The Waiting Place

Not much to report.  These days I’m mostly I’m sitting around waiting for responses to a few proposals, playing a bit of my favorite addiction Civ4 and working on a few new ideas.

I did see two movies recently that reminded me how I’m often out of synch with critics and movie-goers.  9 for instance has received a ton of raves from sundry quarters.  The story of a group of post-human inventions that look a but like sock-puppets is a pretty movie, I’ll give it that, but the characters (aside from twin librarians whose eyes fluttered in an exciting way) were flat, and the story of the cookie-cutter variety, up until an ending that creaked and groan to make any sense whatsoever.  But… show some people your cigarette lighter and they’ll worship you as a god.  Go figure.

On the flipside, Taking Woodstock received pretty banal reviews and has been dying in the box office.  I don’t particularly like Ang Lee (hated his Hulk for instance) and more often than not I find Demetri Martin annoying.  All things considered I was expecting to dislike the movie.  Instead, I was very happy for its entire two hour length.  It’s a terrific look at the sixties with incredible acting, great characters and a brilliant knack for combining the truly intimate with the explosively cosmic.  Imelda Staunton deserves an Oscar for her crazed portrayal of the mother, and Demetri even shows some fine acting chops.  I was particularly impressed by the way the movie manages to capture both the light and dark side of the hippie movement, giving it it’s credence but also pointing to the downside of giddy idealism (especially in a final reference to Woodstock’s dark brother, Altamount.)   Ant’s making thunder, as one acid-tripping fellow says.

Reading-wise, I’m enjoying the second part of MT Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, the story of an African American in 18th century America given a fantastic education by an early think-tank, then left homeless to experience the American Revolutionary War.  It’s been on my shelf for months, but I’d been too busy reading non-fiction research for my own projects to give it a look.  Took me a while to get into it.  The intensely intellectual period language was off-putting at first, but it acquires weight if you stick with it long enough for a wonderfully rendered fictional reality to take hold.

That’s about it for now.  Pax.

Yay School!

So my sixth grader came home today with a list of “Character Traits” given out by her teacher to help with fiction writing.  The full page was arranged in alphabetical order, starting with able and ending with young, all sorts of goodies in between, like alert, ambitious, industrious, innocent, hopeless, humorous and so on and so forth.  What a handy  thing, I thought, for creating incidental characters and such.

Instantly, I made a copy for myself, because I thought it was the coolest thing ever.  I love lists.  Particularly those that dissect the human spirit.

Back in college, my pal Doug Elkins once showed me a longer, more complicated list of traits he’d gotten as part of an acting improve class, organized by categories, like Introvert and Manipulator.  Hot stuff.

Here I am, well over twenty years into my writing career, and still looking at things that might, to to others, seem basic.  Reminded me of a panel I once sat on with a group of terribly famous and smart comic book writers, Chris Claremont, J. M. DeMatteis, Tom DeFalco and the like.

The question came up, “Are there any “how-to” books you’d suggest for aspiring writers?”  The gist of the responses was, “No, of course not, you can’t really get a magical skill like writing out of a book.  It’s about soul and trial and error.  Finding out who you are and what you want to write…”  Yadda-yadda.

I wanted to disagree at the time, but was feeling a bit out of my league.  Fact is, though, like that list of  traits, I think any book on writing can be a handy, helpful thing, even if the book isn’t any good, or totally wrong. 

Stephen King for instance, has written a few pieces on writing, and he’ll occasionally throw in rules like, “never use adverbs when describing character dialogue” and such.  I got the idea, the dialogue should stand on it’s own, but the “never” part always bugged me, so I like to (slyly) sneak ‘em in whenever I think they’re appropriate.

Thing is, even the rules/books I’ve disagreed with are useful, because they made me think about writing, they opened up a dialogue about what works and doesn’t, and whenever I’ve engaged in that dialogue in an honest way, my writing’s always improved.

So in that sense, the lists, the books, the rules, are all useful, provided they’re part of a process and not an end unto themselves.  Consistency is the hobgoblin of small  minds.

And yeah, writing is a magical, soul-searching thing, like any art, and we all have our muses, but I’ve found that a close examination of the pieces of that castle in the sky make it easier to invoke the spirit that brings it to life.  If that makes sense.

Btw – I wrote my previous post in MS Word, then cut and pasted it in LiveWriter.  I was totally shocked to see that tons of punctuation, from apostrophe’s to quotes and semi-colons, disappeared in the process.  Make it look like I wrote it in an emotional flurry rather than my usual cool, deliberate style.  :)  Anyway, will write directly in LW from now on, so my typos are my own.  Pax.

A Farewell to Mouse

After seventeen years and over 200 comic stories featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and co, back in May, I handed in my final script to Egmont Publishing.

Like the rest of the print world, magazine circulation has been in decline and Egmont hard hit. I survived a few cuts, but it was my turn, and I follow a number of highly talented people into the great unknown. No regrets, it’s been a great ride and a solid source of income in a profession that seldom provides such things.

I was first hired by Egmont by Anina Bennett in 1992. She’d been the editor on one of my creator-owned series at First Publishing, Meta-4 during the indie-boom of the eighties.

After First folded, another editor there, Byron Erickson, returned to his native Denmark, found work at Egmont and invited Anina along. Looking for new writers, she gave me a call.

I was incredibly dubious – Mickey Mouse? Disney? As a young rebel writer wanting to push the edges of the medium, it felt more like entering the belly of the beast. But I needed the money, and it seemed better than typing for a living.

Looking back, my fears were unfounded. Aside from supporting me, writing for Egmont never robbed me of an opportunity (The X-Files and The Bandy Man for instance, came while I wrote Mickey). At the same time, writing in such a structured fashion (plot, synopsis, and then script, strict panel guides, etc.) added some greats skills to my toolbox.

For instance, having to come up with several beginning/middle/end stories per month gave me (for fans of The Karate Kid) a wax-on/wax-off instinct for plotting. That instinct continues to serve me well in whatever medium I’m involved in. Beyond that, I look back at a large body of work of which I’m pretty proud.

To be completely honest, Mickey always puzzled me as a character. For me, the best characters have an internal battery propelling them forward. Nancy Drew needs to solve mysteries. Fox Mulder needs to stick his face into the unknown. If you look at the rest of the Egmont/Disney lineup, those batteries are easy to see – Scrooge has his greed, Donald a desire to cut corners, Goofy a skewed way of looking at things and Horace, my favorite, an ego so strong it pushes the line of his moral compass around like a kite-string in the wind.

What’s Mickey got? Well… he’s kind of an everyman – he likes adventure, tries to do the right thing, doesn’t like being bored. Uh…. oh yeah, he’s a mouse. Wow – are you excited yet?

As a result, I tended to either craft stories about things that happened to him (mysteries he stumbled onto) or that played with another aspect of his being – the fact that he’s a huge cultural icon.  Not that he was famous in the stories, more like I often took the opportunity to mess with his physical aspects, sort of the way Andy Warhol did with Marilyn Monroe.

My very first story, for instance, Jurassic Mouse featured a caveman Mickey that had fallen in love with Clarabelle’s hat. In others, I’d make a point of showing Mick’s face distorted as he rockets away from earth, or dress him as a woman to catch a bad guy, or turn him into one thing or another (like Superman with Red Kryptonite), or otherwise double and distort him.

One fave along those lines was All of Me, where scores of Mickey clones eventually had to leave earth and start their own planet. Always wanted to do a sequel on Mickey-world, but never had the plot approved.  Oh, well.

The Warhol/Mickey concept probably peaked when, to my surprise, I did have a plot approved that was a satire of a novel by the great Phillip K. Dick. The result was Through a Mickey Darkly, where Mickey goes undercover to join an entire gang that looks like him, only to be tasked by the mob bosses to spy on himself.

Surrealism was also fun to play around with. If I had to pick a single favorite, it’d have to be a short story where a piece of the wall behind Mickey’s couch, in the shape of a puzzle piece, comes loose. When Mickey tugs it free, he and Goofy see a vast abyss of swirling stars beyond the hole.

Mick tries to find something to plug up the hole, only to return and find that Goofy has pulled out half a dozen more pieces. He just couldn’t help himself.

They try to put the pieces back, but fail. The wall, the house itself, crumble into puzzle pieces. Mickey and Goofy flee as all Duckburg behind them collapses into thousands of puzzle pieces, revealing the deep, infinite void of uncaring space.

Hee-hee!  (I would’ve loved to end it there, but of course I had to stick on some sort of explanation. It turned out Mickey was actually playing some new immersive video game designed by Doc Static. Yadda-yadda-yadda.)

Clearly, though, with a character as popular as Mickey, I figured there had to be something to him I was missing, so I kept at it. And yes, there were times when I did feel like I was getting close to his essence, particularly in a 35-pager that was approved, but will most likely never be published, The Death of Mickey Mouse.

That story had its genesis a few years back at an Egmont conference, which was in itself a fantastic experience. Sarah and I were flown to Barcelona, thrilled to spend time with our fellow writers, the artists who brought our stories to life, and the wondrous editors who broke their butts making everything happen.  Not only that, we were given a series of tutorials by none other than Scott McCloud, a brilliant gentleman I’ve admired ever since the release of his seminal book, Understanding Comics.

But to stick with Mick, while Scott was talking about the unlimited possibilities of sequential art (aka comics), a number of us groused that Egmont’s rigid format didn’t allow us that kind of freedom. An energetic Byron insisted otherwise, saying we could in fact do anything, if we did it the right way.

So, said I, “Can I do a story called The Death of Mickey Mouse?”
“Yes,” Byron said. “If you do it the right way.”

I came up with a sort of DOA plot, where Mickey learned that someone disguised as one of his friends had shot him with a paint-ball filled with poison. The poison gave him only two days to live and solve his own murder.

Of course, Mickey had avoided the poison (even I knew I couldn’t really kill him…), but he pretended to be dying to draw out the crook. As he visits his friends, they go through various stages of grief, from anger to acceptance. They even build him a big memorial statue in the park and Mickey learns just how important he is to them.

In the end, when his pals think he’s dead, The Blot reveals he’s been disguised as Goofy. Before Mickey can let everyone know he’s still alive, his pals beat the crap out of the villain.

In the final scene, Mickey and the real Goofy wander by the memorial statue. Goofy asks if Mickey ever thinks about dying, and Mickey says, “Nah. I’m too busy thinking about living!”

Despite Byron’s optimistic insistence, between the subject and the title, the script was shelved. But I think it was the moment where I came closest to the heart of the Mouse.

Likewise, it seems like a good place to end this meditation on the past. Much as I enjoyed working for Egmont, I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next.

Pax.

Teen, Inc. Down Under

Got a lovely note this morning from Regina Forrester, an English teacher in Australia.  She sent a copy of her glowing review of Teen, Inc., saying it was posted over at the publisher’s site, Allen and Unwin. 

After poking around a bit, I discovered an entire PDF of teacher reviews for the book.  Having spent an hour today struggling to get my wife’s Mac to print (I hate Macs) these put a real smile on my face.  A few excerpts:

This book did it for me. It is quirky, fast paced, funny and fun. It will grab the modern reader by the arm and drag them in. It has it all - which reminds me of the line in The Princess Bride, “Passion. Duels. Miracles. Giants. True love” - but in a modern context. Perhaps with our current financial status and the media so caught up in big business this has opened the audience even further. Students in Years 8 and 9 would find the characters and the plot very appealing and find true connection to them. Regina Forrester, Wyndham College, NSW

After reading an extract of Teen, Inc. on the Allen and Unwin website, I was hooked and was inspired to purchase a copy for the library. I am hoping to recommend Teen, Inc. to my school as a novel set. It is an easy read and there is plenty to discuss. Kimbra Weeks, New Town High School, TAS

I thought this book was very enjoyable, and it took quite a different approach to the usual problems of growing up. Jaiden was genuinely amusing at times and his beliefs, observations as well as his occasional humiliation at the hands of the Company seemed believable and could easily be related to. Anne Sim, Dromana Secondary College, VIC

This was a really good book. I really enjoyed reading the story of Jaiden, the boy brought up by a Corporation. It is told in the first person, and Jaiden Beale is an extraordinary teenager. Pauline Dunn, Mountain District Christian School, VIC

Teen, Inc, written by Stefan Petrucha, is a book that you can not put down. This is a well written book with a great story line. I would recommend this to anyone going through high school. William Knight, VIC

I’m particularly pleased to have all these comments coming from teachers.  Thanks all!

And remember folks, the US paperback of Teen, Inc. will be released this coming March, in conjunction with my new hardcover, SPLIT.  Pax.