Dear Internauts,
I really shouldn't look at the number of views. It probably does little to encourage me toward writing or writing better, but it definitely can make me a bit disappointed when it dips. Still, I've blogged to single digits and zero views and I've blogged to over two hundred. Never reached anything which could be considered more than the most minute speck on the macrocosm of the internet datascape, but then I've no more idea what you might like to read than I ever had what my peers might like me to be for popularity sake. All a chasing after the wind, as it were, even if the wind howls most mightily when my life feels so restlessly still.
This past week I did something I've never done before. (Wouldn't it be nice if we could say that every week? Probably could, but then we'd have to convince ourselves first.)
I finished a first draft.
I know right? But Odist, you've been writing most of your life. Surely you've finished a first draft before.
Well, of course in school most of my papers never got much further than the first draft. My many short stories, too, have been written in a single sitting, which is about how long Poe suggested a good short story should take to read. Good short story writing is like painting to me. I'm fascinated by it and I can appreciate it done well, but all my attempts serve more to show that I don't know what I'm doing than the opposite.
This is, however, a complete story. Beginning, middle, and end. Sure, the format is as choppy as a Maine shoreline in February, and I expect most of the plot points and characters will vastly change if not simply be erased from existence. Still, for a story I've been trying to write for what seems like my whole life, this metamorphosing layer cake of thought vomit is, as of a few days ago, technically a creature of its own.
The plot needed a bit of living from me before it could exist. Maybe if I'd stuck with the winding roads of past ideas more steadfastly I could have made something decent, but there is a necessity in this telling which didn't exist before. I needed to be traumatized. I needed to be shattered and battered and scrambled and all many other Waffle House-esque terms of hash brown toppings before I could write this tale. I do wonder now, though, if my resolution in fiction can be anywhere near convincing with me still feeling so very far from any personal resolution.
I guess I'll just have to stick with it. That is the only way I've gotten to this point. Just write and write and write. Even if no one ever reads it. Likely no one ever will. But I have to write it, for me. For the kid who has loved science fiction and fantasy and wonder and horror and the power of sequential art storytelling. And for the adult who is still becoming myself and in doing so realizes that the world is full of stories. Yet for all those stories, there are still so many that I want to be told. I want them to exist and I haven't found them yet. I guess I'll just have to make them then.
What I'm doing now is breaking the story down into a script of sorts by page and panel layout. Alongside that I'm drawing thumbnail sketches of the pages trying to figure out flow and size and perspective and all other artsy stuff. It feels like I'm learning a whole new language of art. All these balls gotta stay in their arcs while this juggler sculpts Michelangelo's David outta Legos but the Legos are secretly spiders and the spiders all have to sing an improvised fugue but their little spider voices are so high and their little spider lungs are so small and the balls I juggle are actually the abstract idea of community and independence and a connection between the self and the other...oh yeah and I'm being crushed by a million-tentacled space squid who has an opinion about EVERYTHING.
But yknow it's kinda fun. See ya next week.
Thanks for reading,
Odist
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