#why else would you. (SORRY POE BUT COME ON also if you want to memorise a famous poe poem the raven is right there and it's better)

[lotrmusical]

Robert Frost poems are ubiquitous in English classes in the US, I remember having one teacher who assigned us to learn poems and went out of his way to ban Robert Frost as an option because otherwise nearly everyone would default to him as the main poet they knew

interesting!!

[millercrystal]

Home Is Where the Heart Is

Fandom: Star Wars sequel trilogy

Finn appreciation week 2018 - day 4 (Apr 12): home

Warnings: 1 very short scene at the beginning that is about Finn being taken by the First Order, some snippets of Finn’s life in the First Order in the 1st half of the fic, and also recounts the Finn vs Kylo Ren lightsabre duel in The Force Awakens. I tried to write these scenes with as few graphical descriptions as possible, but I’m tagging warnings for kidnapping, violence and injury just in case.

If there’s anything else you need me to tag for, please let me know.

Rating: teen and up

Genre: friendship and family

Word count: 3562

Remarks: I'm rather captivated by the idea of Finn chipping away the necessary walls he has built around pre-stormtrooper memories for surviving within the First Order, and re-learning his freedom for expressing emotions and affection to connect with his newfound family.

Who let Finn wander around by himself on an unfamiliar ship freshly woken up from a coma? And how did he manage to stagger past the hangar at the same time Poe saw him? That's too coincidental, I have so many questions.

---

One of the earliest memories that Finn has, is being hugged tightly as a young child. The hug was warm, like a cookie fresh out of oven.

Then, a voice, presumably his father's, urged him to run and hide in the nearby cave until they go find him.

He ran as fast as he could on his short stubby legs, but was lifted off the ground by strong arms. He tried to kick himself free, but all he managed was a grunt from his captor, who must had given him an anaesthetic patch as he had no recollection of the following events.

---

The next thing Finn remembers, is waking up groggily in a hall with dozens of children, all around the same age as him.

People in white armours and helmets slowly patrolled up and down their lines; the children, seeing the blasters in their hands, wisely stayed quiet. A man in a funny hat, dark tunic and knee-high boots went up on stage, talking about restoring order to the galaxy and loyalty to the First Order. Finn did not recall hearing about the First Order until now, and wondered when his father would come get him.

When the man on stage finished, a child a few rows away asked hesitantly, 'Where're Papa and Mama?' The voice rang through the quiet room.

The man searched through the room until his gaze landed on the child. He replied indifferently, 'From this day onwards, you will not have parents, but only comrades. The First Order is where you belong.'

Order, comrades, loyalty. What big words. Finn did not understand them, nor did the child who asked for their parents either, as they repeated in confusion, 'Mama? Mama?'

The man on stage gave a single sharp nod to one of the armour-clad, who reached the child right at that moment. The armour-clad pressed a patch to the back of their neck; the child soon crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

None of the remaining children spoke up afterwards.

---

Finn was remarkably calm during the first month. Although, the time was spent on memorising their designation numbers, easing into prescribed routines, and working on classes and duties, so he did not have a significant reason not to be. The supervisors for his batch seemed to have experience in training recruits during their first weeks, so punishments were just heavy enough to keep them in line without being too harsh. Extra laundry folding duties here, vacuuming duties there, or meal bans if a more severe punishment was needed. All of this, Finn could manage.

However, he could not quite comprehend the coldness, or rather, lack of warmth projected by any supervisor. Although there would be rare praises of 'Good.' or similar variants, none of them smiled when he or his batch mates did things correctly. He had come to the conclusion that success was expected.

On the last evening of the first month, a supervisor gave a short speech congratulating the batch on making pass a month. She then stressed their loyalty to the First Order, now their official family.

That night, after his batch mates had dozed off, Finn muffled his face in the pillow and quietly sniffled for the home he was taken from.

---

The initiates quickly learnt to hide how much they missed their real homes, for whenever supervisors caught wind of it, additional loyalty lessons would be scheduled.

It was only when they prepare for bed and no supervisor would be present, that they had relative privacy to talk about home. Finn was sure every one of them dreamt about home. They would trade stories, some of which were exaggerated in childish imagination.

Finn shared a few stories of his own, though he could not differentiate between memory and wishful imagination.

---

The cadets did not find out how severely they were discouraged from thinking about their birth families, until rotated training with a newer batch of trainees.

This particular introductory exercise was about the priority of mission completion. Finn, finding it easy to deduce expected actions of the trainees, did not struggle with the exercise. He completed the mission quickly and then sat down to watch the other trainees going through the scenario, with the stimulation projected onto a screen in the waiting room.

A young initiate from the newer batch was next. He made good progress until the last hurdle, where he froze.

On the projected screen, a middle-aged woman with red hair gathered into a bun kneeled on the ground, in front of an astronomical map marked with trade routes and schedules of the New Republic. That must mean the cadet had red hair, as the simulated woman was designed to resemble them.

He slowly raised his blaster with shaking hands.

She pleaded with tears in her eyes, 'Don't you remember your mama? My baby, what have they done to you?'

'Mama?' he attempted, the word foreign to his tongue.

'Yes, it's me. Don't you remember how I tucked you in every night? Come here, give your mama a hug.' she opened her arms cautiously.

The blaster paused in mid-air. Then, the cadet lowered it and walked to the woman. 'I miss you so much, Mama.'

The simulation ended immediately, with harsh white lights turning up to regular brightness. The supervisor for this exercise stepped out from the control room and addressed the trainee. 'FR-3056, were you clear on your mission?'

'Yes, Ma'am.'

'Summarise the mission.'

'Yes, Ma'am. The mission is to extract the map with trade information of the New Republic. Get rid of enemies protecting the map as needed.'

'Exactly. And yet, you chose not to continue your mission. Why?'

'Sorry, Ma'am, I could not kill my mother.'

'So, your personal interest interferes with the mission.' she stated with a blank expression.

Every cadet held their breath, waiting for her decision. Finn felt a sudden chill racing down his spine, even though the room, like every part of the starship, was temperature controlled.

The supervisor consulted her datapad, then continued, 'FR-3056, this is your second incident. Report for recondition tomorrow.'

When Finn saw FR-3056 again in the next training session 1 week later, the trainee fired his blaster at the red-haired woman without a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

The cadets whispered about FR-3056, and stopped talking about the homes they never knew.

---

Eventually, Finn rarely allowed himself to dwell on the voice from his memory. He told himself that, it was because there simply was no time between all the classes and duties when he had the luxury of not being too bone-tired to think for himself.

Deep down, he knew it was only part of the truth.

He had not thought of the voice in a long time, because pretending a home had never existed for him was less painful than knowing he had one but then lost it.

---

Years later, on Finn's second real-world mission, Jakku happened.

He looked into the eyes of scared villagers, young and old. The fact that they were humans, very much alive, struck him. This was not a simulation anymore; if he pulled the trigger, these families would be torn apart.

Around him, his squadmates shot left and right without hesitation.

He had always felt like an outsider among them even when he acted like a model trooper. Now, he refused to fit in. He would not kill for the Order; it would never be where he belonged.

It had never been a 'family' since the beginning.

He lowered his blaster and mentally prepared for an opening to slip away.

---

The Resistance pilot was on his knees before the warrior of the dark side. Finn could not hear their exchange from his position halfway across the squad, but he could see the 2 troopers who searched him brought him onto the ship back to base.

Finn had heard about interrogation methods, he hoped the pilot would not suffer too much at Ren's hand.

He must have projected the thought, for Ren abruptly spun to stare at him. He squared his shoulders and trotted nervously behind his leaving squad, feeling Ren's eyes on him the whole time.

Back at the base, Captain Phasma requested him to submit his blaster for inspection. Waiting for a subtle opening to run away was no longer an option, he had to make one himself.

He gave himself a quick pep talk and marched through the interrogation wing to the imprisoned pilot.

The Force was on his side. He bluffed past the trooper guarding the pilot and took him out of the cell. 'This is a rescue. I'm helping you escape. Can you fly a TIE fighter?'

'I can fly anything.' the pilot smirked. 'I'm Poe. Poe Dameron. What’s your name?'

---

Why did Poe want to go to Jakku again? Oh right, he had to get back some map. Unfortunately, they crashed and Poe was nowhere to be found, his leather jacket the only proof he had escaped with Finn.

Finn hated the planet; all he could see was sand all over the horizon and the blinding sun. The scorching heat drained him quickly; his mouth was dry and his bodysuit was drenched in sweat. He was convinced Jakku was determined to snuff out his existence before he could enjoy his newfound freedom.

When he met the scavenger girl after walking for the whole morning, he had just lost the first person who was kind to him in years (no, don't think of the pilot; losing his first friend - if he can count him as a friend - kriffing hurts). It must be the galaxy sending him a note not to open himself up to another person.

With the scavenger, came a droid. One assumption led to another; before he knew it, he was caught up in the girl's plan to reunite the droid with its owner. And then, he tripped and fell down. She ran to him, offering a hand to help him up. He stared at the outstretched hand like a simulation he could not figure out; surely, she was not really offering? If there was one thing Phasma partially succeeded in drilling into his head, it was that strength is only as strong as the weakest link. That was not wrong from the point of view of an army, though he refused to believe it was the whole truth.

Warily, he looked into Rey's eyes but only found sincerity. Maybe, she was like him, refusing to stop helping others even though a lifetime of teaching had taught him otherwise. He decided to take a leap of faith and took her hand.

He was pulled up and running alongside her and the droid.

This time, he was determined not to lose his new friend.

---

He had failed Rey.

After confessing to her about defecting from the First Order because he did not want to kill innocents, she was initially mad at him for hiding his former involvement with the Order. However, once she calmed down, she forgave him.

He noticed her following Solo around like a lost puppy. He had asked if she knew Solo; she replied no, but he felt familiar. She wished she knew if her father was like him. When Finn gave her a puzzled look, she looked down at the engine she was fixing and explained that she was left on Jakku as a child, with only blurred memories of the people who walked away from her while she cried for them to come back.

Rey had no family, just like Finn. He felt a surge of protectiveness; how dare those people willingly leave a defenceless child behind to fend for herself?

And right when he felt he had known her for his whole life, she was abducted. By Kylo Ren, the First Order's resident ill-tempered dark warrior, no less.

He vowed to get her back, the Order would not take away another friend from him.

---

It turned out Finn had not lost his first friend after all.

As the Millennium Falcon landed on the Resistance base, he looked out of the cockpit to see the ground bustling with activity. Pilots in orange flight suit talked with mechanics in earth brown overalls and droids. In the distance, officers and crews hurried into and out of the compound. Solo directed Finn and BB-8 to go ahead into the compound, while he and Chewie shut down the Falcon.

Strolling down the stretch of the runway taking in the base, Finn saw a pilot climbing down the side of a black painted X-wing. BB-8 knocked into the back of his knees and sped towards the starship with a series of excited beeps and whirls. The pilot talked to a mechanic while taking off their helmet, revealing a wave of black hair. Then, they turned towards BB-8 and a familiar airy voice carried over.

No, it couldn't be! Finn made himself blink once, twice, and was elated to find his eyes and brain were functioning properly.

His feet started running on their own accord. Before his very eyes, Poe stood up from talking to the droid, a wide grin breaking out on his face upon locating him. Poe stepped forward and rushed to meet him halfway, tackling him in a bone-crushing hug. Finn only hesitated for a fraction of a second before hugging back just as fiercely.

If all hugs felt as peaceful and safe as this one, maybe he could get used to them.

---

When Finn told Poe about Rey, who saved BB-8 first, and her subsequent kidnapping, Poe took him to General Organa directly. Unlike First Order officers, she was understanding and sympathetic, readily agreeing to help upon learning the Order's involvement. Finn offered whatever knowledge he had about Starkiller Base and everything else needed. In a short time, a planned mission was approved for the next day. They would soon be off to rescue Rey and stop the planetary weapon.

That night, Finn started awake in a cold sweat and could not manage to get back to sleep. His quarters for the night had no window, too similar to First Order-issued bunks for his liking. He put on Poe's jacket - no, his now - and slid silently out of the room.

Not wanting to get lost around the interconnecting corridors, he pressed onwards to the few zones he was introduced to during the day. His feet took him to a bench right outside the command centre, where they discussed out the mission plan earlier in the day.

Needless to say, he was surprised to find the General seated at a desk near the entrance, still up alongside the night shift officers.

General Organa looked up from the pile of charts she was studying. Not used to friendly interactions with officers, he greeted her and pass it off as simply walking past the centre on a stroll.

'Finn,' she halted him with a tired smile, catching up to tell him 'good work' for proposals on how to destroy the Starkiller. She then reminded him to try and rest enough for the mission while on the Falcon.

'Rey would be back before we know it.' she reached up and patted his arm.

Finn tried not to think about how much of an open book he must be for her to read, idly wondering if that was a skill all mother figures picked up.

---

Flying at light speed to Starkiller took a few hours, which Finn spent half of it fidgeting. Solo and Chewbacca shared a look, then Chewbacca shrugged. Solo sighed and addressed Finn.

'Look, I'm anxious about Rey as much as you do. But she'd survived on Jakku for so long, she's tough. I'm sure she can hold on until we get to her.'

'I know.' Finn glanced at him, then back at the wall panel he had been staring a hole into.

A few beats passed, then Solo made up his mind.

'Tell you what, I've been meaning to fix this squeaky panel in the cargo bay. How 'bout you give me a hand?'

Finn got up and followed him.

They sat on the floor fixing the panel in silence, until Finn asked tentatively, 'Do you ever miss home when you're flying around the galaxy?'

'Well… Sometimes, but I try not to think about it.'

'Where's your home?'

'What's a home? Is it where you were born? Is it where you grow up? Is it where you settle? Or is it a person?' Solo gestured around with the screwdriver still in his hand, then raised an eyebrow at him.

'So, which is it?' Finn tilted his head, frowning.

'That, you have to decide for yourself. You'll know when you've found yours.'

---

Finn was awed to find Rey broke out all by herself.

It was a whirlwind of finding out truths, each more shocking than the previous. Ren was actually Solo's son; him killing Solo for some twisted access to the Force; him choosing power granted by the First Order over genetic family.

And the most worrying turn of events? Ren had been waiting for them as they trekked through the forest back to the Falcon, wanting to turn Rey to the Order's side. He had made his intentions crystal clear.

To Finn's eternal relief, Rey rejected the 'offer' outright. She did not waste one second in insulting Ren, calling him a monster. Kriffing right she was.

Ren responded by knocking her into a tree by Force and Finn's heart nearly stopped. He ran over and dropped to check her pulse. It was only when she groaned that he knew she'd be alright and his brain restarted.

A few crackling swishes and 'Traitor!' reminded him that Ren was still preying on them.

Rey had defended Finn; it was now his turn to return the favour.

He knew there was no way he would stand a chance against an experienced Force user, but Force if he would let anyone else be taken away from him. He was not going down without a fight.

He fired up Skywalker's lightsabre and charged Ren.

He held his own relatively well for a first time user, until Ren swept the sabre from his hands and punched his face so hard, forcing his back to be exposed. Ren followed up with a heavy upwards slash.

Instantly, a fiery pain exploded across Finn's back. He collapsed onto the snow.

If he was going to die, at least he had fought back against the organisation which had manipulated him since he was a young child. He could only hope Rey and Poe would forgive him for not succeeding.

Too exhausted by the overwhelming pain, his vision grew dark.

---

When Finn regained his senses, he was in a transparent bacta suit strapped inside a clear tank.

Thinking the First Order caught him again, he kicked open the cover and scrambled out, gaining his bearing to formulate an escape plan. It was then the interior decoration theme finally caught his attention - the Order's default colour theme was dark grey and black, not light grey and white.

A nurse parted a sliver of the privacy curtain to investigate the commotion. Finn took note of the Resistance emblem over her lapel and relaxed slightly.

'Ah, you're awake! That's good, it means your spine's nearly healed.'

'My spine?'

'Yes, do you remember what happened?'

'Not really. Where am I?'

'We're on the Resistance fleet, this ship's called the Raddus. Better let the doctor check you over first though, just sit here while I get her. Dr Kalonia!' she strode off without waiting for his reply.

For his part, Finn padded out of the medical bay to find Rey and Poe, taking the opposite route from the nurse. It was admittedly not the best idea, as he had no way to know if they would be on the same ship.

He wandered around with a stiff spine and occasional funny looks thrown by passing staff. It was a miracle that he managed to ask someone who knew where Poe would be and could give him the right directions.

He was stumbling past the hangar scanning for Poe when a loud voice exclaimed, 'Finn, buddy!' followed by a heavy thud. When he turned clumsily towards the voice, he was greeted by Poe's thick dark curls suddenly sticking up everywhere right in his face and a hand on his arm. 'You were in a pretty bad shape, I was so worried about you.'

'Good to see you too. Where's Rey?' he squeezed Poe's shoulder in return, not realising water was sprouting from his suit until Poe got busy covering up the disconnected tubes with his bare hands.

'It's a kinda long story, buddy. Let's get your bacta fixed first before I update you, yeah? Bee, go on ahead and tell Dr Kalonia to prep for Finn.'

---

It feels like a whole month of jumping through the galaxy with the Resistance before Finn finally sees Rey in person on Crait; he cannot help himself from crashing into her and burying his face into her neck. She's alive, she's come back for him, she's hugging him as tightly as he's hugging her. Then, he is openly sobbing into her tunic. Poe comes up and puts a hand on his back, mindful of his still healing spine.

This must be what a home feels like, Finn muses. Maybe, he has found himself a new home without realising.

[ihfsttinuf]

Screw It, I’m Making a Webcomic

So, as I made it abundantly clear on Twitter mere moments ago, I have a real honest-to-Glob New Year’s Resolution for 2017.

I am going to create a webcomic.

I am going to write a sequential art narrative which I will draw and provide various artistic accoutrements to and post it on the Internet. This is going to happen by the end of this year. I am doing this.

Perhaps this sudden outburst and declaration of artistic intent seems a bit out of left field, both in its overtones of grandiosity and relative lack of context given what most of you guys know about me. So let me provide some of that much needed context, both to show you why I am doing this and what I am really saying, which is probably even more ambitious (and maybe pretentious) than you think it is.

I’ve been writing weird little stories and drawing accompanying illustrations for them since I was a wean, as most of us did at that age, but since that point I’ve never really stopped. At a very young age I encountered not only excellent children’s books ranging from the charming and heartwarming to the downright mind-bending—Peter Sís and Henrik Drescher were big in my household—but also illustrated works whose contents and subtext were far too old for me yet entranced me nonetheless, particularly the works of the great New England illustrator and satirist Edward Gorey. By the age of six or seven, I had memorised “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” and would recite it with morbid glee to anyone who would ask (or didn’t). I discovered books through Gorey’s cover illustrations, first accidentally discovering the alternate history genre through his work on Joan Aiken’s Dido Twite series, and was only drawn deeper into John Bellairs’ junior Gothics when I discovered that Gorey had provided the frontispiece and dust jacket to every one of the entries in the series he’d written up to his death—which I mourned, with a mix of vague incomprehension, sorrow, and creeping disappointment. I was eight at the time.

Parallel to this, I spent a lot of time at my town’s local art centre, which provided free classes in all sorts of artistic endeavours. I took most to theatre and improv in particular—I was a wee ham; now I am a large ham—but what stuck with me was drawing and, to a lesser extent, animation. As I fixated on Gorey’s superficial techniques and aesthetics, the simple sunken eyes and odd little triangular noses, I’d also more subtly acquired his less obvious techniques: The way he used cross-hatching and simple, intense linework to suggest different textures entranced me, and indeed still does. I am told that a very strict art teacher, who I thought disliked me and of whom I was somewhat afraid, freely admitted that a sketch I’d done of a horned figure playing a flute on a rooftop by the light of the moon had taken her breath away.

Which is not to say that I was, or am, some prodigy of form, or that I lacked for more prosaic influences. The former, I will get to, but the latter is best expressed in the fact that a recurring scene which I have since revised and transfigured many, many times began life as... well, thinly veiled Darkwing Duck fanfiction, minus the duck part, given a sound twist of Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter”. I was maybe eleven or so at the time.

It was in one of these classes that this weird little scene deep beneath a ruined graveyard was born. It was also there that I made plans for an elaborate series of beast fables, set in a world quite unlike our own.

It is perhaps worth noting that one of the handful of these early sketches which sticks in y mind to this day was a tale of two young male lizards falling in love only to be torn apart by a disapproving society. Even at an age when I was functionally unaware of homosexuality and bemused or outright repulsed by what I knew of sex, a queer romance was perhaps the most emotionally intense thing that I had conceived of up to that point. But I digress.

The setting in question and certain characters in it would perennially re-emerge in my other writing, which I was quite certain would be my career path throughout late elementary and middle school. In seventh grade, I was part of an experimental programme where middle and high school students were allowed to enrol in a creative writing course at a nearby university. Only two students wound up attending: Myself, and a classmate of mine who had skipped a grade and would later become known in my high school as something of a mad and insufferable genius. (We got on pretty well.) After several semesters of studying poetry and short fiction, there was a presentation. One of the selections I made for my reading was a list-poem, from the perspective of an older character trying to live day by day with the memory of his deceased wife hanging over him, with the distinction that the final entry was a reminder to keep his claws neatly filed.

It was around that time that I began to come under the influence of Thomas Ligotti, and it was with this exposure to the refiner’s fire of such elegant horror—the kind that brought the same sort of visions into my mind that Gorey brought to the page—that I realised what form my true opus should take, at least in plot. I took it with me into high school, and beyond into the wilderness of these past six-and-a-half years of confusion. The polestar of this mad endeavour formed here.

I had been thinking a lot about epic high fantasy at the time—I was eleven when The Return of the King hit theatres, and I had read enough in the genre and in styles adjacent to it to be aware of the tropes—and it occurred to me that the moral framework and cosmology of a lot of such works rang a bit hollow to me, not because right and wrong did not exist, as certainly people do good and bad things to one another all the time, but because there was always this sense of certainty that the side one was meant to root for was indubitably in the right and some great objective force of Good deemed it so, blessing their struggle against a force similarly ordained by some great objective Evil. It was that last dimension which particularly irked me. It felt reassuring in the most painfully reductive and philosophically trite way possible. And so often the battles were so... literal. I never much cared for war films to begin with, and by putting such struggles in a fantastical framework, you subtracted the one thing that made war films kind of neat: The recognition that these were people doing the fighting and the killing. Not symbols, people.

Very middle school analysis, yes, and unfair to some things I quite enjoy, Tolkien included, but the ultimate conclusions were the important part.

Which is where Ligotti comes in. Much has been made of his non-fiction opus The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, but in terms of his philosophy and its influence on my thinking at the time, I’d rather stick to his fiction, as that was what I was reading and that is what made me. In brief, Ligotti is not a reassuring writer. The universe of his stories reflects his views of our own, which are, in essence, a wholesale rejection of the commonly held notion that human consciousness and life in general are good things that we should all be even remotely enthused about, instead proposing that the very idea that we are aware of ourselves and that we should think of ourselves as individuals for whom some higher power might just be watching out is more likely an obscene and sadistic joke on that hypothetical power’s part or else, more likely, a horrible accident. His stories are filled with personal totems and surreal motifs, the fates of his characters determined by blind chance or the detached malicious prankstery of a party with whom they cannot bargain or reason, the sadistic frenzies of Poe’s maniacal villain-protagonists writ large, often on a cosmic scale. There is the feel of a nightmare and yet also of the sleepless hours after, alone in the dark, thinking, where wakefulness and dream bleed between one another and all the world is a nightmare to which the hells of sleep might well be preferable.

If I’ve lost you, well, I’m sorry; but you and I probably have something to talk about if your first reaction to all this was, “I’ve certainly had *those* days.”

And if you’ve had enough of those days, the rest probably follows easily enough.

Wouldn’t it be interesting, I thought, if one took that quest narrative key to so many epic fantasies, and put it through a world where the rules of the game were so utterly reversed? If our well-meaning hero—of course, as in Tolkien, basically some poor backwater schmo, by no means stupid nor necessarily naïve but very, *very* far from the classical man of virtue—were to bear with him some artefact of power that could, perhaps by its very existence, rend the veil of normalcy that should keep all of the sane and happy citizens of this world from confronting what writhes beneath all that they see, what might he choose to do with it, particularly if he were, say, by some inexplicable invisible bond, *tied* to it?

Now, what makes a fitting antagonist for such a tale? What sort of character provides the ideal foil for a kind-hearted soul confronted with all the horrors of what may be in a neat little package? Rather than some cosmic sadist intent on throwing us all under the bus, why not something a bit scarier: Another kind-hearted soul. Someone who has seen behind the veil their whole life. Someone who has seen the truth and the agony of this world and seeks nothing less than perfect closure

And there it was.

And then it began to get complicated.

For every character that I created to flesh out the story, another came into being, and I wanted to know more about them. A side-plot salvaged from some other silly project merged seamlessly into the new whole, and suddenly there were whole new plots, full of new characters with motives that I wanted to understand. Characters grew, changed, lightened and darkened as my thoughts steeped. Exposure to other writers through classes and forums and variably disastrous shared writing projects made me realise what I did and did not know, what I could and could not do.

It was also in high school that I began taking music seriously, first toying around in Garageband and singing in the school choir and then as part of a band with several close friends. I wrote a lot of poetry, and I sang a bit, so we had lyrics; I still drew sometimes, so we had art when we needed it, although we rarely needed it. I was always ambitious with my lyrics: One of our most successful songs was structured to simulate one character murdering another during a snowstorm in a glade where they had played and hidden as a child. Morbid character studies were common; I was always taking grim little vacations in people’s heads, my own or otherwise. Informed by my middle school studies of haibun and my lyrical adventures, my prose grew more experimental, collapsing into poems or switching into strange persons and tenses. My mind was full of images, yet where to go with them?

My path to sequential art was an odd and rocky one. As mentioned, I loved picture books and illustrated stories as a child, and while I failed to touch upon them earlier (mea culpa!), Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side were pretty important in their own right. I even attempted to create something of a running series at around the time I was in that poetry programme, mainly for the amusement of myself and a very affable art teacher who found the premise amusing. It was only a year or two later that I would read Doom Patrol—the first superhero comic that I would ever admit to liking, and still one of the chosen few—and realise that Grant Morrison, the bastard, had stolen my idea before I’d even been born: Of killing one’s own imaginary friend, only to be tormented by their vengeful spectre years after the fact at the least appropriate of times.

But the comic idea sort of fell by the wayside for the longest time, for the simple reason that I am, to my own mind, an atrocious draughtsman. I cannot reproduce figures to save my life. Hilarious, seeing as I can draw you a teeming alien cityscape, or a perfectly detailed mosquito in flames, but in terms of doing the same thing twice, I’ve spent years hanging my head in shame and self-loathing.

The secret is, though, not that I couldn’t learn this, but that for such a long time, pride had kept me from allowing myself to be bad at things until I was good. As someone to whom a lot of fairly complex ideas just come naturally, someone who just absorbs information like a souped-up Dyson vacuum, the idea of having to draw the same damned thing ten thousand times just to get decent at drawing that same damned thing was a horrifying prospect. It still is.

I got pushed into it. My own fictions put a knife to my throat and told me, “This is what needs to happen.” But it took two different interconnected experiences to understand how, both courtesy of my boyfriend being a huge dork.

The first was his recommendation that I read LAMEZINE 02, at that time the latest salvo from the wonderfully deranged comic artist Cate Wurtz, then going by the moniker Partydog; the second was his use of a Bec Noir avatar on a forum we’re both on, which got me to finally bite the bullet and read Homestuck.

Wurtz’ Lamezone comics are a trip. Her art style is by most technical standards fairly primitive, but it’s a very *refined* jankiness, part and parcel to her overall embrace of scuzzy punk ‘zine aesthetics, immediately recognisable and all-around immediate. Her approach to story and tone is just the same, at once surreal and ridiculous and incredibly emotionally potent, ranging in tone from giddy B-movie absurdity to crushing Carver-esque sorrow, composed of as many little side-stories that flesh out what sort of world these characters live in as of its “meat” and all the better for it. The way that her comics are often framed only adds to the ambience: DVD menus of hit TV series that never existed, tales from the everyday lives of people living on the precipice of madness (and/or suburban Kansas), the wild Lynchian adventures of a man who talks to the spirit of the good ol’ USA through Twitter while traipsing through other people’s comics and the comment sections on furry porn sites. She was even working on a video game at one point about a woman trying to battle her way through deformed iterations of her past selves while maintaining a sufficient ganja supply. I have no idea if that’s still happening. It looked awesome.

Homestuck has already had much said about it, so I’ll keep it brief. Comparisons to Pynchon are not unwarranted. It takes the hypertextual potential of the webcomic to the next level, and is longer than many novel series. The art is, quite intentionally, all over the place, and uses collage surprisingly effectively. The story is a beautiful mess that is, fundamentally, about the process of storytelling and how “things that happen” become “stories” in the first place. It’s very oblique about this, and generally quite funny.

And so I looked to the story I was writing.

I looked at the multiple plotlines growing out of one another, intersecting, snakes devouring their tails, thematic parallels on parallels, spirals of mental imagery with bits of torn wallpaper making the fabric of waistcoats and cathedrals made out of lines of scripture and trees bearing watches like fruit, and I went: “This should be a comic! A hypercomic, in fact, McLuhan-style! This should be a wondrous blend of visuals and text and...

“I...

“I can’t draw. Fuck me. I should stick to prose, like a good loser. Get rejected that way instead.”

So I waffled. For months. And then for years.

But you know what?

I’m done waffling.

Limitation is power in its own right. Ever since I learned of Oulipo in that long-ago three-person poetry class, I’ve been fascinated with the idea of innovation through defining what you cannot do, or what you must do, no matter what. Of forcing yourself to start from a set place or end at one, no ifs, ands or buts.

I am limited. Within that, I am omnipotent.

I am going to draw this comic. I am going to write it and I am going to draw it even if it starts out looking like total shit and the process drives me half-insane. If things that I love, in sequential art but also in music and painting and writing and animation and all sorts of other forms, can make a perceived deficit into a key strength, I can do it, too. Even if I can’t be a classical master, I can be the best at that crazy thing I do.

I guess this is also my grandiose way of saying “fuck last year,” where I made so much progress that felt so thwarted by external circumstances and my own failings, and where so much went wrong for so many of us. So I’m embracing this year as a year of progress. Even if everything else sucks, I’ll be running up that hill.

And just so there’s no mistaking it, I will still be making music and probably writing at least a smidgen of prose fiction and poetry on the side. In the former category, I might even start a band.

Oh, wait. We’re not doing half-measures any more.

I’m starting a band, too.

Tell your friends.

Happy 2017, everyone, and have a lovely rest of your night.