Weekly Update - 82 (Patreon)

What a month!  We gained ANOTHER new Patron this week, Lethe!  Thank you so very much for subscribing!

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I can't believe it's already Monday again.  You can tell maybe from this preview image I didn't get a lot of work done this weekend, but I did play with some interesting coloring and camera angles.  It's far enough along that I should be able to finish it by Wednesday if I really buckle down and shut out all the distractions.

Kinda building up to a payoff scene, as you might have long ago guessed (or when I blabbed about it and told you it was coming.)  I'm honestly curious, does anyone have any predictions for what's about to happen?

Comic this week:  Yes.  I got my music on, ready to work my ass off to get it done.

Max Poster:  ITS DONE!!!!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAA 

Drawing: Page 118

Playing: Stellaris, oddly enough.  Had a sudden weird craving to be a galaxy-consuming evil empire.  Stellaris scratches that itch sometimes.

Rambling:

UUUGHHHHH... I dunno... words and stuff.  Rambling is hard.

You know what, sure, let me ramble for a bit about how much I hate words! This is actually a topic I've been thinking about for awhile.

Words suck. As a writer, as an artist, as a creative who has chosen to tell stories as my career, I hate words. This hatred has been building up for years, largely sourced from my chosen career as a storyteller. I write outlines, I write scripts, I draft up page layouts and then I struggle to fit the words onto the page around the art each week. And sometimes I will spend hours trying to fit words into bubbles, only to eventually decide they aren't needed and delete them. Many a comic page has been strengthened by the REMOVAL of the words I had planned to put on it. Even now, I am spending way too much time (2-3 hours now) writing this ramble and rewriting it and moving words around and adding new words and deleting old words, and at the end of the day, the words I choose and the order I present them in probably doesn't REALLY matter so long as I am getting the point across. That point is: I hate words.

At their very core, words are just strings of letters to which we have applied a communal, agreed-upon meaning. It is only through this mutual understanding can we have a conversation. A given word, on its own, is often subject to a number of different uses and definitions, depending on the context in which it finds itself.

If you've been reading my rambles for any stretch of time, you've no doubt heard me REPEATEDLY use my latest favorite quote, "nothing is so simple that words can describe." That quote, to me, is both a reflection on just how complex concepts in the world are, but it is also kind of an attack on the very nature of words themselves. That quote has become something of a motto for me, serving as a reminder that no matter how hard I slave over my scripts, I will never quite get it perfectly correct. That no matter what I say, or how I choose to say it, I am wrong and it is because the words I used do not go far enough to explain the complexity of the topic. That said, it is only because I keep this in mind that my comic is able to keep going. It's because I know it's okay to choose imperfect words or phrasing and then move on to the next part of the story because the perfect words that I'm constantly searching for do not exist.

It's important to me to stay aware of the fact that I don't have perfect information about my universe either, and I cannot explain to you everything there is to know about it... using just words. The problem I have with words is that in order to communicate something with the highest accuracy, I also need to explain the inverses and the exceptions. I can tell you that everyone in my universe hates gods, except if I stop there, it's wrong because it almost certainly can't be universally true. Although it is perhaps easiest to lump people into categories or speak generally, people are individually distinct and capable of forming their own opinions and there must be those in Kuserra who actually like gods, perhaps even love them, no matter how taboo it might be. For example, a mother is unlikely to hate their child just because society tells them they should. There's also, of course, the gods themselves, who probably don't universally hate themselves. Some might, but it's more common, I think, for one to choose to be on one's own side.

I could tell you that nothing grows in Kuserra, which is again, untrue, because although the city lacks trees and green leafy plants and shrubberies, there is still an ecosystem of fungi and lichens and mosses and insects and rodents and aquatic creatures and various other living things, and it would be unrealistic to assume that some species of incredibly persistent weeds can't be found *somewhere* in the city. The city, after all, despite being likely contaminated in various ways, is capable of supporting living creatures, and I'm sure if you go looking hard enough, plants could undoubtedly be found. The complexity increases exponentially, as even writing this now I realize the inverses and exceptions also have their own inverses and exceptions and I could not possibly sit here and follow each and every topic to an end. Furthermore, Kuserra is just one city positioned on a lonely planet somewhere in a galaxy among millions of other galaxies in an unfathomably large universe, and I can't even tell you for sure if it has dandilions growing between some concrete blocks in the shadow of a burnt-out skyscraper. And my characters, likewise, do not have perfect information about their universe. They can describe it only in their terms, from a single perspective and I can tell you their story only in my terms, from what I imagine their perspectives to be. And those words are wrong, because not only am I choosing the wrong words to explain an impossibly complicated topic, but I'm doing so through several levels of disconnect, because I've never actually lived in Kuserra myself and I can only try to imagine what it must be like.

Now, granted, I acknowledge that words are our primary form of communication. Just because the world is too complicated to describe in words doesn't mean that I think it's not worth trying. I can only WISH we had a better way of communicating, and hope that perhaps some day we will. For now, words are important. Without words, we have no effective way of talking to each other at all. I cannot sit here and tell you how much I hate words without using words. I may use them somewhat begrudgingly, knowing that everything I say is wrong from a different perspective or that it falls apart under greater scrutiny or that every sentence I type is just another mistake I may one day come to regret. I suppose the biggest problem I have with words is when they are taken at face value, or when a specific narrow perspective is treated as irrefutable fact to the exclusion of other possibilities. This leads to problems, particularly in storytelling, when an author might declare something to be true that contradicts other popular interpretations of the tale.

I suppose this is all a long-winded way of explaining to you that I think I am an unreliable author, and through me, Kiva is likely an unreliable narrator. I once listened to another writer rail at me for an hour, arguing against the use of the "unreliable narrator." This writer was a smart guy, who I still have respect for, and while he made some good points, these days, I think I realize that every narrator is unreliable, or at the very least that every narrator should be treated as such because words are unreliable. Further arguments could be made about narrator credibility, but that's another topic for a different ramble. This universe, God Slayers, Kuserra, Kiva's story, everything that exists within it may have been born from some deep reaches inside of my brain, but while I present to you this universe I want you to feel free to interpret it however you wish and imagine it as your own. Always keep in mind that the things I say about it, the things Kiva says, though we might try our best to present them with the highest possible degree of accuracy, we don't know everything and we could be wrong.  There are gaps in my presentation of the universe that I want you to fill with your own imagination. Some are intentional, some are not, but part of the fun of reading is imagining the things the author isn't telling you.

Okay, I spent too long on this, and I have a lot of drawing left to do today. Another reason I hate words? It took me 1381 words to explain why I felt the need to say three.