Picking Apart My Process: Part II

Well, it's back to business here at Hyperbolic Attack!. It's been a week since I've really done any substantial writing on this site, and the nagging desire to write has been gnawing on the back of my brain like a little demon- berating me for my procrastination and clawing at my conscience with claws of self-doubt. I feel a burning need to write, and it's more than a common rash or an itch, swollen red, oozing, and irritated. 

Writing is an addiction. Stop writing altogether, and the absence of scratching that maddening itch will cause the bugs to start crawling under your skin in no time. Sheer circumstance has kept me from writing this week. I've been busy packing my things and moving them into a temporary storage shed which I peruse the Leader Post looking for single bedroom apartments. All the same, I'm the only one there is to blame for not keeping my notebook in the back pocket of my jeans all this week. I should have been scrawling down tiny notes to myself during brief moments of reprieve in the men's washroom at work, as per my usual habit.

The last time I wrote on the subject of writing specifically, I was infatuated with this idea of writing a 90-page illustrated novella. I'm happy to say that, more or less, that idea still excites me and I'm finally taking steps, albeit small ones, towards making that goal corporeal. What has changed since the last time I wrote about, well, writing, is the subject of my intended story. I should have known better, really, than to get so excited by a sudden burst of creativity, but it's hard not to be carried away by a new idea when inspiration strikes. Most of the ideas I plan on turning into actual pieces of writing tend to be stories that have been rolling around in my head for years, like well-weathered stones in a rock tumbler waiting to become diamonds. Hah. Well maybe not diamonds, but some sort of polished rock anyways! So, to make a long story short, the modern vs. old world romance/boy meets girl via personal ads story is probably not going to see the light of day anytime soon. Which, in the end, is probably for the best. 

The idea of authoring an illustrated story appeals to me in a big way. I'm talking CAPS LOCK BIG. Even, Italicized BIG! But when I say illustrated story: I mean that specifically. Not comics, and not their pretentious bastard cousin- the "graphic novel." I'm acutely wary of diving headfirst into the craft of comics, the medium of Sequential Art is full of it's own professionals and amateurs alike, but I've always been enthralled by books which used pictures to aid the story's within. When I was a child, I was in love with the work of English illustrator Quentin Blake, whose imaginative drawings filled the pages of Roald Dahl's children's classics. Later, as a teenager just discovering the literature that would come to dominate my early adult reading habits, the comical felt-pen sketches of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in Breakfast of Champions evoked that same sense of curious wonder and humor I saw in Blake's artistic accompaniments to Dahl's text.  Though anything I'd wind up writing will probably have more drawings in it than Breakfast of Champions of The BFG, the marriage of images and text to create a partnership beyond that of the comic book interests me greatly. Whatever shape my story takes in subject matter, I think it's fair to suggest that I'd like no less than a third of that story to be told in pictures. 

I don't think it's a coincidence that The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic work by Ogred Weary is counted among the favorites on my bookshelf.

More on my writing process soon!