Full moon at Robin Hood’s Stride.

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Monster busy day, no time even for the HALF MOON update right – might be tonight, might be Monday.

(Trixie)

I have a ton of links to get to, but, argh, no time to focus on blogging right now, so here’s the one off the top to be going on with: Late July just sent me her album, after I tripped over the following on YouTube.

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Literally just got this in email from novelist and comics writer Charlie Huston, who’s having some technical issues over at his place.  Am delighted to run it here.  Did I mention that SLEEPLESS is one of my favourite novels of the last year or two?  Probably.  Charlie Huston, folks:

So I wrote another piece for the Mulholland Books website.

Some random thoughts that had been swirling around my head immediately following Hosni Mubarak’s abdication from power in Egypt and that country’s military taking the reins of governance.

What I wrote is HERE.

Obviously a lot has changed in the ensuing weeks. So much has changed that as the post date for this little piece approached, I was considering writing a brief addendum. Not to correct errors in my thinking/projections, but to reflect on the speed of change in cases of revolution. As of a few days ago, spending thought bubbles on the irony of Egypt’s military seeming to be a marked improvement over Mubarak’s regime was a singular waste of fifteen minutes. Both the complexion and inner nature of Middle Eastern protest movements having undergone radical change.

"Protest movement."

The phrase seems positively quaint.

Updated lexicons favor "revolution" or "civil war."

As a case study for generalization, my little brain fart appeared years out of date after a span of weeks.

Of course that was before the last 24 hour news cycle in which we started hearing about THIS and THIS.

Both items to be filed under Same As It Ever Was.

Also emphasizing, to me, the speed of change.

In about three weeks, my little piece on revolution has gone from feeling, to myself in any case, relevant, to being utterly behind the curve of event, to having event go round the curve and circle back and make the piece relevant again.

Presto!

And all without even nodding in the direction of Japan.

Keeping up is no longer the issue. The question now is whether it is more efficient to run as fast as you can in an effort to keep the gap between yourself and the rate of change as narrow as possible, or to stand still and hope that you get lapped on a regular basis, gleaning what you can each time the present/future whips by scattering loose debris in its wake.

This matters to me because I’m trying to write about today. A fictional version of today that is still recognizably today. A task that is complicated by the fact that I’m trying to accomplish it in the context of a novel. A form that does not traditionally lend itself to speed.

From when I finish a clean first draft of this thing I can expect a year to pass before publication. In that time I’ll have opportunities to update, correct, and amend some of the content, but it is inevitable that passages and scenes that felt of the moment when they were written will have become hopelessly bedraggled and irrelevant while type was being set.

Research.

Research in this climate of change is…constant. Relentless.

The question is the same: Try to keep up, or remain stationary?

Try to be utterly of the moment, or take a stab at timelessness?

Which boils down to: Incorporate actual current events, or fictionalize the whole world in a way that suggests the feeling of living in a era of constant crisis?

These are existential question for a writer.

I just wrote that and I did not mean it to be taken ironically. It may be the most sincere thing I have ever stated about writing. So sincere that it makes me uncomfortable enough that I need to comment on it. Because I’m a writer, not a philosopher or a thinking. A storyteller, I.

But there it is.

Lady or the tiger, whichever device you chose to employ in your story, they change the fabric of everything.

Write about the factual NOW in fiction, or fictionalize the NOW to create an honest sense of what it’s like to be alive? It doesn’t get more brass tacks than that.

So I wrote another piece for Mulholland Books. Filler for my new publisher’s website. Loose thoughts cobbled into vague order. And it has been transmuted by the passage of events into a case study applicable to a novel I’m writing. And a way of thinking about writing it. And, because I am a storyteller, a way for me to think about how I’m living.

How it feels.

How the future feels to me.

It feels like living all the time with a hand grenade, and the pin is out.

And I don’t know how long the fuse is.

Throw it and hope there isn’t time for anyone to throw it back at you?

Or hold on for another second more?

And another.

Another.

A second more.

Safe travels,

- c

Three Panels is a guestpost spot for comics artists, wherein I ask them to do a comic about anything they like so long as it’s 640 pixels across and only three panels.

The demented Chris G has been entertaining people on my message board, and via his webcomic SPACE SHARK, as well as his dA page, for some while, and I thought he should spread his brainmuck here too. So I asked him to do three panels for me. And what he produced was surprisingly serene:

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Nice bit of Paul Pope for your evening.

Today I have mostly been writing emails, so far.  You get days like this.  Emailing an interview for Small New Marvel Comics Thing.  Talking with film/tv agent and studio exec about Small Film Thing.  (Which is not a Small Film, but a small job involving film.)  Following up on emails about contract for Oh My God Huge Job That Will Eat Most Of The Next Year.  Turning down stuff.  Sending threatening “you am give me artist for webcomic now” messages to poor William at Avatar.  He’s responding with “I’m looking at fifty submissions a day, I swear.”  He probably doesn’t deserve the somewhat sinister responses with photos of his house attached.  I shouldn’t have scrawled “schizo fishraep-comics fans will do ANYTHING for Alan Moore’s phone number” on them.  Resigning myself to the fact that I will probably not get to leave the house next week.

See those things in the picture there?  Those are boobs.  I ONLY GET TO SEE THEM IN DRAWINGS NOW.

I have a whole drawn comic here for an unannounced project here and I can’t show you any of it.  Bah.  I believe it – the Small New Marvel Comics Thing – will be announced at Wondercon.

And this window’s been open for an hour, while I’ve been fielding another flurry of emails, and obviously things aren’t going to slow down tonight, so I’m pressing publish and going back to work instead of posting something interesting.  Aside from the pretty picture.

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We’re getting there now.

I had to scale this image, and some of the tone dropped out: you may behold the piece in its original size at this link.

This is all still as rough as a bear’s arse, on my end.  There are other details to the above in other emails, I haven’t yet combined it all into a clear document or a handy logline.  But this is the point where we know where we are, where we’re going, and the parameters for what we’re going to do.

(The “drug” thing came up through something Mike threw into one of the earlier sketches, which led us to quoting lines from (the Bowie song, not the tv show) “Ashes To Ashes” at each other.  The tone of which also informed some of what followed.  This also led to my playing him “Spacegirl” by Drugstore.)

Loving those huge Mick McMahon moonboots.  I think the boots were the one useful thing I contributed to the visual discussion.

So.  Yeah.  We have the parameters for HALF MOON pretty much set.  All I need to do now is come up with the story.  Ha ha.

Sometimes it works like this.  You can’t choose what part of a story comes to you first.  Sometimes you think of a setting first.  Sometimes an interesting plot progression drops into your head and you find yourself looking for somewhere to put it, instead.  Sometimes it’s the title first, or a character name, or even a line of dialogue from nowhere that kickstarts the whole thing.  There’s no hard and fast method, no laws about how this works.  Every job is different.  Mike and I are just showing you how this one starts.

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Three Panels is a guestpost spot for comics artists, wherein I ask them to do a comic about anything they like so long as it’s 640 pixels across and only three panels.

Yao Xiao created a bit of a stir with her wonderful piece for the TRANSMET charity art book, so I asked her to do three panels for me.  You can find her, and her terrific work, at her website. And she’s @yaoxiaoart on the twitters. These are Yao’s Three Panels:

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That bloody documentary about me just released a new trailer, which you can find here on WIRED’S underwire blog.

Horrible.

I said we were showing you this in realtime.  Mike shot this over a couple of hours ago.  I think he wants to stick some Letratone on it at some point.  But, goddamn, look at this.  This is like eighty percent of what we’ve been talking about boiled down into one sketch.

Isn’t that just bloody gorgeous?

I made him listen to “King Night” by SALEM earlier, and he figures that “that’s our theme music right there.”  I need to knock together a HALF MOON playlist tomorrow.

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Matt Jones of BERG just sent me this: “Farmpunk” —

A farmpunk could be described as a neo-agrarian who approaches [agri]culture, community development and/or design with a hacker ethos. "Cyber-agrarian" could supplant neo-agrarian, indicating a back-to-the-land perspective that stands apart from past movements because it is heavily informed by conceptual integration in a post-industrial information society (thus "forward to the land" perhaps?) The art and science of modern ecological design will be best achieved through the combined arts of cybermancy and geomancy. These hermeneutic disciplines are not categorical or reductionist, but open-ended. Natural ecologies must be seen as the original cybernetic systems.

Also includes the wonderful phrase “Post-Normal Science.”  Which is now my favourite term.

Apparently the documentary about me and my work, CAPTURED GHOSTS, ran out of money.

Hence they’re on Kickstarter, tempting you with rewards in return for a financial pledge to help them finish the thing.

I just noticed that my friend the mad journalist woman Laurie Penny has her new book MEAT MARKET released by Zer0 Books next month. I wrote a blurb for this, lemme see if I can dig it out…

"Laurie Penny hones her every phrase to a razor's edge. She is absolutely surgical in her anatomising of a mad world. MEAT MARKET is the kind of cut you learn from." -- Warren Ellis, author of TRANSMETROPOLITAN, CROOKED LITTLE VEIN, RED

Which also reminds me: Laurie wants me to give this a listen at some point. You might want to as well.

Via Rita King, your memefood for the day: 50 Unexplainable Black And White Photos.

You all know Michael Avon Oeming, right?

POWERS, MICE TEMPLAR, staff creator at Valve Software, and a vast number of other things (including one of my favourite graphic novellas, PARLIAMENT OF JUSTICE.

Course you do.  Everyone knows Mike Avon Oeming. He’s one of the best pure comics artists working today, and an excellent and underrated writer.  Look at this.

Sometimes, a new project starts as simply as this:

An email out of the blue.  And then a flurry of responses – because I’m not stupid, I wanted to get moving before he sobered up or the drugs wore off or whatever the hell had happened to him to make him email me.

These sketches are all from the earliest part of the discussion, before I’d said

Which led to another round of sketches and notes, and cutting some stuff and rethinking some stuff, which led to the concept firming up a bit, which led to what we’re currently calling HALF MOON.

We’re working in realtime on this one. We agreed on the general concepts just a couple of hours ago, and will spend the next few days in development on it, to see what we’ve actually got. So I thought, and Mike agreed, it might be interesting to open the process out and let you see a bit of the sausage-making. As it were.

So what you’re seeing here is the stuff that led to the stuff we’re actually doing.  The piece on the left, for instance: I was particularly interested in the heavy helmet collar, so that’s what we’re taking from that image.

(When we started, Mike shot me a lot of stuff from his sketchbook, just to see if anything sparked.  And, as noted above, there were a LOT of spacegirls.  So I’m happy to write something that he clearly sub-consciously really wants to draw!)

There will be more notes here as the project develops.  And at some point we’ll even tell you where to find it.  At some point.

You know Bryan Lee O’Malley. He did SCOTT PILGRIM. He’s also written a couple of my favourite pop songs. He’s a bit handy with a camera and the old Instagram, it turns out.

(Flickr page)

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Oupa – “Forget” from The Tearist on Vimeo.