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In an alarmingly short amount of time I will post the part of this Patreon launch I am both most-excited and most-anxious about – the first publicly-available material from my 2010 National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) novel, which has since been through several rounds of edits and expansion.
This superhero story has been with me since 1994, when I scrawled the title “Crisis Team” longhand on composition paper at seven in the morning before being picked up for Masterman to attend 8th grade. It became fodder for English class writing assignments, and later the first thing I rushed to type on my first Word Processor with a screen and memory. I used to carry a binder of it around with my school books, handing it to Gina for a read in Health Class.
After a few years of carrying it with me, its name became my email handle, which then morphed to Krisis with a K when I found that Crisis was often already taken.
Over the years I got in the habit of constantly rewriting the first chapter – updating it as a proof of concept. Of what, I’m not sure, since I never once would follow through with a second chapter or an outline. Perhaps it was just my way of keeping the story fresh for myself.
In 2010, two factors conspired to make me finally get past the first chapter. I had just read (and heard) Eric Smith’s Textual Healing and was suddenly inspired to write my own fiction. And, Gina had thrown down the gauntlet that she was attempting a NaNoWriMo book and that I should do the same.
Finally, I sat down to think about more than the first chapter. Who were these people? What was this world? How would it change as the result of people with super powers emerging? Were they just emerging, or had they been around for a long time.
I was energized by the questions and dashed the book out in 30 days. Yet, having finished the first draft, I sunk back into old habits – I’ve been revising it for six years rather than writing more.
There’s a start-up saying – “better shipped than perfect.” It’s fine that the end goal of writing a book is publishing a book, physically or digitally, but publishing requires something resembling perfection – and perfection is my eternal foe. The way I got the novel out of my head was to give myself permission to write badly for a month just to get it on paper. The way I’m going to get the novel out into the world is to give myself permission to post my working draft here for you all to read, knowing there are still changes both small and large to be made before it reaches a final, printed state.
I am so anxious and excited for you to read it.
In the gap, WildStorm quickly thrust WildCATs Trilogy, a three-issue mini-series from newly-poached Marvel young gun Jae Lee. It took just six months to complete (that’s sarcasm, by the way), and was accompanied by a single-issue Special #1 from Lee’s remarkable feel-alike protegé Travis Charest (which explicitly states that it fits prior to Trilogy).
Performance Notes:
Deathblow was the third book in Jim Lee’s trio of WildStorm launch titles, introducing his own analog to The Punisher – one of his famous runs as a penciller at Marvel in the late 80s.