About The Site

It’s a serious heading, isn’t it?

The last two weeks, and change, have given me time to work on a new project. A novel. It’s been nice to have so much time each day to devote to it, nearly every day seeing more come out of my head and more come into my head. It’s fun to work on at the moment and that is how, and why, I write, for the fun of it.

But, it’s been interesting to watch something happen. I’ve written prose work before, essays, short stories, starts of novels, but this one feels different. Not in a bad way, I just think that perhaps my writing style has changed slightly. Adapted new ways of looking at things. I feel like I’m writing this novel with some comic book conventions.

It is very episodic. I have tried to break each chapter up into scenes, much like I would my comic work. Make it race around, fit in as many different people as possible. Instead of having sprawling chapters about a character and their entire life story, I have scenes, vignettes. I break it all down. Their entire life story can come out slowly, in small chunks.

The sentences can be quite short. I find that the paucity of words can often say more than an abundance of verbose and waffling lines. If I can get it done in four words, and those words feel right, and their look good then that’s what I’ll do. It sometimes feels like I’m writing captions for a comic panel, not an start/end to a paragraph. I kind of like the style to.

I am using repetition. I always think of the Coen Brothers when i think of repetition. The use of words again and again, or the same sentence, or various of words or sentences. If done right, and obviously not all the time, it feels like it can be quite effective. I do it in my comics, and not see that it comes into my prose as well. Something will come up again, perhaps changed, perhaps not, to emphasise a point annd, again, it feels like writing captions.

Dialogue is not always the key. I find that I like to write people talking, but sometimes would rather just relay to the reader what is going on through what the characters are experiencing, not explicitly what is said. IT’s strange, and kind of new to me, but I’m rolling with it.

I have written many thousands of words, and dozens of pages, in this last month and am hoping to get a chance to add to that over the coming months. I understand that while on holidays it is easy to rattle off thousands of words a day, but what with work filling up my sunny hours, I am trying to be realistic and simply hope for the best from my moonstruck hours. Pressure, and guilt to work may get my ass down in the chair, but I don’t want an ulcer to follow it when I can’t get to the laptop and I freak out. Life has to abide too, dude.
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The chapter titles have still been coming along in a fun fashion. A sample:
The Sound Of One Heart Breaking
Big Bangs and Bigger Thoughts
On The Road Philosophy
Sorting Problems In The New World
Two Gentlemen, Neither From Verona
Keep Asking And You’ll Get The Answer You Want To Hear Eventually
More Than Just The Writing On The Wall
When Does Bad News Become The Worst News?
Bloodbath On The Good Ship
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I really wanrt to get time to turn my Ego idea into a TV pitch. I can just see it, now the time to write the bastard. Keep watching this space…
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Justin Greenwood Does It Again

Look for this headline, the man is gold dust.

He has knocked up a cover for my Fate proposal, and it looks so fucking good!

Have a look yourself, the cover of the month

I don’t know about you, but man it sells so much for me. Fate looks great on the floor, and the cracked glass behind him is a great frame for three very cool images; Mills flashing the badge of the law round those parts, Fate’s crew of creeps in Sawney Bean, Gravedigger, and The Kids, and then Prometheus zooming in from above. The destruction looks savage, he’s been knocked about, but this shows that there is still so much more to come.

Love it, can’t wait to see it in stores.

Posted on October 13th, 2008 by ryan
Filed under: Writing, art