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Our Big Lumpy Deformed Baby
Rogan: First of all, we are not Kelly Turnbull on Bluesky. We aren't on Bluesky and never will be. We just linked her post as a silly multi joke.
In all seriousness, though, "People live in my head and I want to make it everyone else’s problem" is a significant reason why we write. (And as kids, it was like, almost ALL the reason. Now it's just a little over half.)
In all seriousness, though, "People live in my head and I want to make it everyone else’s problem" is a significant reason why we write. (And as kids, it was like, almost ALL the reason. Now it's just a little over half.)
People like us get erased from history, culture, and art all the time. We ourself regularly deleted memories and drafts out of shame and pain, including years of trying to straightwash Red Roses, Old Horses (which made it impossible to finish--I didn't want to write a heterosexually bromantic buddy cop story, and I am glad I failed). But since we cannot take photos of each other, or legally exist, there's precious little record of our lives and history. What little there is can be easily distorted into more socially acceptable forms, and there's always the internal compulsion to sand over the rough edges.
Our comics and Infinity Smashed are our attempt to prevent that from happening.
I do my best to write well, obviously. I take pride in my craft, and many stories I write are craft stories: I had an idea/prompt/commission, I tried to write it as best I could, and it made me a little money. But I only started making craft stories as an adult; as kids, we overwhelmingly wrote Infinity Smashed, and we wrote it because we felt a deep inner drive to do so. We needed to record these people who meant so much to us, and fiction was the least unacceptable way to do so. But somewhere around senior year of high school, we lost access to Infinity Smashed and its people, and with that, we completely lost that deep inner driving force. We still wrote, but it wasn't the same. We'd lost our fire, and we stayed that way (with rare, brief sparks) for almost fifteen years.
Without that visceral desire to record, I had no choice but to learn craft and business, to learn to write stories I had no deep personal investment in, to sell them without shame or self-consciousness. As the years passed, I told myself that I was better for it. I passed off the old drive as overemotional teenage zeal that I'd thankfully grown out of. I could be objective now, murder my darlings now, write PROPERLY (logically, coldly) now. As I put it in the Greatest American Novel of ALL TIME!, I could write real plot and build real worlds now, not pump out self-indulgent drek. Sure, I cared about my work... but I cared about it the same way I would if I were a carpenter wanting to build a good sturdy chair.
This was the style of writing that most everyone encourages, because indeed, it's a necessity if you want to SELL your art without a mental breakdown. If you're intensely emotionally involved with your writing, you'll resist needed edits, get nervous about criticism. Everything becomes personal, and personal is the enemy of business.
It wasn't until the end of 2019, with what would become Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting, that our brain started reconnecting to the old Infinity Smashed world again... with intense results. After over a decade of craft writing, I was unprepared for the return of the old drive: the dreams, the overwhelming, blissful compulsion to make, make, make, the inability to murder my darlings. Suddenly I was emotionally involved again... which meant I could feel INTENSE self-consciousness about my work again. It's far easier to make politically correct work when it's not personal, but now EVERYTHING was personal.
And I couldn't go back to the blissful keyboard-slamming of my youth. I was a professional now. I had a paycheck to earn, readers to please, and some mild Internet fame that painted a big target on my back. Furthermore, my old process of writing was deeply unhealthy--a complete tuning out of all consensus reality, a refusal to eat or sleep. No way was I returning to that!
I managed to bull on despite this for a couple years, but eventually I had to face reality. The combo of the COVID pandemic and the increasing realization that not only was I a prime target for trashing, but that if I did, I was now too emotionally involved to avoid a total downspiral, led me to lock up most of my writing. (Though at the time, I didn't understand WHY I felt so suddenly raw and oversensitive. I'd been writing and selling it for years! What the hell was my problem?! At the time, I blamed it on myself, culture wars, and COVID stress, but even then, it felt like an incomplete answer. It was; I wasn't ready to admit the power Infinity Smashed still held, that I wasn't as objective and rational as I wanted to be. Infinity Smashed breaks my ideas of how my mind and how reality work; accepting that requires letting go of cherished illusions and embracing parts of myself I was/am deeply ashamed of.)
Now I've had a couple years to start putting my brain back together, try and come to a new balance between professional craft and personal passion. I still don't know if I've got it down yet, but at least I don't feel stuck and on the verge of a breakdown. And once again, like the beat-up old junker forever being tinkered with in the yard, Infinity Smashed's engine will roar to life and it'll start chugging along in a new form. Part of its nature is to be forever reinvented, leading to our joke that we'll finish the damn thing on our deathbed.
And however lumpy and deformed a darling this project is, that's part of why it's so important. Infinity Smashed has always defied polish and political expediency. It's full of warts and hideousness, and that's what we WANT to remember, about ourself and our work.
It's natural to be forgotten over time, but damned if we'll be ERASED. Not by others, and not by ourselves.
Our comics and Infinity Smashed are our attempt to prevent that from happening.
I do my best to write well, obviously. I take pride in my craft, and many stories I write are craft stories: I had an idea/prompt/commission, I tried to write it as best I could, and it made me a little money. But I only started making craft stories as an adult; as kids, we overwhelmingly wrote Infinity Smashed, and we wrote it because we felt a deep inner drive to do so. We needed to record these people who meant so much to us, and fiction was the least unacceptable way to do so. But somewhere around senior year of high school, we lost access to Infinity Smashed and its people, and with that, we completely lost that deep inner driving force. We still wrote, but it wasn't the same. We'd lost our fire, and we stayed that way (with rare, brief sparks) for almost fifteen years.
Without that visceral desire to record, I had no choice but to learn craft and business, to learn to write stories I had no deep personal investment in, to sell them without shame or self-consciousness. As the years passed, I told myself that I was better for it. I passed off the old drive as overemotional teenage zeal that I'd thankfully grown out of. I could be objective now, murder my darlings now, write PROPERLY (logically, coldly) now. As I put it in the Greatest American Novel of ALL TIME!, I could write real plot and build real worlds now, not pump out self-indulgent drek. Sure, I cared about my work... but I cared about it the same way I would if I were a carpenter wanting to build a good sturdy chair.
This was the style of writing that most everyone encourages, because indeed, it's a necessity if you want to SELL your art without a mental breakdown. If you're intensely emotionally involved with your writing, you'll resist needed edits, get nervous about criticism. Everything becomes personal, and personal is the enemy of business.
It wasn't until the end of 2019, with what would become Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting, that our brain started reconnecting to the old Infinity Smashed world again... with intense results. After over a decade of craft writing, I was unprepared for the return of the old drive: the dreams, the overwhelming, blissful compulsion to make, make, make, the inability to murder my darlings. Suddenly I was emotionally involved again... which meant I could feel INTENSE self-consciousness about my work again. It's far easier to make politically correct work when it's not personal, but now EVERYTHING was personal.
And I couldn't go back to the blissful keyboard-slamming of my youth. I was a professional now. I had a paycheck to earn, readers to please, and some mild Internet fame that painted a big target on my back. Furthermore, my old process of writing was deeply unhealthy--a complete tuning out of all consensus reality, a refusal to eat or sleep. No way was I returning to that!
I managed to bull on despite this for a couple years, but eventually I had to face reality. The combo of the COVID pandemic and the increasing realization that not only was I a prime target for trashing, but that if I did, I was now too emotionally involved to avoid a total downspiral, led me to lock up most of my writing. (Though at the time, I didn't understand WHY I felt so suddenly raw and oversensitive. I'd been writing and selling it for years! What the hell was my problem?! At the time, I blamed it on myself, culture wars, and COVID stress, but even then, it felt like an incomplete answer. It was; I wasn't ready to admit the power Infinity Smashed still held, that I wasn't as objective and rational as I wanted to be. Infinity Smashed breaks my ideas of how my mind and how reality work; accepting that requires letting go of cherished illusions and embracing parts of myself I was/am deeply ashamed of.)
Now I've had a couple years to start putting my brain back together, try and come to a new balance between professional craft and personal passion. I still don't know if I've got it down yet, but at least I don't feel stuck and on the verge of a breakdown. And once again, like the beat-up old junker forever being tinkered with in the yard, Infinity Smashed's engine will roar to life and it'll start chugging along in a new form. Part of its nature is to be forever reinvented, leading to our joke that we'll finish the damn thing on our deathbed.
And however lumpy and deformed a darling this project is, that's part of why it's so important. Infinity Smashed has always defied polish and political expediency. It's full of warts and hideousness, and that's what we WANT to remember, about ourself and our work.
It's natural to be forgotten over time, but damned if we'll be ERASED. Not by others, and not by ourselves.
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Or maybe it's just we tend to have storytastic friends. :p
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Yes!!!
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thank you for writing about this. I haven’t been on your or any DW in a long time, but it’s nice to see you posting, & really helpful to hear your thoughts about this kind of thing.
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I feel pretty lucky that I have a little constellation of related but different things I do for money: comics, zines, fiction prose, essays, and library research, cataloging, and archiving which helps FUEL those essays. It lets me switch around when one of the things stops working for me, which is how I was able to get away with losing the ability to write most fiction for two years!
I also love how different people are fans of different parts of my work. Some people are fiction fans, some are essay fans, others are all about the comics.
It's good to see you around again. Hope things are okay. :)