A cautionary tale

https://www.popehat.com/2018/02/25/kenneth-eng-is-on-the-other-side-of-viral-now/

Popehat brings us the sad story of a person who seems to be suffering from persistent mental illness, a disease that seems to be resisting treatment. It's a cautionary tale in today's discussion of (*handwave*) treatment for mental illness as a (bullshit) "solution" to our problems of gun violence.

Here we learn of a person who got help and support far greater than the average, whose behavior identified them as a possible threat, and who seems to be beyond our help. G-d forbid this guy picks up a mass murder weapon.

WoWftVoWE

Words of Wisdom from the Voice of Warren Ellis. I really like reading his Orbital Operations newsletter, though I find his work load and pace frightening. Once in a while he shares process and style tips. I wanted to capture and retain this one:

THE WILD STORM always starts as scribbled pages in a notebook. Technically, I've been working on this next block for months, filling a page or two with notes over a glass of wine at lunch. At the end of the TWS bible I describe each of the four volumes of the book in three lines. That's the guide - the points I have to hit for the entire Wildstorm revival project to work as a whole. Everything else is mutable. Like writing a novel - I often only want the spine in front of me, so I can wander around the rest as the mood takes me.

At some point, I open a plain .txt file and just start typing, filling in structural progressions. Which characters do I need to check in with? What needs to be explained? What do they know and what do they need to know? Eventually, I'll find a sequence I want to hear, and I'll start writing dialogue, with just a couple of lines for location and activity. (Where are these characters and what are they doing?) I'll just let them talk. I'll edit and rewrite it later. Just let them talk and see where it goes. Trying to hear their distinct voices. I was in it for several hours om Saturday night, introducing a new character, trying to learn them and who they are as they walked down a corridor in an IO black site in the ninety seconds before their cover is blown. With a parenthesis in the middle reading (fight scene). Action scenes work a different muscle, so I'll leave that for another time.

Fight scenes, for being so absurd, probably have a closer relationship to real life than the choppy, journalistic, graphic-design nature of comics dialogue. How many people? What's the nature of the environment? What's in the environment that can be used? When you're in a real fight, anything's a weapon, even a piece of furniture.

I love how this process combines several techniques - outlining, note-taking, character-building - and how it talks about the ways in which writing one kind of thing (dialog) differs from writing another (fight scene).