Blog, Fiction, Columns and Art of Maurice Hopkins
Part of the idea I had for the webcomic involves a car. This is that car’s (very) rough sketch, complete with misplaced headlights:
Ifrit V8 Hell Raiser is native to the elemental plane of fire, and is the chosen car of the comic’s protagonists. Other car models may show up in the series, though the cars aren’t the focus. I just wanted to draw it because it was cool. Mea culpa.
More roughs as things progress.
So, this weekend was a pretty good one. It started with Friday Night Jambalaya and ended with a potential collaborative project.
A couple of friends of mine are following this little blog of mine fairly regularly and they noted in my projects list that I would like to work on a webcomic – I just never had the direction or the focus. One of them came forward and pushed pretty hard in that direction. So yesterday we sat down and just shot the shit for a couple of hours, and I think in the process we got something in the works for a web comic.
Keep posted here at the site – it’s likely I’ll be interviewing the characters for the series here to start getting an idea of who populates the story.
Disneyland is for suckers. I have my own Magic Kingdom.
It’s in my head. I go there frequently and I try to write down everything I remember from it. I even keep a dream journal for this purpose. For instance in a dream last night, I ran into Abed from Community in my childhood home’s kitchen, and he was dressed in costume and makeup like Tim Curry in Legend. that’s one for the books. But I digress.
I like being in my own head. It informs what I want to write about (though I’d sooner not write Community Fan Fiction). I meet new people there and fish for ideas. But what I almost always come back with are my own little kingdoms. I have a thing for places and histories. I’ve created a couple different settings and worlds in the back of my mind, and I almost always treasure these – more so than the players that move through them.
It should be no surprise that I read stories that present settings almost as their own characters. The Maxx was my first love in this regard. The Outback presented by Sam Kieth inspired me to create an Outback of my own, for which this blog is named. There was also Perdido Street Station’s New Crobuzon, set against the larger backdrop of Bas-Lag. There were the sprawls of Gibson, much like our own but strewn with more random lethality, urban decay, and high-tech low-life. Tolkien of course gave me Middle Earth – even though I didn’t grow up with it. As of late I’ve been introduced to King City as well by Brandon Graham and have fallen in love with it’s off-the wall ethos and integration of puns into its very structure.
I like to dive into those little details in my mind when I read about these places. And when I write I try to do likewise. Ossua is peppered with various races and peoples, it has a mythos all its own, and mysteries and secrets. Jah’bran, city of commerce has a personality, both supplicant and taskmaster, and is filled with teeming thousands expressing the dirty yet opulent city’s avarice and ostentation. I even have my own take on the underworld mapped out from the work I’ve done, taking from Greek mythology and the spiraling dens of madness we know as the modern office place.
Places seem to matter to me just as much as characters. Interesting characters moving through the familiar doesn’t seem to engage me as well. In my mind, for a proper escapist experience to flourish, you need not just your heroes, but a new place, new peoples, to move through.
It’s a lot of work to put in, but it’s satisfying work to be sure.
My largest creative problem I fear is my utter inability to focus on one damn thing. My attention span is narrow. I can blame it on whatever I like. Perhaps my upbringing in front of the boob tube has something to do with it. Maybe it’s my neurochemistry. Maybe it’s the fact that I live in a goddamned amazing world filled with neat, shiny stuff. Maybe the internet has too many rabbit holes (damn you, Wikipedia).
But at the end of the day, the result is the same: staying focused is really hard for me sometimes.
I often generate multiple creative imperatives simultaneously from the base of my lizard brain, and I have multiple ways to express them. I am trained not just in the ways of writing creatively (though as I’ve aged, I feel this has become my focal point for my creative energies), but I also have college-level training with visual arts, and musical experience as well. I feel tugs of each frequently – with my musical training being one aspect sorely missing given I live in a tightly packed apartment complex and haven’t played a brass instrument in years. Sometimes these pulls come in too fast to even shift gears. I’ve frequently felt the tug to do a webcomic but always feel pulled in too many directions to do it. With all the distractions, I’m not even sure I could keep that a tight schedule. It’s a miracle I remember to go to work some days.
I’m hoping that this blog can help me reign in some of the aspects of creativity into focused into certain directions, partly using the blog’s audience, so that I might draw down focused fire on any one project at a given time.
In the name of focus, I have several projects in mind that I’m listing here for posterity. Maybe if I throw darts at them long enough, I can find one to attack, then complete.
So, here they are:
– Novel draft completed in 2010 (Modern Fantasy, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)
– Novel draft raft Completed in 2011 (Dystopian Sci-fi, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)
– Incomplete draft started in 2012 (Speculative Fiction and Espionage, First draft completion needed)
– Five Short story first drafts written in 2011 (Multiple Genres, Requires proofreading, continuity edit, and polish)
– Unrealized project (Occult Thriller, Requires more full development of setting, characters, and underlying mythos)
– Unrealized project (Young Adult Fantasy, full development of setting, characters, and underlying mythology required)
That’s the to do list before any of the other ideas I have in my head can bang their way out.
Time to go to work.
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