2024-W39 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• This week was one of the roughest ones I’ve had in a while since the March/April fiasco from earlier this year. The headline news is I had to let three employees go. Found out on Monday, didn’t execute until Thursday morning, so had that information in the pit of my stomach the entire week, while having meetings with some of them. It’s never easy, but also I’ve never had to do so much of it at any job before. Some of it were mistakes on the company’s part, some of it was performance issues, but it’s never ever easy to face somone and tell them you’re taking away their living. On a more personal and minor note, all this was tweaked by the fact that the week started off bad. Went to bed at 9PM on Sunday so I could get up early to work out as usual, but work up at 12:08AM… and couldn’t go back to bed. Spent hours debating whether to go downstairs to work or get something done. I finally did at 4AM, did an hour, and went back to bed for 90m of sleep… and my wife wakes me up telling me how late it is, and because I’m old, I not only had to nap in the middle of the day on Monday to recover, my entire circadian rhythm was messed up the rest of the week and afternoon naps were required to muster through. On top of all this – I’ve been feeling a little down. A feeling of being trapped, of hitting my limits, or running out of time… or unable to get a toehold on the place where I want to be, feeling ignored, insignificant, insecure, wondering if I’m toxic, or overbearing, or aged-out, or a relic. I don’t know if any of this is valid. I don’t know if this is just part of being someone who’s the diametric opposite of whatever “height of powers” is. Nadir of powers, the trenches of powers, the basement of powers? Part of it feeling like a fraud, still haven’t produced or created anything. Part of it is talking about it as if I know what I’m talking about, the whole imposter syndrome thing.
• Here’s where I’m at with BECKY. I’m further into Spies, Lies, and Algorithms (2022). Still don’t have an ARC I feel confident about. I read Pornsak Pichetshote’s The Manchurian three times this week. It’s somewhat adjacent. There are story structures and PROGs here I could use. I reached out to MRK to see if some brainstorming could be had. I should finish Zegart’s book this week. It’s sufficient research and I need to work on the PROG/ARC once I have a CDA I’m happy with.
• I find myself on League of Comic Geeks a little too much. I still have urgings to start a Ghost blog to break down stories. All this is yet another distraction. I have a lifetime habit of distracting myself from the difficult, but I suppose we all do. I would assume every artist or writer puts off the actual doing of their craft, especially those that don’t make it their “do or die” career.

Project Status Dashboard

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

No change, still trying to crack the CDA for BECKY.

EOW Time Tracking

Three Sentences First Thing Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
• BEST STREAK: 83 Days (September 20, 2024)

Thirty Minutes A Day Streak

• CURRENT STREAK: 0 Days
• LAST STREAK: 10 Days (August 17, 2024)
• BEST STREAK: 18 Days (May 10, 2024)

Four Thousand Weeks

So in reviewing last week’s 4000 Weeks, it looks like it’s still not all over with LCG, but everything I wrote in this week’s highlights definitely punctuated this week too.

Book Reading

• STILL NO NOVEL READING
• I guess I am officially a Kelly Thompson stan now? I mean, I got a 💜🖤 reply from her on Bluesky. But yeah, I am in love with how she wrote Kate Bishop in her Hawkeye (2016) run. So I guess I’m fully prepared to admire Absolute Wonder Woman when it hits the newsstands in October. But I should probably pick up her Black Cloak (2023) as well.
• My curiosity got the better of me. I found a used copy of Green Lantern: Rebirth (2004) at my LCS for $10. (But also Global Frequency (2002)!). Started reading it on Friday night, and I’m like… WTF is going on??? There’s this guy named Hal Jordan and he’s a ghost? And he destroyed a city or something? But he can go to a baseball game with his friends? And he’s possessed or his soul is inside Spectre… who tf is Spextre and then there’s a Parallax thing? Wait. How many Green Lanterns are there? And Guy used to be one but now he can transform to something else and that’s why John had to fly him in like a forestry bucket truck? I am so lost. What are the Green Lantern(s) powers even? I ended up looking up synopses to figure out stuff. This was not a good intro to Green Lantern.
• OTHERS: Man, I love Ed Brubaker, but Books of Doom (2005) was so… frustrating to read. It’s basically “this happened, and this happened, and then this happened” recalling the backstory of Dr. Doom. It was basically an illustrated history book telling me stuff. There was no in media res dramatic tension. No time to pace scenes. Just a high level overview with inconsequential obstacles. Like the wendigo/sasquatch. OK? We all knew he’d make it to Kamar-Taj, so just throwing in a giant white monster is like… why? Neither really pushed the ARC/PROG forward in an interesting way. Oh dear god, I want to re-read it now just to analyze why it DIDN’T work for me. Joëlle Jones’ Lady Killer (2015) was just fun and really, I read this purely for Jones’ art more than anything else. The splatter, the bold lines, the rough panel borders. It’s just a beautiful style.
• Did I mention I read The Manchurian by Pornsak Pichetshote three times yet? It’s a fresh perspective. That’s really what it is. It’s the fact that we get access to a mindset and POV that you don’t normally get, and Pichetshote contrasts it with your typical Western mindset. That’s what makes it work. It’s like James Clavell’s Shogun (1975). He continuously compares the Western mindset to the Japanese, and that helps you see the differences and how it will affect the characters decisions and their reactions to the plot. ALSO – on my third read, I picked up on how pages 3-4 are uniquely something only the comics medium can pull off. Page 3 is a screenshot of an email contrasting Chinese intelligence practices with Western, but then on page 4, it’s four panels, three of which are cut scenes of intelligence/STEM/M-I-Complex folks talking about stuff, just atmospheric throwaway dialogue… shared with the a continuation of the email from page 3. This is uniquely only something the comics medium can do because, if it were prose, it would be awkward. You can share the email, and then cut to different atmospheric scenes, but you can only do that as an omnipresent narrator, hopping from one location to the next. If it were film, you’re constrained by the audio track. What would you do? I guess you can do a voiceover (but that’s always cheesy), but how would you sneak in the atmospheric audio in the cut scenes? I suppose you could start the email, cut to each of the three atmosphere scenes, and then cut back to the email? What makes it work in comic form is the fact that visually it’s one frame, but the time is undefined. The email copy, if read, would take up more time than the in-panel dialogue… but because “time doesn’t matter” in one panel… you could have two running texts, each a different timescale, and you can jump from one cutscene to another. SO NOW – you have an email giving you high level context, contrasting the Chinese Intelligence mindset compared to the American one, while also showing the people affected at the ground level, AND, AND… the email sender is an easter egg that will be resolved later plot wise.

Comic Book Issues Tracking

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