When I last did one of these – sheesh, three months ago – I was writing them to figure out how I wanted to use the blog.
I feel closer to having it sorted out – it’s a good place to do series of posts about the samethought, for example, and post half-formed thoughts that you don’t particularly feel like following up on.
But once I stopped doing these updates, I realised they can fulfil a function other posts won’t. I don’t want to do dedicated posts with publishing updates – social media is better for that, since it’s far more “real time”, and a blog post on those lines would be instantly dated – and I have no place to self-indulgently talk about what I’ve been up to in life.
So that’s going to be the purpose of these going forward.
I’ve been reading more non-fiction these days, and I wanted to note a trend in the kind of books I’ve enjoyed most.
One is American Prometheus, the in-depth biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer that formed the basis for Nolan’s recent film (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I’ve been listening to this one on audiobook on my evening walks.
The other one is Space Odyssey, a book by Michael Benson on the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which I finished reading last week in preparation for a rewatch of the movie.1 I expected this one to be 200-250 pages when I bought it on Kindle, and it turned out to be a hefty 600 pages – a good surprise.
It is early afternoon. Not raining yet, but the air is moist and rapidly cooling.
I’m sitting at the neighbourhood café by myself. I came here to write, but I’m avoiding it, nibbling on a sandwich while hunched over my phone.
There are three men at the next table – old friends catching up, it looks like. There’s music playing in my earphones, but I hear snippets – talk of family, traffic in Pune, and something about emigration to the United States.
These are two drawings that I made on the iPad ten months apart – one in August 2022, the other this June.
Titas Mandal/Stephanie Fox Lawrence.
I’ve always been fascinated by negative space in drawings. As a comics creator, I think negative space defines how we approach storytelling. It’s not just gaps in the art – how we draw the eye and where – negative space is fundamental to writing a comic too. Scott McCloud talks about this as closure – someone looking at the space between panels and filling in what happens there.
Due to many factors, including some physical ones, I’ve had to step away from doing much work in June – particularly in the back half.
In that time, I’ve been working on this outline for a comics mini-series (a four-issue horror story that I’ve codenamed SEASIDE). As I’ve written before, I finished around 80% of this before I stopped working on it, and only started back up in the last week of June.
In the meantime, I wrote two comics scripts and several blog posts and essays, so it’s not like I haven’t been writing. It’s more that I haven’t wanted to … take up space.
I have a habit of thinking back on my life twice a year – towards the end of the year, and in July, around my birthday. These are both arbitrary times to do this – I suppose ideally one should be thinking deeply about one’s life all the time – but it’s good to have mile markers where you can check if you’re headed in the right direction and if you need to make any adjustments.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m on my second cup of coffee. I usually drink only two cups of coffee a day – at noon and 6 p.m. – because historically, my body has had a low tolerance for caffeine, but I just like coffee so much that I decided to experiment with adding one more cup at 3 p.m. Doing this might turn me into a jittery, overemotional mess, but we’ll get through it together, won’t we?
I’ve said many times over that I want to use my blog more, so I want to start doing that. All the stuff that I naturally post on Twitter? Let’s see if it can go here. I want to live here again, if I can.
Right before the title drop in Across the Spider-Verse, Spider-Gwen leaves her house and swings out into the sky – does her Spidey thing. It’s a great visual sequence, and I was struck by a fleeting moment where she nearly disappears into the white sky, only standing out by the black and red of her costume.
I wanted to draw that moment, and I wanted to draw it from memory, before I watched the movie for a second time.
