For educational purposes, for this post I'd like to focus in and do a deep dive on one of the best episodes of Avatar and, in my opinion, a turning for the entire series:

 "The Blue Spirit"
written by  
Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko.

Read the story breakdown here. ​
​

​

If you found this useful and would like to try the exercise yourself, I've written out my methodology below as an assignment: 
​

Story Breakdown Assignment

Writing can mostly be broken down into three phases: reading, writing, and reflection. We read to be inspired, write to practice the craft, and reflect both consciously and subconsciously to deepen our ideas and understanding. 

This exercise will combine all three in an active analysis assignment. Watch an episode of television that you love and break it down using the following methodology:
. 

1. Outline - As you’re watching, reconstruct the outline of an episode scene by scene. Make sure to write it down!
2. Storylines - Once you have the outline written out, take a highlighter and highlight each distinct storyline contained within each scene of the episode with a different color. 
3. Premise - Now that you can visually see the different storylines, summarize each one in 1-2 sentences at the top of the document. 
4. Stakes - Below the premises, further break the story down into INTERNAL, EXTERNAL, and PHILOSOPHICAL stakes.  The external are all the action bits, the internal is the subtext motivating your characters, and the philosophical explores abstract values (I like to phrase the philosophical as a VS. statement or a question).
5. Notes - After you’ve done all of the above, write down your stream of consciousness notes / other things you noticed while working on the assignment. Things that were interesting to you for your future self! 

​

Hope you found this useful.  

​Happy writing everyone!

​Ray 

Happy May Mythopoeians!
​
The weather is warmer, the people are restless, and our world is slowly but surely reopening. That is incredibly worrying, given that our closest historical analogue, the Spanish Flu of 1918, saw three waves of infection, with the largest coming in the fall of 1918 after the initial social distancing implemented in March 1918 was eased just in time for the summer. Sound familiar? 

The truth is that as a whole, humans in 2020 are dealing with this latest plague tremendously well, at least from a historical context. It certainly doesn't feel that way, but as of today 253,381 people have died from COVID19 around the world. If this were 1918, the number would probably be much higher. Modern technology has allowed us to share information about the virus and its spread in unprecedented ways. That of course has its own slew of problems which we are also seeing played out through information warfare between China and the USA and the future of privacy looking rather cyberpunk. 

Which brings me to today's topic... the News of the Day. I don't know about you, but after two months of vigorously absorbing almost any and all news about the virus, I'm just fatigued. That's despite the number of infections going up and only a few indicators that things have gotten better since March. We are an impatient species, but the virus has no use for the social anxiety that's resulted in us being forced to stay inside. It moves and spreads and kills regardless. Consuming news is a choice... one that we make on a daily basis. The news is a form of story that reports the truth, but is not in and of itself the truth. 

Finding the truth requires a lot of thought. Asking where the news is coming from, the facts being reported, and cross checking with other sources to see if others are corroborating what's being said. Many of the loudest demagogues will purport this same process of critical thinking.... only to willfully or complicity spread their ignorance to others.

Chinese history is said to be one of unification and dissolution. We come together, we fall apart, same as it ever was. same as it ever will be. I was reading Ram V and Sumit Kumar's excellent These Savage Shores recently, and came across a similar sentiment expressed in its depiction of colonial India. Ancient lands, long shattered, forever one. 

The advent of the digital age has allowed us to see this same cycle of unification, dissolution, and unification in quicker and quicker cycles as information is shared, authority is decentralized, and truth is shattered into a thousand narrow shards. Pessimistically, it seems  people draw comfort these days in uniting under the ugliest common denominator. All of which we experience is through a human lens that, limited to just one lifetime, yearns to seek progress, change, blame, and fault, all under the auspices of  an egocentric worldview -- surely, we have sacrificed these past few months.  Surely there is a reason, a plot, a blame! 

Nope. Disease knows no borders, holds no grudges. It enters and kills and cannot be seen with mortal senses. Just because you, Ray, are tired of hearing about it doesn't mean it's not still happening. I write this to remind myself heading into this summer of tentative easing, while I wait and fear when the next domino will fall.

Ray

Happy April Everyone! 

It’s been a few weeks of up and down. Two weeks ago I was worried that Vince was mortally ill, but realized he would be fine when he started posting memes and browsing the web again. This past week has been extremely productive as we hone in on our “virtual sabbatical.” While we do this, the internet at large wonders what will happen next across a multitude of economic and social axioms. Truly extraordinary and terrifying times we live in! 

The need for change and action contrasts sharply with disagreements about what to do and how. On a micro scale this has played out in our little industry of comics. I guess, to be more specific, the direct market comic book sans superhero industry of America. 

Caveat emptor, I write these things as 30 minute stream of consciousness babbles so apologies in advance for the roughness around the edges… 

-------------

Right now, comics are facing an existential threat. The major distributor of comics to the direct market, Diamond Distribution, is dying. They’ve halted distribution and are unable to pay the comic publishers. Retailers have been frozen from buying any new product and the entire industry has coalesced around a facebook group called Plan C that feels a little bit like the Last Alliance. Artists and Publishers and Retailers alike all gathered together to try and plan for the end... 

But like all Last Alliances, this one has been rife with petty squabbles and disagreements. Many parties face pressing problems which all seem to stem back to distribution. 

The established model of Diamond is to run through a physical catalog and preorders to drive interest and estimate sales to the direct market (comic book stores). That works perfectly well for Marvel and DC, whose properties drive the industry and whose strategic importance is as a creative intellectual property farm rather than as a revenue generator by corporate. Their comic divisions are judged against each other in a bicameral system, and the entire comic industry suffered a major crash in the 90s from which it is still recovering from. All that is to say they have limited interest in growing the industry more than duking it out for the blasted wasteland that’s remained. 

Many in comics know that the system is broken. Some artists like ourselves have chosen a more direct to consumer pathway and built fanbases directly online. Nonetheless, this pandemic has hit us all hard. We were the canary in the coalmine in the USA with Emerald City Comic Con convention scene and now we’re facing an existential threat that admittedly covers the spectrum of retailers, including ours. 


Small publishers like ourselves have offered to help by offering steep discounts to our product. Because we are independent, we have our own distribution supply chains that we can leverage. And by supply chain I mean we mail the stuff ourselves or work with other small companies to do so. 

From a retailer standpoint, they need a fast and reliable way to buy wholesale products with built in curation. They don’t like buying from independents because they are unreliable when it comes to release (guilty) and find indie books in general hard to move. We’ve never had a problem moving our books at retailers, but for us, the margins were too low comparatively and our print volumes too small for us to seriously consider pushing out to retailers in any real way. 

A lot of people claim that the industry is going to be just fine when this is all over. It’s not like we’ll just let all of retail up and die, right? Well, I personally think that remains to be seen… there’s a lot of parts to this economic conundrum we find ourselves in right now and anyone who says they know for certain is for certain full of shit. Even if this next recession isn’t the existential threat that many of us fear, there is a sense that should the entire comic industry come together, we might be able to change things for the better. 

‘Might’ being the operative word. 

It’s hard getting people to agree and interests to align. Even in the face of a great terror from beyond…

That was kind of the plot Game of Thrones, right? It’s a funny thing, fantasy sans mythology. In some ways the plots we weave in these genres are the purest expression of wish fulfillment and many associate that desire to juvenile naivete. But then we  see the metaphorical play itself out over and over again in real life as we wrestle with the one life we are given, uniquely enlightened from the past yet with patterns so painfully similar, vibrantly disappointing rhythms of mistakes made and forgotten. In between the rhyme schemes we imagine and hope for a better tomorrow, of change, and the possibility of the endless to be determined. 

Gotta love that multiverse. 

Ray

​

Hey Folks! 

The news is grim all throughout the world. Every government has mobilized the full might of their resources to fight COVID19 which is already posing an existential threat to the comic industry. My own personal saga began with deciding to cancel Emerald City Comic Con which seems like ages (three weeks) ago. Now the full might of the comic industry has coalesced into a facebook group called "Planned C" to try and save the industry or at least reshape it in the wreckage that follows.

I know it's egocentric, but I can't help but feel that our little industry has been the canary in the coal mine. Things look like they're about to get a lot worse before they get better. Sorry for being grim, folks, but it's with a serene sense of surrealism that I write this as a recollection of the times. I feel like balancing between pretending or acting like things are normal when they so clearly very are not. 

Personally I've been thinking about humanity a lot and our inmutable natures. How we tend to face the same things and react in the same ways in rhythms familiar yet novel for the age. History seems like a strange comfort in times like these, but what else can we use to learn about the future if not the past? 

Anyway, it's taken days to get this out. Sign of the times! And of the very immutable nature of humans ;)

Okay then. 

That's the self diss that  better not miss diss 

cause it gone eat your, mistress.

[ // social distancing // \ ]

Ray  

​

It's been a hard slog the last couple of days when it comes to writing. I can't quite decide what I want to work on and find myself hopping between three projects, pecking away a little at each. I don't think that's a good strategy long term but I find myself stuck and in a downswing in terms of story and a bit paralyzed by imposter syndrome. Everything that I come up with seems so contrived and bad. 

I've definitely been here before. I think most people who are creative find themselves here sometimes if not often. I ... am telling myself unconvincingly to go through the work and to focus on one thing at a time. Ironically, this blog has been an anchor for the past couple of weeks, so I'm glad I got this, at least. 

What a consolation prize. I am currently hopping between writing and thinking and watching and reading and everything seems a jumbled mess or inconceivable height and why even bother trying to climb when some things and people are just clearly at another level. WHO CAN RELATE? That's a bad Logic reference. 

I work hard everydayayayayay....

Writing sometimes can be such an up and down thing. When I have a story or scene or character nailed it's some kind of high. An amazing thrill knowing that what you created works and you're the cool badass mofo behind it. You live for those moments. High brow it's finding that nugget of truth or whatever, but low brow it's just ego, honestly - I made this. I willed it into existence. 

Nothing quite like it. Those who know are those who crave. And then there's the opposite feeling.

The ego death. The hesitancy. The fear. Of nothingness. Of contrivance. Foolishness. For even attempting. Comparing. Dreaming. Doing? For who are you to think it through, the lives of those beyond your own. Is it arrogant to even try? 

I don't know. Probably. Certainly feels that way right now. But this too shall pass.

So sayeth the Toilet Paper Sages. 

Covid be thy crown. 


Ray 
​2020