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 same thought, 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’m going to sit down on a Friday or Saturday, open up Ulysses, and start talking about my week in work and life.1
If a full thought emerges while doing this, I can easily shunt it off into its own post.
So be warned, there’s going to be more of these, and they’re all going to be very self-indulgent, and frequently long.
Basically, as I’ve noted, I’m trying to “live” here now (meaning, make this the centre of my online life), so I need something to fulfil the mandate that social media takes care of at the moment.
At the moment, I’m writing you from one of my two neighbourhood cafés. One has been around for longer – I wrote a whole graphic novel there longhand before the pandemic – and serves healthier food, plus I’ve become friends with the owners over time, but the other is close enough to my flat for me to walk to, and is usually empty in the afternoon, so I go to one or the other depending on how I feel.
It’s good to have places like these. I haven’t worked from an office for nearly 14 years now. For a couple of years, I shared a co-working space with a couple of friends, but for the last five years, I’ve worked from my own home. So a café like this means that I always have a place to go to when I want to get out of the house but not hang out with people.
They’re also good places to write in, because there’s a feeling of humanity around me, but I’m still separate from it, and the white noise helps me focus on whatever I’m writing.
I have writer friends who’ve been so habituated to writing from cafés that the pandemic disrupted their writing rhythm and affected their productivity because they suddenly had to write at home.
But even besides that, when you spend a lot of time alone working or writing, it’s good to have a second place to go to for a change of scenery.
On the workdesk this week – we landed on a digital style for the graphic novella I was originally supposed to hand-letter. I think it captures the emotion of the original hand-lettered style, and because I was working from that reference, it’s also fairly tricky to execute digitally. So I ended up creating some Illustrator actions to make it faster and easier without losing the character of the thing. The team and I are pretty happy with it, and this week I lettered the first three chapters.
I also wrapped up the first round of revisions for the OGN I mentioned in my last newsletter. I vastly prefer working on a graphic novel over working on serialised comics – fewer deadlines, so you have a more flexible schedule – but the downside is that you have to do revisions for 150 pages at once, which is a very different cognitive task from revising 20-24 pages. But it’s shaped up nicely. I think one or two rounds of catching any remaining errors, and we’ll be wrapped on this.
Yesterday, I agreed to letter a very special two-pager for one of my oldest collaborators (if you follow my coterie of comics folks on Twitter, you might be able to deduce what this is, but I’ll talk about it when it comes up properly). This is going to be a lot of fun.
This week, I received my comps for Harley Quinn: Black + White + Redder #3, which contains Juni Ba and my 10-page short called “The Rebound”. This will be out in stores on the 19th.
I’ve had several DC credits so far, but this is my first writing credit for them, and it’s for one of my favourite DC characters, so it feels pretty cool. (Plus, even people who are baffled by what I do for work know Harley Quinn and understand what “writing” means, so … yay, validation?)
I’m keeping a couple of copies for myself (one of each cover, probably), and giving the rest to friends and family. Chief among them are my mother and my sister. I casually mentioned this to my mother and I was surprised by the delight in her voice, which reminded me how supportive they’ve been about my creative work since I was a teenager.
Neither my parents nor my sister have read much of my writing (my parents never tried, and my sister read two of my short stories and found herself disturbed and baffled respectively), but they’ve always valued that I do these things. They were worried when I ignored my studies and nearly dropped out of college, but they respected that I took on a day job to support my writing, and they cheered me on with every professional sale back when I was trying to be a full-time writer.
When I wanted to quit my full-time comics job at Graphic India and try and make my way as a freelancer in the American industry, my mother offered to support me if I burned through my savings in the bargain. Nobody is more relieved than my family that I’ve found financial stability doing this very strange thing I love doing.
Even now, my mother has a massive stack of comics I’ve lettered – not to read, but to show my name in the credits to her friends when they ask what I do for a living. Aditya does that.
I give them a lot of credit for doing their best to love and support what must have been a fairly difficult child to understand. So I find it very sweet that they don’t particularly care about my writing, but are even happier than I am when I achieve some kind of milestone with it.
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, August was a busy month at work. September not so much, but I’ve ended up catching up with a lot of friends and collaborators, and unlike interacting in real life, Zoom/phone interactions demand a lot of focus from me, so I feel drained.
Apart from that, these weeks were also about taking care of a lot of real-life stuff. My father is cognitively disabled, and my mother is also aging, so we figured out control of their assets and finances for the future, which had been pending for a while. Again, fairly intense stuff, and not particularly cheerful either.
I was hoping for an easy rest of the month on that front where I could focus on my own stuff, but I’ll be visiting family next week for Ganpati, and I’ll probably end up staying there for the week, so I’ve moved this prospective “me time” to the week after. If, for whatever reason, that doesn’t work out, you’ll find me being aggressively anti-social in October, because something’s gotta give.
I’m going to use this week away from work to think about my priorities for the next year or so. I think I might’ve mentioned this in the recent past, but after my fairly severe burnout, I needed my life to be unstructured for a while, lacking a regimen. I think that time is past, and there are things I want to be doing next year in a regimented way that I want to start warming up to.
Plus, I’ve been having some Zoom calls with frequent collaborators to discuss prospective projects for 2024 and 2025, and I need to sit with my big annual spreadsheet and see how much work I want to do next year, and where it fits, and how much I can take on in addition to what I’ve already agreed to.
This year looks like it’s going to top out at around 1,300 pages, which is a vast improvement from 2021, which was 2,800 pages. I want 2024 to be lower than even this year, ideally around 600 pages, but I’m on three ongoing series, which by themselves would cross that number, so perhaps 1,000 is a more reasonable number to aim for.
We’ll see.
I finished reading only one book this week, though I’m in the middle of a few others. (I like to be reading one novel, one short story collection, and 1-2 non-fiction books at any time.) This book was Black Wings of Cthulhu Volume 1, edited by S. T. Joshi, well-known Lovecraft scholar and biographer.
I got this book a couple of years ago when I asked Twitter to recommend me cosmic horror novels/collections. As I read this, I realised that my taste for cosmic horror is … decidedly post-Lovecraft. Some of Lovecraft’s own stories I enjoy, and others (you can imagine which ones) I find fascinating for what they reveal about him, but discounting his own work, I’m not interested in people playing with his specific pantheon, nor do I respect stories that are in obvious thrall of him.
I like cosmic horror that has evolved, taking the central Lovecraftian/cosmic horror idea of the horrific rationality of a pitiless universe and moving it into modernity.
This isn’t a bad collection. As horror anthologies go, it’s solid. Most of the bright spots are either by writers who decided to delve into character, or who decided to ignore the stated mandate and just do a horror story they wanted to write. I didn’t, however, find myself impressed by the cosmic aspects of any of these, and was particularly annoyed by the writers doing straightforward pastiches of Lovecraft’s mood pieces. Those weren’t good when he was doing them, and they read worse now.
All in all, an enjoyable book, but an unnecessary one. If you’d like to read a cosmic horror collection that focuses on the “cosmic” aspect of the genre, I’d recommend Laird Barron’s The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, and if you want a story that tackles Lovecraft himself, you’d be much better reading Alan Moore’s Lovecraft trilogy, particularly Providence.
In movies and tv this week:
- It Comes at Night – Claustrophobic survival horror movie, beautifully shot, with some gorgeous music. Surprisingly enjoyable for a slight concept.
- What We Do in the Shadows Season 5 – Like each season (apart from 4, which was uniformly dire), this has a couple of fun episodes among a lot of wheel-spinning. I don’t like that they’re trying to do full-blown lore and world-building – it’s not done well, and it’s not funny – so I started watching the previous spinoff Wellington Paranormal, which is all one-offs, at least in Season 1, and I realised that the problem with all of this is that the original movie was lightning in a bottle, and everything after has been diminishing returns.
- No Hard Feelings – Surprisingly tame but enjoyable sex comedy that stumbles when it tries to be heartwarming, which it does far too much and to the detriment of the comedy. I did like how Jennifer Lawrence’s nudity is used exclusively for comedy reasons and never for titillation. Good move.2
- The Autopsy of Jane Doe – great setup for a horror film, and it’s well-shot all the way through, but the ending lets the whole thing down, and I found some decisions in the script to be eyeroll-worthy. I don’t know how else to describe this, but it’d be a better movie if it weren’t written by Americans.
- The Suicide Squad – This was a rewatch. I want to show K (my partner) the Peacemaker tv show, and this one’s kind of a prerequisite.3 Very fun – my kind of superhero story, which is also why Peacemaker and Harley Quinn are my favourite current superhero tv shows.
- The Dark and the Wicked – One of those times when I feel disconnected from the rest of the audience. This film has ecstatic reviews and dedicated fans, and it was … pointless. Like I mentioned on Twitter, I would give director Bryan Bertino a lot of credit for trying to rescue the movie from a terrible script if he wasn’t also the writer. It’s not a bad setup – a family horror movie based on emotionally distant siblings and parents who can’t collaborate to fight the horror – but not only are these relationships barely explored, most of the film is just iterations of different hokey jump scares – “scary thing jumps out, and then disappears” repeated about 30 times with little variation. There is no tension, no dread. This is particularly a pity because Bertino-as-director is extremely talented – I’d be hard-pressed to point out a bad frame in the film – and Marin Ireland gives a stunning central performance. But … I just didn’t care. Not about the characters, not about what would happen next. Baffling film, and I can’t figure out what people liked about this. Which I’m going to ruminate on for a bit.
I used to get proper haircuts before the pandemic, but, after a misguided attempt to grow a pandemic beard, I resorted to the trusty old trimmer, and have been managing my own hair and beard since then. I watched a couple of “cut your own hair” videos, and landed on a close-cropped style that’s easy to maintain.
But recently, I grew my beard out a bit, and wondered what it would be like to have a beard that I shaped as it went rather than let it run wild as I had in 2020. Victory Barber & Brand’s Matthew Conrad seems to have made far too many videos for GQ about maintaining facial hair, so I watched a clutch of these and landed on this combination of close-cropped hair with a beard I’m going to allow to grow a bit longer, and shape as I go. K was skeptical when I declared my intentions, but has cautiously approved of the results, so this is my look for the foreseeable future.
Next, growing my hair out again for the first time since my early twenties? Who knows!
- These are, in form and function, very similar to Weeknotes, but I hesitate to call them that, because most weeknotes I’ve seen are from tech-oriented people who sometimes give off LessWrong vibes, and I’m … very much not into that. ↩︎
- Oddly enough, this put me in mind of an incredible film I watched a couple of weeks ago – Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, which takes a microbudget Scottish sci-fi drama and plonks Scarlett Johansson in the middle of it to great effect. The connection here is that Johansson is nude for quite a bit of the film, but it is always unsettling or touching, never sexy. ↩︎
- A fascinating decision by DC to release a movie called Suicide Squad and then a sequel/reboot called The Suicide Squad with much of the same cast. Most people I know didn’t even realise there were two movies in the first place. ↩︎