Category: canon

setting

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It’s actually weird for me to working on setting this early. I mean, rough ideas, sure, but usually, it’s brainstorming on plot or exploring character motivations and tendencies.

(Or off freestyling something that’s completely irrelevant, because sometimes, that’s what you have to do, y’all).

But here we are. Thinking about small, crumbling ranch houses in the country, about locked sheds and cornfields that can swallow you whole.

You can almost see the sunrise cresting the tassels, can’t you?

I can.

Muddy, musty, moldy. Water marks in the ceiling. Linoleum that’s been ripped up in places.

Rickety round kitchen tables. Single beds. Creaking floors.

Shadows, reaching again the fall of the light. The onset of darkness.

And something under the bed…

Target: 300 words
Written: 409 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Yours, Cruelly, Elvira
Comics: Southern Bastards 17-20 (come on, Jasons, give us more!)
Music: Young Modern, Silverchair (such an underrated album)

characters

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I don’t know how other writers do it, but I start with writing out my basic concept for the piece (which inevitably and often morphs as time goes on), and then by laying out all the characters I can think of, in rough terms.

The problem is that characters rarely stay who I thought they were; they change. They have their own ideas.

They INSIST.

But for now, they’re just ideas, rough outlines of people with vague thoughts about what happens to them.

But they exist, and I’m going to ruin their lives.

Target: 300 words
Written: 1141 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Yours, Cruelly, Elvira
Comics: Southern Bastards 13-16
Music: Young Americans, David Bowie

so begins canon

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I’ve been poking at it for a while. Haikus and flash fiction are all good, and comic book scripts and thinly veiled political rants are something else, but proof of life, proof of concept, of talent, skill, hard work, dedication, adaptability, open-mindedness, and good old fashioned sex appeal lay in the pudding.

(Or Jello wrestling mud pit, if we’re talking that last thing).

The point is, there’s no me, as I want me to be, without books. Reading is only halfway to completion. It’s the act of creation (which is really just exploration and discovery, connection and understanding), that’s the thing that fills the cup.

(Or Jello mud wrestling pit).

The bottom line is, me as I am now? I’m not happy with that person. That person sucks. That person writes split-sentence haikus and pretentious shit about hats.

(I love them both dearly).

This person that I want to be? He gets dark. He gets into it. He understands subtext and trauma and helplessness in the face of adversity.

He knows how to crush you – your soul anyway.

(He’d likely lose in the Jello pit).

I want to make you uncomfortable; to remember that happy endings are not the only endings, and neither are grand tragedies.

Sometimes, it’s the little tragedies that wreck us whole.

Target: 300 words
Written: 794 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: Getting Things Done, David Allen
Comics: Southern Bastards 9-12
Music: You Only Live Once, The Strokes (The Strokes with Eddie Vedder doing Marvin Gaye?  Fuck me sideways, does it get better than that?)