Busy, Busy, Busy

First, book news! Martian Lit has announced Watching People Burn, my fictional account of the Bath school disaster. It has also announced my novel, Nira / Sussa, which took over a decade to write. Both couldn't mean more to me. Here are their covers:

Second, Martian Lit published the second chapter of my The Many Lives of Yelena Moulin today, accompanied by art by Doug Smock (see image at right). It's punchy sci-fi, where every chapter has a twist or a mind-bending idea of some sort.

Finally, my second article on Frank Miller's Holy Terror is up on Sequart. It focuses on the introductory sequence as a key to understanding the text.

Thanks for reading! And please, if you like anything, consider sharing them through social networking sites. Many thanks!

Julian Darius Defends Frank Miller

Today on Sequart, I have a piece going up in which I defend -- and try to explain -- Frank Miller.

This isn't something I've chosen to do lightly. My politics and Miller's seem to be rather diametrically opposed. Fervently so, at this trying time in American history. But having said that, I continue to find Miller's work -- including Holy Terror -- tremendously vital. And I think that it's being judged in ways that ignore his own stated intentions, not to mention a good century of rules about what constitutes appropriate artistic criticism.

I struggled very much with the piece, and I ended up cutting thousands upon thousands of words, in which I found myself going off about politics, because that wasn't my intent nor my thesis. It's hard, because I'm so conflicted: I admire Miller's boldness and artwork, yet I'm disgusted by his politics. But surely, there must be a place in criticism for such conflicted responses. And surely, there must be some place for Bold... however offensive and repugnant.

In Martian Lit news, today marks the first non-Julian Darius post, the excellent poem "En France" by David W. Pritchard, with art by Mingagraphy.

Martian Lit Launches Weekly Content

Martian Lit, a new company that publishes offbeat fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, has gone live with weekly content.

The internet's got a lot of literary magazines, and it's easy to get lost in the shuffle. Martian Lit is dedicated to publishing quality work that's different. It has a great team behind it, great web design, a bizarre "About Us" page and backstory, and original art to accompany every piece that's not non-fiction.

This last point makes a huge difference in terms of making literary content visually pleasing and accessible. Online, we're used to reading quickly, and the kind of focus that literature requires can be hard to achieve, especially with email and games and everything else just a click away. Artwork is one of the few remaining ways of providing online readers with a beautiful, immersive experience. And we couldn't have better artists working for us.

The website will be running content weekly. My own serialized novel, The Many Lives of Yelena Moulin, will run biweekly. Its first chapter is up right now, with art by the immensely talented and professional Doug Smock (art at right).

We're also going to be publishing books. In fact, we have already announced our first book, my own Watching People Burn.

Let me close by saying that Martian Lit is very dear to my heart. It's something I've been working on for half a year -- and conceptualizing before that for (no kidding) a year and a half. Of course, Sequart's incredibly dear to me too, and the bulk of my time goes to Sequart. But I (and many involved with Sequart) also have a creative side that doesn't fit with Sequart's mission statement. Martian Lit's there to provide that, and I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that if we run Martian Lit with the same concern for quality that we've brought to Sequart, we just might buck the trends and create something that's both literary and successful. Thanks in advance for being a part of that dream, even if it's just reading or forwarding a link now and then. It means the world to me.

Sequart's Entire Line of Books Get New Editions

I've been working on this for the past three months pretty intently, and today we can announce it: all eight of Sequart's books are now available in new, cheaper editions, just in time for the holiday season.

Every cover has been revised, some substantially. The back covers and spines are totally different. The interiors are in a different, more readable font, and some books have additional images.

Oh, and they're all $7 or $8 cheaper than in the past.

This also marks the first time Keeping the World Strange: A Planetary Guide has been available, outside of comic book stores.


And the new Grant Morrison: The Early Years is the book's third edition, with a new foreword by popular comics writer Jason Aaron and an expanded appendix on Morrison's early, early years, including work for DC's U.K. annuals.

For more information and links to all the books on Amazon and elsewhere, check out the news story, posted today.

The Fever of Urbicande Begins!

Today on Sequart marks the beginning of my detailed look at The Fever of Urbicande, the second book in The Obscure Cities.

It's an indulgence for me: a lengthy examination of a comic in French that almost no one's read in English. But it's a fantastic, brilliant comic that's had a very strong influence on me, and it deserves wider acknowledgement. It's my honor to bring it to wider attention.

I sincerely hope you'll read it and share it.

On The Big Lie, by Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine

Over on Sequart, I have a special Sunday piece reviewing The Big Lie #1, the controversial "Truther" comic book by Rick Veitch and Gary Erskine.

It's a positive review, one that doesn't buy into the conspiracy theories but nonetheless praises Veitch and the comic's ability to tell a story while also being polemic.

The reason this wasn't published closer to the issue's release is that I was struggling with what I wanted to say. I knew I wanted to say these things, but I had to figure out how to balance the political content, because I didn't want this to be a "was there a 9/11 conspiracy or not?" argument. And what I admired most about the comic was actually its story -- you couldn't ask for a political agenda that was better wrapped around an actually really interesting story. Reading it didn't feel like pulling teeth, as a lot of political comics do. Instead, it flowed naturally, and I found myself agreeing or disagreeing with the agenda and how it was worded, but absolutely conveyed forward by the story. More so than in the overwhelming number of super-hero titles, in fact. That's saying something great, but it took me a while to articulate it, with everything else going on.

That's not to say that I don't get into politics in the review. I do. I just don't get into the nitty-gritty of 9/11 conspiracy, which I have no desire to do, having already done my own research and been satisfied that, once one looks at both sides, the simplest explanation is pretty close to the official one.

The Fever of Urbicande

Now that Monday's post is up, I can now reveal that, starting next week, I'll be returning to the subject of The Obscure Cities.

For those who are unaware, The Obscure Cities is a French comics series. I've previously introduced the series and offered a four-part look at the first volume, The Walls of Samaris. Now, it's time to look at the series's second volume, The Fever of Urbicande.

Fair warning: it's an enthralling but complicated book, and I'm not going to rush my analysis. If you thought I examined The Walls of Samaris at length, my look at The Fever of Urbicande is going to be even longer because the book has far more to talk about. These are French comics, after all, and the best French comics can be very dense. When an artist spends a year preparing a 44-page book, it ought to be dense -- not in the negative sense of the word, but instead suggesting detail and a concision of implications. That's too often not the case with French comics, but it certainly is the case here. Also, I've loved these comics for a decade now, and I've done an awful lot of thinking about them, so there's a lot to share.

In fact, I just completed another post on it yesterday, and I've already got five posts and over 17,000 words done about the book. Combine this with the 3000-word introduction and 21,000 words on The Walls of Samaris, and I'll clearly be close to the length of a short book by the time I'm through with The Fever of Urbicande. And that's just the second book in a series that runs, depending on how one counts, between nine and 20+ books. Fortunately, I don't have nearly as much to say about most of them, but the task of finishing the entire series remains a daunting one.

It's not one I set out to do, really. When I wrote the introduction, I had it in the back of my mind that, yes, I'd like to continue and at least look at a book or two. But I didn't want to paint myself into a corner, because I knew I might not get around to actually doing the writing. Most writers have dozens of ideas percolating for a decade or more, and what determines what actually gets written is an unpredictable combination of whimsy and outside demand. I've got lots of great ideas I simply haven't been inspired to write, or that I haven't had the time and mental energy to devote the focus required to bring them to life.

Writing about The Walls of Samaris, I comforted myself in thinking that I could stop after that volume, although I'd like to at least continue into The Fever of Urbicande, since I like it so much. Now, halfway through doing so, I'd certainly like to get through three short stories the stem from Fever, and getting to the second means requires also addressing the series's next volume, The Archiviste, because its protagonist is also featured in that short story. As a result, I'm of two minds: my ambition makes me want to cover the entire series, but the practical part of my brain doesn't want me to commit to doing so and then either waffle or become crushed by the size of the undertaking, which could make me feel as if I'm chipping at something too massive to ever complete.

Also, I don't want to be pegged as "that Obscure Cities guy." I don't want to focus on this exclusively, and I know that building in breaks is important for me to maintain my momentum.

So here's my solution: I have a roadmap through the one-year anniversary of my introduction, on 11 July of this year. That should carry me through the next two volumes and two short stories, and it's a good stopping point, because it's about where I'd separate "the early Obscure Cities" from the series' next phase. During this year, I'll make sure that only around half my Monday articles for Sequart concern The Obscure Cities, and I'll build in longer, month-long breaks between volumes. I'll also feel free to write occasional pieces on other days, should they be timely in their concerns. I'll finish out the year and see what I want to do then.

I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all of this, and as of this Monday, my Obscure Cities articles have been precisely a third of all my Monday posts (although they're only a quarter of my total posts during the same period, counting only articles and reviews, not Sequart News pieces I've written). I'm five weeks into the next block of posts, and that's the point at which I'll be back up to 50% of my Monday offerings. I'll be over that by the time I'm done with Fever, at which point I'll take a break, and I'll try to keep that percentage at around 50% while still covering what I want to get done on the series during this year. If I go over 50%, I'll correct that with another break after the year's up.

Will this be a Sequart book at some point? I've been encouraged to make it so, but I don't know. For a long time, I thought I'd write this as a book, but I'm enjoying serializing it online, which lets me get feedback and breaks the material into far less daunting chunks. And I currently think, given the subject, that this makes the most sense: as cool as a book would be, I don't see it having much commercial potential, because we are talking about largely untranslated French comics being written about in English. Plus, I like giving people this material for free, which means more people will read it.

None of what I'm writing here could possibly interest anyone, except for those interested in the minutia of the writing process. But it's the kind of thing I'm thinking about, as I think about The Obscure Cities and my plans for the coming months.

Why Comics Have Failed to Achieve Real Respect

My Monday article is up on Sequart: "Why Comics Have Failed to Achieve Real Respect." It looks at the difference between literary respectability and pop culture cred, tracking this difference through comics history from the 1980s movement to legitimize comics to today.

If you get a minute, it's well worth checking out.

Writing in Advance

Writers have all sorts of different methods, and my attitude has always been that, while you can take advice from here or there, you're your own person, and you've got to work in a way that works for you. As long as you're being honest about what's good and what isn't, you should test out different methods and not follow a prescription. Some writers schedule hours out of their day, while others ruminate for days or weeks or years, then write manically.

This is a point I insisted upon, when I taught creative writing. It's the work that counts, ultimately, and I don't care how you produced it, outside of my writerly curiosity. That's something I've imported into my job as a publisher: I don't tend to be terribly strict about deadlines, because I'd rather have a great book than one that was rushed, against the writer's method, to meet an arbitrary date. The downside of that approach is that many writers need deadlines, so it's a delicate balancing act.

Anyway, I'm certainly on the manic side of that spectrum.

Two days ago, I finished my Monday Sequart post for 14 November. I tend to run several weeks in advance, because I like the certainty of knowing I have a queue, and this gives me the freedom to live the lifestyle of a quasi-manic-depressive writer, and I know I'm particularly susceptible to the pattern of throwing myself passionately into something for 36 hours straight and then disappearing for three days.

That doesn't mean that I can't slot other, timely material into this queue. If I've got a crazy or a brilliant idea I want to get out there, especially if it's on a timely subject, it makes sense to let that go to the head of the line. But if nothing materializes, if I'm just not inspired by recent comics or current events, or if I'm in some weird writer's funk or busy flying off to Bali to get married to someone I barely know, I know got that cushion of work already there.

And it's hardly filler. It's work I care passionately about. It's just not particularly timely.

And as a publisher, having queues is essential. With Sequart, we tend to run a few weeks in advance, although Cody, Kevin, and I all tend to run closer to a month. The weekends are far more open and subject to scrambling. Fortunately, Cody does a fantastic job as webmaster, working with writers and getting pieces up ahead of time.

That lets me breathe. Because believe me, there's no way to run a website with daily content without doing it this way. If I don't know that we're locked away, I get really nervous. It's one thing, relying on yourself. But when you need work by someone else, you don't want to be in the position of calling that person last-minute, only to find out that person had a fire or something -- or worse, to get assurances the work will be done, leaving you to stress about whether it will actually arrive, or arrive in a form that needs editing you cannot do at that particular moment (because you're asleep, for example).

And whether you're manic or not, we all get the blues. We all have lives, and lives are unpredictable.

Over at Martian Lit, I've got nine weeks of my own contributions already written. That's a little different, because the site hasn't launched yet. Launching a site properly, so you can ensure regular delivery of quality content, is no small thing. I wanted to launch the site a couple months back, but the material wasn't quite ready. Unfortunately, this leaves a few people, who have delivered material and done nothing wrong, having to wait. That's something I regret and take seriously, and all I can do is assure people that we are working and do know what we're doing, in deciding that it's best to delay.

Ah, the life of a writer. And the joys of not having to work last minute!

Great Onion Interview with Breaking Bad Creator Vince Gilligan

Breaking Bad's fourth season wrapped on Sunday, and it was titanic. So many episodes, especially beginning about three episodes before the finale, felt like a finale -- they were that jam-packed with drama that advanced the plot. It was a stunning season, certainly one of the best seasons in all of TV history, and it more than fulfilled the promise of season three's unbelievable final couple episodes, which left things very precarious for the characters. It also managed to tell a complete and satisfying story.

If you're not watching the show, you're sinning, obviously.

If you are, you may be interested in this: the Onion's A.V. Club has a brilliant interview with show creator Vince Gilligan, who offers great insight not only into the characters but into how to think about character-driven narrative in general. It's recommended not only for fans of the show but for all writers.