First week of July.
I have a habit of thinking back on my life twice a year – towards the end of the year, and in July, around my birthday. These are both arbitrary times to do this – I suppose ideally one should be thinking deeply about one’s life all the time – but it’s good to have mile markers where you can check if you’re headed in the right direction and if you need to make any adjustments.
This month, things are good on the personal front and the work front.
My dad’s health has been stable, so I don’t have to spend much energy there. It also means my life is less stressful. So I planned to get more work done, but as I mentioned last time, my hip injury put paid to that, and I was forced to sit back and just think.
I’ve been spending a good amount of time with my partner and my friends. Less so with some friends than I’d like, but I consider that a positive – in your 30s, if you’re mindful of people and miss them, it’s a good sign for your friendship. I’ll be rectifying this in the coming weeks.
Work-wise, I’ve lettered one book this month – ref. aforementioned injury – but it’s a good one. It’s going to be a surprise and delight for people when this one gets announced.
I have 150 more pages on my docket for July, but later today, I’m sitting with that number and looking at how much I can move to the next few months to leave myself more room to continue recovering and not create more issues like I had in the last couple of years.
Here’s where we come back to now and to rejigging my life to ensure I’m headed in the right direction. I told you last time that I wrote a surprisingly intimate post about writing (you’ll see that one posted here in the next few days). That was me thinking aloud on where I want to go with my writing.
When I cut down on work at the end of last year, I wanted to recover physically, but I also wanted to prioritise two things that mattered to me but which I hadn’t been able to care for in some years – my health and my writing.
The resurgence of my hip injury told me I still have a long way to go with my physical recovery. I need to make that part of my life important.
And it’s the same with writing. Despite working less, I keep prioritising work over my writing, and that’s not where I wanted to be by this point in the year, but, well, better late than never.
So starting today, I’ve redone my daily schedule to include at least two hours of writing per day and one hour of exercise.
Ideally, the writing will occupy 2-4 hours every day, depending on how much time I can spare around work and life, but I will be writing – or at least sitting in front of the laptop or a notebook and staring blankly – for at least two hours a day.
I’m currently working on my long-form series (“SEASIDE”) and two short stories. Once I wrap up one of these, I’ll move on to another short story or a comic I’ve been planning to write.
With the exercise, since my hip just got back to normal, I will start with a long walk and some upper-body workouts, but hopefully I’ll be back at my standard full-body workouts in a few weeks.
I do want to ensure I don’t waver from this and end up working too much once again. So I’m going to take a hard look at my calendar sometime this week, and take a call on some tentative projects that I’ve been discussing with clients – it’s tempting to fill my time with work (it’s fun and it pays well), but if I want my future to have more writing in it, I will have to put less lettering in it.
It’s one thing to say that something is important and another to treat it as such. But there’s also no point berating myself for forgetting or getting too frustrated. A good life is a series of lurches towards what you’d like it to look like, and your brain and your body are what you have to work with. I tend to do what’s easier or more convenient in the moment, so sometimes, I have to work a bit harder to get myself to do the right things in the right order.
As long I keep looking back every few months and course-correcting, I think I’m good.
Over the last week, I’ve been rereading Stephen King’s Needful Things, and, since I’ve been on a Stewart Lee kick recently, finally sitting down to read March of the Lemmings.
Needful Things is a delight – a delicious, broad character-driven black comedy, which is a rarity among Stephen King’s books. Back when I read a lot of King in my teenage, Needful Things came to me very late, so I’ve only read it once before (unlike my favourites, like Desperation, Night Shift and The Green Mile), and didn’t remember much other than the striking villain Leland Gaunt.
I’m thoroughly enjoying King’s taste for specific detail about every person that shows up on the page. Each detail feels lived-in, each person like they have a history and a story. On the other hand, it took a while to get used to his bland prose – the same thing that makes his books propulsive and popular makes them difficult to read if you’re used to poring over sentences for their delicacy and construction. King is just not that kind of writer, and isn’t trying to be, so I want to meet him on his wavelength. Once I’m done with this, though, it’ll take me a while to pick up my next book by him, and I’ll need a strikingly written book after this as a palette cleanser.
March of the Lemmings is a collection of columns Lee wrote for the Guardian right after Brexit. It’s political commentary, but coming from an attempt to be funny as much as incisive. My favourite columns are the ones where Lee goes on a flight of fancy rather than strictly adhering to his topic. It’s a trifle compared to his stand-up shows, but that should surprise no one. Great in small doses, so that’s how I’m consuming it.
My read of Needful Things was prompted by my watching the two recent It movies.
I read It as a teenager, right after The Stand (man, I had some reading stamina as a teenager), but hadn’t reread it since. I picked it up last year and got a few hundred pages into it (I think I reached the point where Beverly decides to go back to Derry), but that bland prose I talked about earlier got too much for me, particularly with the prospect of several more hundred pages of it ahead of me, and I stopped reading.
I had heard good things about IT Chapter 1 (not so much about Chapter 2), and my partner had liked both movies and didn’t mind a rewatch, so we made an evening of it – IT Chapter 1, dinner, then IT Chapter 2.
Neither of them are classics, and I’m not sure if the decision to split the story into the two time frames rather than having them interleaved with each other quite works, but I enjoyed both movies.
The script is workable, with lots of good moments, and the direction is active and trying to do things with the material rather than just going with the flow. There are a few too many jump scares, but I didn’t mind those.
Here’s where I was surprised, though. I liked the second one quite a bit more than the first one. The first one is tighter and more anchored by its characters’ various traumas, but it is also unsurprising to a fault. There’s nothing here you hadn’t expected, and it doesn’t seem interested in doing anything novel.
Chapter 2, on the other hand, while bloated and ramshackle, surprised me a few times. I expected that it would focus entirely on the adult versions of the characters, and I liked how it flashed back to the past and filled gaps you didn’t know existed. I had also been warned that the second movie was more “jokey” in that Whedon-y/MCU-y way that I dislike, but I found that most of those jokes were specifically grounded in character (particularly Bill Hader’s Richie and James Ransone’s Eddie) with only one that I’d pinpoint as extraneous. Finally, while the climactic sequence didn’t fully work for me, I adored how the film visualised Pennywise as a Lovecraftian creature that doesn’t fit in our dimension – it’s beautifully conceptualised and entirely visual, while leaving a whole lot to your imagination, which is the best kind of cosmic horror.
I also watched John Carpenter’s classic They Live, which was a bit slighter than I’d expected, but immense fun.
Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool rounded out the week. I loved his Possessor and was looking forward to this one. I hadn’t read anything about it, and I was delighted by the movie’s high strangeness, but after delivering its central conceit in a taut, exciting first half, it loses direction entirely and ends with a whimper.1 Still, an experience worth having, and I will look forward to Cronenberg’s next.
That’s about it for last week. This update was a few days later than usual because I was too busy having fun over the weekend, but it’s my blog, and I’ll do it as I like!
Have a good week ahead, folks!
- Spoilery bit: As I mentioned to a friend, at first the film is Ballard/senior Cronenberg, then it’s Kafka, then it’s Brazil, then it’s Funny Games, and that’s where it goes wrong, because a) it’s got nowhere to go next, and b) it’s gone too far from where it started to remain a single unified story. ↩︎