Inside The Grinding.

-  So I’m a regular reader of comics.  At any given time I’ve got anywhere from 5-10 books on my pull list at the shop.  But for some reason I have never read any Avengers stuff (I don’t read too much superhero stuff besides some classics and/or products of great writers).  I was simultaneously trepidations and excited to jump into the deep end when I heard Jonathan Hickman (a writer who’s creator-owned work I follow) would be writing not one, but two, Avengers books.  And though I firmly stand on the side of the “New Avengers/Illuminati”, I did catch up on the regular “Avengers” title last night.  I read a lot of slightly negative things about the 2nd and 3rd issues of the book, which I don’t really understand because the quality is almost exactly the same as the first.  But a lot of readers of comics — and your fanboys who don’t read comics — don’t have the best taste.  Anyways I’m hoping these “Creators”, these spectacularly complex and borderline sympathetic villains, are revisited later on during Hickman’s run… perhaps reigniting the evolution of Mars and thus far surpassing Earth?

-  An article on Wired is garnering quite a bit of views: Inside The Battle of Hoth.  It basically takes a satirically serious look at the strategies employed by both the Empire and the Rebellion during the big first set-piece of Empire.  But after reading this article, you’ll realize how inept and incoherent a military strategy the Empire employed in their best chance at wiping out 90% of the Rebellion with one stroke.

-  ARTIST OF THE DAY is Akiko Stehrenberger.  Wow.

(via http://www.impawards.com/index.html)

-  I may have to watch Dave Grohl’s documentary “Sound City” soon, sounds like an interesting doc.

-  Damn cool pic I found on Grinding.be:

 

-Sonny

 

Link JERSEY??

-  Hurricane Sandy as the Fibonacci Spiral/Sequence:

-  I wonder how close this is to the character from 2001…?  Someone has decided to make a HAL9000 robot for purchase and — I’m assuming — mounting on your wall somewhere?  You can preorder it for $500 right now.  LINK.

-  Then we got some what looks to be hockey jersey’s that are really fucking nerdy and awesome at GeekJerseys.com.  This Link jersey is really, really fucking awesome:

Thanks Topless Robot for the tips!

-  The Biggest Expansion of Man In PreHistory?

DNA sequencing of 36 complete Y chromosomes has uncovered a previously unknown period when the human population expanded rapidly. This population explosion occurred 40 to 50 thousand years ago, between the first expansion of modern humans out of Africa 60 to 70 thousand years ago and the Neolithic expansions of people in several parts of the world starting 10 thousand years ago.

-  Warren Ellis FAQ featuring some interesting writing questions.  Such as:

I was wondering if you had any advice regarding making ideas more important. I have pages of different events + characters that I can only develop so far because, after a time, all I can add to them are “WHO CARES?” and “WHY DOES THIS MATTER?” (I’m talking about events characters will go through. “Statues come to life all around Greece” is immediately followed by “WHO GIVES A FUCK?”) Does this ever happen to you? Thank you very much for your time, and sorry if you’ve answered a similar question!Ungh.  This is a really tough one.  There are two ways, maybe, to attack this.

1) One way of doing it, and this works okay for standard dramatic storytelling, is this: what do your characters WANT?  The secondary questions are, what stops them from getting what they want, and how far are they prepared to go to get what they want?  But start with the simple first question.  What your character wants defines how we perceive and feel about them in the story.  Find one thing they want, and see how that feels to you.

2) From a certain view, stories are two things.  There’s what the story’s about, and what the story’s REALLY about.  Wells’ WAR OF THE WORLDS is about a Martian invasion of Earth.  But it’s REALLY about something else entirely.  There’s a subtext: there’s the thing Wells wrote the story toactually talk about.  What you may be encountering is having a story that’s all surface, or a story with a subtext that isn’t working out for you.  Find out what you really want to say with your fiction.  If it matters to YOU, it’ll matter to other people.

-  PoliFact has a list of “Scariest Lines from the 2012 Campaign” up for Halloween.

-Sonny

Fall Photos, 10/18.

From Bill “OddBill” Cunningham.

From Alanna.

And lastly, from National Geographic.  These are grey wolves playing somewhere in MN.

-Sonny

The Realist Gebetbuch.

That is a picture of a book from a blog called Chateau Thombeau which seems to specialize in very old photographs of often times obscure stars and celebrities (there’s currently an excellent picture of Truman Capote).  The post doesn’t say anything about the book, but at the link is a very high resolution pic for your viewing pleasure.  But it is German based on the small “Gebetbuch” (which roughly translates to “prayer book”) engraving near the spine side.  Look at that clasp though, that is unreal… what if novels/books all had this amount of care today?

Writing a novel — much less several at once — is fucking difficult*.  Just writing alone is hard enough for most people.  Yes, the act of sitting down at a computer or moveable type machine and putting letters to screen/paper over and over again for hours on end.  I’ve been doing it for a while now, so I have an advantage in that department.  But in terms of laying out a novel fully in advance (I’m just talking the big plot points and themes and outcomes), then turning that into a fleshed out story with characters and worlds that breath and whisper through the letters and words back at you, that is a task.  The concept I’m working with (for my first ever attempt at a novel) probably lends itself well to a novice, or someone who is completely mad, however; so I got that going for me.

It probably is both helping and hurting that I’m going back to read old Grant Morrison comics right now.  It’s funny: his stuff always seems to be better than you remember it, even if you’re re-reading something of his for the 9th time.  I do find it a little perturbing how reviewers — websites like IGN – seem to not be able to remove his teat from their mouths; many of them instantly crown anything (no, really… literally anything) he does as a breathtaking modern classic.  The guy’s a crazy bastard — who also seems very, very bright — with a whole plethora of crazy things running through his mind… I like that, I like it a lot, but that don’t mean he pisses all over Dostoyevsky.

The only Dostoyevsky I’ve read is The Brother’s Karamazov, which is a daunting read and probably the longest book I’ve ever gotten through entirely.  Hyper-Realism isn’t necessarily my cup of tea — it isn’t what I do as a writer and it isn’t what I normally read — but it is entirely admirable.  One could argue that it takes more focus and will-power to both write and read realism rather than the more surreal works amongst us.  What I really enjoy is that sense of realism, however tedious and “boring” and long, embedded into that which isn’t necessarily real.  Like if The Brothers Karamazov – will all it’s style and realism and even story elements — was a science fiction novel set in the Russian 1950′s.  And I don’t mean “Hard Sci-Fi”, that literary category assumes something about content, I’m talking purely of style.  Now, if The Brothers Karamazov was actually the story of three sons dealing with the death of their terrible father in 1950′s Russia, to be released in 1890′s Russia, it’d probably feel something like a Philip K. Dick novel.  But that’s something else for another day.

*(I am whetting my beak with trying to update my other Sonny Wilkins blog more and more; the one which explicitly chronicles his life post-overdose.)

-Sonny