My immune system’s down. I’ve been smoking for a while now. Took it up again when M was away in Prague for a couple of weeks. I’ve been away for a while now. My priorities once again completely shifted. This blog wasn’t going where I wanted. I didn’t have time for it. It was taking time from what I needed to do. I was only making myself more misunderstood. Failing to get through to anyone.
Well, now I’m ill and I can’t convince myself I’m doing anything more worthwhile. I cancelled my tai chi class today - my third, one of many New Year’s attempts to settle my mind - because I was so run down. I’ve been ill for some time now and haven’t stopped. I’ve been digging drainage ditches and was fencing today - even picking up the sledgehammer set my heart racing but I carried on throughout the day.
Things have gone tits up. Everything has come to a head.
I’ll go into that perhaps some other time.
What prompted me to write was my groing feeling that what is in my head can only be communicated by the more compressed form of the graphic novel.
I was looking into that today.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to try to work with my temperament not always against it. That has led me into problems, but it was also a refocusing, back on short stories, on poems too - hence a review of a Bloodaxe Poetry Handbook I got for Christmas which is here as a draft - and on graphic novels, on forms in short which I can read, not those novels, such as Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa which I bought to read as part of my research into form, since it forms part of Percy Lubbock’s classic study into point of view, The Craft of Fiction. I have since this time got myself a few graphic novels, in French, Czech and English, and have intermittently been thinking of my new work, which has been going under the working title Chutzpah, as once again being suited to being told in part as a graphic novel.
In any case, I found today this article on How to Survive Writing a Graphic Novel and enjoyed it. Even the title, which speaks of the trials of writing, is enough to shoot down even my most hypomanic sense of the possibility of taking on such a thing myself, a sense which is, I will admit, occasionally encouraged by the ingenuous styles of writers such as Jeffrey Brown, but it does once again put the seed in my head (always a dangerous thing, I admit), of what a coup it would only be to find an author who would be interested in helping me tell my story, in collaborating, and what I could achieve could I only discover what it takes to reach out for such a partnership.
The idea no doubt will ebb away, and certainly I will not pursue it here since the discipline for this has ebbed away itself, but it was pleasant to pursue it in my mind today.
Watch this space.