Witch Doctor and Novel Update 05/02/2012

I did a fair bit of writing this week, not only on my novel but also some general whining about the Watchmen Prequels which you can find one post down. Aside from writing I've spent most of this week working overtime, teaching my immediate family to use Skype (and relearning how to use it myself) and returning to York for drinks on Friday.  Since pay day was this week I also bought myself some comics.  All of which were pretty good but the highlight was probably Witch Doctor: Resuscitation.  

Witch Doctor was my favourite new comic of last year, a magical medical mystery about a maverick doctor (is there any other sort) who fights supernatural diseases.  The creative team behind the comic; writer Brandon Seifert and artist Lukas Ketner, have created a well thought out world of grimy monsters that are just about biologically plausible and each issue introduces at least one or two interesting scientific twists on classic monsters. I've seen Witch Doctor described as House verses the supernatural and  Garth Marenghi's Darkplace played straight and it's no where near as terrible as the Garth Marenghi comparison implies.  It's a fun comic from creators who know how to pace a story for single issues, there's a graphic novel collecting the first miniseries and a new series starting this year.   I'd recommend Witch Doctor to anyone who doesn't mind a bit of body horror in their comics, especially my fellow science/horror fans/geeks.

"But what about your writing Tom?" I hear no one ask, it's been another good week and my word count currently stands at 20,187 or 27.0% of my 75,000 word target.  Come back next week to see if I make 25,000.

Before, Before Watchmen

This week DC Comics announced a series of prequel mini-series to Watchmen.  According to DC's The Source blog the mini-series will be:

• RORSCHACH (4 issues) – Writer: Brian Azzarello. Artist: Lee Bermejo

• MINUTEMEN (6 issues) – Writer/Artist: Darwyn Cooke

• COMEDIAN (6 issues) – Writer: Brian Azzarello. Artist: J.G. Jones

• DR. MANHATTAN (4 issues) – Writer: J. Michael Straczynski. Artist: Adam Hughes

• NITE OWL (4 issues) – Writer: J. Michael Straczynski. Artists: Andy and Joe Kubert

• OZYMANDIAS (6 issues) – Writer: Len Wein. Artist: Jae Lee

• SILK SPECTRE (4 issues) – Writer: Darwyn Cooke. Artist: Amanda Conner

I love Watchmen, I have a copy signed by David Gibbons with a sketch of Rorschach saying "Tom Huh?" in his threatening scary voice, which is probably the third thing I'd save if my house burnt down (first two are my sketch book and whatever friends/family are in the house with me, I'll leave it to your imagination to decide which order they're in).  

Anyway, before I wander too far off topic; I love Watchmen and I've enjoyed the work of all involved in Before Watchmen.  Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier is a masterpiece of comics storytelling which uses everything that's great about the DC Universe, Amanda Conner is one of comic's best cartoonists and manages to capture a range of facial expressions most beyond most artists, J Michael Straczynski's sadly unfinished Supreme Power, a brilliantly tense "realistic superhero story" was a triumph in long term suspense and Len Wein co-created Wolverine.   I can see why all of them were chosen for the job.  Having said that, I'm not excited about Before Watchmen.

I've already said how talented these creators are, but everyone involved in Before Watchmen could do the best work of their career and it would still seem redundant.  One of the original Watchmen's great triumphs (I hate that I'll have to refer to Moore and Gibbon's text as the original Watchmen) was it's tight plotting and razor sharp characterisation; everything was fully fleshed out and built to the conclusion, all of the characters had a clear motivation and the reader understood the reasoning behind every action they took.  Watchmen wasn't a story like Star Wars that exists in a universe where you could potentially tell thousands of exciting stories (I stress the word potentially).  Everything that mattered in Watchmen has already been fully explored.  Watchmen covered the entire lives of these characters, every emotional turning point or moment of character development has already been shown.  These mini-series cannot be anything other than redundant retreads of the flashbacks in the original, or diverge from Moore & Gibbons's work and so fail as an origin story.  

Why (other than the obvious answer of because it'll make a quick buck) assemble such a talented roster of creators and hamstring them with such a problematic assignment?  Any one of these creative teams could produce a classic graphic novel with a long lifespan as a collected edition that would win a shower of Eisner's. Cooke and Conner are a dream team, why waste them on a Silk Spectre origin story?  I'd love to read another period, political superhero book from Darwyn Cooke, or see Jae Lee draw a man slowly realising he has to become a supervillain to save the world.  But like the majority of DC's audience, I know how they'll end & that makes it all a bit pointless.  I can't imagine another project in comics with Before Watchmen's calibre of writers & artists being less inspiring.  DC already owns thousands of franchises and characters, why couldn't they leave Watchmen as something unique and special?

N.B. I haven't touched on the problems around why DC own the rights to watchmen rather than Alan Moore and David Gibbons, mostly because others have already done so, but needless to say DC acted shamefully.  

Novel Update 30/01/2012

Hello all, apologies for the slight delay.  I've spent most of this weekend travelling about Yorkshire doing various exciting activities.  I was in Barnsley on Saturday to celebrate a friend's birthday.  We spent most of the day in various pubs including a nice real ale place and two Wetherspoons.  I'm a bit out of practice at daytime drinking and I was worried that I might be hungover on Sunday but we all paced ourselves and ate plenty of nutritionally dubious pub food so I ended up ok.

On Sunday I went to York to see Robin Ince perform his Happiness Through Science show at the Hyena Lounge Comedy Club.  I'm a big fan of Robin Ince; I've seen him live several times before (I once saw him twice in one day at the Edinburgh Fringe) and I subscribe to his many podcasts, so I was expecting to enjoy the show but worried he might reuse material I'd already seen. Fortunately he didn't, and I enjoyed two hours plus interval of an intelligent, likeable man shouting enthusiastically about really interesting topics and ranting about terribly infuriating things.  Robin Ince always seems to attract interesting audiences to his shows and tonight's was no exception, the room was full with various breeds of academic who were more than happy to contribute a fact or clarify a misunderstanding.  This could easily have been terrible but Ince had created a vibe of jolly interest, so much so that when he mentioned Bishop Berkeley he received two contradictory heckles and proceeded to compère a brief discussion about the philosopher without derailing the show.  I left the show feeling enthused and interested in the world and would highly recommend seeing Robin Ince if he tours near you.

I knew I would be having a busy weekend so I made an effort to get as much done during the week as possible and reached 14,500 words by Friday night. Surprisingly I managed to get a fair bit of writing down over the weekend, writing on various trains and whilst waiting in pubs.  I would have written more but my solipsistic friend James Sizeland selfishly distracted me with beer and interesting conversation.  I'm quite proud of my writing this week, I've finished a scene I've been thinking about for a while that is really pivotal to the course of the novel but until yesterday I'd been unable to articulate properly.  The whole thing will need some serious polishing but so far I'm satisfied with how it's progressing.

I've been using a moleskin notepad I'd received for Christmas.  The piece of paper moleskin arrogantly slip in the back of their products claims that Hemingway used a moleskin, that's got to improve the writing. I'm only a few bottles of whiskey and a bunch of slaughtered animals away from the Nobel Prize.  The total word count stands at 16,297 which is 21.7% of my target 75,000.  Come back next week to see if I can hit 20,000 words.

Novel update 22/01/2012

I've had a fairly productive weekend this week.  Today I woke up early (for a Sunday) and constructed myself one of the greatest breakfasts ever fried.  This triumph of pork and grease gave me the strength to write over 2000 words and get fairly lost in some local woods.  I took a break from writing this afternoon to go for a walk with my mum.  We walked to the evocatively named "Druid's alter rock" a rocky outcrop with some impressive views of the valley.  Although we didn't spend much time on the rock as the wind was becoming increasingly aggressive and neither of us felt like a broken neck.  To escape the wind we cut through some woods hoping to find the path to the river, but we got lost and ended up going back the way we came, still it was a good walk.  On the way back we walked past a local antiques shop called Curio Cottage, a tiny building overflowing with strange old things that feels like it should be run by a kindly, magical shopkeeper in a CBBC TV show.

This week I've met my target and written 10,048 words.  This means that the novel is the longest single piece of writing I've done.  It's closest competitors are two reports I wrote for my Post Graduate Certificate in Education Studies and my B.Sc project on "Laser trapping and cooling, featuring atomic hose-pipes" which despite (or because of?) having a title like a hip-hop collaboration, was the most successful part of my Physics Degree.  10,048 words is 13.4% of my arbitrary target word count of 75,000 so while I've got a fair way to go I feel I'm on track.  Next week's target is 15,000 come back then to see if I've made it.

Novel update 15/01/2012

So far I've written 5395 words of the novel.  I'm not sure how long it's going to be in the end, the  Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula award rules define a novel as 40,000 words long and National Novel Writing Month say a novel should be over 50,000 words.  A brief google shows that most novels are longer, with the typical word count between 80,000 and 100,000.  I'm not sure how long my novel's going to end up being. I think 300-400 pages is a good length for a satisfying book.  Assuming 250 pages per word this gives me a rough target count of 75,000-100,000 words.  

I want my book to be as deep yet direct as a cruse missile with a philosophy degree and a passion for scuba diving so I'm not going to pad it out to meet an arbitrary word count but it's nice to have a target.  If I use the lower number then I can say that I've written approximately 7.2% of the book (and that I've put a bit too much thought into almost meaningless numbers).  My goal for nest week is 10,000 words which would be 13.3% of the book.  I'll update again next week and let you  all know how I've done.  

New Year's Resolution

I've decided on my New Year's Resolution:  Finally write that damn novel I've been threatening to inflict on the world.  It's going to be an action packed, apocalyptic adventure/horror story ala Solomon Kane, Hellboy & Carnacki.  The book will feature a disparate group of characters working with/against each other to prevent the end of the world.  One of these will be the exorcist/monster hunter character Daniel Hawksworth who I introduced here last Halloween.  So far the first half of the story is in a shambolic collection of notebooks.  I will organise & expand this into a serviceable 1st draft by my birthday (19th April).  I'll find some way to publish the book by the end of the year and tweet the word count each Sunday evening.  At the moment the working title is "Dealing with Devils" and I've written 2,181 words.

Not Safe for Fucking Work

The Huffinton Post has demonstrated the worst possible way to censor offensive language.

From the Huffington Post article "13 Funny Christmas Songs You Never Hear On The Radio (VIDEO)"