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Free Comic Book Day 2024
Huzzah! Nothing more fun than having Free Comic Book Day on a sunny 💐 Spring 🌷 Saturday.
MARVELous
The experience of reading a printed comic book will never change, but now, thanks to the digital age, there are many different ways to enjoy the same story. Digital comic books, of course, can be interactive in many different ways, allowing the reader to feel like a participant in the story. ~Stan Lee
Who’s thrilled to get a free comic book? Me. Will I? Maybe. Not sure if I’ll be heading out today. Remains to be seen.
Since last week was Independent Bookstore Day, Kelly and I headed out to a regional library book sale and got a stack of good ones.
It wasn’t quite the wheelbarrow full of books we usually get but considering that I hadn’t expected to find any that I actually wanted, a decent stack of them wound up on my To Read pile.
lol, my To Read pile… As if I actually had time to read anything. Well, I’m going to be making time because I bought these particular books with a purpose in mind.
My AuthorTubers are conspiring to guilt me into reading more. There’s quite a bit of chatter about Reading like a Writer on there these days.
Okay, message received. As much as I like to feed my head with shows, movies and how-to writing videos, it’s definitely time to crack open some books and see how the kids are doing it these days.
I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily “caught up” at work (knock wood), but I’ve gotten past some effort-intensive pieces. This has freed up some of the existential anguish that has been corking my creative juices.
Perish the thought that I might actually achieve something passing for a healthy work/life balance, but the scales ⚖️ are coming closer to being even than they’ve been in a while..
F-R-E-E
FREE Comic Book Day 2024 Keys and Speculation!!
Okay, I’m not that guy. Never have been, probably never will be.
I like comics for the story and the drawings. Certainly, some comic books are worth their weight in gold but that isn’t my thing.
Actually, wild comics speculation nearly destroyed the industry a while back. People bought comics solely as investment materials.
Worse still, the publishers fed the craze by developing special covers to attract the weirdos and sell more copies of the same comic book.
Literally. They released the exact same comic book with a variety of covers to drive the investing Tulipmania.
If the video dude above is to be believed, this year’s Free Comics may be tomorrow’s classic gold.
Maybe so, but it would be fine with me if they’re actually just enjoyable stories.
Maybe we could just write a good story and draw some awesome panels.
Yeah, let’s do that…
Exercise Your Mind
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. ~Joseph Addison
I’ve been feeling mentally flabby. Okay, that’s silly. I’ve been grinding my brain to paste over the last couple of months over rather complex assignments.
It would be a bit more accurate to say I’m feeling creatively flabby. Naturally, the work stuff requires a good bit of creativity, but I’m referring to artistic creativity rather than utilitarian creativity.
As I mentioned above, I went to the book sale last week with the expectation of coming away empty-handed.
As a bibliophile, it is nearly impossible for me to go to a book sale and not find something that catches my eye. I did, however, have some intentionality in what I bought.
For one thing, I wanted to prime my subconscious to have a desire to get back on the To Read list. I haven’t read an Ed McBain in ages, and I’ve got a shelf full of his books I haven’t gotten back to yet.
I’ve now added Nelson DeMille and Stuart Woods to my list. The blurbs caught me. Hopefully, the books will meet expectations. Even if they don’t, “Reading like a Writer“-mania has some potential to help inform my own writing.
I also picked up a Dickens anthology with three novels in it. I have read Great Expectations before but not Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities. It will be nice to read Dickens with a writerly eye.
Also, I haven’t finished The Chaos Engine Trilogy yet or even the copy of The Great Gatsby that I stashed next to my desk in order to inspire me to get back to my long-forgotten reading habit.
Good God, so much to do and so very little time to do it…
It has also come to my addled attention that I haven’t posted a single video on my sadly neglected YouTube channel in years. That needs to be remedied.
It seems like a great place to publish some flash fiction to set expectations for future readers. We’ll see if that happens.
I’ve got to get my Christmas monthlies wrapped up before I worry about that. I’m stepping on the gas to get those done and scheduled so I’ll have more time to write The Lights of Pine Hollow this year.
Fortunately, I did have a few evenings of clarity available to work on a chapter or two of The Sentinels: New Blood. Not loving what came out, to be quite honest.
Seems like I need to get a handle on my waypoints. I think the thing that works for me in the Holiday Season Serial Romances is that I have a format.
The overall series outline is based on the 12 Stage Hero’s Journey. In my case, the tridecology ends with a new status quo.
Typically, the hero in question is a single protagonist.
In The Sentinels, the series protagonist is the superhero team as an ensemble cast.
As such, coming back around to the new normal after the full twelve stage journey helps to tie the series to the related works in my Holiday Season Serial Romance.
Within each of the thirteen novels, I need to establish a pattern that will tell the tale, facilitate some engaging arcs and translate comic book mayhem into a literary form.
Big ask, that. I haven’t worked it out yet. Pantsing isn’t getting me there and probably never will.
I need to set some waypoints. I’ve got some, but not enough to get me where I need to go. Yay, more work…
Wow, talk about time-slicing. So much to do…
That’s all for today. I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up on. Hope you’re enjoying your weekend with a free comic book.