purchased individually. And what a range of colors they supply!

I’m also particular about the brushes I use, the paper, and my brands of paint (Holbein Watercolors and Golden Acrylics). Often times I’ve stumbled into using a new tool and then I become hooked.  Once upon a time I used Staedtler pens for drawing in ink. They come in a range of sizes–good pens. Then I discovered Sakura Micron pens and the heavens opened up with tears of joy.

Sakura Micron Pens

I can’t fathom using any other pen for drawing now. They are available in black and sepia. Sepia! If I’m going on a trip and I want to bring something to sketch with, I usually grab these pens and lightweight pad of Strathmore drawing paper. So what are your favorites? I’m positive I’m not alone when it comes to special favorites in the studio. I imagine even writers are particular about their setup and musicians too.

Leave a comment, let me know!

amandamakepeace.com

Roleplaying for fun and profit

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It’s not a secret, not really. I wasn’t embarrassed… not exactly. Much in the way that many things I have done in my life which fall under the heading of “geeky” or “nerdy”. Before the days when telling people about comic books was shunned.

I mean, I keep hearing about how the nerds won. As if it was for the very soul of the world. That they’ve done what we all predicted would happen when that first “nerd” started messing around with the family computer. They have overthrown their jock-overlords and have claimed the top of the mountain.

Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks!

Rise up in the cafeteria and stab them with your plastic forks!

Throughout middle school, through high school and college and for some time afterwards I role-played. And I think it has made me a better writer.

How’s that? Well, let’s see.

Character Creation – One of the biggest things in role-playing is that initial character creation. Maybe you are trying to balance out the team that already exists, or maybe you’ve had the nugget of an idea swimming in your head for the last few weeks and now you get to try it out. Sure there is the rolling of dice for your stats, and you would love to roll well to get them higher. But the character is something more than just numbers. There is a history there. A personality that you want to play with and figure out. Sometimes it is tropes, the disgraced knight, the reclusive wizard, the thief who walks the line between good and evil.

But the best characters are those ones who begin to mold themselves as you play them. As your Game Master puts you through the paces on an adventure. As the other players begin to speak with you character… a true personality emerges that you could have never expected… not 100%.

In writing, at least for me, I’ve found it is much the same. I may have the barest idea of how a character will react to something, but time and time again, when that moment comes something crazy happens.

The character surprises me. In the same way that those characters I role-played needed to act a certain way a month after I created them, so too does the written character need to be true to themselves. In fact, I sometimes learn more about them in that moment than I did in any of the moments previous to it (and then I have to go back and tweak a couple of things to help seed that “turn” or “moment”).

ddi_characterbuilder

World building – A lot of times this is the domain of the Game Master, but a good player can help develop the world in lots of different ways. Through their personal histories: maybe your uncle is a local lord (what is he the lord of? are you in line for his property? would someone want you dead to get their hands on it?), perhaps your best friend died in a conflict across the great sea (was it a conflict or a war? is this the first volley or the last? ), or maybe the village you came from was burned to the ground (who did it? why? are they still coming?).

I’ve heard that writing for comic books is a lot like playing with someone else’s toy box: you want to leave it with more toys than it started with. A good Game Master will take these toys from you and weave them into their world, creating more cohesion, and more stakes for the players.

Heroes – Most of the time I have played the hero (or one of the heroes) of the story. And in that I push the villains as hard as I can. I want to escape their death traps, foil their master plan, and save the maiden. But if I’m paying attention, I can see the obstacles that the Game Master is throwing in my way. You see, it is his job to not quite let me win… at least not for a while. Small victories will keep you going until that final big battle.

In my writing it is the same way. My job as the writer is to figure out what my character wants to achieve and then put as many obstacles in the way of them succeeding in their goals. In overcoming those setbacks, I learn more and more about how my characters think and feel and maybe even what it might take to completely break them.

Villains – I’ve played a couple of villains through the years. And it is fun. It  is fun to mess with the other players and sometimes even catch the Game Master off guard with a line of play. Mostly I’ve found that while sometimes the Game Master isn’t looking to flat-out kill your character, another player who is opposing you has no such qualms. That’s where fast thinking comes in handy. But it is also the point where you can fill a villain with more traits than just “he’s evil”.

Not that there is anything wrong with that!

dice

The End – I’ve played in epic novel length campaigns. They have that feel of a good book series where the heroes get a victory towards the end of the book, only to have something else happen which will propel the series forward for book 2 and 3 and 4. So I can identify where a good breaking point for a chapter, a section, and even the end of the book should be. It is a more subtle thing, but I believe it is there all the same.

Plus it never hurts to end something so that later you can get those heroes out of the mothballs and send them on their one final adventure. Everyone likes a last ride story, right?

Sadly, the closest I come to role-playing these days are playing Dragon’s Age (waiting for the next one!), but I take those old sessions to heart. What might have been cool and what moments might have caused groans. Either way I continue to sift through my memories to see if there is more buried treasure somewhere in there.

I’d like to think there is tons.

***

John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program. He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.

The Dark That Follows is now available in print here or on Amazon!

 

Creative Feature Interview

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Friend and author Lisa Shambrook interviewed me on her blog this week. Here’s a teaser. Click the link below to read the rest!

What inspires you?

If I’m honest, what doesn’t inspire me may be the better question. As a child I spent most of my time playing outside, wandering in the woods, creating imaginary worlds to play in with my friends and sometimes alone with my toys. My favorite movies from age 6 to 12 were The Black Stallion, The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, Star Wars and Alien/Aliens. Nature, Magic, Fantasy and Science Fiction (with a dash of horror) can all be seen in my art from the last decade.

Read more on Lisa’s Blog…

Collecting Inspiration

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When Pinterest first popped up on the web I had zero interest in signing up for another social site. All I saw was a place to share shopping wishlists, recipes, and fashion trends. Sure, some artists were pinning items from their Etsy shops, but I just didn’t see the value. I’m going to be blatantly honest… I really don’t care much about celebrities lives, fashion trends, DIY home improvement, etc. My wardrobe is proof of this! If I’d left it at that I would have never seen the bigger picture. I wasn’t thinking outside the box. My opinion was changed when I saw author Emma Pass using Pinterest for her writing. She created boards for her books. She pinned covers, character inspiration, places, etc.

I might not be interested in redecorating my living room or finding that perfect outfit, but I’m always inspired by hidden beauty, nature, magical places and dark places. So I began collection inspiration. Here are three of my boards, a general Inspiration Board, Dark Places and History, Myth and Lore. I also have boards for Magical Places, Science, Nature and Magic, Natural History and many more. I don’t use Pinterest in the hopes that what I pin will go viral. I use it like a visual bookmark, so that I can return to it and be inspired. The images I pin can be the starting point for my own painting ideas.

Follow Amanda Makepeace’s board Inspiration Board on Pinterest.

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Follow Amanda Makepeace’s board Dark Places on Pinterest.

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Follow Amanda Makepeace’s board History, Myth and Lore on Pinterest.

Pinterest is good for saving all those redecorating ideas and recipes but it can be so much more.

Sketchbook for the end of the world

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 Let’s face it. I’m likely the worst artist on Tessera. If you want beautiful, colorful, deep art, check here.

Otherwise…let’s dance.

A few months back, I shared a few sketches I drew ages ago during the inception of Down the Dark Path. Each sketch depicted a fragment of the story as I’d originally dreamed it. My pattern was: I dreamed it, I drew it, and years later, I wrote epic fantasy novels about it. It sounds simple. It wasn’t.

Recently, I dug up about forty additional sketches.  Most (read…all) I sketched during my early twenties. They’re simple, sometimes juvenile, and somewhat faded by years spent moldering in an ancient paper envelope.  Even so, to this day they reflect my early conceptual visions of the Tyrants of the Dead series. If I were a true artist, I’d spend my time painting reimagined masterpieces for each one.

But I’m not.

So you get sketches…

Gryphon Inn

 

We begin with a tower deep in Grandwood. It’s ten stories high, surrounded by oak trees, and hides a wizard’s laboratory in its walls. I named this tower Gryphon. About ten years after this sketch, I wandered back to it. I decided Gryphon needed to be an entire city, not one lonely tower in the woods. And so Gryphon, home of Rellen, was reborn.

 

 

 

 

Knight 1

This was my original concept sketch for Rellen Gryphon, one of the heroes of Down the Dark Path and Dark Moon Daughter. Rellen later lost his halberd, became younger and blonder, and sat atop a horse instead of a bizarre, long-snouted mutant mule, but his pose…reining up to watch the Furyon horde draw near…still belongs to him.

 

 

 

 

The Whisperers

 

Long ago, I only had the vaguest notion of what the bad guys in the Tyrants series looked like, but this is how they began. I’m not spoiling anything, because the modern-day Ur look very little like this trio. And yet, somehow…I still remember the night I dreamed them. White eyes… Pale as death… Whispering black thoughts into fragile minds…

Hmmm…

 

 

 

Ghoulish

Nothing fancy about this dude. Every other sketch I created in the beginning just happened to be of a ghost, a ghoul, or a skeletal horror. I suppose this guy could be the murderous spirit who shows up in the swamps of Furyon. You’ll just have to read it and decide for yourself.

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KiraniSexy Elf

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It’s no secret. Women are usually more pleasant to draw and dream of than zombies, ghosts, and stone towers. These two ladies were characters who lost their spots in Down the Dark Path during the great 200k-word ‘let’s make this novel more serious’ culling. Even so, I remember them, though these drawings do them no justice.

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Soul Orb Sketch J

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Now we’re getting somewhere. This is my first sketch of the Soul Orb. (The final version graces Down the Dark Path’s cover.) Notice the ghoulish faces at the Orb’s base and the demonic eyes gazing out of its center. This is among my favorite sketches.

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Night Wisdom

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My original concept for Dark Moon Daughter’s antagonist, the Warlock. He later lost the horns and the jewelry, but kept the hood. Because…you know…every diabolical wizard needs a sinister cloak to hide behind.

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What are YOU looking at

And lastly, a bit of adolescent fun. The original Andelusia was sassy, sneaky, and completely willing to use her beauty to snare men’s adoration. Here she seems to be saying, “What are you looking at?” And yes, she’d have used that knife. You probably had it coming.

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That’s pretty much all the sketches I have related to the big fantasy trilogy. Maybe someday, after I write my fiftieth novel and the ideas cease to flow, I’ll get some art lessons.

I could definitely use ’em.

Love,

J Edward Neill

Author of the Tyrants of the Dead dark fantasy trilogy

Author of The Sleepers and Old Man of Tessera

Down the Dark Path

What if…I directed the original Star Wars trilogy?

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vader87

 

 

 I’m pretty sure Vader had better days.

 But while being x-rayed by the Emperor probably hurts, it also makes for a perfect skull…

 …and a perfect lead-in to Part II of my new What if…? series.

 Last week I What if’d The Lord of the Rings, and what it would’ve been like had I written it as a dark fantasy. This week I’m jumping over to film. To Star Wars. To the original three movies. A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and so forth. Yes, I know it’s heresy. Deal with it.

So…what if? What if, instead of George Lucas’s sometimes fantastical, ocassionally sci-fi (ish), and oftentimes made-for-kids space drama, F’n J Edward Neill stepped in with total creative control? What if I’d fashioned all three movies into a deep, dark, end-of-the-universe, not-at-all-for-kids series?

Well…what if? How would I remake one of the most beloved series of all time into a thick, soupy, shadowy epic?

First up: the bad guys. I demand more competence, more lethality. From the ground up, I’d reinvent the Stormtroopers. Gone would be the slow, bumbling, easily-confused cannon fodder. Dark Stormtroopers would come complete with 500% more terror, skill, and slavish devotion to their purpose (murdering rebels). Instead of nice, clean, shiny…and entirely useless white armor, I’d pack them in matte black. Their armor would amplify speed, aiming, and strength. They’d hurl wookies aside like rag dolls, pick rebels apart with terrifying precision, and sweep through ships like locusts. I was never afraid of the Stormtroopers, not even as a child. But I wanted to be.

Moving along…

An effective way to cast a deeper shadow across any story, especially a sci-fi space drama: give the villains superior weapons. And I don’t just mean bigger guns, scarier costumes, and huger numbers. I mean truly terrifying technology. Red lasers, big ships, and tractor beams are all well and good, but I want to feel a true sense of dread when the bad guys slow down to approach a planet. Give me Star Destroyers launching millions of explosive nano-projectiles. Give me Stormtroopers firing silent, invisible death rays. Give me good guy x-wings not bursting into flames when shot (wouldn’t happen in space anyway) but falling quietly to pieces when Tie Fighters roll up behind them and launch volleys of death particles. Any villain worth his salt (aka Darth Vader) should have a plethora of ways to annihilate his foes. In Dark Star Wars, even one tiny little Imperial ship would scare the shit out of a planet packed with helpless good guys.

 A few small quick hit ways I’d darken up Star Wars:

Ewoks: Scarier

C3P0: Talks less

Star Destroyers: Can actually destroy stars

Darth Vader: Chokes out dozens at a time using the Force. Who needs Dark Stormtroopers when you’ve got a Sith lord capable of slaying ships’ entire crews from afar?

Death Star: Doesn’t blow up planets or blast ships to smithereens, but kills all living things with a big invisible death ray (silent death for everyone!)

DeathStar

Now with a new, darker, scarier paint job…

Perhaps blurred in the fantastical-ish nature of Star Wars are the horrors of extreme technological advancement. Imagine if you will the sheer amount of labor (likely slave labor) and economic sacrifice needed to build a Star Destroyer, a herd of Imperial Walkers, or two Death Stars. To darken up the series, I want everyone to pay the price of building the Empire’s army. Entire planets stripped of resources: Check. Vast automated space stations manned by droids and guarded by ship-killing probes: Check. Star systems enslaved: Check. Alien species wiped out due to inefficiency: Check and mate. The Empire’s truest evil is not in wanting to kill rebels, but in creating the conditions that make the rebels want to rebel in the first place. Compelling my dark reimagining of the series is a vision of galactic-scale misery. I want us to hate the Empire like never before.

And lastly, it has always been one of my contentions that  good guys get off too easy. In modern movies and books, it seems (aside from Game of Thrones) that most if not all protagonists survive their ordeals despite hurling themselves into danger again and again. In my darker, graver vision for Star Wars, the good guys suffer more. In Cloud City, C3P0 meets his doom. He doesn’t get to come back after being blasted by imperial agents, but gets reprocessed with the rest of the junk droids, perhaps even being hacked to provide the Empire with information. And then there’s Lando. In Return of the Jedi, Han foretells the destruction of the Millenium Falcon (piloted by Lando against the second Death Star) but once again fate intervenes and the MF survives. Let’s darken it up. Lando and the Falcon get caught in the big explosion, and Han sees his ship plummet to Endor’s surface in ruin. And Luke. Poor Luke. In J Edward’s What if…? version, he dies with his father in the Death Star. Much like I needed Frodo to perish in tragic fashion with the One Ring, Luke needs to make the ultimate sacrifice. Leia gets to be the last Jedi hopeful…ever.

 Blasphemous enough for you? 

Join me next week when I reimagine Harry Potter’s Voldemort as an agent of Cthulu. No, I’m not serious. Or am I…?

J Edward Neill

Author of the Tyrants of the Dead dark fantasy trilogy

Author of The Sleepers and Old Man of Tessera

Down the Dark Path

Time to Put the Brush Down

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Follow the smell of oil paints, the trail of art frames and pencil shavings–that’s where you’ll find me. It’s non-stop right now. I’ve been busy embellishing prints for Dragon*Con, working on a oil painting (what was I thinking??), and amassing a collection of frames for the art show. I love it! But every artist must venture forth from the studio to the real world. What keeps me sane amidst the rush of creativity?

1. Walking – I started a new routine of walking the circle of our neighborhood. It’s just shy of 2 miles. Unfortunately, I had to put that on hold when I took a small tumble down our stairs. No broken bones, but I do have a bruised tailbone that is still causing me pain two weeks later. I’m hoping to get back to my walking routine next week.

2. Longmire is back. – Wait. Did you think I only watched Science Fiction/Fantasy type shows? I do have other loves and this is one of them. You can’t go wrong with me if you put together a crime show, set in the west, with a strong Native American cast (not that you can tell from the photo below). Katee Sackhoff is in the show too. She’s been a favorite since BSG. The big guy there, who plays Walt Longmire, he was an agent in the first Matrix film. Seriously! And of course there’s Lou Diamond Philips. When Longmire isn’t on I’ve been re-watching Fringe from the beginning. How I miss that show!

Longmire Cast

3. Comics – I’ve been devouring them lately. It’s what I find most relaxing before I shut my eyes at night. Here’s a peek at what I’ve read and what I’m still reading. I’ve read so much lately that I couldn’t easily post them all.

Digital:

The Gilded Age by John McGuire  Saga Vol 1  Latverian Prometheus

Paper:

 

 

Journey into Mystery: The Complete Collection Vol 1  Loki: Agent of Asgard  Trees  The Wicked + The Divine

 

Walking, a little TV, reading comics and of course studio time–that’s my life right now. 🙂

A Little Luck

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I want to try something for the blog. I’m not 100% on how it is going to work, but… I like the idea of demystifying things. So how do you come up with the stories you write? Just like this:

Royal Flush Poker cards & Chips

My wife and I play poker at one of the local restaurants nearly every Sunday evening. It works out well because it is something we are decent at and enjoy together. But I had a lot of time to think about Luck when a hand didn’t go my way (“Bad” Luck) and suddenly I was out of this week’s tournament. In my mind the fact that my opponent ended up winning the hand when (once we got all the chips in the middle) he only had about a 25 % chance to win tells me I had some bad luck in that hand.

Sometimes I wonder if I don’t just have bad luck in many other hands. But as many poker players (and more than one mathematician) would tell you, sometimes you are just in a bad stretch, but eventually things will regress back to the mean. Or to put it simply, things will average out.

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But let’s face facts, we remember the bad beats in cards and in life more than we remember the times when we got “lucky”. It is very easy to bemoan our fates when those negative thoughts keep coming up. When we know that the other shoe is bound to drop. We’re the types of people who when you say bad things happen in 3s, we are quick to point out items 4,5,& 6.

We compete to figure out who has it worse. We’ve all been in those conversations:

Me – “I blew a tire today so I was late to work.”

You – “Yeah, my car wouldn’t start today, so I ended up having to call in sick. And after repairs and everything I’m out $1000.”

Me – “O.K. You win!”

Though, let’s be honest. I’m going to talk about some other instance of something bad happening to me today while I was at work, because I cannot concede defeat that easily, right?

It’s the same in stories. One of the ideas I’ve heard is when you are writing figure out what your character wants and then put an obstacle in front of them. So maybe they have to get across the state for some meeting of the minds which will solve all their problems… oops! your tire blew, and because you didn’t have a spare you missed the meeting and now the aliens are going to invade (or something). In a lot of ways it seems like Bad Luck is almost the thing that can keep your hero from winning their story.

But I think the other side maybe works too well. Sometimes it is too much good Luck running amuck. It’s gotta be believable. It’s gotta be something where you don’t scratch your head because the solution was not just impossible, but beyond lucky.

Star Wars – If you were a character who didn’t understand the Force, but knew the events that led to the destruction of the first Death Star, wouldn’t you think that Luke was literally the luckiest man alive? I mean he closed his eyes and took the shot. “One in a million, kid!” What a stroke of luck.

Of course, we the viewer, know the truth of the situation.

StarWars_Scene3

One Lucky S.O.B.

The Hobbit – Bard ends up hitting Smaug in the one spot where he is vulnerable. Yes, maybe he is just “that good”, but I know  when I read the Hobbit, that was my biggest problem with it. So one arrow fired by someone not in the main group was going to be the thing to end the evil of this dragon? How lucky!

So there is a fine line to walk. You must make it so that your character has to struggle a bit, perhaps they bemoan their fate (their Luck), but most of the time they are going to triumph in the end. Overcoming the odds.

Overcoming the odds… sounds like they got lucky to me.

Something else that puzzles me about luck… Is it possible that there is an amount of luck that each person has? Can it be measured? Is it like matter in that it cannot be created or destroy, but merely transformed?

There’s an 80s movie with Richard Dryfuss called Let it Ride (a personal guilty pleasure movie). In the film, he’s a compulsive gambler (horse racing in this instance). There’s a line in that movie that’s always stuck with me:

“You could be walking around lucky and not even know it.”

That’s a profound thought. What if we have some amount of luck which ebbs and flows on a daily basis? What if we could predict when those cycles were so that we only played poker or craps or blackjack on the days when our own personal luck meter (for lack of a better term) was in the positive rather than in the negative? Maybe that’s why there is something to be said for the idea behind “beginner’s luck.” Those are people who have not burned through their luck for a particular luck based game. So that first time they play… well, it’s like they can’t lose because they really can’t.

I have a friend who I have joked with over the years about his luck. I’ve seen it in action before to the point that it is now a matter of fact that it will happen. It’s like he has a super-power where he can manipulate the odds into something a bit more in his favor. And obviously it doesn’t work every time, but it works enough for me to notice. It works enough for me to wonder if there might not be something to it.

Here’s the key thing, he doesn’t waste it. When we play games of chance, he isn’t always winning. In fact, he probably wins at an average rate. What you might expect any person to win who plays Settlers every once in a while. Does he know what he’s doing? Does the Luck?

I think there is something to all of that. Could I steal someone else’s luck? What would that look like? How might you go about taking something like that? Is there such a thing as taking too much? I mean, if you reduce all their Good Luck and only leave the bad… well, they’d probably get hit by a random object from the sky (oh, and if you are going to do that, make sure that you are nowhere near them afterwards).

writing

And this is how ideas begin to form. A bad beat in poker becomes something more… but where to go? This feels like there is something there. Buried underneath, waiting for a story to be told. The only question now is whether I can exhume it anytime soon. Or perhaps it is destined to be filed away for a while.

 

 

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John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and now the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program. He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.

The Dark That Follows is now available in print here or on Amazon!

What if…I rewrote The Lord of the Rings

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This week marks the first entry in my new ‘What if…?’ series. If only to agitate, exhume, and pontificate, I plan to explore popular books and movies with purpose to pretend remake each of them as if I’d been the author, director, producer, etc. I’d like to think most creative types have asked themselves, “What if I’d written that? What if creative control had been mine?” Well…what if…? Let’s do this.

My only disclaimer: this is for fun. I intend no heresy. Well…maybe a little.   

And so…

Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien. The first and most powerful of all fantasy series. Take a glance at how many books, movies, tv shows, and friggin’ cosplay conventions are LOTR-derivitave. This is where modern-day fantasy literature began.

What if I had written it?  What if…instead of a sometimes high/sometimes dark/sometimes strictly narrative fiction novel, f’n J Edward Neill had sat down and written it entirely as a dark fiction trilogy? What if, what if, what if…?

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Let’s start with what feels obvious to me. In LOTR, you’ve got some seriously terrifying bad guys. You’ve got nazgul, orks (rumor is J.R.R. wanted to spell it with a ‘k’) a balrog, evil wizards, fell beasts, etc. But more than any of them, you’ve got Sauron, aka a flaming eyeball in the sky. In J Edward’s version of LOTR, Sauron gets a full third of the narrative. He gets dialogue (perhaps from the Witch King’s perspective). He gets backstory (front and center instead of in the appendices). I don’t have a giant list of scenes I’d cut out to make room for more Sauron, but no matter. I’d add a fourth book if needed. The easiest way to darken up Tolkien’s masterpiece would’ve been to add 700% more Dark Lord, and that’s where I’d start.

Still here?

 The second way I’d cast a shadow over LOTR: more good guys need to die. Let’s start with Gimli and Legolas. Their unexpected friendship is a metaphor for all the strange alliances required for the good guys to have any hope of defeating Sauron. And so…one of them must die. My money is on Legolas. And my choice of death is via nazgul, at the Black Gate, right in front of Gimli. Let Legolas’s diminutive friend watch him go down in a blaze of glory, and let Gimli forever cherish their friendship after a nice, long spell of mourning. It’s possible (maybe even likely) that my desire to see Legolas go down has something to do with Orlando Bloom. No matter. It’s a war (the last and greatest of all Middle-Earth wars). The good guys get off too easy.

Who else needs to die? Frodo Baggins. I know. I’m sorry. Slap me silly. Kick me in the shins. I get that Frodo essentially dies when he sails away from Middle-Earth, but I’d have done it in a much more literal sense. Whether by falling into the crack of doom with Gollum, death by sheer sadness after losing the One Ring, or being speared with Sauron’s departing shadow, I’d have snuffed Frodo at the very moment of the Ring’s destruction. With every hobbit making it back to the Shire, the good guys get off too easy again. “You didn’t seriously expect him to survive Mordor?” someone could’ve asked Gandalf. “No. It was only a fool’s hope,” he would’ve answered again. And it was. We should all be punished for our foolishness, not just the poor, misunderstood antagonists.

A few quick-hit ways to continue darkening the series up:

Tom Bombadil: gone

Nazgul: win a fight or two (instead of constantly losing)

Minas Morgul: we get a glimpse inside

Gondor: utterly annihilated

Witch King and Gandalf: fight (with the Witch King fleeing back to the battle)

Moving right along. To really F with the reader, and to maximize the good guys’ suffering, I’d have ramped up the battle at the Black Gate. Tolkien made it well and truly dire. I’d had written it direr. I’d have butchered the good guys almost to the last man standing before the One Ring is destroyed. Legolas: dead. Gimli: wounded. Aragorn: wounded. Gandalf: holding the horde at bay for just…one…moment…longer. Leave the good guys with maybe a few dozen brave souls, and no more. I’d have wanted the reader to wonder, “He won’t really kill them all here? Will he?” Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I would.

In ending the series, and with an eye toward leaving the reader with a subtle feeling of dread, I’d let Saruman live. Sure, Grima can try to kill him, but I’d give the original White Wizard a pass. He can creep off to the north, broken staff on the mend. His heart will be filled with vengeance, anger, and always the memory of Sauron’s voice in his head. Tolkien’s version works perfectly for a happily ever after ending, but any dark fantasy worth its salt needs a shadow of a threat to remain, therefore reminding the reader that conflict always was and always shall be.

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I’ve got a certain Rolling Stones’ song in mind…

There you have it. Don’t get me wrong: LOTR is perfect as-is. I wouldn’t really change a thing. It’s all just speculation. And by speculation I mean; painting rooms black and making hearts jump.

Tune in for next week’s What if…? segment, during which I rewrite 50 Shades of Grey as a horror novel. Just kidding. Maybe.

J Edward Neill 

Don’t Fall for the Trap

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Charles de Lint quoteIt’s easy to lose sight of our path. It’s easy to paint what everyone else is painting. It’s easy to think I’ll never be as good as “them.” It’s easy to fall into the trap.

If you aren’t painting for you, you’re stifling your own creative voice. This makes you unique, what sets you apart from other artists. There are dozens of artist/illustrators I admire, and there is a small part of me that hopes and wishes I might be as great as them one day. But focusing on that won’t get me anywhere. As much as I admire Todd Lockwood, Cynthia Sheppard, Dan Dos Santos, and Cory Godbey (to name only a few), trying to be them is a trap. Read more

My Writing Process (Blog Tour Entry)

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I loathe chain emails. I’m not sure if they existed in paper form, but the thing which always killed me was the warning at the end. Like something out of a Steven King novel: “If you dare break this chain of old, a thousand locusts will descend upon thy host until only misery and bones are left to thee.”

Chain Letter

 

I snub my nose at such dire warnings. And I’m insulted that you feel that the subject manner itself is not good enough to spur me into action. There are many things that are difficult in this digital age, forwarding something on is not one of those things.

(Though I wonder if some of my recent bad luck is a result of not sending along that latest one… hmm, maybe I should rethink my stance.)

But a Chain Blog Tour? Well now, that is a horse of a different color. And when a fellow Guild-mate taps you then you do your best to appease the chain-blog gods. So with that in mind a little something to say about J Edward Neill.

I’ve known Mr. Neill since high school, brought together by a shared love of basketball and roleplaying. For the many years I thought about writing a book, he was sitting in his dark cave (or mountain top or volcano fortress) actually putting pen to paper, fingers to keyboard to create his fantasy opus: Down the Dark Path. And much like in sports where they tell you to play against better competition in order to get better at your craft – I use him as one of my gauges. Of course, this week he’s come out with Book 2: Dark Moon Daughter… so my work is cut out for me.

 

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What am I working on?

Sometimes I feel like the question should be “What am I not working on”, but let’s see:

The White Effect – My science fiction story about a man who finds that his world is rebooting, and he is one of the lucky (unlucky) ones who realizes what’s happening. It is currently with BETA readers with my next draft being targeted for late summer.

Hollow Empire – Serialized Dark Fantasy is all I’ll say about this one until it is out. This one is done, I’m just in the process of hiring some proofreading Australia experts to make edit or two on it. This process has slowed due to some recent life developments, but I’m hoping (and I’m sure my co-writer hopes as well) to have this one all wrapped up in the next month or so.

Gilded Age – My Steampunk creator-owned comic series through Terminus Media. Issue 2 is set to have final inks and colors begin any day now, and in the meantime I have final edits on issue 3’s script.

Entropy – A post-apocalyptic comic series set at the Ends of the Universe. Co-written with Robert Jeffrey II (see below for more on him), we merely wait for the artist to be unleashed upon this project.

The Edge of the World – A story in the vein of Journey to the Center of the Earth where our heroine seeks to find her missing uncle. I am 15,000 words into the first draft of this one.

 

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

With my comic writing, and The Gilded Age in particular, I’m trying to write character based stories and create a world from them as opposed to plopping them into a world. With my novel, The Dark That Follows, I’d say that it differs from “standard” urban fantasy in that it isn’t a romantic story where you wonder will they/won’t they. Instead it is about a man in way over his head just trying to do the right thing.

 

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Why do I write what I do?

As you can see above, I’m a little all over the place with regards to genre (for better or for worse). I guess I just follow that old rule of write what you’d like to read, and since I don’t just read fantasy or science fiction or urban fantasy or super-heroes exclusively my brain ensures that almost everything I work on is something different from the thing I wrote before. I take everything I’ve read, everything I’ve watched, everything I’ve ever heard and put them through the grinder of my brain and then something comes out. If it is interesting and moves me, then I write about it, if not, I move onto the next project.

 

How does my writing process work?

It starts with music. Something to write to. Recently it has been 10 Years, Chevelle, and Deftones. Once I have the right mood set I generally have a decent idea of what needs to happen within the story, so much more plotter than pantser. For a comic script I tend to write out a 1-2 paragraph summary of the major story beats and then start writing dialogue. Only after most of the dialogue is written do I go back and fill in every panel’s description and manipulate the pace of the comic. After a couple of passes I send it on to my editors, do one more pass with their notes, and then end up doing a FINAL-FINAL pass during the lettering stage as I can see the whole picture (literally) and see if something needs to be added or subtracted.

With my novels I have the story beats, but I write out-of-order most of the time, jumping from one scene to another and then piece things together like a puzzle. After that first draft is done I follow Steven King’s advice and put it in the drawer for 6-8 weeks to gain perspective. After that time I do my second pass, and if I’m happy with that version I might reach out to a couple of BETA readers for thoughts. Another draft follows that and then the editor. And then the final draft.

But at some point I do say “pencils down” because while we can tweak and refine our work forever, it doesn’t mean we should. Release it into the world and move onto the next project.

 

whos next logo

Artist Highlights (or Next on the Tour):

Robert Jeffrey II: Robert is an Atlanta-based freelance writer whose portfolio includes a multitude of work in the arenas of print/web journalism and comics. His work with Atlanta-based Terminus Media includes comics (his creator owned/ 2014 Glyph Comic Award winning “Route 3” and “Daddy’s Little Girl”, “Terminus Team Up”, and B. Robert Bell’s “Radio Free Amerika”) and contracted client work including custom comics and animation scripting/editing duties for clients such as the Center for Disease Control and Nitto Tires.

Robert’s life long dream is to win a pop-locking battle to save a community center.

 

Sean Taylor: Bad Girls, Good Guys, and Two-Fisted Action is the official writing blog of Sean Taylor. But it’s not just a place to promote his stuff. It’s a resource (he hopes) of information about writing and creating genre fiction, literary prose, comic books, and just about anything else you can create with pens, pencils, paper, or word-processing software and a printer. On this site, you’ll be able to find publishers calling for submissions, tutorials about the craft of writing and editing, interviews with other writers, links to helpful and fascinating articles about the art, craft and business of writing and publishing, etc. — and of course, yes, you’ll also be able to keep up with whatever Sean has his writerly little paws involved in too.

 

 

***

John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and now the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program. He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.

Why Digital?

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There are quite a few misconceptions about digital art. I honestly don’t hold that against anyone. It can be confusing. Digital Art is a broad term to describe anything created via a computer. Just as with Traditional Art, you can then break that down into subcategories: Photomanipulation, Digital Painting, Vector Art, Pixel Art, Fractal Generation, 3D Art and more. Digital Painting is what I do. Illustrator Kelley McMorris has a comic to help explain it a little better:

How Digital Painting Works by Kelley McMorris

 

This is incredibly accurate, even the second half. Over the holidays I was showing some family members my digital paintings, specifically my Jackalope. One person asked me, “So the computer does this for you?” I was polite. I tried to explain in simple terms, that no, a digital painting is not that different than a traditional painting.

If a computer were able to spit this out:

Gatsoh Elder by Amanda Makepeace

Or this:

Stone of Knowing by Amanda Makepeace

Then I’d have far more paintings in my portfolio already. Paintings, whether they are digital or traditional, take time and planning. With that said, there are a myriad of shortcuts to the process when you are painting in Photoshop. Custom brushes that look like leaves or trees is one example. Not everyone utilizes these shortcuts. I have on occasion, but more often than not, I paint everything in my paintings by hand. There are no shortcuts. See the little tablet in the comic above? I have one of those too:

Wacom Intuos 4

It’s called a Wacom Intuos 4 (Medium). When I use the stylus to draw on the tablet, it translates that into Photoshop–precisely and accurately. No, it doesn’t feel the same as drawing on paper or painting on canvas, but it basically does the same thing. The outcome is the same. Anything I can draw on paper, I can draw the same in Photoshop via my tablet. It’s  not magic. I use all the same skills I’ve learned with traditional art.

There’s one of those misconceptions. Many people think that using the tablet is somehow like cheating or it will make it easier to draw and paint. Sorry, but, no. I’m not saying it’s impossible, because I always believe in exceptions, but if you struggle with traditional drawing you will have an even harder time trying to use a Wacom Intuos. It’s not easy and it’s not for everyone. Many artists find it cumbersome to draw with the tablet. So they draw on paper first and then scan it into the computer. There’s nothing wrong with that. It took several months of retraining my brain before it became second nature.

Still, your asking, how is it the same as a traditional painting? Let’s look at the definition of the word.

Cambridge Dictionary:

the skill or activity of making a picture

Dictionary.com:

the act, art, or work of a person who paints

Merriam Webster:

a product of painting; especially :  a work produced through the art of painting

A painting is a painting, whether it’s painted with oils or computer brush strokes. The outcome is the same. When I paint in Photoshop, I use a digital brush to apply paint to a digital canvas. Here’s a look at the brushstrokes from a few of my favorite brushes.

My basic brushes

These brushes can be large for painting washes or very small for painting details. Sound familiar?

There will probably always be individuals who refuse to see digital painting as Art. I will probably continue to be asked, “Are you going paint any originals soon?” Which, kinda feels like they are actually asking, “Are you going to create any real art?” I’ll admit, it stings a bit, but only for about a minute. Then I get back to creating. Creating is what it’s all about. That’s why, to answer the title of this blog post. To create. I’ve not been the luckiest person as far as my health goes. I’m not going to go into all the details. Those of you that know me well, know I’m lucky to be alive.

In 2011/12 I began developing another “issue” but this time it was with my hands. It was becoming increasingly difficult to paint and draw without putting myself through a lot of pain. I deal with pain on a daily basis. Most of the time you’d never know it. I’m a fighter. I keep going. But this was proving to be a challenge. My time in the studio slowed to a crawl. I was depressed. All I wanted to do was create.

Artist Amanda MakepeaceThen I bought a Wacom Intuos 4 Small and my world changed. Painting and drawing with the tablet is far less strenuous on my hand. But what I never expected was the effect it would have on my creativity and imagination. It was as if the flood gates had opened. I’m not painting anything now that I couldn’t also paint in oils or watercolors, but something broke free when I changed mediums–something I’d always kept under lock and key. If they found a cure for all my disorders tomorrow, I wouldn’t stop painting digitally. I’m a happier person and a more content artist, for letting go of my insecurities and letting my passion be set free.

Limited Edition Prints can be purchased from my shop:

http://amandamakepeace.com/shop/

It F***ing Sucks Bein’ Green

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The-Avengers-Climax-Hulk-the-avengers-34726224-1920-1080

signal_ver2_xlgIt was announced last week that David Bruckner, a long-time acquaintance, friend of a dear friend, and fellow Atlanta-ite, is going to direct the next Friday the 13th movie. Dave directed one third of the Atlanta-based horror film The Signal as well as the first (and in a lot of people’s opinions, the best) segment of the anthology V/H/S. It will be his debut feature as a solo director.

I congratulate David and wish him nothing but the best. I’m very excited for what he’s going to do.

Oh, and also, fuck him.

My friend Jake Goldberger‘s second film, Life of a King is available on DVD now.

His first film, Don McKay, was an off-beat dark comedy that was so off-beat that most people didn’t get how funny it was. It starred two Oscar nominees and a future Oscar winner. It wasn’t treated very well by critics and not very many people saw it. I liked it, but I also read the script about a decade before and was elated to see it make its way to the screen.

life-of-a-king-posterLife of a King is a much more high-profile film. Starring another Academy Award winner, Cuba Gooding Jr, it is a moving tale about an ex-con that teaches a group of inner-city kids the value and beauty of the game of chess. It’s kind of Stand and Deliver with a Karate Kid finale (with a Rocky twist). It may not sound like your type of film. It’s honestly not mine. But I found myself enjoying it quite a bit. More than anything, I was impressed by the performance by Gooding and by how much Jake has grown as a director. He told me the other day that it was shot in just 15 days, which astounded me for how good it looks. Dakota Skye had more time to shoot and it felt like we had no time at all.

I have known Jake for over a decade. I’m proud of him and congratulate him on his success and hope his next film is even bigger and better and I can’t wait to see it.

Oh, and also, fuck him.

Lake-Effect-Brochure-Small-728x1024I don’t know Tara Miele very well. But I do know her husband, Dakota Skye cinematographer Brett Juskalian. Right after Dakota Skye Tara made a lovely little film called The Lake Effect and has since then made a couple other films (I’ve lost track) for the Lifetime Channel.

Tara is a talented writer and I’m happy her career as a filmmaker is taking off.

Oh, and also, fuck her.

 

An old collaborator of mine, Charlie Ebersol, with whom I worked on many projects that never quite got off the ground (see my tale about pitching a show at the Sci-Fi Channel), has been hired to write a sequel to Space Jam. Charlie is more of a producer than writer, and it’s not a project I would necessarily kill to be a part of, but still. It’s a big opportunity.

I wish him and his brother all the luck with the film.

And, yes, fuck him.

One of the first friends I made upon moving to Los Angeles was a funny kid from Tulsa named Bill Hader. I don’t need to explain to you who he is. If you don’t know, just Google him. I’ve heard Mel Brooks praise him. Mel. Brooks.

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He also does a pretty good impression of me.

Fuck him.

Even within this very guild, on this site, my friends are bugging the shit out of me. J. Edward Neill, having released Down the Dark Path last year, has just finished the follow-up. This would be less impressive if his books weren’t approximately seven million pages long. Likewise, John McGuire just put his first book, The Dark That Follows (we like the word “dark” in our titles, don’t we?) up on Amazon but I also happen to know that he’s currently revising his second novel, having already finished the first draft. Plus, John has some comic books out in the world, with more to come, and that’s awesome.

Fuck both of them.

I, of course, don’t mean any of the profanity I have hurled at my friends and peers above. Good people, all of them. Some of them amongst my favorite people.

Wait. No. I do mean it.

Fuck all of them.

Envy is a hell of a thing.

I’m not a religious dude but if Morgan Freeman has taught me anything (other than how hard it is to be a penguin, how to smuggle a rock hammer into the slammer, how to be the quartermaster for a vigilante, how love is worth dying for, how not to storm a Civil War fort, and how to embrace my inner Master Builder), it’s that Envy is one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Brad-Pitt-and-Morgan-Freeman-in-Seven

You remember those. I think they go: Being Fat, Being a Child Molester, Being a Lawyer, Being Pretty, Being a Hooker, Envy, and shooting Keyser Söze.

Envy. That big green monster that sometimes beats me senseless worse than…

i3r38XmIrCPRY

“Puny Self-Worth”

I like my life. This is not about that. I wouldn’t trade places with anyone not named Clooney or Timberlake and only then if I can take a few people with me.

This is professional envy. Comparing where you are at in your career to that of your peers. I know better than to give into it, but I’m a human being and not a very good one at that.

Of course, envy leads to doubt.

At 25, I hadn’t done X. At 30, I wasn’t even close to accomplishing Y. At 35, I had pretty much given up on Z.

40 is coming on really fast and I’m out of fucking letters.

And what do people tell you when you’re feeling green? Not with seasickness. Not with lovable singing felt frog-ness. But with the feeling of wanting what someone else has…

They say “Keep your head down and do your work.”

And I say—

I’ve been swearing a lot this post, huh? Well, you fill in the blank.

giphyI have gotten so much better over the years in dealing with this. A while back I wrote a piece on here about Livin’ Small, based on the mentally of my friend Jonah Matranga. It’s about being happy with what you have and embracing what you have accomplished, not what you haven’t. It’s a perspective I cherish. And try to hold to.

But I can’t always. Sometimes it stings. Badly. Sometimes it sears a hole in my heart.

Sometimes in makes me hate my friends.

Because they’re not as smart as me. Not as talented. I’ve read his stuff and I’m such a better writer than him. I could absolutely do a better job behind the camera. What’s so special about her? What’s so important about him?

WHY DOESN’T ANYONE REALIZE THAT I’M THE BEST PERSON IN THE WORLD AT WHAT I DO?!?!?!?!?!?

That is what envy can do to. Take all my insecurities and turn my brain into a hornets’ nest. The awful thoughts I keep just beneath the surface, born of doubt and fear and narcissism and frustration, they seep out of my pores and turn me into something I don’t like very much.

That’s my secret, Cap…

83366-bruce-banner-transforms-into-h-BhDR

…I’m always an asshole.

It’s not an original tale, a writer struggling with egotism and doubt. Hell, they’re job requirements. They can fuel you. Only someone with an enormous ego thinks their thoughts are worth people paying money for; only someone full of doubt needs the love of millions of strangers to validate them as people.

Like I said, though, this has gotten a lot better over the years. I can actually now feel genuine joy at my friends’ successes. Sure, it’s joy laced with a little vitriol, but it’s joy all the same. I want everyone I know and love to do well at whatever they do. But it is hard when what they do is also what I do. Because I can’t help but measure myself up to them. And, rightly or wrongly, every step they take forward feels like a step back for me.

I also know that there are people that envy me. Not everyone is lucky enough to have a produced feature film in the world, no matter how small and indie. Not everyone has the time, endurance, or will to write a novel. Some people are better writers than me, but many are not.

What has been the point of this? I don’t know. Do I get off on exposing this jealous and angry part of myself? Maybe. Am I using this as an outlet to vent my frustrations? Certainly. If you take anything from this, other than a deep dislike of me, I hope you check out the work of my friends that I listed above. They’re all talented and hard-working people. And they’re good people.

Boy, I’m in a bad fucking mood.

I promise next week I’ll be a better person. Because, luckily, this feeling will fade and I’ll go back to this:

Snapz-Pro-XScreenSnapz0023-1024x572

No, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go keep my head down and do my work.

How it all began…

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Malog J Sketch

 

 

 

Quite by accident, this week’s blog…

 If not for a cup of chance, I’d have drowned Tessera in an entirely different ocean of bones. But an old friend stumbled upon a twenty year-old folder I thought I’d lost ages ago, and I found myself unable to resist writing about it. Not that twenty years is all that long, but to me, still a wee lad, two decades feels like an eon.

I haven’t always been a writer. Well…maybe a little, but not in the way I am today. Long ago, in the primeval soup of early creative-dom, I fancied myself an artist of a different kind. Not with quill, ink, and keyboard, but with markers, pencils, sketch books, and posterboards. I airbrushed T-shirts, made huge Slayer banners (signed by the band!) and silkscreened dark, crazy images onto every bit of cloth I could find. Those were different days. My stories lived on the tips of my fingers, not in the cavernous void inside my skull.

And then one day I started sketching.

I can’t remember the exact moment. It must’ve been cold outside, or rainy, or both. My mind wandered realms both dark and mysterious during those days. I’d already dreamed up the stories and characters which would later become haunt the pages of Down the Dark Path, but I’d gone no further. Lacking the skill or the means to write an epic fantasy, I likely locked myself in my room, climbed on my captain’s bed, and started drawing the images that’d been locked away in my mind’s dungeon. I wasn’t particularly good at it. I hadn’t attended but a few art classes, and while the teachers had taught class I’d never done anything but daydream. I was a novice, an oaf, a blunderbuss of smudgy pencil rubs and cheap not-meant-for-real-art pens. Even so…

So without further ado, I humbly offer my earliest fantasy scribblings. These are the images I first dreamt of when mortaring the bricks of my first epic novel in my mind. I beg only that you forgive their simplicity, and perhaps appreciate the strange glory of passion without talent:

Grae Knight J Sketch

 

– My first try at a Graehelm knight. In retrospect, he needs a saddle, but what did I know? Ignore the tree and tower in the background. They were part of a different sketch crowded on the same page.

 

 

Wraith Sketch 2

 

 

– Look at this ghoulish guy. He’s one of my favorites. He never actually appears in any of my novels, but I like to think he could. He’s reaching out for you. He doesn’t want you dead. He wants you to join him.

 

Wraith Sketch 1

 

 

– Another dead dude. A precursor to the Furyon warlords. I always liked the head of his spiked flail. Imagine getting whacked by that thing…

 

 

Undead J Sketch

 

 

 

– Ok, so maybe one spiked flail head wasn’t enough. Here I sketched two. And if you couldn’t already tell, I really liked (ok, still like) imagery of undead warriors. This hasty little sketch is cartoony and anatomically goofy, but I still thought it belonged. Maybe he’s an undead guardian of the Furyon fortress of Malog. Or maybe he’s a Sarcophage, whom we don’t meet until Book II…

 

 

Grimwain J Sketch

 

– I drew this guy with but one villain in mind. Here lies Grimwain, the Sleeper, the mover of all the world’s pieces on the chessboard of doom. His hood should be deeper, but I feel I nailed his beard, his collar, and his white, starry, and soulless gaze. He doesn’t appear until Book II.

 

 

Ande J Sketch

 

– In the beginning, the heroine Andelusia Anderae inhabited a role far less ‘benevolent’ than who she eventually became. She was harder, grittier, more roguish and fantasy trope-like . This was my first conceptual sketch of her. Clumsy? Yes. Are her boobs too big? Probably. But something in my teenage mind saw a rare emotion in her eyes, and thus was born the Dark Moon Daughter.

 

 

 

Thank you for indulging me. I’ve a ton more sketches, some of which I might hurl up on Tessera should even a mild clamor arise. It’s strange to think that once, so many years ago, I wanted to be a painter, a sculpter, and a fantasy artist god. Thank goodness I kept my day job, right?

Until next time,

J Edward Neill

 

 

 

 

 

How to write Dark Fantasy Novels (and shave decades off your lifespan)

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Skull Party

 

 

Look at these guys. They’re dead, but still having a grand time of it. Makes me want to start hosting poker nights at my place. There’ll be just one rule: everyone has to dress up as their favorite dead person. For one night a week I can pretend I’m having a drink with Poe, Shakespeare, Attila, and Stalin. Who’d want to dress up as Stalin’s bones? I’m not sure, but I know some pretty strange people.

Ok. Look. This isn’t really a how-to article. I’m in no position to tell anyone how to do anything short of throwing footballs, kicking things, and losing at video games. I’m writing this week to take myself down a notch, put a lid on the can, and cork up my fountain of sunshine.

I write better when I’m in a terrible mood.

There. I said it. I’m sure I’m not the only one. What is it about creative people that allows them to make masterpieces out of misery? I’m not saying I’m capable of creating a masterpiece, but I think you get my point. Why are the best novels full to the brim with tragedy, suffering, and death? Why are history’s finest artists at best obsessive, at worst sociopathic? Why is human misery so appealing? Go click on a news site. Go google murder, kidnapping, terrorism, war, or Bieber. It’s a never-ending worldwide horror story. Why, why, why?

I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.

A few years ago, while riding a half-year span of dumb-stupid-happy, my writing crashed and burned. I couldn’t even spit out a page a week, to say nothing of my current pace of five pages per night. I was just too damn pleased with life to concentrate on dragging my readers through the abyss. It was awesome, but it sucked. I mean; if darkness renders us blind, intense sunshine does the same, right? Try seeing through your car window while driving directly at the rising sun. Can’t see a damn thing no matter how you adjust the visor, can you? You’ll think you’re on the road, and meanwhile you’re about to run over a line of kids on their way to the school bus. All the sun’s fault. Maybe vampires are on to something.

So tonight I’m sitting beside a dark-shaded lamp, surrounded by silence, floating on a cloud of gloom and doom. I’m pissed off. I’m bored. I’m willing to fight anyone who dares come through my door. My morbid sensibilities smolder inside me. It’s perfect. It really is. After I finish this blog, I’m betting on 2,500 words and a satisfying night’s sleep. Here’s the proof: right beside my ugly old recliner, my Buddha statue is smiling at me. ‘How much did you write tonight?’ I ask him. ‘Nuthin’,’ he says. ‘I’m more of an eater these days.’ And over there on the wall, the knights on their murals look peaceful in their repose. ‘You guys ever paint anything?’ I ask. They’re so damn happy they don’t even bother to answer. See what I mean? What artist does his best work while feeling bubbly? None, I tell you. You need passion, fury, wrath, and darkness. To cast a shadow, you need light, and something big to block most of it out.

They say all good things must come to an end. Whew. Thank goodness for that. If I’d have stayed on my bus to happyland, I might’ve given up writing altogether, and that would’ve been a different type of low. Maybe I’m wrong about this whole sad-makes-awesome thing. Maybe Fred Rogers and Barney the F’ing Dinosaur really are on to something, but I doubt it. How does one make beautiful, tormented art without knowing how it feels to walk alone in the night? The answer: they don’t. Sometimes, to create you must first destroy.

What’s it all mean? Well…maybe tomorrow I’ll be even gloomier than tonight. Why not? If it helps me finish my latest book and write deathier, bloodier, and grimmer stories than ever before, I’m game. I’m ok with that. What about you?

Until next week,

J Edward Neill

Behind the Comic – The Gilded Age

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This week over on the Terminus Media LLC’s Facebook page this week is The Gilded Age week (available at Amazon and Comics Plus). So I thought I’d provide the blog with a little bit of how this little project came to be.

GildedAge_Front Cover-tessera

It all started with a convention in Orlando a few years ago. My buddy Egg either had a table or was sharing a table or something (it doesn’t much matter). The important thing was that while he was down their he met an artist by the name of Larry Watts who was looking for a project to work on. For some reason Egg thought Larry and I could match up on a project. Larry has since gone on to work on a Zenescope Comic called Robyn Hood (found here).

The only problem was that I didn’t really have any ideas that were artist ready.

Now I certainly had a handful of ideas, but I had no finished scripts that were just begging for an artist. So when faced with the prospect of working with an artist and you have no solid ideas I cheated and went onto his Deviant Art page to check out his stuff and see if anything “inspired me”.

And there it was… a shot of a old western gunfighter… with a metallic arm. In that instant, something flipped in my brain and I had the barest bones of an idea. What followed over the course of the next few days would end up becoming a pitch called Machine Heart.

Now Machine Heart was ready, but I believe that Larry was no longer available to work on it (I probably missed my window by not being prepared with something). So I filed it away on the computer, just waiting for the moment to spring it from it’s prison.

A year or so later Terminus Media was beginning to look towards doing something more than just anthology stories. They wanted to have something that could be 5 or 6 issues to start. Something different than what was on the shelves. And that little voice popped up in my brain and I mentioned my “Steampunk” story. A couple of meetings later things began to crystallize and suddenly it looked like things were a go… there was just one problem.

With an indy comic there is always the risk that there will be a delay between issues. You might have production problems, money problems, printing problems, and who-knows-what-else problems. But here we are wanting to tell a story over the course of 5 issues… what happens if people don’t want to wait that long? What happens if someone stumbles onto issue 2 and can’t find issue 1?

So what was the answer? In a perfect world you would find a way to have a regular schedule. We, however, live in the real world (one populated with superheroes and the like, but real enough) where delays are going to happen…

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Iron Man doesn’t like Daylight Savings Time either.

And then it hit me –  I could build this world from the ground up by telling single issue stories about a variety of characters. And what better way to ensure that there are plenty of characters to choose from? Have the stories take place in a vaudevillian carnival where you could have all sorts of weirdos running around and no one would bat an eye. Plus, the other bonus was that I could tell a variety of stories (adventure, horror, heists, etc.) and they could all work because of the characters involved.

There was only one more problem… a title. Machine Heart didn’t really apply to this particular story, so I needed to come up with something better than “Untitled Steampunk Comic”.

Enter Mark Twain and his coining of the phrase “The Gilded Age”. Now his applied to the late 1800s corruption occurring within the US government, but I saw something that could apply to this new world. There would be corruption (there always is), but it also rang true somehow for the comic… I can’t explain it completely, but it “fit”.

gilded age by twain

While Machine Heart’s plot-line no longer applied, the characters of Hannah and Elias still worked for me. An actress who is new to the carnival, bright eyed and innocent, and the stage magician of the crew who would need her help acquiring an item for his next performance. So I made the first issue about the two of them, giving the reader a complete story in 1 issue, but hinting at a much bigger world that I’m hoping to explore more and more of.

Issue 2 is still in the process of being finished, but that gunfighter with the metal arm that inspired it all… well, he’s getting to tell a story of his own…

Gilded Age #2-004-small

 

***

John McGuire

John McGuire is the author of the supernatural thriller The Dark That Follows, the steampunk comic The Gilded Age, and the novella There’s Something About Mac through the Amazon Kindle Worlds program.

His second novel, Hollow Empire, is now complete. The first episode is now FREE!

He also has a short story in the Beyond the Gate anthology, which is free on most platforms!

And has two shorts in the Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows anthology! Check it out!

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com.

Strategies for the Obsessive Mind

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working_my_fingers_to_the_bone

 

 

  Let’s get back on topic.

 Let’s work our fingers to the bone.

 Ever been obsessed? Ever not been? Not with a person or an object, but with a concept, an idea, a ‘We’re taking the One Ring to Mordor’ type of life journey? Search your heart. You know you’ve been consumed at least once in your life. It’s part of the human experience. To want. To need. To live and die with your obsession until it’s done, devoured, destroyed.

For the most part, I don’t have an obsessive personality. I’ll close a book after an hour to recharge. I can’t remember the last time a movie came out I needed to see. I’ll flip off the tv always. I try to make big deals out of saving money, being a better man, living life to its fullest, but when these ideals escape me, I generally shrug it off. Perhaps my absence of I need to do this is a weakness. Perhaps it’s a strength. Sometimes it’s a struggle just to find something worthy of caring about. Sometimes I want to lose myself in obsession, and it eludes me.   

But then there’s writing…

You may have seen the title Strategies for the Obsessive Mind and thought, ‘Oh great, another writer telling us about his writing process. Joy of joys.’ Never fear. Not gonna happen. I’m neither interested in processes nor compelled to criticize people who are. Discussing the anatomy of ink and quill just isn’t for me. What I am interested in is finding balance. We all need balance, right? If we indulge our obsessions too often and tip the scales into a shadow too deep, we risk losing ourselves. But…if we never dip our toes into dark waters, we’ll never know what lies beneath.

The truth is; it’s already too late. I’ve gone and lost myself.

 I can’t remember when it happened. A year ago? A decade ago? Last week? At some point in time, after teetering on the edge of the abyss, I let myself fall. Gravity claimed me. All the things that used to be important crumbled into dust. And here I am at the bottom, well and truly haunted. I still go to work, play with my kid, eat, sleep (a little), and force myself to exercise, but at all other times, whenever my mind strays from my daily routine, I fall, and fall, and fall. In the deep dark of my man-cave, I gloom over the end of one book, pen handwritten notes for the beginning of another, plan a total rewrite of another, and pepper light edits into still another. Whenever I’m not hammering out words, I’m contemplating my surroundings: Would new art in the man-cave provide even more inspiration? Should I paint the walls black, a la Rolling Stones? If I shaved my cat and dressed it in plate mail, would the other cats respect their new overlord?

And if that’s not enough, whenever I’m not distracted by the mundane, I’m dreaming up new stories. I’ve got more tales in liquid form than I know what to do with. Protagonist sent alone to alien world with purpose to destroy it, aware that if and when he returns hundreds of years will have passed and everyone he ever knew will be dead. – Protagonist unearths a relic that makes him godlike, and then becomes the antagonist. – Prehistoric civilizations discover the secret of fire, and then start the world’s first war. Go ahead. Steal them. I’ve got hundreds more. I’ll be dreaming in my grave long before I can write them all.  

 I ask myself if I’d like control of my mind back. The answer is, ‘Not really.’

 The way I see it, if you can’t beat obsession, bargain with it. Cut a deal with the devil in your mind. Obsession isn’t quite like addiction. We who are magnetized to the object(s) of our desire have a fighting chance…sometimes. I’m not talking about love, by the way. People in love are pretty much screwed. I’m talking about you, the I need to do this in order to be happy person, the writer, the reader, the movie maker, comic-book artist, painter, fighter, soldier, backyard car rebuilder. Embrace your obsession, but let it go sometimes. Fall into your work, but come back up for air. Don’t burn every bridge to reach the promised land, just most of them. Don’t let your passion kill you, but don’t stop until you’re dead.

Or ignore everything I just said and let yourself plummet into the lowest cavern of your desire. Either way is awesome.

Just don’t forget to shower.

J Edward Neill

 

Inspiring Young Creatives

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I’m in the zone right now. The one where I don’t want to stop painting. I don’t want to do anything that will disrupt my rhythm. I imagine all creative people experience it and the torture when they do have to stop. That drive to create is always there, even when I’m tired. Last night, after clearing a couple TV shows off our DVR, I headed back upstairs to paint just a bit more before bed. But that never happened. Instead, at ten o’clock in the evening I gave my daughter a drawing lesson. In the last year she’s begun drawing more and more and showing signs that she’s inherited the artist gene from her mother and grandmother. I always try to make the time to show her how I do things not because I’m her mother, but because it’s the right thing to do for any young creative person. So when she asked me last night if I’d show her how I draw a tiger, I said of course.

Beginnings of a Tiger Read more

Understanding the Beast

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Golden RatioJohn’s post yesterday on Writer’s Block had me thinking about creative blocks in general. Artists too have suffered from the imaginary ailment probably since the dawn of civilization. It’s the same beast. I know I’ve suffered those same thoughts of doubt with my own art, but it’s not the only problem to throw a wrench in the creative process. Sometimes what may appear to be a block is a simple obstacle, not something that lasts weeks, months or even years.

The following are my experiences with the beast in relation to art making, how I’ve come to understand it and neutralize it. Obviously, my experience may be nothing like yours and it does not take into account psychotropic medications; which can sometimes have an effect.

Read more

Life Outside the Studio

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Break the MonotonyBefore begin, I should apologize to those few friends I have. This is why you rarely see me. I love my friends, but I’ll admit I’m not very good at staying in touch. I do try though, believe me!

Given the choice, I’d be a recluse, an artist voluntarily confined to the studio. I don’t watch a lot of television. I’m not on the PTA of my daughter’s school. I’m not into most sports. I don’t go to church. I don’t like talking on the phone. I can only handle socializing for so long. I cherish my solitude. I’d be fine with letting my own birthday pass me by if I could be left alone in my studio to paint.

Yes. I’m an introvert. But it’s a misnomer to say introverts are shy, antisocial creatures. True, once upon a time I was paralyzingly shy, but I grew past it. Nowadays my solitude and silence is by choice, but I wouldn’t underestimate my quiet demeanor. I am anything but quiet on the inside. Painting quells that inner fire and colors are a feast I devour daily. But every artist, whether they are introverted or not, has a life outside the studio. As much as I love my peace and quiet there are times I crave interaction, and while Read more

Hasa Diga Eebowai

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photo (1)

Ugh.

Ugh. Not you again.

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I don’t feel like writing. Not this, not anything. Sometimes it happens. There isn’t one part of me that wants to be in front of this keyboard. My eyes hurt; I’m tired. I just got my daughter down for a nap: we’ll see how long that lasts. I’m just not feeling it right now and the monitor of my laptop is staring at me like an asshole I want to punch in its stupid face.

I am writing to fulfill my obligation to my friends/guildmates and nothing more.

As I type this sentence I have no idea what the next one is going to be. I started working on a post about the time I worked for Quentin Tarantino and about his recent controversy but it’s not done and it’s not going to be done today. I’ll do it next week. Man, I don’t want to be writing right now at the moment.

(I didn’t like the internal ‘write’/’right’ rhyme.)

So, because I don’t want to write, I will write.

Come on. Words words words. Mary had a little lamb. Little lamb. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. Soylent Green is people. Darkness. Imprisoning me. All that I see. Absolute horror. I cannot live. I cannot die. Trapped in myself. Body my holding cell. Yeah-uh!

(Editor’s Note from the future: There does end up being a point to this. So bear with me.)

Let’s see. Come on…

Peyton ManningThat Super Bowl sucked, didn’t it? I was about 50-50 on who was going to win and despite my hatred of the Broncos (any fellow Browns fan will understand) I sort of wanted Peyton Manning to get another ring. Apparently, he didn’t want to. Holy cow. Any sporting event is boring if one of the teams doesn’t bother to show up. I bet even some Seahawks fans were somewhat disappointed. That was plain awful.

The game being yesterday did stir up some frustration for me. Geeks have spent their whole life defending what they love, protesting that they shouldn’t be looked down up on and shit on for loving comic books or video games or science-fiction. And we’ve pretty much won that war. If the geeks have not inherited the Earth, we sure as hell, for better or worse, inherited popular entertainment.

But there’s a trend amongst geekdom that is such hypocritical nonsense. It’s okay to dislike sports. It’s okay to not watch sports. It’s okay to say “I don’t watch sports” when someone brings it up. But there are so many who cannot WAIT to tell you how much they hate sports and how stupid the people who like them are. They cannot WAIT to tell you what they’re doing instead of watching the Super Bowl. They cannot WAIT to make sure you know they are only watching it for the commercials. They cannot WAIT to Tweet about the fucking Puppy Bowl. They cannot WAIT to make their “Go Sports! Kick that ball through the hoop for a goal!” jokes that are hacky and lame.

So a group whose entire plight (and I use that term relatively. this is largely a group of privledged white boys and girls) was being derided for liking the things they like are now using any occasion to deride the things other people like. Part of me gets it. I was picked on by jocks in high school, too. But guess what? That jock who beat me up? I’m damn sure he went and saw The Avengers. Your teenage years are a fucked up time and I’m way too old to worry about how people acted towards me when we were kids. I was a dick as a kid. So were you. Ask the other three members of this site if I was a perfect person, a beacon of kindness and friendship and caring, when I was sixteen. They would laugh in your face. We were all fuckwads in high school. We were just all different types of fuckwads.

Like sports. Don’t like sports. Fine. But you are a damn hypocrite when the first thing you do on Super Bowl Sunday is run to your Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr and tell EVERYONE how dumb they are for liking sports. Bite me. You are traitors to the principles of geek culture, nerdy little Fidel Castros, overthrowing a dictator only to become dictators yourselves. (Okay that’s real dumb and hyperbolic but hypocrisy is something that infuriates me. Especially in myself. It’s part of me like it’s part of everybody.)

Inclusion works both ways. Other people can enjoy what they want to enjoy and it doesn’t affect you one iota. Let it be. Don’t watch the game, but don’t make fun of people who do. You are no longer geeks. You are hipsters. That’s what hipsters do. Do you really want to be a hipster? While you’re at it, stop watching shows you know you hate just so you can hate on them more accurately. I stopped watching “Heroes” midway through the second season and never looked back, not even ironically. Don’t like “Game of Thrones”? Just dandy. Don’t tune in every week just so you can tell me what you hate about it. That makes you a giant dick.

(The funny thing is so many of them absolutely love MMA and UFC and fill up my Twitter stream every Saturday with accounts of thugs beating the shit out of each other for their enjoyment. And then turn around and complain that everyone is talking about football on Sundays. MMA’s a sport, idiots. YOU LIKE SPORTS.)

I’ll end this dumb rant with a Tweet I sent out a few days ago that is my final word:

“I enjoy both the Super Bowl and the Oscars, but am neither a date rapist nor a homosexual.”

We’ve taken a rejection of ‘us and them’ and turned it into ‘them and us’.

I’m this close to turning in my geek card. Traitors.

What else?

So, speaking of Oscars, Phil Hoffman died. Fucking tragedy. Really. I was devastated. Had to leave the house and walk around the block to dry my tears (although it was raining and it didn’t do much good). He was easily one of the two or three best actors working in film today. He wasn’t even 50. Just a shame.

Quick note: several people yesterday claimed the opinion of  “He was using heroin. Fuck him. He should know better. I mean, he has kids!”. Chemical dependency is not a choice, not something people can be reasoned out of. I am lucky enough to have never gone through it, except for maybe caffeine, but have been touched by friends who have and I tell you it’s not something you can chalk up to a “bad life decision”. Addiction never leaves you and can come back to destroy you at any moment. It is a constant battle.

You never beat addiction; the best case scenario is that you play it to a draw.

Philip-SeymourMy favorite Phil Hoffman performance, and I think every one is worth watching, is as Phil the Nurse in Magnolia. In a film chock full of crazy, conflicted, selfish, distraught, sad characters, Phil is a beacon of good and love. He radiates caring in a way I’ve never seen on screen. His quest to find a dying man’s estranged son is pure selflessness and the way Hoffman portrays it is heartbreakingly genuine and beautiful. I know Tom Cruise got all the attention (and nominations) for that film but the true masterstroke in P.T. Anderson’s epic of anxiety and helplessness is Hoffman’s nurse, who Anderson named “Phil” because he knew exactly who he would be casting in the role.

If I were to hold a Phillip Seymour Hoffman memorial film festival, I would watch the following:

Magnolia
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Synecdoche, New York
Charlie Wilson’s War
Capote
and Almost Famous, where he plays the legendary Lester Bangs and steals every moment he is on screen.

And nearly every other film that he made. Although I thought that DeNiro one was pretty bad. And Savages was garbage.

Rest in Peace, Phil. A peace it seems you had a hard time finding in life. I didn’t know you, so I can’t mourn like your family and friends. I can only mourn the passing of a legend and bemoan the fact that there won’t be any more Phillip Seymour Hoffman performances (after the last Hunger Games comes out). A damn, damn shame.

So I didn’t want to write anything and here I am coming up on 1500 words.

Hey! Maybe I found a point.

A writer should write every day. If it’s ten words or three thousand, you should put something down. If it’s nonsense or if it’s gold. If it’s a useless blog post or the final touches on your masterpiece. I truly did not want to sit down and do this. I had nothing to say. I still don’t, really. But I did it anyway. I typed and typed and typed and typed.

I forced my brain to expel letters, form words, construct sentences, build paragraphs, express thoughts. It didn’t matter about what: I rambled about the Super Bowl and a dead movie star. But I got it down, got through it. Broke through that wall.

And you know what?

I think now I’m going to be able to get some work done on Chapter 6 of my book.

I wouldn’t have said that an hour ago. All I wanted to do today was sit my fat ass in front of the TV and see if that new “Black Sails” show is any good, catch up on “Brooklyn Nine Nine”, and maybe dive into the new Blu-ray of my favorite silent film, FW Murnau’s Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans.

But now my fingers are limber. My brain is a little more awake. I realize I am capable of forming thoughts today. Maybe not great ones, but one doesn’t need greatness to work on a first draft. You only need the will and the time.

So I guess this post will go down under the category of ‘writing advice’, although in sort of a meta way. This has been a document of me writing myself out of my not-wanting-to-write mood. When the last thing you want to do in the world is write, get writing.

I promise I’ll be back next week with an actual post. Most likely that piece about Quentin Tarantino: the man, the filmmaker, and the lightning rod.

Now, onto Chapter Six.

Shit. The baby’s waking up.

Chapter Six will have to wait until the afternoon nap.

-chad

PS – If you don’t understand the title of this post, look it up. It was the first thought I had when I learned about the passing of Mr. Hoffman.

Livin’ Small

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Above is a song by my friend and role model Jonah Matranga. Listen to it. I’ll wait.

Okay. More on him in a bit

As child I had the usual dreams about what I wanted to do when I grew up. Police officer. Fighter Pilot. Archeologist.

Then I learned the police academy wasn’t nearly as much fun as the movies that bore its name, that my nearsightedness meant I could never be Maverick, and that real archeologists don’t carry whips and fight Nazis.

In the third grade, my teacher told me I was going to be a writer. That ended up being the one that stuck. That piece of advice given to an 8 or 9 year old boy set the course for the next 30 years of his life. For a decade I wanted to be a novelist; after that, a screenwriter and filmmaker. I never considered studying anything else but writing and movies. I never had a fall back. I didn’t go get a safety degree that I could use to pay the bills while I tried get my writing career off the ground. I, naively and some would say foolishly, went all in on this dream. Sometimes I wonder if I should have taken the route some of my friends took: getting an advanced degree that assured them a job and attempt to launch a writing career in concert with their 9 to 5 obligations.

I admire them for doing that. But that’s not me. I have no other skills. Even if I had gotten into Georgia Tech like so many of my friends, which I did not, I don’t have any feel for things like engineering and science. John McGuire builds roads and plans cities. Another friend makes robots; one has risen through the ranks of one of the world’s biggest and most important companies. They have real jobs, like real men, and while I respect and sometimes envy them, I wouldn’t trade for anything.

I married a brilliant woman who is a bio-organic chemist. She loves chemistry and is very good at her job, but still, even after going through enough school to acquire a PHD, her profession is not what defines her. When she gets home she does her best to leave her work at work. It took me years to understand that. I am a writer 24/7. It’s who I am. It is my profession and my hobby and my identity.

I had big dreams. Still have them. I still want to write and direct major motion pictures. A few best-selling novels. I want to be admired and accepted by others. I want to be known: not famous, but known. I want kids, 22 year old writers or film geeks, running up to me like I once ran up to Wes Anderson and Steven Soderbergh. I want to run my own TV show. I want to win an Oscar, a Hugo, an Emmy, and eventually a lifetime achievement award from the Academy.

I want to be great.

None of that has happened yet, but I haven’t given up. But a recent piece of news (which I will not get into) has made me doubt. Made me think about giving up, walking away. Part of me knows I’m never going to reach the heights I dream about. Part of me knows I’m not going to be Martin Scorsese or George R.R. Martin. I look at things happening today, to people in my age group, and think I missed my chance. Drew Goddard is writing a Daredevil series for Netflix: that should have been me. JJ Abrahms shouldn’t be doing the new Star Wars, I should. They’re making a movie about hip-hop legends N.W.A.; I’ve had that idea for years, just ask any of my friends. Joe Wright is making yet another live-action Peter Pan movie, which was for a long time my dream project. Bill Hader, who was the first friend I made upon moving to Los Angeles 15 years ago, is now a TV and movie star. I used to get drunk with him and watch Evil Dead movies all night and now he’s in movies with Tom Cruise and Larry David.

Sometimes thinking about this stuff really gets to me. Fucks with my head. Makes me feel like a loser, a failure.

And then something like this happens:

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Or this:

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Or this:

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And it buoys me. Takes my head out my ass. Because all I really want to do is reach people, talk to them, move them. And here are these young people (this is just a small sample) proving that I have done that with the one tiny movie I wrote. It is not a large group of people, although it feels like it to me, given the fact that Dakota Skye never had a theatrical release, never got any press, and has had to rely simply on word-of-mouth to get anyone to watch it. But to the people (mostly young women, to be completely honest) who have found it and embraced it, it is very important. It is a big deal. They see Ian and Eileen as movie stars. They seek out the music. And they do things like this, which brings me back to Jonah Matranga and the idea of Living Small:

Jonah MatrangaJonah Matranga is a rock star. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, even him. Especially him. He was (and sometimes still is) the lead singer and songwriter of the band Far. Far is one of my favorite bands to ever put music to tape. When they were around, I never missed a chance to see them live and they never disappointed. Their two major albums, Tin Cans with Strings to You and Water & Solutions are legendary pieces of Sacramento emo or screamo or whatever-o rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t define them. They’re just Far. They are two of my most beloved records, those go-to-anytime pieces of music that never cease to entertain, stir, rock, and inspire me.

But Far never reached full-blown mainstream success. I don’t know if they really came even close. But for those of us who knew them, loved them, followed them, Jonah, Shaun, John, and Chris may as well have been John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

After Far broke up, Jonah began recording solo work under the name Onelinedrawing, had two brief stints with the bands New End Original and Gratitude, and then went back to solo work, this time recording under his name. It was at a Onelinedrawing show that the story for Dakota Skye came to me. The whole thing. In a rush. Three songs in particular are responsible for me writing the screenplay:

1) Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) – my favorite song by my favorite band, Deftones, who are friends of Jonah and Far. Early in the show Jonah played a stripped down cover of it and it send my mind aflutter. The song doesn’t really have a traditional chorus, but it ends with the repeated line “Drive. I don’t care where. Just far away.” If you go back and watch the movie, look for those exact words. I totally stole them. “Be Quiet and Drive” is the unofficial theme song of Dakota Skye and would have been in the film if we could have afforded it.

2) Crush on Everyone – A Onelinedrawing song that is one of the most beautiful, simple expressions of infatuation I have ever heard.

3) My List – A song written by punk legend Kevin Seconds (who was also on the bill that night) that Jonah turned into a beautiful ballad (as opposed to the awesome two-minute original punk version), with backing vocals by Kevin’s wife Allyson.

It’s hard to explain, but I was both fully immersed in the concert AND writing a movie in my head at the same time. So many things from that night ended up informing the film: the character names of Kevin and Jonah (fictional Jonah’s last name, Moreno, is taken from Chino Moreno, lead singer of Deftones and my #1 man crush), the feeling I had that night, the fact that the original title of the film was Far, and, obviously, the music. It thrills me to no end that two of the three songs listed above ended up in the final film. I always hoped they would be, but never thought we could make it happen.

The thing I admire most about Jonah Matranga is his attitude about making things. He has run the gamut in music, from releasing albums on a major label to recording songs alone in his house on his computer, from playing big(ish) rock shows to playing quiet, intimate shows in fans’ homes. His post-Far DIY spirit has been a wonder to me. I’m sure he gets frustrated at times. I’m sure he gets angry. I know he does. I’m sure sometimes he wishes he was Mick Jagger or Bono. He loves making music and loves playing music for people and why wouldn’t he want as many people as possible to hear him? But he seems to understand something that has taken me a long time to come to:

If your art touches just one person, it was worth it. Maybe not financially, maybe not by society’s benchmarks for success, but because it did what you wanted it to. If you get into art to make money, you made the wrong choice. It’s very very hard to get anyone to pay you to write or paint or play music. If those things come, great. You’re one of the lucky ones. And while I still strive for and need to make money creating things, that is not where the joy or motivation comes from. It comes from touching that one person.

Every time I’ve spoken to Jonah, he’s been nothing but kind to me. Early on as a sweaty fanboy after a Far show. Later, as some guy coming and asking to use some of his music in a little movie…for no money. And more recently as a peer, if not a friend, who now lives only about fifteen minutes from me. He is a good man. Sometimes I feel a little conflict in him, but show me a man who isn’t conflicted about something and I’ll show you a dullard without curiosity or passion.

Chances are, unless your name is John or Egg or had something to do with Dakota Skye, you’ve never heard of Far or Jonah Matranga. But believe me when I say he’s touched a lot of people with his music and spirit and will continue to do so. And to me, he will always be one of the biggest rock stars that ever lived.

If this sounds like a love letter, then I guess it is.

“But Chad,” you’re thinking, “When are you going to turn this back into something about you, because that’s what you do, you egomaniac?”

Very true. Sorry. I almost forgot.

Wil Wheaton recently put up a blog post on this subject that I connected with in a major way. I urge you to check it out HERE.

I’m writing novels now, but haven’t given up on movies. I still want to be on the Dead Guy montage on the Academy Awards. I still want to direct Daniel Day-Lewis. I still think I’d write a better Star Wars film than JJ. I still want to make a good living doing what I love. I want to reach as many people as I can.

I still want all those things. But I may never have them. And that’s okay. Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way, but it really is. All I can do is do my work and create things I want to create and hope people find and connect with them. On whatever scale. Ten or ten million people. One person. I mean, I moved a person to do this:

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I’m not saying I endorse it, but someone thought enough of words that I wrote to have them permanently inked onto their body. That has to count for something. That may be the only Dakota Skye tattoo in the world, but that’s more than a lot of people get. I have to remind myself that. And every day on Twitter and Tumblr I have people reaching out to me about how much the film meant to them.

And I know I’m talking a lot about Dakota, even though it came out five years ago. It’s just at this point the only thing I have out in the world that I’ve gotten a reaction to. Proxy is just an infant and I don’t think my fiction is going to get any attention until I have a few more books on the (virtual) shelves. So the film is the only example I have. At the moment. But I am confident there will be more. I have so many more stories to tell; so many more characters to introduce you to; so many more ideas rolling around in this chaotic shitstorm I call a brain.

But success? I’ve chosen to redefine success for myself. I think for the time being, and maybe forever, I’ll try to be happy livin’ small. Anyway, at this moment in my life, this is what success looks like to me:

(I don’t post these to brag. I post these because they are people being touched by our little movie. They are currency to me. Worth more than any paycheck.)

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Please check out jonahmatranga.com and listen to and buy some music.

I’ll leave you with another song, one from Jonah’s short-lived band New End Original, that is the best song for getting me out of bed when my brain and body refuse to do so. I listen to it once a week at least. I don’t always live up to it, but I try. I’ll keep trying.

Illinois Corn, Comics, & Sound Direction

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A few years ago (maybe 2006, 2007) my mom’s side of the family, the mostly Chicago based Stephenson clan, decided to hold a family reunion in Monticello, Indiana. Monticello has great vacation spots/ campsites in the area, including a hallmark of Midwest fun times, Indiana Beach, a local amusement park/ waterpark.

Now if you could ignore the various “Anti-Meth dealing” warning signs we saw on various back roads, this place is one to visit.

Emmy-winning meth.

Emmy-winning meth.

In the surrounding area you’ll find picturesque woodlands, replete with nice lakes, small towns, and great places to just barbeque, and while away the day. We were able to snatch up a set of cabins for the entire family, and spent a five day vacation just catching up and having fun.

Our folks had come from all over to commiserate: Atlanta, Sacramento, San Francisco, Jackson (MS), Los Angeles, Chicago.

Heck, there was some family I hadn’t seen since the second Rodney King trial verdict.

Basically, it’d been a while since I’d seen half of these people.

So being Atlanta based my brother (Brandon) and I decided to forgo the sensible option of getting plane tickets to Chicago, and catching a ride with the family to Monticello which was just a few hours away.

Nope, being the guys that we were (and wanting to have some wheels while on vacation), we’d come up with a decision to load up in my 2001 Nissan Altima, and take the 9-10 hour drive to the reunion. Added to this, with the work schedule that I had at the time, we had two options on when to leave: exactly after I got off of work, which would have been around 9 or 11 pm, or wait until the next day.

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Road tripping how it should be done. At least for insomniac’s.

Needless to say, we decided to tap into our inner insomniac and hit the road, caffeine/ Red Bulled up to the gills.

For me night driving is fun, and a bit relaxing. I enjoy being able to see the world when it’s basically asleep, and just catch the sights as most folks are winding down for the day. Our nocturne route took us through Georgia, Tennessee, Illinois, and then Indiana.

Alternating between blasting OutKast, Kanye West, Esperanza Spalding, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, my brother and I took turns with the driving duties.

It was when we hit mid Illinois that things got interesting.

At the time, I was driving, rolling through moon drenched rows upon rows of corn.

Endless-rows-of-corn.

Though I’d gotten use to this from previous road trips to Chicago, to say that endless rows of flat farmland can lull you into a chillastic state is an understatement.

So guess what I had to break me from this stupor?

Police lights ahead of us. A lot of them. Blocking the whole two-lane interstate.

You would’ve thought that damn Dr. Richard Kimble was on the loose with all the lights that I saw.

No caption needed. This scene was just all sorts of awesome.

No caption needed. This scene was just all sorts of awesome.

First thought I had: Damn.

Second thought I had: Damn, damn.

Third thought I had: Our current situation playing out like the one from “The Five Heartbeats” when the cops pull the main characters over on a lonely country road

Check the movie out and you’ll catch my drift.

So I wake my brother up, who’s a much cooler dude than I am. He tells me to just chill, and we hit the roadblock.

I rolled down the window and the officer asks for my license and registration. As I’m handing it over I decide to ask why the whole freeway is closed down at the latest hour known to man.

The cop hands back my information and doesn’t give a reason. At all. Just hands it back. Then asks where we’re headed.

Yeah....our cop wasn't Mr. Smiley.

Yeah….our cop wasn’t Mr. Smiley.

I told him Monticello, and then ask is there an alternate route we can take to get back on the highway we were on.

The cop mumbles something about taking a nearby exit, follows up with something else unintelligible, and then backs away ready to direct the next car in line.

So as I prepared to barrage the officer with more questions, my brother, sensing that this dude wasn’t going to be too forthcoming, instructs me to keep rolling.

So we follow the officer’s “directions”, and all we see are rows of corn.

We drive in another direction, and see rows of corn.

No indication of how to get back on the freeway. None at all.

So this goes on for maybe, 30, 35 minutes max. As far as gas, we’re doing alright, but not spectacular.

I started imagining thoughts of my mom getting a call from the Illinois State Patrol:

ISP: Ma’am, we’re sorry to have to inform you that, well…., ma’am, your son’s got lost and gorged themselves to death on corn.

Ma: Oh….. God….No….

ISP: The truly tragic thing about it miss, is, well…. there was a McDonald’s not but a step or two around the corner from where their bodies were found.

Ma: Noooooo!

So as we’re driving my brother points into the distance.

“BJ (my nickname), look.”

I look in the direction he’s pointing and see a convoy of taillights. A semi-truck convoy.

“Who would you figure might have the best idea on how to get back to the interstate?” Brandon asked.

I figured, heck, we’re not having any success so why not follow them?

Keep on truckin'.

Keep on truckin’.

Relying on faith, and the sound judgment of Brandon, we struck pay dirt. Following the truckers lead we rolled through a small town, sleeping neighborhoods, took a bunch of side roads, and within a bit of time, we were back on the freeway.

After hitting the interstate, we were good to go. Heck we even got to the vacation spot before anyone else in the family.

One thing I learned from that situation and in countless one’s before and since, is it’s sometimes good to follow the lead of others. Not those folks who don’t have your best interest at heart, but those who care enough about you to set you on the right path.

On the nerdy/creative front it’s happened a number of times.

Some of Ms. Butler's most awesome sci-fi works.

Some of Ms. Butler’s most celebrated sci-fi works.

My Dad introduces me to the awesome work of Octavia Butler, a talented sci-fi novelist to whom I now look for inspiration on the writing front.

One of my closest friends Oscar gives me a copy of Alan Moore’s seminal work, Watchmen, and this writer’s mind is blown. An awesome friend, Patrick, loans me his entire of collection of Preacher to read, and I devour the books in the span of a weekend.

 

 

 

A man of many talents.

A man of many talents.

One Saturday afternoon I get a package from my Dad in Atlanta, and was introduced to the mind-blowing universe of Milestone Media, and another writing inspiration, Dwayne McDuffie.

My mom picks up a copy of “The Amazing Spiderman” from the drugstore (remember those days folks?), and my world is forever rocked by the exploits of a certain web slinger who often had problems paying the rent on time.

 

 

 

 

 

I meet up with the folks of Terminus Media, who teach me the ins and outs of writing/ creating comics, and I’m now a published comic book writer.

A little comic I created.

A little comic I created.

Through the instruction, and direction of my editor/ brother from another mother, Dennis, I got a firsthand instruction on what it took to be a successful freelance journalist.

Heck, the often maligned Wizard Magazine got me pushed in the right direction of another writing inspiration, Greg Rucka.

Tara Chace. Her Majesty's Bad Ass.

Tara Chace. Her Majesty’s Bad Ass.

So if you get the gumption, take a chance, and follow the direction of those folks willing to offer a helping or a guiding hand. Makes things fun, heck even easy in some cases.

I’m still doing it, and think I’m all the better for it.

If you don’t you might find yourself stuck in endless rows of corn.