Boy, today was touch and go…and I knew it would be. With my inability to focus on one thing for more than about a half hour, and with the difficulty I have beginning challenging projects, let alone completing them…NaNoWriMo has officially begun. I’m not sure if I’m going to make a special page and an updating word-counter or not…but I’m definitely not doing it tonight.

I spent the majority of the day organizing and did a spot of test painting on one wall for a future project. That one will likely have to wait until December…but perhaps not.

While Inktober proved to be a smashing failure in its original intention, it actually spurred me on with some of the prompts to create a comic universe of my own. I’ve done it before (back in grade school) and have read about forty years worth of comics since….and I’m a writer so…why the hell not? This is a pretty long term project, but many of the core ideas have already taken shape, including the setting, time, long-term story arc…it could be fun if it takes over in my head long-term, but we still have a long way to go before that happens.

With this universe, I am hoping for at least some of the look and feel that Mignola gets with his Hellboy universe, but mine won’t look anything like his. I suppose my influences for looks will come more from Kindt and Lemire, though Mignola will not be absent. It will be a futuristic weird-sci-fi type world (more weird than sci-fi). With characters like The Angler, The Bulk, Petrol Man, Detritus, The Living Brain, this will not be a super serious world, but nor will it be light-hearted. The story will be a sort of unraveling mystery that takes place over three acts.

ANYway, back to the novel… I DID actually get some writing done at the last minute on The Mycelium Network. I sat on the couch in my studio to think about how I was going to approach this part of the book and it practically wrote itself before my eyes even closed. I don’t have a word count because it’s three pages of quickly hand-written scribbles in my Moleskine, but it’s a good start….better than I was expecting of myself if I’m being honest.

So my grade for today is probably a B-…that’s what it feels like. I got quite a bit done, but not nearly as much creating as I’d like…it’s likely just beginning intimidation after being idle creatively for so long. Baby steps and perhaps I’ll get around to the word counting tomorrow. I also would really like to get some art in the books and try out my new watercolors. I do need cover art for the aforementioned elsewhere in this blog comic zine for Peregrine Comics, so maybe I can do something for that.

Long-winded me is back. That’s a good sign for a productive writing Needles.

I can never know what music will strike inspiration for my writing projects…it’s usually different for each piece that I write. I can’t even remember what I was listening to when I wrote my first book, but it’s buried in journals somewhere.

For the first quarter of The Mycelium Network, I relied primarily on The Beastie Boys release ‘The Mix-Up” which, despite its title, is not an album of remixes, but instead some (at the time) pretty experimental music-only tunes, no singing or rapping at all. A couple of the songs figure prominently in the mood of the first part of the book, “The Gala Event” figuring prominently among those tracks. I did also listen to a fair bit of music from the various Twin Peaks iterations, but mainly the soundtracks to both Season One and Season Three, both of which are stellar (to be expected from Lynch).

It’s looking like it’ll be Marilyn Manson’s new release ‘We Are Chaos’ doing the heavy lifting for the middle third (or so) part of the story. I’ve listened to this thing a couple dozen times by now and I think it’s become my favorite release of his. Pretty astonishing that he can make this kind of album thirty years after he started. I watched an interview with him yesterday and he seemed the most lucid I’ve ever seen him. Ever. Good on ya, Marilyn.

And guess what? I’m 100% done organizing. The first time I can say that since I moved back to Arizona two years ago.

Time to create.

While adding my Bluetooth speaker, I stumbled upon the following: in my available wireless networks.

Honestly, I’m not avoiding work.

I’ve officially reached adulthood having experienced, in person, the birth and death of a musical format: the CD. Oh sure, they’ll always be around, but the fact that I needed to get an external CD player to plug into my laptop to load the CD tells me that the revolution has ended.

Being productive today, though not necessarily creative. Yet.

Let’s see how it goes this year. With the writing. And other stuff.

Pictured here is a Matt Kindt sketch I basically got for free with a Mind MGMT lot I picked up on eBay.

I recently found that Manson released an all new album in the middle of a global pandemic. Anyone that doesn’t see the pure poetry in that, sorry but we can’t be friends. I’m a pretty harsh critic of bands that I really like (The Cure, Zombie, and Manson are a few) and he hits this one out of the park for me. It’s not my favorite of his…but he’s released so much material in the last thirty years that it becomes hard to rate new material against classics, but as of this moment, We Are Chaos sits at my #3 of his releases after The Golden Age of Grotesque and Superstar.

Getting towards the end of a giant reorganization project before the onset of truly cold weather and November. Time is running short.

Almost time to write.

Hey guys, what’s up? I’m sorry I haven’t written…you know how it is. You get some separation. Start seeing other jobs. Look, over there…it’s a cute little landscaping position! Bang! The next thing you know you’re working somewhere else and you think less and less of those other folks….

Ha! Just kidding. I can’t get within six feet of a job right now for patently obvious reasons.

Also just kidding that I don’t think about y’all. It’s not every day, but it’s often enough. It’s been such a weird year that it seems almost impossible to me that we all were working together (for a couple of months, even) in this very calendar year.

But life do move on, so here’s to Joel, Lacey, Kire, Peg, Kris, Julie, the team I worked so intensely with for two year trying to fix things that were leagues beyond our power. That shit were brutal. I’d be hard pressed to work for a big company again after that. You know what? I don’t really like it any more so maybe I just won’t go.

But for serious and for true, I know I promised books in some silly-ass time-frame that we all knew was hogwash in the beginning and we all see what the plague has done to pretty much everything (which none of us saw coming). Well, part of ‘everything’ has turned out to be my writing…though I did manage to get about a quarter of the book done thus far, so I’m well along the way. The gears are clicking again and I actually still have an amazing amount of time left in the year to get this sucker finished and printed out on my beat-up laser printer so you can have something to use for fire-starter.

Don’t fret, it’s still a go. And you have to remember that time works differently outside of Evil Corp’s Office. To y’all, I’ve only been gone a week, but out here ten months has gone by in the real world. I’m a grandfather now.

And of course my ex-boss and friend of twenty years, Jackie who moved away from one big-ass forest fire in AZ right into the biggest fire in Colorado history. I mean, good choice….I guess? Hope you’re staying safe. Talk soon, I’m sure. You are a titan to have survived Evil Corp, Inc…..even thrived in that environment the way that you have. Anyone that can weather Raquel (was that her name?) for more than ten minutes could easily walk on the surface of Mars for a week without oxygen.

You know the one. Hard working. Upwardly mobile. Sucking the fun out of the room is the least of your worries with this example of corporate mistakery. I told an ex of mine one time that there was actually something worse than hatred, and that was indifference and I continue to believe that.

So here’s to everyone! (Except for, you know, that other one, who can go insert her plastic self straight into an ATM).

Look what happens when I get on a roll. Nonsense galore! Coming soon: date solicitations, comic reviews, and preparation for NaNoWriMo which I cannot believe begins in three short days.

Ciao

I can’t believe these particular words are going to come out of my mouth, but the new Borat sequel is a pretty genius piece of film-making. The writing is what drove the film, despite the fact that much of it was improvised on the spot. But some of the most genius moments of the whole thing were the real people that Baron Cohen’s character interacted with. If the scene in the church doesn’t take you from completely laughing your ass off to tearing up a little bit, then this probably isn’t the review for you. But if you know me, then you’d probably find something to like about the film. It’s safe to say if you disliked the first Borat movie, then you have no business seeing this one. For maybe the first ten or fifteen minutes I violently disagreed with his having such a prominent (and young) co-star because I felt she was taking away from his natural abilities, but I apologize for that hear and now because she was a brilliant actress and did things that I cannot imagine anyone doing with a completely straight face. Just astonishing. I haven’t laughed this hard in quite a while.

The movie had some controversial scenes and the one with Giuliani astonished me. I’ll say nothing here but I can’t believe that really nothing much at all was said about it. I never saw Rudy as much more than a mouthpiece for whomever needed one, but he just seems like a real creeper now.

This is going to be a watercolor eventually. Took some video of the local gang of jays and am going to paint this still from the video.

This may not apply to everyone, but certainly applies to me and likely several people I know. As one ages, one discovers (rather quickly these days) that the world is a big and complicated place. When you start to zoom down in on the people that populate the planet, all of those peculiarities and complications are magnified. It’s a wonder that our race gets a thing done given how fractured the society has become.

There are so many lenses through which to view the world and the owners of those lenses, in large part, will ridicule you for wearing a different type of lens. It’s all ridiculous and I’m tired of it. It’s my goal to see things in an unfiltered manner. A big problem is that even when you do that, as you age, you have a plethora of input, tons of information, much of it often conflicting even in your own head, even after experiencing it in person (are you familiar with the phrase ‘garbage in-garbage out?’. An equally worse problem is the fracturing of society and the extremes people will go to see that their side ‘wins’. Today’s society is stimulus overkill and I can see us proceeding to the world of Blade Runner before it’s all over.

Apologies to one of my comic heroes, but Steve Ditko’s Mr. A got it wrong. There is no black and there is no white, there is only gray.

Tl;dr