Gerard Jones's Blog

I'm moving all my blogging back to my first and eponymous blog, Gerard Jones. If I'm going to concentrate my writing energies on the book, I should at the very least consolidate my potential web distractions. I'll be running excerpts from this book there, starting in a day or two.

Well, it worked. I finished that draft of my book before the end of October. While I was plowing through it, I imagined that I'd be here on November 1, crowing about it. But here we are 1.75 months beyond November 1 and I haven't said a word.

See, there are four ways I got it done:

1. I just got really, really sick of not having it done.

2. I enlisted the encouragement and nagging of friends.

3. With the help of one of those friends I created powerful incentives for myself—things I wanted to do very much that I could do only if I met my goal.

4. I stayed off my blog, my Facebook page, Twitter, and every other "internet presence" I have. (The teasers for the graphic-novel installments below are auto-posted by Mark Badger; I don't even have to look at them.)

The last of those tools was so helpful than once I was free to come back to my blog and strut, I didn't want to. I wanted to keep my focus going into the rewrite. Now, hardly a week goes by that I don't hear or read someone telling me that a writer these days needs to be running a regular blog and keeping a lively presence on all the social media. Maybe that'll make sense when I have a book about to come out and not a book doing everything it can think of not to get written. But when I look around, most of the writers I admire for their productivity and quality don't keep up much of an "internet presence." I just looked at Michael Chabon's website: a caricature of his latest book's cover, a skeletal appearances calendar, a few goofy pictures, and three uncollected essays, complete with typos. Why does he have no blog, no news, no discussion? Why does he have no Facebook page or Twitter account? Because the little fucker's getting his work done, that's why.

That's why I'm not posting today. And why I'll be back soon to tell you more about why I'm not posting then either.

Just plugging an interview with me about the new graphic novel and related social issues on Examiner.com by Sona Avakian. It was fun to do, and I like how she pulled it together. It's here.

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Some book signings are good because customers are lined up out the door and the store owner sells enough copies to pay the rent for the month. Others are good because interesting people show up and have time to talk. More salon than signing, they're good reminders of why we do the work.

Mark Badger and I signed copies of Networked at Leef Smith's Mission Comics and Art in San Francisco a few days ago. We weren't expecting a big crowd, not on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon with the Giants in the playoffs, not the day after the Mission District had spent itself on the literary bacchanal of LitCrawl. But the people who came carved out the time to sit around and talk: people connected to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, a student of Mark's at the Academy of Art, the publisher of an arts magazine who grew up on my's comics for DC and Malibu, a young comics artist showing his sketchbook, a video game designer, and a local writer and journalist named Sona Avakian who may or may not write about us for the SF Examiner.

Leef's store is an airy and nicely lit space, an art gallery as well as a comics shop, one of the nicest places to sit around and talk in the Mission District as an Indian summer afternoon turned to evening. We talked about art and superheroes and social networks and privacy laws and old comic book artists and generational changes and Guatemala and Chad and digital drawings and nonprofits versus for-profits and Cleveland sports and elections and video games. Leef sold a few copies of Networked and gave away some free comics. Mark did a pen and ink drawing of Batman. I signed some old copies of Guy Gardner. Then some of us went for Indian food and learned that the Giants had come from behind in the ninth inning to win game three.

And that, as much as sales figures and lines out the door, is reason enough to write and draw.

We'll be doing another signing on Saturday the 16th, at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games in Oakland. No idea who'll show up or what we'll talk about, but we're looking forward.

Tomorrow night, Saturday the 9th, from 7:15-8:15 PM, Elizabeth Bernstein and I will be emceeing the San Francisco Writers Grotto reading at LitCrawl, which is basically a gigantic literary block party on around Valencia Street in SF, the concluding event to LitQuake. The theme is "Disobedience" and the readers will be Marianna Cherry, Rachel Howard, Kathryn Ma, James Nestor, Justine Sharrock, and Meghan Ward. And note how we honor diversity: we made sure to include one Asian-American and one male.

Then Mark Badger and I will be doing two signings for our new graphic novel from NBM Publishing, Networked: Carabella on the Run. The first, Sunday Oct. 10 from 5:00-8:00 PM, is at Mission Comics and Art in San Francisco. Mission is a relatively new entry in the retail community, a combination comics shop and art gallery right off Valencia Street, the main hipster artery of Northern California, and it's already becoming well known for its music gigs, art openings and literary readings.

Six days later, from 2:00-5:00 PM on Saturday Oct. 16, we'll be across the bay at Dr. Comics and Mr. Games in Oakland. In some ways Dr. Comics is the opposite of Mission, a venerable citizen of the quiet, classy Piedmont neighborhood that sells not comics and cutting-edge art but comics and board games. But it's legendary for its comprehensive selection and that great rarity in comics shops, a pleasant and helpful staff. You can read people raving about them on Yelp here.

It's all a welcome break from grinding through this first complete draft of The Undressing of America, which I'm supposed to finish in about two weeks. Drop by if you get a chance and wish me luck!

Although it is undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed must maintain a presence in the blogosphere, it is also undeniably true that in this competitive, interactive, media-driven era every writer who hopes to succeed has to get his goddamn work done. Which is an easy fact to ignore as the rationalizations to blog and tweet and facebook come thick and fast, and so we find ourselves in that rue-inducing cycle of never finishing our books because we're so busy promoting the books that we hope to sell once we finish them.

Sometimes it takes an ultimatum to get us to open that internet-blocking application (MacFreedom for me) and withdraw from the constant fix of networking and stay buried deep in that Word file until the writing is done. Bringing with it relief and excitement and fear, such an ultimatum has come to me. Terms were offered and I've accepted: by late October I have to finish the first full draft of this book. That's a lot of writing. It's not a sure thing. But if I succeed I'll rewarded by far more than a sense of accomplishment, and if I fail I'll miss an opportunity to pursue something that I very much want to pursue. It's what I needed, this combination of carrot and stick; they say rewards are more effective than punishment for creative motivation, but I know from experience that it's too easy to be philosophical about not getting something extra, and that what I also need to keep pushing me is the fear of losing something I truly value.

So I won't be here, or anywhere else in the cyberworld, much at all until November. The little promos for the new graphic novel will keep popping up on this page, but then the truth is that I'm not even doing those myself. I might run an excerpt or two from the book as I go, just to prove to myself that I'm really getting there. But otherwise I'll just be writing. I'll be writing and writing and fixating singlemindedly on the end of October.

I'm optimistic. I think I'll be very happy at the end of next month. But I know too that there is vast potential for frustration and self-recrimination, and in the late hours when I'm exhausted and seeking any excuse not to keep pushing toward the end of the draft, I know it will be that possibility that makes me start another cup of coffee and keep going.

Wish me luck?

I was sitting at a bar and grill on Michigan Avenue, eating a blue-cheese loaded iceberg wedge and drinking a basil-infused gimlet, taking notes in my little Moleskine notebook while the guide to the Chicago Art Institute that I'd been using as a bookmark lay on the table next to it. In small-talking the waiter I said I was from San Francisco and I'd come to Chicago because my son was attending G-Fest, a convention for Godzilla fans. We shared a smile: oh, those crazy kids, ha ha ha. Overall, I was doing a very good impersonation of an adult.

But ten days later I was at the San Diego Comic Con, and I wasn't with my son. True, I had a graphic novel to promote, one that sprang from a web comic commissioned by a nonprofit advocacy group. I could try to pretend that that's the only reason I was at Comic Con, but that wouldn't explain the twenty-six straight years I'd been there before this one.

I get why my son loves Godzilla and all his fellow kaiju. And it's not just that he's huge and destructive and free of the constrictions of society and all those other virtues I wrote about in Killing Monsters. It's that he's junk. He's chuckled at by the rest of the world, and Nicky is part of a select group who understand that there's something valuable in that junk, who can tell you why the guy who directed Mothra is better than the guy who directed Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and why YMSF makes more accurate vinyl monster toys (or "figures," if you will) than Bandai and how the composer of the best Godzilla soundtracks consciously combined Western symphonic music with Japanese folk ballads and why the American Godzilla movie really sucks.

I was that way with comics before they had a cachet, when comic cons drew only a few thousand obsessive guys and a few dozen embarrassed girlfriends. I liked discovering artistry in a medium completely dismissed by the world at large. I liked being able to take one look at a comic book page and recognize the artist, and somehow it meant more that hardly anyone beyond the confines of that convention center would even know his name. It wasn't just about finding a community and setting myself apart, either, although those were both part of it. It was also about coming to rescue of the junk. It was about saving great junk from the garbage and telling those obscure artists and writers that someone noticed. And it was about discovering gems that lay right under the noses of the mavens of culture but that they could never recognize.

That's part of what's drawn me to The Undressing of America. Because while comics have gone cool and even Godzilla has his conventions and fanzines, no one is championing the confessional magazines. No one is arguing for the importance of true crime magazines. No one tells the stories of the men who created the tabloids. It isn't even that I like the things as works. Far more even than in superhero comics and monster movies, the glimmers of artistry there are lost in a sea of hack work. Read ten True Story articles in a row and my brain goes numb.

But as cultural forces they mattered. As historical capsules they're rich. As threads in the American story they deserve far more attention than they get. When cultural historians write about the history of magazines in the Twenties they wax about the New Yorker and Mencken and Time, with perhaps an obligatory nod to the Readers Digest and the Saturday Evening Post. But naive, tatty, neglected True Story reached more people than any of them and did at least as much to change the cultural and social landscape. I like digging them out from under the piles of better-respected magazines that have been stacked on top of them for decades. In comic-fan terms, I like discovering them at the back of the quarter box.

Although The Undressing of America plugs along, it's lately getting less attention in my life than this graphic novel that's just coming out, Networked: Carabella on the Run. Which I still find disorienting, because it wasn't so long ago that I thought I was out of the graphic novel and comic book business entirely. But people warned me: once you get comics in your blood, they said, you can never get them out.

I wrote a lot of comics from the late '80s well into the '90s, then started shifting toward nonfiction books and screenplays. After the Pokémon newspaper strip in 2000 I stopped writing comics entirely. But ten years later, here I am again. In my case, what pulled me back was a bit more substantial than just something in my blood. The mistake I made when I left comics was not severing all my social ties with them. I kept talking to Mark Badger, one of my favorite collaborators from my DC Comics days, thinking it was safe to talk about innocuous subjects like kids and politics and our respective careers.

Mark was mostly teaching and coding then, but he fiddled with comics occasionally, some for small publishers and some for political groups. For a couple of years I was writing a book about comics called Men of Tomorrow, so of course we talked about the old medium. We'd even say occasionally it would be fun to play with some of our old ideas, like that Haunted Man thing we did for Dark Horse Comics, although that usually felt like just one of those nostalgic things old friends say.

Then Mark started doing work for a nonprofit group called Privacy Activism. First they hired him to do the art on an interactive game on their website, and after he impressed them with that they started talking about a web comic to encourage high school kids to start thinking about issues like online privacy in their own lives. But Mark didn't feel like writing it himself, so he asked me if I'd like to play. The work would be light, he said. Just an ongoing comic strip, nothing ambitious.

But as soon as I started thinking in panels and balloons, the old fever kicked in. The story got longer, the characters got more interesting. "Hey, we could turn this into a graphic novel," we said. And suddenly there's no staying out anymore.

Where am I? The Central Valley of California has a real geography, of farm roads and rivers and cities, but the the long, thin twilight zone of Interstate 5 has only its own reference points: about an hour downwind from the doomed, stinking cattle of Harris Ranch, between the two closed state rest areas, past the towering diesel sign, still a long way from Starbucks.

I love driving through the valley for itself, but I may love this weird road more. I love the light and I love the wind. Coming out from under the cool, foggy July of San Francisco, I especially love the wind. Hot and solid, pushing on me and stirring me to push back. It makes me want to write, too. Notes on the book, a blog post typed in a parking lot and uploaded through a truck stop wi-fi.

I know a lot of people who find that the gray calm of San Francisco makes them want to draw inside—inside their offices and their heads—to write. I have a hard time keeping my focus and energy in gray calm. It's in the noisiest and most public places and the most aggressive weather that I find myself wanting to work. Maybe it's because, when I was young and felt myself trapped in a chilly fog of a life, writing was the way I found to push my way out and engage with the world. As private an act as it is, in my gut it excites me most when it pulls me out of myself. When it knocks me around and agitates me like the valley wind.

I go to Comic Con every year, but lately it's just been to hang out with my friend Joe and look through old yellowing comics and feel that sultry San Diego air. Oh, and the drive. I love driving alone down I-5 in the summer heat, staying at some shabby motel at the bottom of the big valley, then pushing through LA early the next morning. It's been a while since I had work to do there, but this year I do, both as the writer of a new graphic novel and as a comics historian. Another distraction from The Undressing of America, but it's always good to be reminded that there are actually people out there who like my work and want to hear what I have to say.

My schedule, if anyone's planning to be there and wants to look me up:

Thursday July 22:

1:00-2:30. Moderating a panel, More Fun with Siegel and Shuster, "a historic and revelatory panel about the misunderstood originators of superhero comics," in Room 26AB.

4:00-5:30. Signing copies of the just-released Networked: Carabella on the Run (and whatever else people want to bring up to be signed) at the NBM Publishing booth.

7:30-9:30. On a panel with a bunch of old writers and editors following the first showing of a new documentary, Secret Origin: The Story of DC Comics (in which I'm a talking head), Room 7A.

Friday July 23:

1:00-2:30. Signing at NBM again, this time with my artist pal Mark Badger alongside me.

5:30-7:00. Me and Mark at NBM again.

Saturday July 24:

10:30-12:00. Me, Mark, NBM.

1:30-2:30. On a "Comics Criticism" panel, Room 4.

5:30-7:30. Back to NBM.

Sunday July 25:

1:00-2:30. Final signing at NBM, if there still seems to be a market for it.

Look me up if you want to say hi!