What are the chances that Freakangels will get adapted to a TV show or film?

mattgoldey

FAQ: I don’t get to decide what gets made into a tv series or film.  I cannot, I’m afraid, cause people to give me money for things by magic or force of will.  Because, let’s face it, if I could, you’d be part of the slave army building my hundred-mile-high golden revolving statue right now.

I’m glad we got that straightened out.

How particular do you think new authors should be about which publishing house they get published through?

misterwil-son

New authors should be more particular about how many complimentary copies of the book they get (and what it looks like), because that’s your calling card to other publishers, to show that someone else gambled their money on you.  That’s the trick.  Getting published once is often the biggest, toughest hurdle.

So, having just finished the slipcase/box-set of The Sandman that I got for Christmas… what are the chances Vertigo will do something equally lovely for Transmetropolitan? It definitely deserves the box set treatment.

drewsof

You have to understand that I’m not the publisher, and I cannot cause these things to happen.  THE SANDMAN was a best-selling, critically-acclaimed work that forms the backbone of the mainstream adult comics canon.  TRANSMETROPOLITAN was a fairly obscure, nicely drawn container for a bunch of swearing.  I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Howdy. I just wanted to clamour about "How to Burn Water". After all, you are the reason why I own and enjoy using a mandoline. And why I always keep a small jar of fresh cow tears in my cupboard. So a proper manly cookbook with a beard that would curbstomp my wife’s namby-pamby jamieolivers would really be appreciated.

phuzzy

No plans for the occasionally joked-about cookbook HOW TO BURN WATER.  But I will give you this:

STUPID LEMON CHICKEN

I had two skinless chicken breasts and no idea what to do with them.  So I did this:

Find a bottle of white wine.  Remember the rule: don’t cook with anything you wouldn’t drink.  So drink some.

Now get a roasting tin.  Throw a large glass of the wine into it.  Squeeze one lemon’s worth of juice into it.  Stir.  Throw some herbs in — I used thyme and chives.  I grab some chives and a pair of scissors and just snip half-inch lengths of chive in to the pan.  Stir it all again.  Lay the chicken breasts in.  Go away for five minutes and drink some more wine.  Come back.  Flip the breasts over.  Wow, that sounds weird.  Put them in the oven at 190 C (do the conversion yourself, you have the internet.)  Every five minutes, open the oven and spoon some of the liquid in the pan over the chicken.  And then drink some more wine. Until 25 minutes have passed.  At which point it is cooked.  It is not only stupidly simply, but you’re well on your way to being drunk.  Excellent.

Hello Mr. Ellis, I apologize if you have already answered this, but what was it that made you want to write comic books?

wyokid

The riches, the glamour and the seductive charisma such a career supernaturally gifts one with.

However, back in the real world: I love visual narrative media, and comics are the purest kind.

This is something I get asked A LOT.  It seems to be a thing that really paralyses a lot of first-time comics writers, particularly ones coming from other media. What is the picture?  How do I find the right panel to describe?

A useful starting place might be something the actor and comics writer Nick Vince said, back in the early 90s. It comes from cinema, as did Nick, and it goes like this: imagine the panel as your “print moment.” The frame that captures the essence of the moment. Imagine, say, thirty seconds’ worth of film, and that your job is to overlay those thirty seconds of dialogue over a single frame pulled from that ribbon of film that best encapsulates what’s going on.

That’s a very mechanical way of looking at it, but it might get you started. You’re looking for the image that captures the moment.

You’re also, wherever possible, looking for an interesting image. But don’t confuse “interesting” with “splashy.” You’re still trying to serve the demands of storytelling, telling the story as clearly and simply as possible.  In most forms of narrative, each panel must have a relationship with the panels on either side of it.  You’re plotting out a sequence of motion in a series of stills.  Imagine it like that, and you may be able to get a better sense of how a story in comics might flow.  It’s not a perfect analogy, but it might be worth considering if this is something you’re having trouble with.  You’ll develop your own view, approach and methods as you go.  Everybody does.

I’ve been enjoying Crooked Little Vein a lot, but I was wondering what motivated the narrative decision to make your protagonist be (and I hope I’m phrasing this properly) an essentially conservative character. By that I mean he tends to react with hostility to the oddballs his work brings him in contact with, and then defends people who, while seemingly being more socially typical, demonstrate close-mindedness.

alanmcmillian

The truth, I think, is that most people are essentially conservative characters, and I found it interesting to try and develop a character like that towards some kind of acceptance of the real face of the modern Western world without betraying his basic nature.  People can and/or should change during a story, but they shouldn’t transcend into completely new people, especially not in a short book.  My note to myself on McGill’s passage through the story was something like “Trix doesn’t magically fuck enlightenment into him.”

Aside from stuff Phillip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson, what’s on your must-read cyberpunk novels and comics list?

printedvelvet

Okay.  Deep breath.

Cyberpunk, also known as Radical Hard SF or The Movement, was born around 1980 and didn’t survive that decade.  (Some people map the end to 1992, with Neal Stephenson’s SNOW CRASH.)  Philip K Dick had no affiliation with the movement, and was dead by 1982, two years before William Gibson published NEUROMANCER.  People tend to associate Dick with cyberpunk because of BLADE RUNNER, particularly its visuals, which had nothing to do with the novel, but were so strikingly of the speculative zeitgeist that in 1982 William Gibson had to get out of his cinema seat and leave the screening because it looked too much like what was in his head.

Phil Dick was pre-cyberpunk.  He, JG Ballard and Alfred Bester were major touchstones for the movement.  Ballard’s CRASH and Bester’s STARS MY DESTINATION and THE DEMOLISHED MAN are essential.  Also John Brunner’s STAND ON ZANZIBAR, THE SHEEP LOOK UP, and, most importantly for cyberpunk’s ancestry, THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER.

(EDIT to note: yes, and about a hundred others, I’m sure.  These are the ones that occurred to me that day.)

Of the cyberpunk period itself, you will need William Gibson’s first trilogy, NEUROMANCER, COUNT ZERO and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE.  Also, Bruce Sterling’s THE ARTIFICIAL KID and ISLANDS IN THE NET.  Richard Kadrey’s METROPHAGE.  Rudy Rucker’s SOFTWARE and WETWARE.  Pat Cadigan’s TEA FROM AN EMPTY CUP.  That should keep you going for a bit.

I couldn’t help but notice your recommendations of cyberpunk writers a couple days back were all men. Are there any female writers of cyberpunk (or sci-fi) in general you recommend? Are there any that have influenced your own work?

lizvseverything

Um, Pat Cadigan is in that list, and she’s female.

A partial, off-the-top-of-my-head list of female speculative fiction writers whose work I’ve liked would include:

Ursula LeGuin, obviously, who’s influenced everybody.  Seek out and start off with THE LATHE OF HEAVEN, if you haven’t already.

Pamela Zoline.  Carol Emshwiller.  Mary Soon Lee (one of the single best short stories in sf in the 00s was her “Pause Time”).  CJ Cherryh’s early book DOWNBELOW STATION is warmly remembered.

Doris Lessing’s SHIKASTA had a *huge* effect on me.  Very influential, I think.

Cherie Priest, Elizabeth Bear, Cat Valente… I’ve written book blurbs for two of these, and those two have also written on my website, which it suddenly occurs to me you don’t read…!

Kate Wilhelm.  Mary Shelley counts.  Probably so does Angela Carter, at least in my head.

Lauren Beukes, of course, who is also a friend.

Obviously incomplete and written in two minutes, but a start.

Sir, let me start by saying you are awesome. Thank you very much for giving Transmetropolitan to the masses. My question to you is this: How best do you deal with writer’s/artistic block and what tips would you give anyone going through such annoyances?

mcchubbin

I don’t believe there is such a thing.  There is only being unable or unwilling to write the thing that’s in front of you, and, consciously or unconsciously, looking for ways to not write it.  Some people on the internet argue with me about this sometimes, or denounce me from the cheap seats.  All the fucks I give: see if you can detect them.

The trick — and it’s imperfect and can take a while, but — is simply to write something else.  Don’t let your hands go cold.  Don’t let yourself stop thinking.  Shift to something different.  I think it was Robert Silverberg who used to do his (type)written correspondence on bad days, and then “trick” himself into writing by slipping manuscript paper into the machine once his fingers were flying.

It’s about letting your backbrain chew on the problems while your frontbrain is amused by the new and shiny things.  Find an essay to write.  Do some flash fiction, or a short story, or a novelette about dancing gravediggers written in the style of Cormac McCarthy.  An audiobook about dirigible vampires who shit sexy babies down chimneys.  Whatever.  I’ve read of several writers from eras past who would type out passages from their favourite writers, to get a feeling of what it’s like to make sentences like that.

Write something else.  Anything else.  Either you’ll solve the problem in the background, or get the taste back for what you’re stuck on — or, guess what, maybe that whole thing was dead and you were just shoving electrodes up it to make it twitch in an awful semblance of life the whole time.  I mean, that happens.  It doesn’t mean you were blocked, it means that you were zapping a big stinky corpse with all your electricity and wondering why it wasn’t sitting up and calling you Mummy.  It was dead.  Bury it and never speak of what you did to it again.

You’re a writer — or an artist — or you’re not.  It sounds harsh, but, seriously, not everyone’s wired for this stupid life.  If you think you are, then you have to write around the block.  Anything that takes your fancy.  Just get words happening.  The rest will follow.  Best of luck.

I’ve got one for you, actually, though it’s a bit pedantic, I suppose. You said you wrote GUN MACHINE (which is fucking fantastic) on your iPad. With what, howfore, and why? I find jumping between an open Pages doc and Safari a royal pain, for instance, and given the amount of research you did, I’m wondering how you negotiated it. Also: keyboard? program? And any other details you care to share. Me, I’m lost without my laptop.

ruckawriter

Greg Rucka, everybody.  When you pass out from stark boredom three lines into this one, blame him.

Okay, so, yes, I did write a chunk of GUN MACHINE on the iPad.  I did it in a couple of different ways, depending on my mood.  To write material on your iPad, you need:

*  A keyboard case.  I have the Logitech Zagg Keyboard Case for iPad, which is a nice keyboard inside a padded aircraft-grade aluminium shell, that connects via Bluetooth.  It is very good.

*  Dropbox.  Dropbox Dropbox Dropbox.  Seriously.

*  I have two basic word programs on the iPad that both pretty much do the same thing.  PlainText and iA Writer.  I still can’t decide which one I like best.  Probably PlainText.  They both have their annoyances.  But what they do is create (inside your Dropbox) a plain old .txt file.  If I was writing something that I needed to check the research on later, or something that I felt was going to need a polish later, I’d just bang it down in PlainText.  Writing in .txt makes me take another look at it before it goes into the manuscript.

*  For actual finished work, I open Quickoffice HD Pro, which uses and creates Microsoft Word doc files, which is what I submit manuscripts in.  Again, it’s seamless with Dropbox.  I can write on the iPad in the main manuscript with full comfort.

*  When I’m mobile with iPad-only and I am stuck for research but want to get a thing done — well, I can simply keep Quickoffice running in the background and launch the Evernote app, which is where my book research lives, organised by folder.  Or I can launch it on my iPhone, for that matter, because where I go, the phone goes, and when I’n writing it’s usually propped next to the work machine anyway, picking up messages, playing a podcast and/or running a news stream of some kind.  (Twitter, or Reedlines, or similar.)

*  Why do I do this?  I’ve always hated lugging laptops around, and have always looked for efficient mobile solutions.  I had one of those early Asus netbooks.  I had a Treo.  Hell, in the 90s, I had a Handspring Visor.  And I figured that since the iPad was light, instant-on, built for wifi and supposedly fucking magical, I should be able to make it work as a mobile work solution without having to screw around with laptops and crappy batteries and all the rest of it.  In the mornings, I just grab the iPad and case and go out into the back garden and sit at the table and am ready to go.  I go back to the office, wake up the laptop, and thanks to Dropbox everything I’ve done is already there.  It works for me.

How did the idea for Nextwave (Or is it NEXTWAVE?) come about? I’m just getting into the series and it’s pretty much one of the most amazing comics I’ve ever read.

afriendtosell

Oh, god, that was a few years ago.  Nick Lowe at Marvel wanted me to do a book in his office.  I know I’d been thinking about something Brian Bendis said, about hoping his work on the AVENGERS comic would start a conversation about that kind of superhero-team comic.  This was, what, seven years after THE AUTHORITY and Grant’s JLA and all, at this point, so it was a fair conversation to have.  And Brian was presenting his take on that.  Brian’s very interested in David Mamet, and Mamet’s often used as a stick to beat him with, but his approach in AVENGERS is probably easier to understand as being like Tarantino going to crime fiction in RESERVOIR DOGS — turning a greying “action genre” formula thing into a hyper-verbal ensemble piece.

So, well, I obviously couldn’t do that.  I wanted to engage that work in conversation, but I had to come in from another angle.  And since this was to be a company-owned book, and my job at Marvel was really to service their extant creative library, coming up with something brand new would have been counterproductive.

Which brought me to this: taking just a ton of those old characters and ideas that were currently useless to Marvel, throwing them in a pot like thepotboiler catmeat they were, and just driving them down over high heat until you had something pure.  Or at least concentrated.  While watching FLCL on repeat.  Just boiling and mixing and throwing more old Marvel ideas in there and remixing and sampling and remixing some more.  Taking out all the sticky tendon and unmelted bone of, you know, plot, and character, and continuity, and anything else that people think should belong in superhero comics.

And that would be my contribution to the conversation.  There’s a quote that’s stuck with me for, oh, 25 years, that I’ve used a few times to describe a certain kind of work, and it was probably never more fitting than used for NEXTWAVE.  It was my motto for the job as I was writing it.  Nik Cohn describing “Tutti Frutti” by Little Richard:

“A glorious burst of incoherent noise.”

I doubt I ever lived up to it, but that was the target.

i have no idea if i’ve answered the question NEXTWAVE IS LOVE send

Also Stuart Immonen is a genius.

[The FAQ category]

What are your opinions on the quandary of downloading scans of comics due to a Trade Paperback’s lack of back matter. I recently bought a copy of the original 1997 Helix comics single of Transmetropolitan and loved your essay in the back. The TPBs lack this and I want to read them all. I hate illegal downloading, but lust after your mouth-words. Guide me.

nickgonzo

Is this something I really have to have an opinion about?  If I’d wanted that stuff in the trades, I’d have had them put in there.  They were just ephemera for the monthly readers, for as long as we had use of those editorial pages.  But I certainly can’t stop you from downloading scans, and would really have no interest in doing so.  I don’t police my readers.

So long as you’re not making new money off me, I won’t track you down and have eels violently introduced into your innards through whatever human portal presents itself.  How’s that?

The new book, Gun Machine, is rather short for a novel at 320ish pages. Crooked Little Vein wasn’t all that long either. Has this been a conscious decision on your point to write shorter books or have you found, so far, that this has been the appropriate length to get your stories on paper?

genziel

GUN MACHINE came out around 85 to 90 thousand words long, which is almost 40,000 words longer than CROOKED LITTLE VEIN.  I’ll never be Neal Stephenson (in a great many ways).  I tend towards concision.  They end where they want to end.  I suspect the one I’m currently writing will be about as long as GUN MACHINE.  I dream of (being able to afford to spend several years) writing a huge meandering doorstop like AGAINST THE DAY, but I seem not to be that kind of writer.

(Also: I think I’d actually question “rather short for a novel.”)

Greg Rucka had an interesting further comment on this:

ruckawriter said: 90K novel is not “short.” I’ve read 60K novels that read as if they’re three times as long, and that’s not a good thing. Over 120K, in my experience, and the publisher gets nervous. And raises the price, to boot.

baffledjailbirdisin asked: Hi Warren, I was wondering if you know of or are talking about some alternative adaptation projects for Transmetropolitan? I understand that seeing it on the big screen is at present too big a budget to even consider, but do you have any thoughts on how you might like to see it adapted otherwise? If so, how good are the chances of this happening?

We don’t take TRANSMET out, but very occasionally persons in the film and tv industries request conversations with us about it.  And I mean very occasionally, because it’s an obscure work.  We haven’t, since the days of Patrick Stewart optioning it, met with anyone we’d consider the best fit for the material.  TRANSMET is not a thing we sell options on for the hell of it.  There are other works of mine that I’m happy to see other people adapt, just to see what happens.  TRANSMET is not one of them.  It’ll go to the people who will keep it intact, or it won’t go out at all, and either result is entirely acceptable to Darick and I.  I don’t feel that any book has to be “legitimised” by film or tv for it to have been a successful work.  And, at this point, the book is between ten and fifteen years old, depending on how you measure it, and enquiries as to the rights are growing ever fewer.  So, you know, don’t hold your breath or anything.

[FAQs passim]

How does do you write dialogue so well? I’ve always heard other writers say that all it comes down to is listening to how people talk and mimicking that in your writing, but most of time I feel like what I have my characters say either falls flat or isn’t going to be interesting/witty/funny/what have you.

afriendtosell

I’m ignoring the first bit, because my dialogue isn’t great.

Dialogue for comics is a hugely different animal to dialogue in books or film, but here’s a couple of general things to think about:

1) You can’t force being funny.  Forced funny is never funny.

2) When you have a character talking, have two things you know about their lives in your head as you let them talk.  Two things that make them what they are.  What was their childhood like?  What was their first job?  Do they spend a lot of time alone?  Are they guarded around people?  Because dialogue is about moving information around and expressing character.  What you know about them affects the way they talk.  Take a book you like — or, hell, even one you don’t — and select a passage of dialogue, and see what you can learn about those characters from the way they speak.  (And, on top of that, see if the way they speak changes during the course of the book.)

2a) Once you know what they think is funny, or what’s funny *about* them, their dialogue will get funny.

I hope that helps a little bit.

Hiya. What kind of reading vs. writing ratio do you normally have? (Sometimes it seems like you cruise the internet for the amazing and absurd while your beard writes the books. Also, if that’s actually the case, what’s the best way to make a beard?)

ericdittloff

There is no ratio.  People tend to look for structure in my working life, and there isn’t a lot.  Reading is work.  Writing is work.  Communication is work.  Research is work.  I work from when I get up to when I go to bed.  I’m fairly stupid, and writing passable pages doesn’t come easily, so this is a 24/7 gig for me, just to be competent.  All this means that it’s really hard to separate the elements of the day out enough to be able to see a ratio.  It’s all The Job.