Because, if you’re a regular reader, you know I’m shit at keeping track of things.  So this is one of those posts that’s mostly for my own benefit.  That I’m burying on a Saturday night.

I have Skype and WhatsApp.  Hilariously, almost nobody has my Skype and WhatsApp IDs.

The first two screens of my phone are always the most-used apps, and the apps I kind of feel like I should be using more.  If I’d shot this yesterday, Days would have been on there, but I tried that app today, and it didn’t seem to be in the mood to let me use it, so. 

Downcast is a pretty good podcast app.  A damn sight better than having to manage them through iTunes or Apple’s appalling Podcast app that I’ve railed about before.

You may, if you haven’t passed out already, have noticed there’s not a writing app in the first two screens.  There are a couple in the back screens.  But I don’t want a writing app staring at me on the phone, demanding I write something in it.  (The WordPress app, on the other hand, is there specifically to taunt me.  I am way out of practise with this blogging shit.)  The phone is, first and foremost, a thing that gathers information.  And I live on this goddamn phone.  I can and have written on it, using a foldaway Bluetooth keyboard, and it works fine.  But I find – and here is the proof, horribly, now I look at it –- that, as much as I talk about devices needing to be equipped as communication and creation tools, it’s become a consumption device.

Which is kind of an interesting thing that I didn’t realise until I put this up here.

This is a Maxpedition Mini EDC Pocket Organiser.  It fits neatly in my coat pocket.  I’ve always been one of those people who just stuffs their coat pockets with the stuff they might need thirty seconds before I head out of the door.  This means, in practise, that I either overstuff said pockets or that I can’t find one thing I need to stick in there.  Obviously, the older and more senile I get, the more this will become one of those idiot problems that wastes more time and mental energy than it should.  I’m going to need that mental energy for things like remembering where I live.  Also, if I’m just shooting into London for something, I like to avoid carrying a bag if I can.  Not least because a bag tempts me to carry more stuff than I need, “just in case.”

(I like Maxpedition bags.  I also have the Maxpedition Jumbo Versipack Shoulder Bag for overnight travel and, for travelling more than one night, the slightly absurdly named Maxpedition Aggressor Attache Tactical Briefcase.  They’re strong, clever and compact bags that take a beating.)

So I have this.  I don’t like the colour, but it was the only one in stock that week.  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not like anyone will see it, because it lives in my coat.  For scale, the black Field Notes notebook on the far right is five inches tall.  That’s a Pilot Frixion pen next to it: they’re erasable pens, and are nice to write with.

The shiny thing reflecting my iPhone 4S (which is always at hand) is an Anker Astro2 battery pack, which will charge the phone and everything else in the pack.  At left of that is my Sony mp3 player, which has been running strong since, what, 2009?  I choose mp3 players very carefully.  It’s the NWZX-1060, 32GB.  Monster Turbine earbuds.

The thing with the white blob above the mp3 player is, if you’re my daughter, my “douchebag ear-thing,” otherwise known as a Bose bluetooth earpiece.  Which mostly gets used to listen to spoken-word podcasts while I’m on the move, and to allow me to take long phone calls from my agents while drinking and smoking heavily.  Not that they cause me to drink and smoke heavily.  Often.  (They are the only people who ever phone me.)

Never, ever, ever be without a notebook and something to write with.  Phones are great for lots of things, but nothing beats paper and pen for complex thoughts, notes and sketches.  I wrote an entire issue of PLANETARY in a notebook on a long three-leg train journey once.  The phone is for everything else, and the mp3 player is for when everything else needs to go away.

Faintly ridiculous, all lined up like this, isn’t it?  There’s a tiny little penknife that also goes in there, but it’s, um, currently missing.  (See?)  Thing is, the business of writing doesn’t stop just because I’m travelling.  So this simple little bag stays in my coat.  For me, this is actually streamlined.

Was going through an old notebook, and found these notes for a talk I did at the AA – the first Thrilling Wonder Stories event, I guess.  See if you can decipher my handwriting while I attempt to write a new story for Thrilling Wonder Stories’ organiser Liam Young, as an element of the ongoing Under Tomorrow’s Sky project to imagine new iterations of the city.  You can learn more about Under Tomorrow’s Sky here, where there are lots of pictures and videos.

Copying these from the notebook before I lose it.  I want to come back to a bunch of these: one of them led to a long Twitter conversation between Deb Chachra, Eleanor Saitta and myself that I need to return to soon.  So, anyway.  Jottings for the outboard memory.

Notes I worked from:

*  What is the legal status of the weather?

*  Are we in fact tending to imagine a city-state?  A city that borders on a closed and self-sufficient (resilient) energy state?  Singapore rather than Brussels?

*  Sonic architecture – footfall energy harvest – road energy harvest

*  Repurposed ambient urban drones

*  The ethics of machine reportage

*  The lessons of archaeo-acoustics – can cities be designed for sound?

*  acoustic mirrors in architecture

*  Buildings that breathe

Notes from things Simon, Rachel and Bruce said:

*  Futurism as radical reductionism

*  Capital as simplification – human life happens in the friction

*  To be an ecological human means understanding our bacterial nature

*  Dematerialised Urbanism

*  Predator Lidar

*  Cities as habitats that domesticate the human

*  Architecture forces solutions on materials

*  It costs $1000 to grow three inches’ worth of tissue culture

[top image cropped from a bad iPhone shot of one of Rachel’s slides]

This may seem obvious, but give me a minute. I think it’s often misunderstood.

A script is a set of instructions to the artist(s), letterer, editor, colourist if applicable, and designer if applicable. This set of instructions is intended to present the mechanics of your story with the greatest possible clarity. Adhering to a precise format, as in screenwriting, is not necessary. Presenting a script whose operation is clear to everybody is the requirement.

This set of instructions must surround your story to the extent that you feel necessary and comfortable. Some writers produce reams of panel description because they require fine control of the artist, letterer and colourist to meet their vision of the story. Some writers boil their description down to a telegram because they require only that the most basic requirements of the panel be met in order to achieve their goals.

Both methods, however, and everything in between, are about manipulation of the artist. That sounds grim, doesn’t it?

Even if you and the artist have previously agreed on content and scenes and set-pieces, clear and specific notation of the mechanics of the comic is down to you. You are telling the artist what to do. The trick is to get the artist to like it.

When you’re starting out, you may well find yourself writing “blind”: not knowing who the artist will be. This is why people like Alan Moore evolved that hyper-descriptive style — so he could get the end result he was looking for regardless of who was drawing it. You may prefer to do that. I would prefer that you took some art classes, and talk to some illustrators (this may involve sign language and grunting sounds).  Investigate art, even if your drawing hand, like mine, behaves more like a flipper. Understanding what is joyful about illustration is important. It’s important to create a thing that will delight an artist. (And even a letterer, although that’s going to be harder as many of them have the demeanour of a demented gravedigger.)

You are, in many ways, writing a love letter intended to woo the artist into giving their best possible work to the job. A bored or unengaged artist will show up on the page like a fibrous stool in the toilet bowl, and that’s not their fault — it’s yours.

(Unless the artist is crazy. Which they all are. But you take my point, yes?)

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I already knew this – he told me, a few years back – but it still baffles and fascinates me.  From a long and interesting interview with The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

How do you begin a novel?

GIBSON

I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

INTERVIEWER

You won’t have planned beyond that one sentence?

GIBSON

No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.

E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.

Partly, it fascinates because it’s alien to how I’ve worked for the last fifteen or twenty years.  In comics, we’re working in serial form and very rarely have the luxury of finishing the entire manuscript before it begins publication.  So one has to have a structure before the writing begins, because we can’t go back and tweak something in chapter 1 due to having had some story-changing bright idea in chapter 10, because chapter 1 probably saw print seven months ago and you’re still wanting the thing to hang together as a coherent whole in a collection.  Which is a terrible thing, really, but endemic to the commercial form.  Even FREAKANGELS, which I began with no real long-term plan at all, had a structure roughed out for the first 144 pages or so.  But even the bunch of notes and lists I had for FREAKANGELS at the start turns out to be more than Bill has when he sits down to write a novel.  When he began SPOOK COUNTRY, he had nothing more than a single interesting image in his head. 

It’s a horrifying, intimidating way to work, and I want to try it one day.

Digital devices are great work tools.  But always keep a notebook and pen or pencil handy.  They don’t use batteries, are as instant as use gets, and can help you think in different ways.  And then store them somewhere convenient so that you can sort through them when necessary.

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No, really.

The stuff in block caps there is the dialogue.  The comic is going to be lettered in upper case, so I write the dialogue etc in upper case, which gives me an idea of how it’s going to look when it’s lettered.  Which is important.  Some text effects in sentence case simply don’t translate to upper case.  I indent it for ease of reading and also for the same reason as above – I can kind of squint at it and guess roughly how the balloons will look.  Also, I have a rule of thumb – if one of those pieces of dialogue had run to a third line, then it’s getting a bit long for a single balloon.  If it runs to a fourth line, then it’s going to need cutting, or be the only balloon in the panel unless it’s a really big panel.

When you’re starting a new story how do you decide on what to name the characters?#

That is so complex, for me, as to be almost unanswerable. Weirdly overdeveloped instinct, if you like. Sounds. Character background. That which evokes. While trying not to end up with character names that’d make even Don McGregor throw up in his mouth. (Don McGregor’s a comics writer who did groundbreaking work in the 1970s, and also did some of the most overcooked captionwork and character naming ever.) I do sometimes overdo it.

For instance: I’m working on something right now where I think I’ve nailed the character name finally. Birch. Birch = wood = connotes a degree of strength and basic groundedness. But also birching = flagellation. Also, “John Birch Society,” skeevy and untrustworthy. And it’s a hard, sharp word. There’s a lot about the character that unpacks out of the name. I tend to look for a name, particularly with protagonists, that somehow strikes sparks off elements of the character.

Or not. You can easily reverse that out. Michael Jones, in DESOLATION JONES: as ordinary a name as you can get. Which — at least in my head — indicates that what happened to him could have happened to anyone, given the right chain of rotten luck. (And also, in my head, a good name for a confused detective, because something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?)

(Yeah, I know. These things only have to happen in my head. The flow of notions and themes around a name only have to be visible to me, to give colour and direction to the writing.)

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I don’t have much that you’d recognise as a daily routine. Aside from one thing. The pub.

Within an hour or so of rolling out of bed, I stagger to the pub round the corner, buy three cans of Red Bull, and sit outside in the pub’s smoking compound to drink them and have six or seven cigarettes. I have a terminal allergy to common housedust, and need to get out in the air for a good ninety minutes every day. So I sit there, caffeinate, push some smoke around my system, and read and communicate.

I’ve been doing this for years: with a Handspring Visor, with a Treo, with a Nokia N95 8GB, and now with an iPhone 3GS. Time was that I’d write to my email list from the pub. I shut that list down a while ago. What I tend to do these days is wrangle information, sitting outside in a nice pool of 3G (no wifi around).

The iPhone is an annoying device in many ways. But with the right arrangement of apps and web services, I find I can get a bunch of things done very easily. This is very probably the best mobile comms device I’ve had yet.

There’s an app called Reeder that links to my Google Reader RSS aggregator. Reeder connects to my del.icio.us account, which lets me save links, and my del.icio.us account dumps to warrenellis.com every 12 hours or so. So I can start the day by digesting a chunk of news and leaving a permanent record of the interesting stuff. I’ve got something like 130 sites in my reader — some of those are music sharity sites that I’ll only look at when I’m at a proper keyboard and a decent connection — but, even so, that’s usually a lot of new stuff. (I also read the BBC News, The Guardian and Variety on dedicated apps.)

I actually get much less email than you’d think. Much less than, say, Amanda Palmer — just reading her inbox rundown makes me want to curl up in a corner and mewl for a while. I took my mail email off the web a year or two back, which means I’m not actually spending a shitload of my pub time replying to email. So I can usually just focus on the RSS capture. I still don’t feel like I’m getting enough stuff or processing enough stuff, which is a catch-22 I’ll probably just have to live with.

Think of it as watering the plants, or priming the engine. I have an agreement with myself – I don’t have to write while at the pub. I very often do, but I don’t have to. Only when I feel it coming on, and have to get stuff down. When it’s warm enough to type, I carry a netbook to the pub, otherwise I always have a couple of notebooks and pencils in my coat. But the rule’s there so that the day’s production isn’t contingent on my first having it together enough to write the moment I sit down at the pub. If I need the recharge time more, then I get it. Forced writing is very rarely good writing.

And then I go home, eat lunch and begin the horrible slog through the day that ends around 4am.

Someone just wrote to me with the following question:

The problem I encounter every single time I try to write something is that I have a brilliant idea, but I have absolutely no clue as to how to make a proper story out of it. Bits and pieces will come to mind, but finding the whole story is typically a feat… do you know of a way to overcome this issue?

And this was my very quick response, which it occurs to me might be worth sharing, as one avenue (of many) that can be taken to solve this:

Identify a character in your idea.

1) What does that character WANT?

2) What does that character need to do to GET what they want?

3) What are they prepared to DO to get what they want?

Superman wants to save the world, will go through a quest to save the world, and will, if need be, sacrifice himself to save the world. (Crap example, but you see where I’m going.)

Hannibal Lector wants to be free to live in the way he wants, needs to arrange people and incidents in such a way that he can escape his current circumstances, and will kill and eat anybody he feels like in order to be free. (The difference between a "hero" and a "villain" is often the ruthlessness and extremity they’re prepared to go to in order to achieve what they want.)

(Also, the villain is rarely the villain in their own mind. Norman Osborn from THUNDERBOLTS/SIEGE is a good example of a villain who is plainly the hero of his own story. Another good example is one of my favourite villains, the deluded, vicious Janetty from Steven Grant & Vince Giarrano’s BADLANDS)

It’s a really simple way to discover a rough one-two-three structure that you can start to build on. You build on it by asking yourself what you can do to make 2) as difficult as possible for the characters.

Hope that helps someone.

DO ANYTHING was mostly written in a Moleskine reporter’s notepad with a propelling pencil. The page reproduced below — cranked up in GIMP to make it visible, if not legible — appears to date from late May 2009. It’s written in block caps because I needed to be able to copy-type from it, and as we know from earlier posts, my handwriting is shitty.

Pretty much every page of DO ANYTHING in this notebook looks like this:

If you’ve read DO ANYTHING, you know a lot of it is pretty densely layered with connections. The column was written in a very specific way to maximise the information. It always, always started out as longhand, early in the day. The longhand was always about the forward thrust of the column — the column meanders a lot, but it doesn’t wander, it’s constantly following a channel. As I go, I’m signposting things I need to check later, or need to remember to tie in.

Later, I sit down and copy-type the thing into Notepad, with a browser open, because I’m fact-checking as I go. The longhand draft is all mental, and that includes working in information from memory. Since I often can’t remember what I did yesterday, it needs to be checked.

I’d write the longhand version in intense two-hour stretches, and usually had way too much for a single column. After 003, in fact, I just kept writing without thinking about column breaks, and found those breaks later after the copy-typing.

Once I’d typed the column up, the real draft started. Because I’d then spend an hour plugging names from the column into Google, looking for more connections, as well as following my signposts, and layering that stuff into the piece. The Notepad draft after an hour or so on Google was the actual first draft, and that’s what’d get pasted into OpenOffice to get edited and cleaned up.

Really, an incredibly complicated and time-devouring process for a column no-one read. But it was fun, and it taught me things.

After many years of doing rough work on Visors and Treos, I switched back to notebooks this year. Moleskines and Field Notes. Usually working with a propelling pencil, until I found a reliable micro-Sharpie thing earlier this year. Just because I think it’s always worth looking at the way you work and seeing if a change won’t do it good.

These are from a Field Notes notebook started on 5 July 2009.

Had to crank this one up in GIMP, as I was working in pencil (some notes on ASTONISHING X-MEN I scanned were too faint for the scanner or GIMP to save). The left hand page was made around the time I was speaking to the Architecture Association. As you can see, I do tend to go back and add guidance notes later — here, reminding me not to re-use this bit because I ended up using it in a WIRED UK column.

On the right, is how I tend to start roughing out a comics script. It’s almost legible, innit?

I write GRAVEL as "scriptments," usually — a cross between a script, a short story and a film treatment, that Mike Wolfer then turns into something that makes some kind of sense before he starts drawing it. They can run to four or five pages, sometimes just becoming long runs of dialogue. This is me halfway through #15 of that book, just banging the dialogue down without stage directions, as it comes to me:

Yes, I do have bloody awful handwriting. Always have had. I’ll often write in block caps just for the sake of legibility — sometimes I can’t read my own writing.

I’ve filed the serial numbers off this one, as it were, because it was for a work-for-hire project that never got off the ground due to my lack of time. Hence the odd gaps on the page. But this is what you’ll most often find in one of my notebooks: looking at comics page flow. This was the start of several pages of diagrams and notes, trying to find a formal page flow I liked for a DPS, or Double Page Spread.