What my daily four to five hours of writing is like:
Write on subway for hour while traveling to work. Write for hour during lunch break. Write for hour on subway ride back home … if I can find a spot to sit. Evening trains are considerably more full than my morning train. Get home. Fuel up. And erase the entire last three hours of writing. Rewrite what was a couple hundred to a few thousand words to a third of its previous existence.
I think I spend more time writing things I eventually erase than I do writing what I end up keeping. It’s a lot like drawing a comic page, though: even an initial rough penciled page usually involves pages worth of drawings and sketches and thumbnails just laying it out. My writing process seems to work the same way: scribble furiously in the margins for hours in order to get that half to full hour’s worth of credible content.
My temp position at HC is up at the end of the month, so I’m taking a week and a half off to work on “Jane’s S.O.S” and “Jeannie Carnini”. As much as I enjoy this job, I’m happy to be getting the break to work more solidly on my personal projects again. It’s only been a month, and I’m experiencing the pangs of loss from not being able to work on my comics full-time. Snatches here and there aren’t enough. I think temp work agrees with me!
Last week, I was terribly sick, and I’m only just now starting to recover. Congestion, throat, and lung issues, and feeling like a leech was stuck to the back of my spinal cord, draining every ounce of mental energy from my brain. Spent my few semi-lucid hours watching Harry Potter and Indiana Jones. The latest Harry Potter, “The Half Blood Prince”, was so beautifully directed and composed I ended up watching it twice. Without a question, the best Harry Potter movie so far. It even beat out “Prisoner of Azkaban” which was my previous favorite, and that, honestly, was the only movie I liked better than the book. Though I can’t say that movie six was better than book six. The book “The Half Blood Prince” was so exponentially better than any other that it couldn’t even compare.
The music in “The Half Blood Prince”, however, was what made it truly stand out for me. The composer, Nicholas Hooper, moved away from some of the tired tropes of the earlier movies, and composed scores that managed to capture the essence of the previous Harry Potter music themes, yet played with an originality, diversity, and finesse that every musical scene sparkled with emotion and depth. I ended up downloading the soundtrack, and the entire movie unfolds through the score alone. I’m reminded of “Peter & the Wolf” in that every character has a unique sound or instrument perfectly suited to their temperament and theme. And while the score is generally very simple, it’s rarely repetitive and musically directed with the kind of emotional skill you find in modern music, not classical. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a classical soundtrack, and having once wanted to be a composer myself (Didn’t realize I was an avid music student all through middle and high school, did you? Why do you think I got such a late start with my art?) it’s refreshing to hear emotive, compelling music that isn’t over-composed or cliche.
Anybody who’s a fan of a broad range of music that explores the depth of human emotion and thematic mood really should check this composer out. Very few are so skilled in their craft.
On that note, back to work for me. It’s only ten, so I still got a few hours of writing time left. Less deleting, more saving. :)
