Shopping On Sunday

Once again, we ventured out into downtown, which is not too difficult to do since technically we live in downtown.

But this was our first extended foray into Queen Street West, which is, of course, where all the Cool Folks hang out. We sort of side-stepped that portion entirely, however, went Way Out West to the part of Queen Street dominated by galleries and art shops that tended to be frequented by actual professional artists. The Wife had already found a favorite store in the form of Terns, a quiet little spot, owned and operated by a nice lady who immediately remembered us from our last visit and was more than eager to help the Wife out with her quest for paper of a particular weight, that still had the firmness of a postcard, but would not jam up her new laser printer when she tried running it through.

This was followed by a walk past the various galleries to another, larger store called Woolfits where more paper was purchased in the interestes of continued experimentation. But before we actually got to Woolfits, we got sidetracked by a gallery that showed off some very interesting photos and we got to talking to the guy who ran it. The Wife initially just wanted to ask some questions about doing print runs using whatever equipment they obviously had on hand to their archival quality prints, but the talk ended up turning into artist talk, where the three of us stood around enjoying a meandering conversation and he eventually had to kick us out when he reminded us that it was Sunday and the stores we wanted to see would close soon. Still, it looks we’ve made a new interesting acquaintance, and he pointed the Wife towards some folks that might possibly be interested in exhibiting her stuff.

After that it was back to Home Ground, in the form of Bloor and this time, when we perused the evil, evil voluminous collections of Beguiling, I fell prey to the Siren Call I’d been trying to ignore and picked up this:

Yes, it was a book where the man himself discussed some the mechanics thinking about comics and divulged a little of his actual process. Of course, right in the introduction, he emphasized that this was not “Write comic books the Alan Moore way!” since he detested that kind of thing, and pointed out that while there was definitely room in the world for one Stan Lee or one John Buscema, there was definitely no call for trying to create an army of thousands that all did the Same Damn Thing.

What’s particularly interesting about this book however is the fact that Moore originally wrote it in 1985, when he was just on the cusp of forever changing the face of comics with The Watchmen. There’s an afterword that was written in 2003, and in it, amusingly, Moore basically negates most of what he wrote in 1985, insinuates that he was deluded and essentially says there’s really only one piece of advice when it comes to comic writing: Do what you haven’t done before. Find something you find uncomfortable to write about and write that. He dimisses all his earlier advice about plot, structure and transitional/character devices, insisting that anyone that’s serious about becoming a good writer is going to pick these skills up anyway, and eventually it’ll become unconscious instinct.

All I know is after reading all that, I came to one inescapable conclusion:

It’s time to finish that damn book.

Hopefully once the stuff arrives and I’ve gotten my Guitar Hero withdrawal out of my system, I’ll sit down and do just that. In typical Power Writing mode, which is probably not the right way to do a children’s book, but dammit, that’s the way it’s gonna’ be for me.