013: Copping Z's
A little late again—and this is gonna be a lighter edition too. So, let's just jump into it, right after...
Support my work
Work-Life Balance – the multi-award-winning prose/comics hybrid co-created with Benjamin Chee
Worlds Apart: A Conversation About Mental Health – a comic co-created with Nurjannah Suhaimi
HANTU – Spotify channel for the narrative series, Ghost Maps, and the talk show, Dead Air, both of which were co-created with Kyle Ong
Tales From Incredible Tales – a podcast by Kyle and I, looking back on the cult classic horror series, Incredible Tales
Minor mentions
Work-Life Balance was a small part of two articles this week. The first was in this piece for Catch about what makes comics literary. The other was in Bleeding Cool's video walkthrough of the London Book Fair, where we were spotted at the Diamond booth.
There we are, at the lowest shelf under the Oni Press logo—which, let me tell you, as someone who came of age during the Bob Schreck/Joe Nozemack/Jamie S. Rich era of Oni, is just wild to me.
Sleep of the just
I need to get more rest. I know, this feels like a weirdly ordinary topic to cover in this newsletter, but as any creator worth their salt would tell you, sleep is pretty important to the process.
I passed the 20,000-word mark this past week—my first milestone for this novel. I've been editing and expanding what I had already written in Norwich, which can be tricky in a lot of ways, but is also really helpful because it means I'm never confronted with a blank page when I start each day. Now, however, I enter relatively new territory, so more than ever, I need to be in my best frame of mind—which brings me right back to getting rest.
I've not been keeping decent hours. Hell, I'm writing this at 1:40am. Most days, I usually take all morning to warm up, before hitting my 1,500-words-a-day goal in the afternoon. And, again, that might be fine when I have a draft that I'm working off of, but for a blank page, that approach definitely won't fly.
I tried heading to bed at nine earlier this week and ended up with a night of fitful sleep—a clear sign, if any, that I've been letting my unhealthy habits slide for way too long. I'm going to try again later tonight though, this time at ten pm instead and also armed with an eye mask. You'll find out how this goes in the next edition.
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One-line "reviews"
I put it in quotes because calling these reviews of movies or shows that I've seen recently would be like calling me an athlete 'cause I jogged five metres to catch the bus.
Leave the World Behind – Todd Phillips should ask Sam Esmail how to do an homage to another director, instead of doing the karaoke cover equivalent of another director's greatest hits.
True Detective: Night Country – If Nic Pizzolatto wrote this season, I guarantee you that Liz would've been a dude, Pete would've been a woman, and they would've slept together in the first episode.
(I enjoyed both of these, in case you can't tell.) (This isn't going to be a regular feature necessarily. I shared these two because I was quite proud of them, even though maybe only three of you would appreciate them.)
Morning sayangs
Sure he wakes me up at ungodly hours, but this cutie patootie always deserves head scratches.
And we're done
No links and things yet again (it's nearly three in the morning and I wanna get to sleep, folks), so once more, support my work...
And I'll see you in April.