Book revising and writs and blots

You probably thought that i had fallen through the wishing well, into the black void, out into the unexpected and lost from the land of the gnawing wall.

well I didn't.

(so far...)

In fact i've had a few busy months. Working and revision have taken up a good part of my time and I've just been lazy to tell you about it.
In fact, I spent most of august revising Morto and finding out that I needed to write an entire new section.
The thing just keeps getting bigger.
Fortunately I also feel it's getting better!
There's a lot of stuff put into this book. A lot of which is not entirely visible. There are a few experiments (in fact main storyline of the book is such a thing) in relation to plot devices and character construction that I'm curious to see how they work with the readers.

In august I revised most of the book. two thirds of it probably. I had a good rhythm and some discipline.

September however, it has been a different matter...

you see, I wanted to have it ready by the end of august... but i just couldn't do it. Especially when a new section needed to be added. I've got more than 120 pages of notes that I still need to type and there's probably some 30 or 40 more still to come...
Which is what I've been doing... slowly.

In any case, November is drawing dangerously close and i want to have empty headspace so that I can write something else on that month. Maybe even two new somethings... more on that later...

So, until then the plan is to more or less stick to this one, get it ready (come on! only 120 more pages of text to revise and some 10 or 20 more to write...) and get it out of the way.
As soon as the whole thing is typed and compiled I'm gonna print it out once again, read it again (no major revisions allowed just speelling and the odd sentence) along with whatever I deem necessary corrections, print it again and send it out to whatever book competition is running in portugal - as well as sending it to a few publishers.

So, I've got a month to do all that. Not as much as it seems.
Especially because October is going to be quite demanding work wise...

One of the problems that I've been having is this stifling of creativity that I sometimes feel while revising. I mean, for better or for worse, I jumped from revising Land Of Fog to revising Morto. And I miss writing something simple and short that gets out of the way in just a couple of days...
And I miss writing scripts...

So, yesterday, after a talk i had with a good friend of mine in Colombo's FNAC in Lisbon, I decided to write that Hulk story that can serve as a prequel to a larger series i'd envisioned a while ago.

I've called it Strange Ways and it's simply a chase sequence that will begin setting the stage for the Bruce Banner/Hulk relationship.
I envision the series as being a What If? type of story, ie, set outside the normal continuity.

The Incredible Hulk was probably the very first super-hero that I identified with.
Just a few days ago I was holding and showing a friend of mine the very first super-hero comic I ever bought and, you're right, it was an Incredible Hulk one.
I read it once again a couple of years ago and, even though it create an impact as big as that first time, it still retained all it's importance for me.
This is one of the things I've always enjoyed about comics. The ability to talk about the big themes in a perfectly simple and direct way.
I've read many Hulk stories through the years - and a few good ones - but I'm yet to see a series that really brings the character home.
I've liked Jeph Loeb's stories. The late seventies/early eighties (correct me if i'm wrong!) storyline where the Hulk is trapped in a labyrinthic dimension where each road takes him to a particular world, doomed (for a time at least...) to roam possibilities and strange existences.

This was my favourite time of the comic. Each story had some uniqueness to it and, in all of them, it was that crushing feeling of loneliness, of not belonging, of being an outsider that ran underneath everything. Even the episodic humour or the regular strangeness.

There were also a couple of "psychological type" comics that I enjoyed. Can't really remember which, but that's just me...
There have also been some stories that have tried to endow the series with as much realism as possible and, even though I think this is a good approach i think it doesn't fit the character entirely.

The Incredible Hulk is this wonderful bridge for the scientific mind to reach and make contact with the deeply ingrained emotions. In fact, Bruce Banner is the one who is lost, striving to find and regain his identity via the body which the Hulk so admirably represents. His story is pure hero quest. Only that his goal can only be on the inside.

It's also a story about purity. Purity of the mind. and purity of emotions - in their rawness, as expressed by the Hulk.

There are more things to say, of course, but I just don't want to reveal too much at this point.

In closing, I'd just want to say that, even after so many years and so many stories, I still haven't found one that has really filled and sated me. But I know I could write it.

So, what I did yesterday was to write down this short story, with very little dialogue, in hopes that this Portuguese Marvel penciller will read it and be interested and kind enough to want to know more about it.

Peace.