Going for Bolingbroke

If you think that pun is bad, you'll love the joke that got bandied about a lot my first time through the play:

"The great thing about Richard II is that even if you don't know Shakespeare, by the end at least one person is sure to get the point."

Yeah, you know what? I'm not here to impress you.

Tonight's been a mixed bag. I've spent a few hours going over the script [re: The Tagalong], tweaking this, and fixing that. No surprise to anyone, my fondness for commas left the thing a wasteland of punctuation. If you've read my stuff before, or if you just take in a few old blog entries, you know I have a tendency to play it fast and loose with commas, ellipses, and what I think is sort of like my signature - the dash/double dash. It's my feeble attempt to try and mimic the way things sound in my head, the rhythm, the way I talk, or tell a story out loud, trying to keep all the beats and pauses, and bits of suspense intact even on the page. When it works, I think it works well - I've have some high-standard writers and readers tell me that even when chucking Strunk and White out the window, it's forgivable since the final product delivers.

But like with all things, moderation's the key, and if you're like me, and you have a particular style, or trick, you know it can easily become tiresome, trite, or lose a lot of its oomph from too much repetition, and on the path to first draft to final, I'm always left weighing whether phrasing x, or ambitious punctuation y, is best used here, or later, or not at all [save it until next time, kind of thing]. And a lot of scriptwriters will tell you any of those kinds of flourishes should just be left out - even when it comes to dialogue - and pity knows I'd save boatloads of time if I'd just blanket eliminate them from my work. But the charm!

Anyway, I've gotten some notes back on the script already, and Ian especially was good pointing out that I was over-doing it. So I guess the bulk of the writing night was just messing with that, hunting those spots down, and making the hard choices in places where the choices should probably be easy.

Rest of it I spent reading Richard II over again. I'm not sure why. I think it was my intention to read Cymbeline, or at least find out if I had already had[despite studying Shakespeare in college, I'm convinced that there's one play out there I haven't polished off yet. Even though I can't for the life of me figure out which one that is]. But I like Richard II, and reading it again I realized I liked it more than I remembered, an having been through it a couple times before I could just sort of have fun with it, pick it up, put it down in between Adult Swim bumps. With the book reviews, and new books I get, and comics [which I almost always give preference], and the loads of news and blogs and internet-related reading I do, I don't tend to get to read things over as much as I'd like [one of many, many reasons I'm garbage at memorization]. Especially something that demands Shakespeare-level engagement.

It was a good night, but not one with any sleep in it, and I'm watching the sun come up again. What a drag.

Here's some good, cool news though. My "Change is Gonna Come"/"VHS Generation" collaborator/partner-in-crime from across the ocean, Ander [that's Ander Sarabia, kiddies] and friend of the Mojo Wire Eric M. Esquivel [of the Modern Mythology Esquivels] have a story coming out in the Moonstone published comic "Zombies vs. Cheerleaders #4." The big excitement about this is that "Zombies vs. Cheerleaders" is a Diamond Distributed book, so you can get your very own copy just by asking your local comic proprietor to put it on your pull list. You've seen the amazing work Ander can do in some of his sketches for our stuff I've posted, and hopefully you've checked out Eric's stuff that I've linked in the past, so really, you've got zero reasons not to check it out.