2024-W33 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• NERD STUFF: I am up to 50+ issues a week. It’s only been two weeks, granted. But it’s like injecting stories straight into my veins. The 3-5 issue arcs, which is about 70-110 pages means you can cram a lot of narrative inside a 30-45m window. You can’t do this with prose nor film. It’s just not possible. Prose needs to develop scenes with voluminous words, and at best, we read at 250-300wpm. So maybe we get one scene in three minutes. With video, the barriers are dialogue and action deliverables in real time. You can’t (or, I mean, you can) speed up video, but then you’re watching chipmunks. You’re ruining the medium. But comics, I can burn through an issue in 5-10 minutes? I’ve never timed myself. But it’s not just TIME. The other metric here is how description and action is delivered. The information is downloaded into your brain, 3-5 panels at a time.
• I dug into cleaning up character arcs and the anchor/aspect matrix more this whole week. I’m 90% happy with the outcome. I examined the history of this deep-dive and internalization from June onwards: the history of it. I’m going to clean it up either in Iceland or tomorrow. I don’t feel so bad about the stalling these past few months now that I’m on the other side of it. While in the muck it was defeating. Felt like zero progress. But now it feels like a foundation. Just keep going, just keep going.
• Leaving for Iceland on Tuesday.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

EOW Time Tracking

Here’s the benefit with my Marvel obsession, but specifically reading the entire Krakoan run from the start and jumping from title to title. It’s re-igniting and sparking all the various types of stories I love and dislike and everything in-between in extremely fast cycles. Five issue arcs, at 100-110 pages can be read in one night. Hell, I can read two of those in one night. So it’s just speed of consumption here. I’ve found this reflected in my 3-sentence exercise. Just more variety. Not feeling stuck. Imagination running wild and everywhere again.

Three Sentences First Thing Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 49 Days
• BEST STREAK: 49 Days (August 18, 2024)

Thirty Minutes A Day Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 10 Days (August 17, 2024)
• LAST STREAK: 5 Days (June 14, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

Not much to report here. Getting up early enough to do 30 minutes again. Moving at a snail’s pace, but moving.

Book Reading

• Heeeeyyyyy, I’m reading novels again. I knocked off two chapters of Time of the Twins (1986), really hoping to finish it before Iceland. <100pgs left. Maybe it’s doable. I want to bring three novels to Iceland for the plane rides and knock them off. Nothing heavy, maybe three of the “quiet novels” that Cecelia Lyra recommended at SIWC last year. Also, after going through all the books in my walk in closet last night, I decided to move the 2012 Clarkesworld compilations downstairs to my office, and while there, I went through the fiction top shelf and pulled out Treasure Island (1883) because that book was a big dialogue piece on On Golden Pond (1981) where Henry Fonda is disappointed Dabney Coleman, who played his son-in-law, had not foisted this literary classic on Doug McKeon, who played the grandson. I read 30 ages of it, it was wholly entertaining (because it was an adventure written for young boys, y’know? And given my regression to my 11yo self this past month, I had a lot of fun with the voices and the naive protagonist who has zero characterization and is for the audience to use as a vehicle into this wondrous world.)
• And speaking “picking up books because another piece of media referenced it”, I picked up Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) because Erik Lehnsherr dropped it as a power move at Davos in X-Men (2019) #4. What a brilliant flex – both Hickman as author (show off) and Magneto as character (show off). I think issue #4 might be my favorite issue of X-Men ever (as of now). I have always liked my comics to be more grounded in real world socioeconomics and politics. I loved Bendis’s run on Ultimates and still recall being so excited about how a news anchor flat out asked Tony Stark why it was OK to have these superheroes, who were basically WMDs, not be legislated and controlled in any way. So when Xavier, Lehnsherr, and Apocalypse got off the helicopter in suits… that was. YES. Geopolitics. Power games. Political intrigue.
• Which, I think, is why I’m in love with Benjamin Percy’s X-Force (2019) run as well. The stakes are international. Krakoa is a new nation, it has to protect itself. Chris Claremont once said in an interview that Professor X and Magneto weren’t so much influenced by MLK and Malcolm X as they are by two Israeli PMs. “Menachem Begin as Magneto, evolving through his life from a terrorist in 1947 to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years later” and David Ben Gurion as Xavier. X-Force is essentially the Mossad and not so much the CIA, unless you see Krakoa as a hegemonic state, which it is not.² Which brings me to my final point as I’m reading over fifty issues a week the last two weeks. Just like my heavy novel run the last six months… I’m getting a keener, clearer idea of what I like and don’t like, and what I would like to write as a fiction author myself. And it’s this stuff. Clear historical analogues. Clear social commentary. Grounded in socioeconomics and geopolitics. Sly references to other media, literary references, pop cultural drops.
• So while books by Jed MacKay, Chip Zdarsky’s X-Men/Fantastic Four (2020), and Donny Cates’s Absolute Carnage (2019) – which I read purely for the Marvel Insider points – are fun, kinetic, and full of great action sequences… it’s not enough for me. TBH, I find these just kind of… not boring, but “OK, that was fun, but what else are you saying?”. It feels like empty calories. I know that sounds elitist, but if you’re going to take up someone’s attention for 20 minutes, or a couple of hours in a film, or 4-6 hours like a novel… why wouldn’t you include some medicine with the syrup? Why wouldn’t you attempt to expand someone’s mind? Why wouldn’t you try to show them a framework or perspective or worldview they didn’t have, or reinforce it, or something?
• Counterpoint to the above – Gerry Duggan’s Marauders (2019) and Hickman & Brisson’s New Mutants (2019). I guess I give comedy a pass for some reason. I mean, yes, my favorite sitcoms are The Good Place (2016-2020), and Community (2009-2015), which are both extremely intelligent in their analogies and philosophy… but I also just enjoy drunk Captain Jack Sparrow Kate Pryde and full-of-himself Bobby da Costa and the four geriatric Hordeculture women. I don’t know, is it because they’re just well written tropes? The interminably-inebriated-but-still-hyper-competent character, the so-self-absorbed-and-selfish-character-flouncing-through-important-events-and-not-realizing-its-gravity, or just cranky old people taking the piss out of each other? There’s just humor in incompetence, selfishness, and curmudgeon wit.
• Final point - I mean, I guess I also give a huge pass to purely emotional relationship stories that are done well, like This is Us (2016-2022). So maybe another way of looking at this is I just don’t care for straight-up adventure and action stories? OK, but, I’m enjoying Treasure Island. And on that anti-example, I’m going to wrap up this week.

Comic Book Issues Tracking

Archive of all EOW reports here