Brendan Peveril . net

You may have noticed that there’s no update for Gone yet this week, and I’ve got an explanation for that. The artist, you see, is busy and not the fastest. On top of that, knowing full well that there was a good chance it would take more than a week for him to get me the next page, I got excited when I saw that first page and put it up right away. Hell, I put it up before it was completely finished.

Anyway, I’ll just tell myself that I’m using this first seven page story as a way to get ahead. Hopefully the second story will be started (by the next artist, I’ve already got a pile of them written) by the time The Time Traveler is finished. There will be some changes to the Gone page itself soon too.

So, today I officially finished the first draft of chapter two of Hallowed. I’m elated! It’s mostly in hieroglyphs in several different notebooks, so I still have some work to do, but in a few days I should be sending it off to my crack team of readers to get some opinions. I can honestly say that I’ve never written anything that I was this excited about.

I’ll leak some details about it here a little later so you can all be excited too.

If you’d like to join my crack reading team, let me know. Also, if you think you might like to draw Hallowed, email me and we can discuss it. When I started writing it, quite some time ago, I had a particular artist in mind, but that didn’t work because, you know, an artist was involved.

Anyway, stay tuned. Everyone will want to read this.

This is my webcomic, there are many others like it, but this one’s mine. I wrote it, and my brother is drawing this first story. I plan to update roughly weekly. The page is still a bit unpolished, but I’ll fix that, or get it fixed, as the web-nymph is able.

It’s long gone. This was well over a year ago, and it will never happen again. My meth-lab exploded, you see, and the recovery was long and difficult.

I have a place where I can type things and imagine that many people will read it. Of course, I can also look at the site stats and see that… nobody reads it. It’s like I’m writing this in a diary hidden under my pillow, really. Following are bits of news related mostly to this site.

Here’s something cool. Neil Gaiman’s story How To Talk To Girls At Parties is available both as text and audio here. Gold if you’re too cheap/poor to buy the book it’s in right now, like me.

Work rolls on with A Deeper Shade of Gone and Hallowed. Shamus is working away at that first page, but apparently he’s having a few problems. I’ll post it as I get it. Hallowed is still in script form, but I’m getting closer and closer to the point that I’m ready to start aggressively seeking and artist so I can get a treatment out. Any artists who stumble across this should get in touch with me if they’re interested in taking a look. There will be much blasphemy.

I’m looking at a new short story too. It’s a solid idea, it straddles genres, it’s staying in my head; all of the good things. Now, one way to learn to write good stories is to read good stories, but there’s a problem with that for a beginning writer. To sell a story, Hell, just to get someone to read a story, even if they get it for free, you need to hook them with a killer beginning. I can read good stories by other writers until my eyes bleed, but most of them will be by writers already established as good. Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman, Theodore Sturgeon, they just don’t need as strong a hook as I do. I’ll read the whole story no matter how weak the beginning is, because I know it’s good. If I find a story by an unknown, though, I’ll not bother to finish it if the beginning is weak, because chances are that the whole thing is.

I’ve got a killer story, with a compelling narrative, a delicious twist, and a startling twist on the twist (which I hesitate to call a meta-twist, it’s more like a re-twist), but no fucking hook.

Anyway, I’m dangerously close to turning this into a lecture on literary theory, and nobody enjoys that. I’m out.

I took some pictures at work.

Alan Moore, esteemed creator of comics that get turned into movies no matter what his opinion on the subject it, has written a long and vastly entertaining history of pornography. I totally stole this link from The Warren Ellis.

It’s really fascinating, and, along with writing the reviews below, it has almost completely dissolved the lead I had on the arbitrary deadlines I set myself for Hallowed. It must be nice to have that much time on your hands.

Sorry, I couldn’t let this go by without a masturbation joke. I’m not that strong.

Heavy Metal Hearts + Flowers
A Scary Go Round Story by John Allison

I’ve been a fan of John Allison’s work for a long time, since Bobbins, the sort of first incarnation of Scary Go Round. While his art didn’t really change between the original strips (1998) and this book (2004) (there are some differences; it’s much more dynamic than it used to be), Mr. Allison’s storytelling style developed drastically. While the earlier comics stood almost completely on his quirky artwork and endearing characters this book delivers an great, fast paced, stand alone story.

The only thing I can really criticize? I think it needs more Shelley. Of course, I think everything needs more Shelley.

By Hope Larson

I’ll admit that I read these a while ago, and I still don’t know what to say to convince everyone that they should read it. I was original introduced to Ms. Larson’s work through She’s From Away, a series that hit very close to home for me, about being in a new place and figuring out what being a grownup is all about. She does things with sequential art that you don’t see very often; every page is like a poem. Gray Horses (and Salamander Dream) carry these same themes to a longer format with Ms. Larson’s incredible sense of graphic and narrative grace.

These books blew me away, and changed the way I think about comics. You should own them too.

In the interest of plugging things that deserve plugging, Ms. Larson has a new book out as of a couple of months ago, but I’ve only seen a few pages, so I can only assume that it’s good.

Also, someone out there has a signed copy of Gray Horses with my name on it (literally). I’m checking my mailbox every day wondering when it’s going to show up. You know who you are.