Author: JennyDetroit (Page 4 of 43)

What Does One Do with One’s Comics?

May 6, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I used to buy a lot of comic books. So many, in fact, that I often didn’t get around to reading them each month, and then more books would come the next month, and I would fall further behind. But I continued to buy them, and store them in those plastic bags with cardboard backing to keep them straight, and I swore I’d read them some day.

Then, when that some day came, I didn’t read them. I decided to sell them back to a store and make some money and free up copious amounts of bookshelf space.

But I still really love comics. I’d love to buy them again. I just don’t know what to do with them once I’ve read them? Keep them? Sell them back? Give them away?

Comics (the floppy magazine comics, not the trade paperbacks) are in this weird space between disposable and keepable (yeah, I know that’s not a word).

This is all to say that I took my daughter to Free Comic Book Day 2024 and we brought home a haul of comics, and now I’m itching to start subscribing to a few books, but what do I do with them once I start buying them? I don’t want to have boxes and boxes of comics again. Do I read and purge right away? But then what if I want to reread the comics? I might (I tell myself). And comics aren’t cheap. So I’m spending four or five bucks per month (or more) on something I’m just gonna get rid of?

This is why I’ve started reading comics on the Hoopla app from the library. One, they are free. Two, I don’t have to worry about them taking up space.

But still, as a person who loves physical media, there’s something wonderful about holding a floppy comic book in my hands. Going to Free Comic Book Day reminded me of that feeling.

Maybe I start small. Start with one or two subscriptions. See how it goes. And if the issues start piling up and space gets limited, then off-load them. Sell them or put them in my classroom or something.

Now which series to start with… The new TMNT looks pretty good…

(Free Comic Book Day did it’s job, I guess. It got a new customer.)

Creative Writing: Week ???

May 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

“Take art seriously without going about it in a serious way.”

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act, p. 354

I’ve lost track of which week it is in the term. End of April and all of May are such a whirlwind when teaching high school. I feel like All the Things are happening. I can’t keep up.

Anyway, in one of my recent weeks of teaching Creative Writing, we spent a week dedicated to playing games and thinking about how making art is/can be/should be playful.

To help them along the way, we played a storytelling RPG where I and another student were the game masters, and the rest of the class were our players. I played with two different groups on two different days, and one of the groups was a real struggle to engage with.

There were some in the group who just could not take it seriously, and therefore they could not be playful.

I don’t mean they were being silly and I wanted them to be serious. My aim was quite the opposite, in fact. I wanted shenanigans. I wanted laughter and high jinks.

The first group I played with was generally able to do this. They committed to their ridiculous characters (the world we were playing in was a bit of a spoof of the Twilight series), and we all laughed a lot and had a fun time. They approached the game on its own terms and took it seriously, while at the same time, being playful.

But for the students in the second group who wouldn’t take the game seriously, there was neither laughter nor pathos nor anything in between. Only grim faces and boredom.

Now, maybe my GMing skills were subpar and that ruined things. Maybe I should have done a better job of crafting the world and the challenges. But I don’t think that was the case. The likelier culprit was that for some of the students in the group, the game was beneath them. They were embarrassed by the whole notion of playing an RPG. Of pretending to be a character. Of romping around in a fantasy world.

And that’s fine. Not everyone digs that kind of fun.

But I think their overall attitude to the game illustrates Rubin’s point quoted above: Games, like art, should be taken seriously without going about it in a serious way. The first group, who DID meet the game on its own terms, ended up having a blast. They weren’t playing in an overly-serious, solemn way. They were light. They were silly. But they accepted the game on its own terms and committed to what the game was trying to do.

The second group could not do that. They didn’t see the value in the game, nor could they approach it with any sort of commitment. And thus, they couldn’t have fun.

Or maybe they thought they HAD to approach the game in a serious way, and therefore they were blocked from having fun. Because they thought they had to be serious, they disengaged entirely.

Either way, their experience illustrates Rubin’s point. We have to take what we’re doing seriously, whether it’s playing an RPG or writing a story or illustrating a comic or directing a film or whatever. We have to believe that the thing we’re making is worth making. That our commitment to the project is worth our time and effort. That we’re doing something worthwhile.

Because this is the paradox: If we don’t have that commitment, that seriousness about the enterprise, then we can’t be playful about the making of it either.

In order to do good work, we have to go about it without seriousness. We can’t make the work “important” because then we’ll freeze or play it too safe. So in order to be light and playful, we must believe in the seriousness of what we’re doing. But in order to not get bogged down, we can’t approach our work with a grim-faced sense that we’re taking our medicine or doing what we’ve been told. We have to be playful.

For my grim-faced, bored students playing the RPG, they were being told to play. And they couldn’t be bothered to. Playing an imaginative role-playing game was beneath them, I guess. So they slogged through it and never got to experience the lightness and playfulness of taking something seriously without going about it in a serious way.

Creative Writing: Week Two

April 9, 2024 / / 2 Comments

I told them that input could be whatever they wanted, so I have to refrain from being judgy about their choices, but after looking over their input logs from the first week, I think it might be time to talk about high-quality input versus low-quality input.

It’s a tricky subject because it reminds me too much of the snobbish position that certain kinds of literature are better than others, that comic books and video games are worthless, that pulp literature and Hollywood movies are for the unwashed masses, etc. etc. All that elitist crap.

I’m a “more/and” kind of person. A “yes” person. I like liking things, to quote Abed. And for too long, science fiction and fantasy were looked down on as “lesser-than” by the literary establishment, and I don’t want to contribute to that kind of judgment, a judgment more often born out of snobbery and cliquishness than actual merit and quality.

But. But, but, but…

There are certainly artistic avenues and byways my students could be exploring that they aren’t, and if they did explore those byways, they might find them rewarding and much more satisfying than what they are reading/watching/listening to right now.

I’m tempted, therefore, to maybe give them more required reading/viewing/listening/etc. Not a lot, but a few assignments each week that they have to engage with. “Read X by Wednesday and we’ll talk about it in class.” That kind of thing.

Yeah, I’m backtracking a little from what I said at the beginning of the term, but I think/hope it will help them see that it’s not about which art is “good” and which is “bad” so much as it’s a question of whether the art I’m inputting is expanding my life as a writer or limiting it. If it’s limiting/narrowing/same-old-same-old, then what’s the point? A kind of familiar numbness? The comfort of hearing my old notions parroted back to me? Inertia?

Or is it that they don’t know what else is out there? If I’m going to assign better input experiences for them, then I need to meet them where they are. Maybe something like the book recommendations John Warner does? They give me a list of their last five input experiences and I put together a list of five more to explore that are of a potentially better quality. It’s worth a shot.

We’ll be watching Richard Linklater’s School of Rock in Week Three, partially because I want to introduce the concept of going back and exploring the influences of those who influence you.

I feel like I’m only in Week Two and the year is almost over. These quarter-long classes we do at my school just don’t feel like enough time, especially this fourth quarter with senioritis hitting hard and Easter and all the random days off and schedule changes. There’s SO MUCH we could be doing in this Creative Writing class. If I am going to teach it next year, I’ll need to scale back my ambitions for the class considerably. At the moment, there’s too much I want to do and no time in which to do it.

I need to repeat my mantra from the beginning of the year: “Slow learning.”

We don’t have to do it all. We can leave a few chips on the table. We can do less. We can go deeper on the things that matter for us right now, not some predetermined schedule.

I need to remember that. I’m building a space for them to write creatively and develop ideas and skills. It takes time to build that space, and maybe we only start to build it together, and it’s up to each student to finish building it on her own (or with each other, after the last bell has rung on the school year).

Whenever I want to do too much, I end up regretting it.

For now, we’re looking at input. Better quality. Exploring influences. Finding the good stuff that will expand your imagination. Leaving the stuff that limits you.

I’ll go down this road with the students until I feel like we’ve gotten what we need. Then we’ll move on. Maybe that’s by the end of Week Three, maybe it’s by the end of Week Four. Maybe we stay on this for the rest of the school year — IF it’s yielding fruit and helping us all grow.

Otherwise, we can keep going down the road: going slow, but going beyond the surface of things.

The “Morning Routine” is cliche at this point, but it still works

April 3, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I hesitate to write about morning routines because I feel like at this point, all the gurus have spoken (often annoyingly), it’s gotten cliche to spout off about how important one’s morning routine is, and we’ve heard the advice ad nauseam so what more is there to say?

And yet, I have been thinking once again about why I’ve been floundering since mid-December, and the answer is crystal clear: It’s my faltering morning routine.

From early August until the end of November, my morning routine had been relatively steady (I even managed a modified version of it while visiting family over the Thanksgiving holiday), and even though my writing output wasn’t huge in that span, I was writing consistently and enjoyably. Life was in balance.

Then December hit, Christmas prepping and end-of-semester-grading took over my life, and the morning routine was decimated. I tried to get back on track in January, but to no avail. I couldn’t get to bed on time, and in the morning, sleep felt more important than writing, so I would snooze until it was time to get my kids ready for school.

And now, here I am in April, and I’m grumbling about how out of sync I feel, how paltry my creative output has been, and how, frankly, depressed I’m getting.

It’s the lack of a morning routine!

I’ve known it the whole time, but for some reason I had convinced myself that perhaps my life was too unpredictable to commit to a regular morning routine and I’d be better off sneaking my writing in whenever I could, doing my art whenever the small snatches of time presented themselves. Planning didn’t seem to be working, so I would be more spontaneous.

But spontaneous is just another word for not getting shit done. Without a rhythm, without a routine, I never was able to find those snatches of time. My output nosedived.

Here’s the thing: it wasn’t that planning didn’t work. It was that I had given up on committing to the plan. I wanted my sleep (I still do, of course). And I figured it was too hard to get to bed at 10:00 p.m. My life wouldn’t let me. I had to face reality. Blah, blah, blah.

But what I was facing wasn’t reality. It was my own resignation in the face of a challenge. I had given up and soothed myself by saying it was pragmatism.

It wasn’t pragmatism. It was a reluctance to make changes. To turn off the screens and go to bed even if there were other things I wanted to do. The real reality is that we have to make choices, and from December to April, I had been making the choice to stay up later and not wake up early to do my morning routine. This was a choice I was making. I didn’t have to read one more online article after 9:00 p.m., but I did. I didn’t have to watch a second episode of that TV show, but I did. I didn’t have to put off my paper-grading all day so that I had a stack of them to grade at night, but I did.

These were choices. They still are choices I must face each and every day. But if I want to establish my morning routine again, then I must make different choices. Some things, yes, are always out of our control. I can’t control when my child has a nightmare and needs me to sit with him in his bedroom. I can’t control those nights when we get home late from visiting family and I have to stay up late to make the lunches and wash dishes.

But on typical nights, those normal nights when I have more control over my choices and time, I can start making the choice for the morning routine — the routine that gives my life balance and structure and health — over the choice for one more episode, one more article, one more paper to grade.

If it’s at all interesting to others, my morning routine consists of waking up at 6:00 a.m. and immediately doing stretches in bed to help with my back problems and muscle stiffness. Then I get up, drink a glass of water and take vitamins, and then begin walking around the house for exercise. While I walk, I usually pray. If it’s light enough outside, I might walk outside, but usually it’s too dark for that.

After my walk and prayer time, I do my Julia Cameron-style morning pages in my notebook, and then I do some creative writing, either fiction or nonfiction or poetry, whatever feels right and I’m most excited about.

By this time, I have to get ready for work, so I shower, pack the kids’ lunches, eat breakfast, and head to work with enough time to grade papers for thirty minutes before my first class period starts.

This is the ideal morning routine for me. In this three-hour span, I’m able to exercise, pray, reflect, write creatively, eat breakfast, and make progress on my teaching job, so that by 9:00 a.m., I have accomplished all the important things I need to accomplish for the day related to my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job.

After 9:00 a.m., if I’ve done my morning routine, whatever else gets accomplished throughout the day, I can feel good knowing I did the things I needed to do to make myself feel whole.

Maybe some of the gurus would say my routine is too ambitious, and that’s why I fell off the wagon.

Maybe.

But over the years, I’ve trained myself to become more and more of a morning person, and as I get older, I know that by the time the afternoon hits, I’m too tired both physically and mentally to be effective at my creative work. The best time for me is the morning. Before the day has had a chance to drain me. So I need to get several things done in the morning because my health, my spiritual life, my art, and my job are all things I need to keep in balance for an ordered, satisfying life.

And if that means I need to wake up at 5:30 a.m. and go to bed at 9:30 p.m., then maybe I need to start making the choices that will allow me to do that. But it all comes down to choices, to what I value, and where I focus my time.

Not everything is under my control. Life will have bumps and setbacks.

But the morning routine — for me, at least — really does work as a tool and structure for making my art. I’ve noticed a huge plummet of happiness and artistic fulfillment since I floundered in my morning routine. And in just the past two days, since I’ve been trying to reestablish that routine, I’ve noticed a huge upswing in my mood and ability to get creative work done.

Reminding myself that the morning routine really does work, and that it’s worth making different choices at night, may be cliche to write about, but I wouldn’t have had the energy or time to write this blog post without my morning routine.

I’ll take the cliche every time if it means I get to make my art again and keep myself whole.

Creative Writing: Week One

March 24, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I’m teaching a Creative Writing class for the first time in several years, and this week was our first week. I’ve got fourteen students — high school kids — and we started the week watching a movie, coloring, and eating candy (an idea I blatantly stole from Lynda Barry... sorry for being a thief, Professor Lynda!).

It was great, though. Super chill. Fun and relaxing. A big part of this class is about having fun and being playful, so watching a movie and coloring felt very playful and kid-like. These are teenagers, so sometimes they want to act grown-up and mature and be sophisticated adults, but there’s also this yearning for childhood and play and fun (something often sorely missing from their busy, over-stuffed lives), so by giving them permission to have fun, to be a kid again, to be silly and do something “just because,” I’ve (hopefully) given them permission to also be creative.

We talked a bit about what it means to be creative, and my biggest message on this is that creative means “to create,” so any time they are making something, they are being creative. Doesn’t have to be “original” or “special” or even “good.” Just has to be making something.

What that something is, I’m leaving up to them.

(One student asked if she could make jam every week, and I said, “Um… okay? But maybe write, like, a poem and stick it on the label?” It is a creative WRITING class after all; I feel like some writing should be in there somewhere…)

We also spent some time decorating our writing notebooks and choosing “guardian spirits” (via Austin Kleon), and I told them they had to do some “input” every day and that a big chunk of their grade will be based on how much input they take in week after week.

Input includes reading poetry, fiction, non-fiction, essays, comics, watching movies/TV, listening to music, looking at art, and having new experiences. When I told them they had permission to watch a bunch of movies this week and count it as their “homework” for my class, they all got very excited and couldn’t believe their luck. I also got very excited. I can’t wait for them to spend their week watching movies and getting ideas and having fun.

I’m very big on fun these days. We take things too seriously, acting as if writing stories or reading books or making art is some kind of excruciating task that tortures us. If reading a book is torture, you’re doing it wrong. And if writing something that came out of your imagination is laborious and unfun, then also: doing it wrong. This is art, kiddos. Not work.

So, we spent some time talking about how to have fun, and then I tried to do things all week that were fun. We went on walks. We listened to Japanese soul music from the 1970s. We made blackout poetry. We spent an entire class period inputting things into our brains: some students watched a movie, others read novels and poetry. I too read a book during that time, and listened to some synthwave music.

Their assignment this weekend is to keep doing their input, everyday. I’ll check their input logs on Monday.

I also asked them to spend thirty minutes to an hour doing some idea-generating. I gave them a list of twenty different activities to try, including playing the “What If?” game, making a list of titles, and listening to music to see what images and ideas flow from the songs.

In some ways, you could look at this first week and say, “She didn’t teach them anything! They just goofed around!”

And you’d be right. We did goof around. We did silly things. Playful things. Fun things. I gave them some advice about writing, but mostly, we just played. Because if they’re going to be writing creatively, they must first be playful. They must first be given permission to have fun. It’s a permission they were craving.

This first week was the giving-permission week: “Yes, you can play. Yes, you can laugh. Yes, you can make jam.” (Just maybe make a poem or a clever line to go with it.)

Going forward, we’ll learn some craft; we’ll learn techniques. I’ll give them prompts and exercises. But I’ll also continue to give them space and time and permission to have fun.

Note to Self: Stop Making This Mistake!

March 23, 2024 / / 1 Comment

I’m in the midst of correcting a mistake.

The mistake was beginning a novel, writing about nine chapters, and not outlining the major plot points, character details, and world-building information of each chapter as I finished it (which is a thing I do: I outline after I write, not before).

Instead, I wrote, wrote, wrote, my hair on fire, my fingers flashing, and I just kept chugging along, oblivious to my fatal error until I’d written 25,000 words and I was like, “Oh, fuck.”

I am a “discovery writer” or a writer who writes “into the dark,” so I do not outline beforehand. Instead — ideally — what I’m supposed to do is outline AFTER I’ve written each chapter, so I have a running summary of what’s happening as the story progresses and therefore I can keep track of all the details without having to use my critical voice to plan things beforehand.

Ideally.

Because what ends up happening — seemingly every time I start a new book — is I forget to do the outlining after I finish a chapter. And then about a third of the way through the book, I realize my mistake and have to spend days/weeks going back through and rereading my manuscript and taking notes. It really puts a halt to the creative energy and stalls the progress of the story. But it’s kinda necessary, otherwise I’ll forget key details and get all messed up with the continuity of the story.

So back into the manuscript I must go. Rereading and taking notes.

That’s where I’m at right now. I started writing Norse City Limits several months ago, and I was on a real roll — letting loose and getting the story down with energy and excitement — and then I realized I hadn’t been outlining after each chapter, and it was an emergency, screeching-of-the-breaks moment, quick-grab-the-notebook-and-start-outling, and now, it’s March, and I’m still not back to writing. I’m still outlining.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

I need to put a sticky note somewhere to remind me to STOP FORGETTING TO THE DO THE POST-WRITING OUTLINE!!111!12121!

This is not the first time such an error has happened; you’d think I would have learned my lesson, but apparently not. It’s kinda good that I’m so caught up in writing the story and finding out what happens next that I forget to do the “housekeeping” side of things afterward, but man, it is not good when I have to go back and do all this rereading and it just kills the momentum of the story.

I’d like to say, “Live and learn,” but apparently, I don’t learn? I just keep doing the same stupid mistake book after book.

So that’s where I’m at. Fixing my stupid mistake and trying to get back into the story so I can start writing it again.

Ugh.

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