Website Progress

Spent pretty much the entire day working on my new website. It's really starting to come together. I've posted a couple teaser screenshots of what it's looking like. But yeah, expect to see it up and running by the end of the week, assuming we don't run into any more issues (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer...)

New Day's Dawn

Woke up at 7:00 this morning to find my backyard draped in a ghostly fog worthy of some shots.

The Beard Project

Sketches of what Joshua's beard activity might look like after a few weeks of walking around purgatory without a proper razor.

The undeniable feeling

that all of this has happened before, and not just once but countless times, over and over again, a closed loop, and you are merely retracing steps you've already marked for eternity. You are living a memory, a memory that will never end.

In a sense this is already true: this moment, everything you are sensing now, is merely a memory your future self is accessing, somewhere further up ahead. Pre-determined. Nothing you do now in the "present" has any spontaneity; your future self is merely recounting it.

Remember

You've had a breakdown. You might have known it was coming, and

here it is.

It's become an image. It's become your tool for grabbing "success."
You've become so caught up with comparing yourself to your peers, judging your "worth" as far as society is concerned, you've lost sight of what it was originally for.

It was never for anyone else but you. You were never supposed to play to an audience, shock people into new modes of awareness.

You were a kid with an imagination, telling yourself stories.

All that shit you thought you wanted, were brainwashed into thinking you wanted, that's not for you.

You didn't care about any of that shit.
You were above it.

Remember when it was something you did to entertain yourself? To imagine new realities because your current one sucked?

You've been out of touch with reality for years now. Your reality has been a lie, an illusion crafted by you, a joke. It was never meant for you.

Remember when you didn't have the internet? Remember when you didn't have a portable, easy-access means of comparing yourself with your peers? Remember when you weren't plugged into an electronic social network? Remember when you didn't have all these various online portals you used to validate your worth as a human being?

Remember when you weren't pressured into achieving certain rewards by a certain age?

Remember when you were self-motivated?

Remember when you didn't have to worry about putting up a facade?

Remember when you had all the time in the world?

Remember when writing wasn't easy,
(it's never been easy)
but you braved the obstacles anyway to write something nobody but you was ever going to see?

Remember the enjoyment of it? Remember when it wasn't your job?

Why do you keep trying to fool yourself? You've never felt like an adult in your entire life, and you never will.

Issue #1...

Is finished!

Well, part 1 anyway. Of the first issue of the first part of the sprawling epic otherwise known as "Fiends of Nashville." The very first issue, when completed, will be about 40-48 pages long, a two-parter of which the first part is now complete. A couple weeks ago I was sitting around trying to figure out how to tell a chronological story that takes place in the afterlife, a place where time is eternal, there is no passage of time. I finally figured out the answer, and it's so good it scares me.

Anyway, part one starts off with a single title card: 1989. Then, we're introduced to Joshua Danton as he's walking into a Louisiana bayou roadhouse. Very choppy storytelling here, we're flashing brief, small details as Joshua is hit with a flood of sensation. This is the last moment of his life, and it's going to be preserved in his memory for the rest of eternity. Before he dies, we're cutting ahead to things he hasn't even seen yet. Before his eyes the bar starts to take on western properties, foreshadowing where he's going. We start to make the transition to the afterlife even before he's "killed" so it seems that much more seamless.

On page 19, Joshua dies, and by the end of this first part he arrives in Purgatory. We don't know a whole lot about how he got here, except in the literal sense. We know he was looking for his wife, who he thought was taken prisoner by these guys with guns, but it might be that she simply walked out on him.

In the next part, Joshua begins to explore his new bleak, bare world, and in doing so, builds it from the ground up. Technically at this point he's just a disembodied mind floating in a stream of electronic data. His reality is undefined, so he has to construct his own from essentially nothing. The reality he's going to construct for himself is a western, straight out of a John Ford movie. But in the beginning, there is only chaos. So the second part of this "pilot," so to speak, is told mostly through flashes of random-but-not-so-random imagery, memories of where he's been, scraps of dialogue that he took with him to his grave.

Anyway, just thought I'd share my progress. I'm pretty excited to get back to work and see how this thing starts to come together, because right now it could be anybody's guess.

Purgatory

Like being in a fishbowl. That's what purgatory must be like. Swimming circles in a fishbowl, without any concept of time or space. Awareness only of the present moment, mind numbed. Perhaps a vague hint of either past or future, the blurred shapes beyond the glass membrane of your reality non-discernible.