angst and creativity
Sep. 3rd, 2002 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashToday was a slow, overheated, nothing day at work. I spent it shepherding a recalcitrant printer... ink had managed to splatter on one of the little rollers somehow, so I got to swab it off with rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, occasionally hitting the 'form feed' button and hoping that it wouldn't end up with the roller in the exact same orientation as before.
I feel nasty amd useless after unproductive days where my brain is kinda off like that.
But then on the way home I started thinking about 'The Drowning City'.
For those who don't know, this is a comic that's been brewing in my head for a while. In some respects it's been building for almost a year; in others it's been on the back burner since about a year after I moved from New Orleans.
The setting - an always-overcast, often-rained-on city, which is the center point of the reality that holds elves merging with our own reality, and its designated Destined Hero, has been around for a while. It's partially a channelling of a burst of homesickness, I think; New Orleans is almost as perpetually rainy as Seattle, and can, perhaps, be said to be drowning in various metaphorical ways... tradition, ignored change, things like that.
But it never went anywhere. The hero was blatantly two-dimensional. I got some interesting graphic themes going in my design roughs, but I could never get it to cohere.
Then, a little less than a year ago - yes, a few weeks soon after September 11; I'm not sure if it's related or not - this emaciated girl stepped out of some shadowy corner of my mind and began telling her story in little snippets, starting with who and what she was: a monster, but only partially. Her visual design came together very quickly; while it's been refined since then, I caught her essential features in something like the fifth exploratory sketch.
She's obviously a channeling of several dark and distraught fragments of my psyche, fleshed out by later conscious contemplation of her travails and her reactions. At first I wasn't sure if she lived in the Drowning City, but it quickly became obvious that she did - her transformation was caused by the incursion of the fairy realm into ours; she'd said herself that she was pretty sure she wasn't the only one changed this way. And with discovering that she did, indeed, share a world with this boring, destined hero, events began to build themselves.
I have a number of isolated vignettes concerning this (at first) nameless monster girl. She's notationally a side character in the saga of a standard-issue Destined Hero, but her story is so much more interesting; now and then her path crosses the hero's, with the distinct sense that he's involved in his own story that we never get more than fragments of. Slowly, the vignettes have been connecting over the past year, mostly in slightly gloomier moments of mine. New ones have appeared, often popping into my mind like Minerva bursting from Zeus' head - fully-formed from the start. Enough has accreted over the past year that I think I will soon be turning my sketches, thumbnails, and barely-legible plot notes into a gloomy comic.
I hope.
I'm not sure what purpose it will serve for me, but this monster-girl's story is the first story I've ever really felt I had to tell - other fragments of other characters are just exercises in plotting and connecting, but Alecto's woes spring from something deeper inside me. Maybe.
Anyway. On the bus home tonight, I had another one of those glorious moments when I'm tuned in to the voice of the muses, and a few lovely new bits of story appear, and existing ones turn over to expose how they're all connected together. Nothing really large came up in terms of new chunks, but a lot of connections came to light, including some thematic ones that I will have to bury a little in the final execution lest they be too blatantly obvious. I've known since the last major discoveries what the 'moral point' of the story is, and how it ends (how it begins has been set since she first appeared in my mind's eye: with her narration, setting forth her woes), but now most of the isolated, disconnected events that make up the amorphous middle of the story are showing me their sequence and their interrelations...
(Early design, since revised, and her introduction of herself to me can be found here.)
I feel nasty amd useless after unproductive days where my brain is kinda off like that.
But then on the way home I started thinking about 'The Drowning City'.
For those who don't know, this is a comic that's been brewing in my head for a while. In some respects it's been building for almost a year; in others it's been on the back burner since about a year after I moved from New Orleans.
The setting - an always-overcast, often-rained-on city, which is the center point of the reality that holds elves merging with our own reality, and its designated Destined Hero, has been around for a while. It's partially a channelling of a burst of homesickness, I think; New Orleans is almost as perpetually rainy as Seattle, and can, perhaps, be said to be drowning in various metaphorical ways... tradition, ignored change, things like that.
But it never went anywhere. The hero was blatantly two-dimensional. I got some interesting graphic themes going in my design roughs, but I could never get it to cohere.
Then, a little less than a year ago - yes, a few weeks soon after September 11; I'm not sure if it's related or not - this emaciated girl stepped out of some shadowy corner of my mind and began telling her story in little snippets, starting with who and what she was: a monster, but only partially. Her visual design came together very quickly; while it's been refined since then, I caught her essential features in something like the fifth exploratory sketch.
She's obviously a channeling of several dark and distraught fragments of my psyche, fleshed out by later conscious contemplation of her travails and her reactions. At first I wasn't sure if she lived in the Drowning City, but it quickly became obvious that she did - her transformation was caused by the incursion of the fairy realm into ours; she'd said herself that she was pretty sure she wasn't the only one changed this way. And with discovering that she did, indeed, share a world with this boring, destined hero, events began to build themselves.
I have a number of isolated vignettes concerning this (at first) nameless monster girl. She's notationally a side character in the saga of a standard-issue Destined Hero, but her story is so much more interesting; now and then her path crosses the hero's, with the distinct sense that he's involved in his own story that we never get more than fragments of. Slowly, the vignettes have been connecting over the past year, mostly in slightly gloomier moments of mine. New ones have appeared, often popping into my mind like Minerva bursting from Zeus' head - fully-formed from the start. Enough has accreted over the past year that I think I will soon be turning my sketches, thumbnails, and barely-legible plot notes into a gloomy comic.
I hope.
I'm not sure what purpose it will serve for me, but this monster-girl's story is the first story I've ever really felt I had to tell - other fragments of other characters are just exercises in plotting and connecting, but Alecto's woes spring from something deeper inside me. Maybe.
Anyway. On the bus home tonight, I had another one of those glorious moments when I'm tuned in to the voice of the muses, and a few lovely new bits of story appear, and existing ones turn over to expose how they're all connected together. Nothing really large came up in terms of new chunks, but a lot of connections came to light, including some thematic ones that I will have to bury a little in the final execution lest they be too blatantly obvious. I've known since the last major discoveries what the 'moral point' of the story is, and how it ends (how it begins has been set since she first appeared in my mind's eye: with her narration, setting forth her woes), but now most of the isolated, disconnected events that make up the amorphous middle of the story are showing me their sequence and their interrelations...
(Early design, since revised, and her introduction of herself to me can be found here.)
no subject
Date: 2002-09-04 03:27 am (UTC)I should get on with the music I'm doing in the style of that game's soundtrack sometime.
Do It!
Date: 2002-09-04 11:01 am (UTC)It sounds cool!