CyberSync was fully funded on its first day. It hadn’t even gone live when I sent the last one of these out. We’re nearing sending it to the printers, which is incredibly exciting. I couldn’t be more proud of that book, and I’m so ready for everyone to read it.
I’ve been outlining and world-building for the next comic I’m going to write. I roughed out about 2000 years of history for the universe… most of which won’t show up in the book itself (unless we do some cool data pages or back-matter stuff) but it’s useful for me to know and build on. It was thoroughly helpful in finding more of the tone and atmosphere for the world I’m creating. Stuff like that is a fine line, though. Research and outlining, specifically. There’s a weird line of, “Do I need to be doing this or am I just putting off the actual writing?” Sometimes it’s a bit of both. Sometimes you don’t know until you’re doing it. Either way, I’m happy with the progress I’m making on it. I have a couple of character outlines to work on and then general plotting for the issue(s) and I’ll get to scripting.
The Apollo City Comics Podcast is still on hiatus. We have plans. There will be a return, but we can’t discuss it yet. In other exciting podcast news that I teased last time, the Inspired Ink Podcast from Comix Well Spring has launched! Brandon is the show host and interviews a new creator in every episode! They talk all things craft and so much more. I’m serving as editor for the show, which releases twice a week, and it’s been awesome. The show is super fun and informative and the response so far has been great. Go check it out if you haven’t!
It’s been a wild few months. I started this newsletter with the intent of it being weekly. That didn’t happen. The school semester got hectic, the CyberSync campaign took off, and the holidays quickly got here. On top of all that, there’s still the need for a social life. It can feel impossible to keep up with everything and so I gave myself some slack on projects that didn’t need my attention right that moment. This was one of them, but I want to change that. I want this to be a consistent thing I do, so I’m back at it. Hopefully for good this time.
I think it’s important to take that time to let yourself breathe if you start feeling too cramped with projects and things happening. That said, I am excited to be diving back into having a regular creative output. I’ve been wanting to put out more video/short-form content lately, and sort of started with these philosophy TikTok’s (which I need to get back on) but I haven’t found my stride with it yet. There are a couple more ideas that I have though which will hopefully take life soon. In the meantime, I’ll try to focus my attention on a regular output for this and refine what I want it to look and feel like.
Ohhh so many things. I was able to convince my girlfriend to sign up for AMC A-List, so we go to the movies constantly now. It’s wonderful. We went to the Across the Spider-Verse re-release the other day and she had never seen ITSV so we of course had to watch that one first. Both are top-tier, but Across still remains my favorite of the two. We also saw Oppenheimer and Dune for their re-releases in IMAX. We saw them as a double feature, actually. Nearly 7 hours at the theater and it was glorious.
Newer releases though… The Iron Claw was phenomenal. Heartbreaking as hell. The Boys in the Boat was a great, heartfelt time. Poor Things was stellar in the weirdest ways. The Holdovers was tremendously moving and a beautiful film.
For books, I just finished reading through Murtagh and really enjoyed it, and have now started Chalice of the Gods as a sort of light breath before I dive into Dune Messiah to hopefully finish it before Dune Part 2. For comics, I recently finished Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans’ DIE series, and have been trying to keep myself from buying the RPG game itself. I can’t recommend the comic enough, though. I also just dove into Hickman’s Avengers run, starting with all the Secret Warriors stuff. It’s fantastic so far, as expected. The Krakoan Era is coming to a close in the current releases, and to say I’m disappointed would be an understatement. Rise of the Powers of X and Resurrection of Magneto have the sauce, though.
We’re going short and sweet with this one and almost flipping these last two sections, but here we go:
“The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”
-Epictetus
I’ve been listening to this podcast again recently called You Are A Storyteller — which I highly recommend to everyone — that primarily dives into storytelling. I haven’t gotten through all the episodes yet, I’m somewhere in the middle, but I found it an incredible resource. It helps get my brain moving in those storytelling motions when I’m gearing up to write a script or plot or whatever it might be. So I’ve been listening to them again lately and it’s bursting with great advice, but one of the pieces I wanted to latch onto for today is the idea of letting the story guide itself and taking your ego out of the equation. They go into great detail about what exactly they’re talking about and how they apply it, and you should go listen to them talk if you’re curious. Here, though, I want to highlight a bit about how that happened to me recently.
I mentioned I’ve been doing some outlining and whatnot for the next script I want to tackle. This story is so, so far from what I initially imagined it as. The first seed for the story is still mixed in the roots, but as I’ve let the story grow and evolve in my head and as I reach problems and find the only solution that makes sense for the story, it morphs into something I couldn’t have predicted. There’s a certain level of expressing what I know I want to personally say with the story, there’s always going to be my imprint on there. At the same time, though, a lot of the story is decided by the story itself once certain things get set in motion. There’s a general… I don’t know how to explain it. Things just start to click, and that makes it to where these other pieces can really only click together this certain way now, and sometimes that means shifting away from this original idea I thought it was going to be. Sometimes that means killing your darlings or getting rid of a cliffhanger that doesn’t make sense.
The important thing is being open to finding that out along the way and letting the story form itself. It’ll take you to amazing places.
Thanks for reading.
Be nice. Be kind. Learn, and tell stories.