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From the back matter in “The Amazon” #2 re-issue:

Tim Sale: Really? I don’t remember the physical script that well. Did you write full script?

Steven T. Seagle: It was a weird script. Since the story was going to be experimental, I made the script experimental, too.

Sale: [Laughs] Upside-down and backwards?!

Seagle: Well, kind of.  It was in three columns–a column that said “visual” and was the physical description telling us where we were and what was happening; there was a column that said “journal,” and it had what Malcolm would write about the visual experience; and a column that said, I think, “article,” that had what Malcolm thought about the experience in the future, when he was presenting the story for public consumption.

You see its funny, I hadn’t heard about this series at all, mostly because its the twenty year anniversary and not something new (I was eight when this first came out).  It probably would have helped if I had read the back matter in this issue with this interview before reading the content, as it would have helped with my first reading because I was completely lost with this format.  I thought I’d post this because its a pretty interesting style to comic scripting that Seagle did.  Below is a scan from those back pages.  I highly suggest The Amazon for those readers looking for something different with comic structure, and, yeah, Tim Sale.

Steven T. Seagle's script from Amazon #2

You know, the expression “hitting the wall,” where you’ve been going and doing something for so long your mind breaks a little, and refuses to let you go any further? My brain did that to me yesterday.

I could not get a single word down that I didn’t think was totally worthless.

The term comes from running.  The first and only time I ever encountered it was my freshman year of high school during swim practice. There was a fifteen-year old Russian teammate of mine whose name I’m forgetting but he had a mustache swimming in front of me and suddenly went from a normal pace to almost a dead stop, literally in between strokes.  Yesterday was just one of those days where I was in a total funk where I could not focus and could not get anything done. Especially with Tim and Jude coming today, Monday had to be a big workday.

Just as I was working through my issues, getting my shit working again, a friend came up to me, who I had previously explained my plight.

“I think I’ve got it,” I say to him. “I think I’ve broken through the wall.”

“The wall?”  he asks.  “One time, my friends and I tried to see how fast a supermarket automatic door sensor reacts.  We did this by running as fast we could on the pad, but, of course, the pad wasn’t as fast as us.”

“That literally made my day.”

I guess you could say hitting the wall is the same as writer’s block, but the person writing this doesn’t believe in Writer’s Block.  I believe in bad days, but not being blocked, that means being stopped, literally not even able to type anything.  No, that was not what was wrong with me yesterday, it was not being able to write to my standard.  Sometimes I find its best to just write through the problem.  Walk away from the computer, and just sit down with a pad and pen somewhere far away from distraction and just write about the Funk you’re in. Being around people you can talk to helps, because then situations like this arise, people help in snapping you out.

For short story writers in his class, the requirement was one story, ten to fifteen pages in length.  For people who wanted to write a novel–I think there must have been one or two of these souls–a chapter of around twenty pages, along with an outline of the rest.  The kicker was that this one short story, or the chapter of the novel, might have to be revised ten times in the course of the semester for Gardner to be satisfied with it.  It was a basic tenet of his that a writer found what he wanted to say in the ongoing process of seeing what he’d said.  And this seeing, or seeing more clearly, came about through revision.  He believed in revision, endless revision; it was something he felt was vital for writers, at whatever stage of their development.

From Raymond Carver, in the forward of John Gardner’s book “On Becoming a Novelist”.  With Grad School starting next week, (I have orientation tonight), I’ve been reading this book to get me in the mind set. I found this book being given away in my apartment building while heading downstairs to meet Bee for a smoke after her date the other night.  I think this quote is especially something that I really need to ingrain in myself–the patience with revision, because I hate doing it.  I like getting it right the first time, and I often make stupid mistakes because of this mind set.

There was some reason I felt compelled to grab my laptop from my desk, while still in bed at 3am, last night.  I was musing over the remnants of an episode of Californication, and trying to wound down the evening at 3am with a book. Ruth Fowler’s book, No Man’s Land, about stripping in New York City while being an illegal immigrant and waiting for her journalist’s visa. There’s a lot of intoxicating prose that literally sexes up a profession that fails to turn me on. It was while doing this, laying in bed, and thinking about these things that I came to a conclusion that was worthy of jotting down.  There was some kind of inner meaning to it all while bathed in the yellow light from the spike bulb that I got at some pawn shop on West 4th, or maybe it was the Duder’s…?  I don’t remember, and that’s the point: I don’t remember what the inner meaning that I was achieving that vanished as soon as I grabbed the laptop.

Of course, its always like this, but I’ve become all too used to this kind of thing happening and I’ve developed a kind of life hacker way around it. I wouldn’t call it life hacking, that popular turn of the phrase that’s ever-present in this blogging world. I wonder how many previously trained print news writers are now turning to the intertubes? Probably a lot.  No, I would call it life gerry-rigging.  Gerry-rigging a way around your own neurosis. See the way, I solve situations like this is to think over the day’s events, that led me to this moment that I felt compelled to reach over and grab my laptop. Its as if some force, (”the Bug,” TJB and I call it), that makes you work towards your words, to find that right tone, and that shouldn’t be easy, while at the same time cursing you for not scribbling down the notes at the moment of knowledge.  You see, I know this, and in another attempt of life gerry-riggage, I carry the a-typical Moleskin book around with me, but I don’t slip it under my pillow for moments like this. It sits at my desk, like my laptop, and I’m forced to write around the stuff that may have influenced this moment.

When I wandered into my room earlier in the evening to go offline to get some work done I was reading about the 80s literary Brat Pack as they were called. Those involved were Jay McInerney (author of The Good Life) and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho).  The story had to do with them using each other as characters, and how much of their own literary works could be construed as actual aspects of their daily lives.  This was a common criticism among these people and their works; these wunderkinds who had done different works of literature.  I started my own thing, and started watching Californication, David Duchovny’s character on this show is a middle aged writer who fornicates (see what I did there) throughout the city of Los Angeles. Hating everything about the city, its people and its women, all while vying to win back his former domestic partner and their near teenage daughter.  He’s a straight talking New York City writer, trapped in a city where (I have been led to believe, but maintain a great level of doubt as I’ve never visited) all people do is smile through their teeth and talk shit about you behind your back. More and more people do that to you here now.  I used to believe this city, while never without shit-talkers, was full of people who would tell you to your face that you suck.

Perhaps it is McInerney and Ellis’s legacy, the legacy of the question: “Well, how much of this book is based on your life? Did you actually do that stuff?” This mode of questioning, as far as I can tell, started with Hunter S. Thompson and was later further pushed by people like Ellis and McInerney, and others. As they, or their parents likely had errant Rolling Stones laying around their house when they were teenagers.  Now, Hunter’s popularity hasn’t faded, it seems his attraction continued throughout the college years of many people, including my own.  And his style, like Ellis and McInerney’s after him, have become increasingly popular in today’s world; the “fictionalized,” first or second person memoir.  So, they developed their style somewhat like Hunter’s (even though no one could duplicate or be anything like Hunter they were definitely influenced, like many other people and developed their own style). Then there are those of us, who grew up on reading the latter two, and while still trying to find the style that is yours were influenced by them. It’s a natural vicious circle, one that is bound for comparison.

Perhaps that’s what I was trying to get at tonight. An opinion I had already formed forever ago. It seems too glaringly obvious. But its 3:45 and I should get to bed. I have a day filled with people who are straight up and good to my face.

From “Factotum,” by Charles Bukowski. 

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write.  But starvation, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it. A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax. Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man.

I’ve always believed this to be true.  A friend of mine, a guy who fancies himself an artist, and he is, recently chastised me for letting go of some things that I was working on in favor of other things.  He always preached to me the mantra of the starving artist; where all you had was your art, you worked on your art and your art alone to feed yourself.  My buddy Brian and I always called bullshit on that concept, but the reason why we call bullshit is our friend who preaches to us doesn’t realize that we do make our livings with our art just through separate venues.  Ideas don’t go anywhere, they see the light of day through other means too.  

From “Factotum,” by Charles Bukowski. 

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write.  But starvation, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it. A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax. Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man.

I’ve always believed this to be true.  A friend of mine, a guy who fancies himself an artist, and he is, recently chastised me for letting go of some things that I was working on in favor of other things.  He always preached to me the mantra of the starving artist; where all you had was your art, you worked on your art and your art alone to feed yourself.  My buddy Brian and I always called bullshit on that concept, but the reason why we call bullshit is our friend who preaches to us doesn’t realize that we do make our livings with our art just through separate venues.  Ideas don’t go anywhere, they see the light of day through other means too.  

From “Factotum,” by Charles Bukowski. 

I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write.  But starvation, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it. A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax. Once you realized that everything was a hoax you got wise and began to bleed and burn your fellow man.

I’ve always believed this to be true.  A friend of mine, a guy who fancies himself an artist, and he is, recently chastised me for letting go of some things that I was working on in favor of other things.  He always preached to me the mantra of the starving artist; where all you had was your art, you worked on your art and your art alone to feed yourself.  My buddy Brian and I always called bullshit on that concept, but the reason why we call bullshit is our friend who preaches to us doesn’t realize that we do make our livings with our art just through separate venues.  Ideas don’t go anywhere, they see the light of day through other means too.  

Comes from Brian K. Vaughan:

If they made it, it’s a only a matter of time before I make it. It seems like a simple and obvious thing, but I have to say, that was right before the time Y (the Last Man) and The Hood. It was such a change in outlook where you stop being bitter and you realize that art is not a competition, that there’s more than enough room for all of us. You there to be as much diversity as possible.

Comes from Brian K. Vaughan:

If they made it, it’s a only a matter of time before I make it. It seems like a simple and obvious thing, but I have to say, that was right before the time Y (the Last Man) and The Hood. It was such a change in outlook where you stop being bitter and you realize that art is not a competition, that there’s more than enough room for all of us. You there to be as much diversity as possible.

Comes from Brian K. Vaughan:

If they made it, it’s a only a matter of time before I make it. It seems like a simple and obvious thing, but I have to say, that was right before the time Y (the Last Man) and The Hood. It was such a change in outlook where you stop being bitter and you realize that art is not a competition, that there’s more than enough room for all of us. You there to be as much diversity as possible.