The Dotted Logline

As a writer, I find that I have to try out every form I come across at least once. Thus, I have just finished my first comic strip script and sent it to an artist friend who kindly agreed to collaborate on this little project.

The script was an interesting project because it felt more like directing than writing. The script ended up having no dialogue (somewhat unintentionally), so the writing was really based on what shots would best tell the story and how to make everything flow smoothly within the set format (eight rows of three panels each.) It was actually a lot of fun. It reminded me of working with some of the more rigid poetry forms (especially sonnets) but with much less angst.

All in all, this is definitely something I would like to do again. I’d love to resurrect the comic strip I did in high school as a web comic, but that’s something I would probably have to draw myself, and coming up with a character design that is simple enough for me to draw consistently is fairly hard (I actually did a couple of years ago, but of course promptly lost my sketches.) Luckily, one of the characters is a brick, which even I of the limited artistic skills can draw.

Tonight I read a good portion of Douglas Adams’ The Salmon Of Doubt on the plane ride back from my grandfather’s funeral. It is an interesting book, full of snippets of writing that give some nice snapshots of Adams as a person. It’s a small thing (can a mass market paperback really sum up the entirety of a human life? Can a eulogy?), but it is some comfort

Now, I’m a Christian girl with some fairly set beliefs about death, but the loss of the experiences and dreams, the real story of a person’s life that only they knew, has always struck me as utterly tragic. I don’t believe that a person’s existence really disappears, but it can be hard to think outside of the realm of human experience and people are quite apt at forgetting. Actually, it seems like people are quite apt at not listening, or at least asking, in the first place. Which is why I unfortunately know more stories about the life of Douglas Adams at the moment than I do about Alton Houser. Sometimes we realize too late that people’s lives aren’t something we can pick up and study at our convenience, like a paperback book.

So today, at my crappy customer service job (which I’ll probably never be able to write about because most readers wouldn’t swallow the sheer amount of crap I deal with as being plausible), I took a phone order for a battery operated children’s mini Porsche. This car is apparently a gift from a certain CEO to the child of a certain REALLY BIG STAR and I was able to help finagle a complex plan to get it there on time. Not because it was for a REALLY BIG STAR’S KID, but because it’s for a kid, and the assistant who was placing the order was actually very polite and not at all demanding or obnoxious or idiotic like 99% of the people I have to talk to.

But hey, I was like three or four degrees away from a REALLY BIG STAR today. And I used the phrase “swallow the sheer amount of crap.” Was your day as cool? I think not.