THEY CAPTURED WHAT SEEMED UNKNOWING AND CANDID, BUT THEY SUSPECTED IT WAS FALSE

Yesterday was productive. I wrote the entirety of Lying Down #5. I kept telling myself I was going to stop and pick it up the next day, but the dominoes kept landing one in front of the other.

I started the script using a grid structure that allowed for a particular sequence to be embedded in another sequence, another something I thought I would stop at some point, but it kept going and before I knew it this technique ran through the entire script. At times, I wrote both elements together, and then in the middle, I wrote the sidebar on its own before backtracking and filling in the main story all the way to the end. This left about half of the experiment to polish off as the last work to do.

This here is a scan of the notes I did to plan out those pages, sequenced here as their matching double-page spreads, pages 16-23.

I don't know if Mike Holmes is going to love me or hate me with this.

Writing Lying Down has been a challenge at times. I had a lot of days where I felt I was in over my head, tackling something I was not capable of, followed by bouts of self-confidence and elation. Yesterday ended in elation.

I've been experimenting with the structure of this one a lot, writing each issue as individual units, like shuffled pieces of the larger whole. Then, within each of those units, more pieces, more shuffling. It continues, in some sense, structural techniques I began in 12 Reasons Why I Love Her and that have been cropping up in my work ever since, including in "Reverberation," the story for Popgun, vol. 2. Not being so linear allows me to control how information is released to the audience and thus manipulate perceptions. What you know when and how you know it can make a huge difference. Thematically, this makes sense in Lying Down, which is about deception and how one presents oneself to others. It's also about con men.

Today, we start the last issue.

Current Soundtrack: Spearmint, A Different Lifetime

Current Mood: canceling noise

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All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich