Hullo

Mother
Still Bundled
No Good Advice
Links
Bye

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We’re back, and DIE: Loaded is too. Issue 3 drops next week. Here’s the preview…

Grab a copy next week, from wherever you get comics from.

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I plugged this before Christmas, but the deal is still running, so I’m doing it again.

Until January 12^th there’s a DIE: RPG deal running on Bundle of Holding.

For $14.99, you can get the DIE: RPG core book, plus the three adventures modules and the quick start. The pack also includes a 15% off voucher if you want to buy physically from RR&D.

Bargain!

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ON ADVICE

This is prompted by a thread on Blue Sky over the holiday, where folks responded with their least favourite bits of writing advice. It was a lot of fun, but also deeply infuriating. It led me to say that one day I’ll write up my Three Stages of Advice, but today is not the day.

Today is the day.

Advice basically goes through stages.

The Actual Advice

Someone is trying to impart knowledge, born of learning and experience. They present a context (even implicitly) and what they’ve drawn from that context, and why it’s important and why it has worked for them.

They then gather all all that advice in a one-liner to sum up the line of thought. They stick it at the start or the end. If you’ve followed their argument, you understand what the advice actually is.

If the line is catchy enough and the advice actually useful in many contexts, it spreads. That’s fine. Folks know what it means.

Dogma

Oh no, folks don’t know what it means. They have not actually read any of the thought which led to the one liner – they’ve just heard the one liner, or things people have said about the one-liner, or just skimmed the original context and didn’t give it sufficient thought.

At this stage the one liner is interpreted in ways which the original advice-giver didn’t intend. It’s interpreted in ways the original advice giver explicitly argued against, but if all you have is the one liner, you end up where you end up. Folks start treating advice (maybe try this if you’re in this situation) as dogma (one must do this, and only this).

Deconstruction

Eventually, this form of the advice has spread so far that people notice it’s bullshit, and how it’s preached in its dogmatic form can be critiqued on various axis. The original advice is rejected as wrong, either unwise or unethical, and a new advice covering a similar topic is cooked up.

This new advice is almost always identical to the meaning of original advice, but rephrased.

Any advice which is pithy enough to be memorable is open enough to be misinterpreted.

Let’s walk through a simplified version of one of mine.

When I’m teaching comics, I use the phrase “Space is meaning.”

Actual advice: The more narrative space you give any story element, the more import it carries. For example, a large panel feels more meaningful than a smaller panel. If you do a scene about a specific thing for multiple panels or even pages, it sends the message that this is interesting and important and worth considering. Space is meaning.

Dogmatic: Space is meaning. Big panels are more important than small panels. Only use big panels for important things.

Deconstruction: This is nonsense. If you use a lot of small panels then it also makes it feel important.

To stress the point – the critique is included in the actual original advice. We go nowhere but to where we started.

If you click through to the actual thread, you’ll see a lot of these. Have a look, and think of where the deconstruction may have gone awry from the actual advice due to the idiocy of the dogmatic stage annoying people. The first one that caught my eye was someone saying “It’s not show not tell – you should show AND tell” which is what the screenwriter (important context for that one) maxim actually means. Your showing should be telling whatever you need to tell. Don’t have your lead say they love their spouse. Make their love clear by showing what the character does and how they interact.

The takeaway of this when listening to advice, I would encourage folks to think not what you think it is saying, but what the original statement actually was trying to convey, and how it applies to your current task (if at all).

Most Advice isn’t actually the advice. It’s the title of the essay.

Now I’m going to stop, because my brain is starting to work on how that will be misinterpreted.

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• I really liked Ella Watts’ Downriver, and in Zinetopia she and Georgia Cook want to do The Deepest Dark, and Gmless tragic horror game about dying in a cave-in. Exactly my jam, clearly. Do sign up for notifications here, and you’ll be doing Ella a solid – she needs 400 people to sign up so she can be part of Zinetopia in the first place.

• A decade on from Gamergate and GameIndustry.biz interviews women about how the industry has changed in this period.

• Tini writes about her forthcoming Black Label book with Babs Tarr, Sirens & The City. She’s including the fashion sheets for the characters, which is something I just love to see. That was such a big part of the process with Jamie.

• El Sandifer is posting Last War In Albion again, on the work of Morrison in the 1990s, specifically related to Millar. This is compelling stuff, and some of the interviews are really something else. I’ve said it before, but I consider myself lucky I didn’t properly break into comics until my early 30s, with a work specifically about what arseholes 20-year-old creatives can be.

• Tom Ewing is still on his Discourse 2000 tip. There’s been a bunch of 2000AD essays since I last linked, but his piece on The Cursed Earth is especially good..

• I’d traditionally do a best tracks of the year post this time, but I don’t really see the point this year. My listening has been fun, and perhaps I’ll go back and do some more recommendations soon, but I don’t feel capable of making a list. Perhaps a list of Kids’ TV shows? However, Matt Rosenberg has done a list of his favourite tracks of the year, which is a great download of his space.

• The Open Hearth is a gaming community I play in (not nearly enough) and it’s their end of year podcast, where the members record short audio clips talking about their fave games of the year. I actually got organised enough to include my own. Listen here to a lot of love.

• A meta-list of Best Comics Of the Year list, which notes that The Power Fantasy was on a lot. Hurrah!

• The closest I came to a new year resolution was trying to get the RSS app actually in my regular check ups again. That led me to reading A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry’s musing on Eowyn, and how she’s suspended between two concepts of war. I thought this was really good.

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Well, it’s a new year. Let’s leave it at that.

I normally write the meat-and-potatoes part of the newsletter first, as that’s why it primarily exists. You lot like my stuff. It exists to tell folks when my stuff is out, as god knows we can’t rely on anything else right now. However, that I write that first – and it can be a lot – does tend to leave me burned out by the time it comes to write the outro letter, let alone any additional writing.

This time I’m trying it back to front, having written the above essay first, and then this, and then I’ll go back and do the rest. I’m hoping that because that’s a task which is primarily grunt work, that I can do it. I worry this will balloon the time to write this – but I’m hoping that that writing essays is more fun than assembling links, that I’ll actually gain back the time because I procrastinate a lot less. I certainly did this morning.

In reality, with an ADHD brain, you try tactics, which work until they don’t. It’ll do for now. Even if it’s only for today.

The holidays were good. We were hosting for the first time, and it was great to see everyone together, and the kids forming a gang. It’s the first Christmas that Iris could actively engage with and be aware of what it was, which is a special kind of magic. The second they left, C came down with the monstrous cold that’s going around, and was off for the best part of the week. As such, I didn’t get any work done – except an hour or so on the Wednesday, and then another couple after everyone had gone to bed on New Years Eve.

Which was enough to actually wrap what I wanted to send off at Midnight, and I decided to send it off. Waiting to hear what my collaborator makes of it, before we make plans.

Anyway – now to go back and do the rest. Wish me luck.

Speak soon.

Kieron Gillen
Bath
7.1.2026