The Author
Hi, my name is Tony, and I'm an obsessive autistic guy with a way with words.
A few years ago, I realised that I had spent more than half my life thinking about books I might write, and not writing any of them. There were reasons of course: busy with work, busy with family, crippling self doubt. But the biggest one of all was that I knew I was a bit a weird (still am), and I wasn't sure people would know how to take me.
Not long after this, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This was around the time when it became popular to not use the term Asperger's Syndrome, and talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which, not having been Aspie for very long, didn't bother me much.
I'm Autistic. That's why I'm weird. And understanding that made a massive difference to my life. And it inspired me to start writing. And it gave me the confidence to write with my natural, quirky, authentic, autistic voice.
My weirdness comes from my Autism, but I've had to practice really hard to get this good at it. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Like most autistic people, growing up I found fitting in challenging. But unlike some, I loved the challenge. It was like a puzzle to me, working out how the pieces fit together. Neurotypical people are very weird. Some of the stuff you do makes no sense at all.
I know; it's mutual.
It took me a long time to work out the difference between quirky and embarrassing. I spent most of my teens, and a great deal of my 20's learning the difference by studying the concerned looks on the faces of the people around me. Which is hard when you don't read people's faces accurately.
I was the guy who said out loud what others chose to leave unsaid. Sometimes it got a laugh, and sometimes it got a groan. And occasionally it got worse. But I learned from these experiences, and I got better at reading the audience, and understanding their boundaries.
I think I've mostly got it now. The groans are fewer and further between. And my very helpful brain helps by constantly reminding me of all the times I got it wrong. Negative reinforcement can be very powerful when it's self-imposed. And I have lots of fodder to draw upon.
I was a weird guy, and I had no idea why.
Now I do, which I like. Knowledge helps.
This book is my weirdness expressing itself in story form. It's my obsessive interests all mashed together in the most convoluted way I could think of. There are many interests contained here; some of them are shallow and some are deep, and they're all fascinating to me.
This book is about the things I find weird and interesting and confusing about the world, and about people. I hope you'll find them interesting too. And maybe learn a thing or two about my weird lens on the world.
I might elaborate on some of these themes outside of The Hero Complex.
If I do, they'll be here:
tonyhuddy.com
If you're interested in that kind of thing.
A few years ago, I realised that I had spent more than half my life thinking about books I might write, and not writing any of them. There were reasons of course: busy with work, busy with family, crippling self doubt. But the biggest one of all was that I knew I was a bit a weird (still am), and I wasn't sure people would know how to take me.
Not long after this, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This was around the time when it became popular to not use the term Asperger's Syndrome, and talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which, not having been Aspie for very long, didn't bother me much.
I'm Autistic. That's why I'm weird. And understanding that made a massive difference to my life. And it inspired me to start writing. And it gave me the confidence to write with my natural, quirky, authentic, autistic voice.
My weirdness comes from my Autism, but I've had to practice really hard to get this good at it. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Like most autistic people, growing up I found fitting in challenging. But unlike some, I loved the challenge. It was like a puzzle to me, working out how the pieces fit together. Neurotypical people are very weird. Some of the stuff you do makes no sense at all.
I know; it's mutual.
It took me a long time to work out the difference between quirky and embarrassing. I spent most of my teens, and a great deal of my 20's learning the difference by studying the concerned looks on the faces of the people around me. Which is hard when you don't read people's faces accurately.
I was the guy who said out loud what others chose to leave unsaid. Sometimes it got a laugh, and sometimes it got a groan. And occasionally it got worse. But I learned from these experiences, and I got better at reading the audience, and understanding their boundaries.
I think I've mostly got it now. The groans are fewer and further between. And my very helpful brain helps by constantly reminding me of all the times I got it wrong. Negative reinforcement can be very powerful when it's self-imposed. And I have lots of fodder to draw upon.
I was a weird guy, and I had no idea why.
Now I do, which I like. Knowledge helps.
This book is my weirdness expressing itself in story form. It's my obsessive interests all mashed together in the most convoluted way I could think of. There are many interests contained here; some of them are shallow and some are deep, and they're all fascinating to me.
This book is about the things I find weird and interesting and confusing about the world, and about people. I hope you'll find them interesting too. And maybe learn a thing or two about my weird lens on the world.
I might elaborate on some of these themes outside of The Hero Complex.
If I do, they'll be here:
tonyhuddy.com
If you're interested in that kind of thing.
I first sent an email to myself with the text "The Hero Complex" in November 2018. As far as I can tell, that is when it started.
I can't remember what the initial idea was, but I know it was a superhero parody. It morphed into "Superheroes are fake" fairly quickly. Within a few days I was obsessed with the idea of a political satire about a fake superhero conspiracy. So obsessed that it completely replaced the story I was previously obsessing over (but not actually writing).
(That story, The Decline of Empire Saga, may never happen, and I am surprisingly OK with that, given how much time I spent on it without ever writing a publishable word.)
This story came with so much more opportunity. I loved it immediately, and I still do. More and more so every day. The more I write, the more there is to love about it. And the more there is to write, because this story keeps growing faster than I can write it.
That doesn't mean I think everyone will love it. Quite the Opposite. The fact that I love it means most people probably won't. That being my general experience throughout my life. I've always liked weird shit, so it's no surprise I've written something weird.
What I saw in this story was the chance to mix a superhero spoof with a political satire. I love good superhero spoofs. I love The Tick, and The Boys, and Mystery Men, and Kick Ass, and Howard the Duck (yes, even the terrible movie). And I love good satire. I love Terry Pratchett and Douglass Adams and Tom Robbins and Haruki Murakami and, and I love Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Animal Farm and Brave New World and Honk if You Are Jesus and and Catch 22 and that's the stuff that makes my brain buzz when I read.
It took longer than it should have to realize that this story had to be told as a graphic novel. I had not read a comic for over 20 years. I was never a huge comic nerd. I was a Star Wars nerd. I had all the toys. Kids envied my collection. I digress.
So over about a 2 year period I immersed myself in superhero comics and graphic novels. Spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours reading, absorbing, listening to anything I could that was relevant. And I took notes. Copious notes.
I have a LOT of notebooks. Many of them completely full. Every idea noted somewhere. I have no idea what's on most of those pages. I'll probably remember most of it when I read it, but right now I could not tell you very much about the contents. It's going to be fun going through it all.
After 2 years of research and ideas, I felt like I was ready to write.
The though of going through all those notebooks to find the good ideas was daunting, and I was moving house at the time, so stuff was being packed into boxes, and then the new house was supposed to be a temporary stop, but it stretched out longer because viruses and such happened. So all those boxes of notes never got unpacked properly. Just opened and rifled through occasionally. It was not ideal.
To get around this problem, I decided to write the first book off the top of my head, and see which ideas had stuck. There is a lot of detail that I made up on the fly, but the story itself I know is in those notebooks. Somewhere.
I also decided that the idea had gotten too big, and I was scared I'd fuck it up, so I decided to write a practice book. So I thought it would be fun to write the origin story of the main character.
Once I got serious about actually writing this one, I used a website called Airtable to sort all my ideas out. And the script itself is written in Google Docs. I've tried some specialist writing software, but none of it worked for me. Not the way I think.
Once I worked out how to sort my ideas out, I started writing. Sometimes I wrote in the database, and sometimes in the Google doc, and most days a bit of both, and gradually the story took shape. And the characters started becoming real people who I knew and understood, and they spoke their lines in my head and I dictated them. At least, that's how it felt some nights. The best nights.
Writing this story has been an amazing experience. I've always enjoyed writing, and often tortured myself to make everything I wrote as good as it could be. But most of my writing was functional, and much of it marketing related, and none of that was ever as satisfying as writing this story has been.
In writing this story, I've tapped into parts of my brain that I had barely seen before. I've pulled fragments of thoughts together from distant reaches of my memory, and mashed them together with on the fly research. And out came this torrent of words, most of which have been deleted, some of which I am very proud.
In between other responsibilities, I manage to write most days, mostly at night, and have done so for the past 2 years. If you do the math, it works out at about 50 publishable words an hour which is terribly slow.
I blame this on the ADHD. But that only accounts for the distractions and tangents. The obsessive perfectionism is probably more from the Autism side of the equation. And life is a factor too. Sometimes I'm too tired to write. Sometimes I write all night. But the later I write, the more I have to re-write, so maybe that's a false economy.
Anyway, after much grinding and re-writing and editing and obsessing, I've got an almost finished script of the Prologue of the story. And people are reading it. And some of them are liking it. If enough people like it, I'll keep writing it.
There is so much more story to tell.
TO BE CONTINUED...
I can't remember what the initial idea was, but I know it was a superhero parody. It morphed into "Superheroes are fake" fairly quickly. Within a few days I was obsessed with the idea of a political satire about a fake superhero conspiracy. So obsessed that it completely replaced the story I was previously obsessing over (but not actually writing).
(That story, The Decline of Empire Saga, may never happen, and I am surprisingly OK with that, given how much time I spent on it without ever writing a publishable word.)
This story came with so much more opportunity. I loved it immediately, and I still do. More and more so every day. The more I write, the more there is to love about it. And the more there is to write, because this story keeps growing faster than I can write it.
That doesn't mean I think everyone will love it. Quite the Opposite. The fact that I love it means most people probably won't. That being my general experience throughout my life. I've always liked weird shit, so it's no surprise I've written something weird.
What I saw in this story was the chance to mix a superhero spoof with a political satire. I love good superhero spoofs. I love The Tick, and The Boys, and Mystery Men, and Kick Ass, and Howard the Duck (yes, even the terrible movie). And I love good satire. I love Terry Pratchett and Douglass Adams and Tom Robbins and Haruki Murakami and, and I love Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Animal Farm and Brave New World and Honk if You Are Jesus and and Catch 22 and that's the stuff that makes my brain buzz when I read.
It took longer than it should have to realize that this story had to be told as a graphic novel. I had not read a comic for over 20 years. I was never a huge comic nerd. I was a Star Wars nerd. I had all the toys. Kids envied my collection. I digress.
So over about a 2 year period I immersed myself in superhero comics and graphic novels. Spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours reading, absorbing, listening to anything I could that was relevant. And I took notes. Copious notes.
I have a LOT of notebooks. Many of them completely full. Every idea noted somewhere. I have no idea what's on most of those pages. I'll probably remember most of it when I read it, but right now I could not tell you very much about the contents. It's going to be fun going through it all.
After 2 years of research and ideas, I felt like I was ready to write.
The though of going through all those notebooks to find the good ideas was daunting, and I was moving house at the time, so stuff was being packed into boxes, and then the new house was supposed to be a temporary stop, but it stretched out longer because viruses and such happened. So all those boxes of notes never got unpacked properly. Just opened and rifled through occasionally. It was not ideal.
To get around this problem, I decided to write the first book off the top of my head, and see which ideas had stuck. There is a lot of detail that I made up on the fly, but the story itself I know is in those notebooks. Somewhere.
I also decided that the idea had gotten too big, and I was scared I'd fuck it up, so I decided to write a practice book. So I thought it would be fun to write the origin story of the main character.
Once I got serious about actually writing this one, I used a website called Airtable to sort all my ideas out. And the script itself is written in Google Docs. I've tried some specialist writing software, but none of it worked for me. Not the way I think.
Once I worked out how to sort my ideas out, I started writing. Sometimes I wrote in the database, and sometimes in the Google doc, and most days a bit of both, and gradually the story took shape. And the characters started becoming real people who I knew and understood, and they spoke their lines in my head and I dictated them. At least, that's how it felt some nights. The best nights.
Writing this story has been an amazing experience. I've always enjoyed writing, and often tortured myself to make everything I wrote as good as it could be. But most of my writing was functional, and much of it marketing related, and none of that was ever as satisfying as writing this story has been.
In writing this story, I've tapped into parts of my brain that I had barely seen before. I've pulled fragments of thoughts together from distant reaches of my memory, and mashed them together with on the fly research. And out came this torrent of words, most of which have been deleted, some of which I am very proud.
In between other responsibilities, I manage to write most days, mostly at night, and have done so for the past 2 years. If you do the math, it works out at about 50 publishable words an hour which is terribly slow.
I blame this on the ADHD. But that only accounts for the distractions and tangents. The obsessive perfectionism is probably more from the Autism side of the equation. And life is a factor too. Sometimes I'm too tired to write. Sometimes I write all night. But the later I write, the more I have to re-write, so maybe that's a false economy.
Anyway, after much grinding and re-writing and editing and obsessing, I've got an almost finished script of the Prologue of the story. And people are reading it. And some of them are liking it. If enough people like it, I'll keep writing it.
There is so much more story to tell.
TO BE CONTINUED...
The Story of the Story
The Hero Complex
A WORK IN PROGRESS
The Hero Complex is a political satire wrapped in a superhero spoof with an undercurrent of bad philosophy and a truck load of pop-culture references.
It’s a story about lies and deception and the things we believe, and the things we believe about the things other people believe, and how most of what we believe probably isn’t true, but some of it is more true than we’d like to admit, but not in the way we believe it to be.
It’s a story about lies and deception and the things we believe, and the things we believe about the things other people believe, and how most of what we believe probably isn’t true, but some of it is more true than we’d like to admit, but not in the way we believe it to be.
I loved it. There is so much in there that’s hilarious and clever.
— A friend
— A friend
Laughed out loud (literally) for 10 seconds on the bus.
— Another friend
— Another friend
Gripping, Balanced, exciting, suspenseful, brilliant! The Santa joke is genius.
— Yet another friend
— Yet another friend
Definitely not aimed at 78 yr olds
— My dad*
* He also said some really nice stuff, and thinks it's very good.
— My dad*
* He also said some really nice stuff, and thinks it's very good.
It's the story of Felicity, who is having a very bad day. The worst she's ever had, and she's got a lot of bad days to compare it to.
She hates being a superhero, and she's very close to breaking. And now she has to jump out of an exploding building, with a hangover.
And that's not the worst part.
Now she finds herself in the middle of a clusterfuck with an ill-fitting costume, an asshole director, an unexpected complication, and an overwhelming urge to go out with a bang.
Then it gets complicated.
It's a story about fake superheroes and real conspiracies and what happens when one woman has the courage to stand up and say "fuck this shit!" to powerful people.
And it's the introduction to The Hero Complex.
She hates being a superhero, and she's very close to breaking. And now she has to jump out of an exploding building, with a hangover.
And that's not the worst part.
Now she finds herself in the middle of a clusterfuck with an ill-fitting costume, an asshole director, an unexpected complication, and an overwhelming urge to go out with a bang.
Then it gets complicated.
It's a story about fake superheroes and real conspiracies and what happens when one woman has the courage to stand up and say "fuck this shit!" to powerful people.
And it's the introduction to The Hero Complex.
Curious?
You can read it now.
Just beware that it is a tricky read for some, for a few reasons:
So it's not for everyone.
If you're happy to go ahead on that basis, by all means click the button...
Just beware that it is a tricky read for some, for a few reasons:
- It's a script for a graphic novel
- It's full of nerd references
- It's not a final draft, so there are typos and other issues
- It's quite long
- My characters are a fucking sweary bunch of cunts
So it's not for everyone.
If you're happy to go ahead on that basis, by all means click the button...
Finished?
Did you like it?
Do you want to get involved?
This is the draft script of the first book of a multi-book graphic novel series. And it will be created through a massive online collaborative creative process. And everyone is invited.
Go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheHeroComplex/
But before you do, it will help if you read the script above, and then read these...
Do you want to get involved?
This is the draft script of the first book of a multi-book graphic novel series. And it will be created through a massive online collaborative creative process. And everyone is invited.
Go here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheHeroComplex/
But before you do, it will help if you read the script above, and then read these...
The Author
Hi, my name is Tony, and I'm an obsessive autistic guy with a way with words.
A few years ago, I realised that I had spent more than half my life thinking about books I might write, and not writing any of them. There were reasons of course: busy with work, busy with family, crippling self doubt. But the biggest one of all was that I knew I was a bit a weird (still am), and I wasn't sure people would know how to take me.
Not long after this, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This was around the time when it became popular to not use the term Asperger's Syndrome, and talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which, not having been Aspie for very long, didn't bother me much.
I'm Autistic. That's why I'm weird. And understanding that made a massive difference to my life. And it inspired me to start writing. And it gave me the confidence to write with my natural, quirky, authentic, autistic voice.
My weirdness comes from my Autism, but I've had to practice really hard to get this good at it. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Like most autistic people, growing up I found fitting in challenging. But unlike some, I loved the challenge. It was like a puzzle to me, working out how the pieces fit together. Neurotypical people are very weird. Some of the stuff you do makes no sense at all.
I know; it's mutual.
It took me a long time to work out the difference between quirky and creepy. I spent most of my teens, and a great deal of my 20's learning the difference by studying the concerned looks on the faces of the people around me. Which is hard when you don't read people's faces accurately.
I was the guy who said out loud what others chose to leave unsaid. Sometimes it got a laugh, and sometimes it got a groan. And occasionally it got worse. But I learned from these experiences, and I got better at reading the audience, and understanding their boundaries.
I think I've mostly got it now. The groans are fewer and further between. And my very helpful brain helps by constantly reminding me of all the times I got it wrong. Negative reinforcement can be very powerful when it's self-imposed. And I have lots of fodder to draw upon.
I was a weird guy, and I had no idea why.
Now I do, which I like. Knowledge helps.
This book is my weirdness expressing itself in story form. It's my obsessive interests all mashed together in the most convoluted way I could think of. There are many interests contained here; some of them are shallow and some are deep, and they're all fascinating to me.
This book is about the things I find weird and interesting and confusing about the world, and about people. I hope you'll find them interesting too. And maybe learn a thing or two about my weird lens on the world.
I might elaborate on some of these themes outside of The Hero Complex.
If I do, they'll be here:
tonyhuddy.com
If you're interested in that kind of thing.
A few years ago, I realised that I had spent more than half my life thinking about books I might write, and not writing any of them. There were reasons of course: busy with work, busy with family, crippling self doubt. But the biggest one of all was that I knew I was a bit a weird (still am), and I wasn't sure people would know how to take me.
Not long after this, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. This was around the time when it became popular to not use the term Asperger's Syndrome, and talk about Autism Spectrum Disorder. Which, not having been Aspie for very long, didn't bother me much.
I'm Autistic. That's why I'm weird. And understanding that made a massive difference to my life. And it inspired me to start writing. And it gave me the confidence to write with my natural, quirky, authentic, autistic voice.
My weirdness comes from my Autism, but I've had to practice really hard to get this good at it. I've made a lot of mistakes along the way.
Like most autistic people, growing up I found fitting in challenging. But unlike some, I loved the challenge. It was like a puzzle to me, working out how the pieces fit together. Neurotypical people are very weird. Some of the stuff you do makes no sense at all.
I know; it's mutual.
It took me a long time to work out the difference between quirky and creepy. I spent most of my teens, and a great deal of my 20's learning the difference by studying the concerned looks on the faces of the people around me. Which is hard when you don't read people's faces accurately.
I was the guy who said out loud what others chose to leave unsaid. Sometimes it got a laugh, and sometimes it got a groan. And occasionally it got worse. But I learned from these experiences, and I got better at reading the audience, and understanding their boundaries.
I think I've mostly got it now. The groans are fewer and further between. And my very helpful brain helps by constantly reminding me of all the times I got it wrong. Negative reinforcement can be very powerful when it's self-imposed. And I have lots of fodder to draw upon.
I was a weird guy, and I had no idea why.
Now I do, which I like. Knowledge helps.
This book is my weirdness expressing itself in story form. It's my obsessive interests all mashed together in the most convoluted way I could think of. There are many interests contained here; some of them are shallow and some are deep, and they're all fascinating to me.
This book is about the things I find weird and interesting and confusing about the world, and about people. I hope you'll find them interesting too. And maybe learn a thing or two about my weird lens on the world.
I might elaborate on some of these themes outside of The Hero Complex.
If I do, they'll be here:
tonyhuddy.com
If you're interested in that kind of thing.
The Story of the Story
I first sent an email to myself with the text "The Hero Complex" in November 2018. As far as I can tell, that is when this all started.
I can't remember what the initial idea was, but I know it was some sort of Super Hero Parody. I know it quickly morphed into the fake superhero idea fairly quickly. Within a few days I was obsessed with the idea of a political satire about a fake superhero conspiracy. So obsessed that it completely replaced the story I was obsessing over form many years prior to this.
(That story, The Decline of Empire Saga, may never happen, and I am surprisingly OK with that, given how much time I spent on it without ever writing a publishable word.)
This story came with so much more opportunity. I loved it immediately, and I still do. Even more so every day. The more I write, the more there is to love about it.
That doesn't mean I think everyone will love it. Quite the Opposite. The fact that I love it means most people probably won't. That being my general experience throughout my life. I've always liked weird shit, so it's no surprise I've written something weird.
So what I saw in this story was the chance to mix a superhero spoof with a political satire. I love good superhero spoofs. I love The Tick, and The Boys, and Mystery Men, and Kick Ass, and Howard the Duck (yes, even the terrible movie). And I love good satire. I love Terry Pratchett and Douglass Adams and Tom Robbins and Haruki Murakami and, and I've read Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and 1984 and Brave New World and Honk if You Are Jesus and and Catch 22 and that's the stuff that makes my brain buzz when I read.
It took a very long time to realise that this story had to be told as a graphic novel. I had not read a comic for over 20 years. I was not ever a huge comic nerd. I was a Star Wars nerd. I had all the toys. Kids envied my collection. I digress.
So over about a 2 year period I immersed myself in superhero comics and graphic novels. Spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours reading, absorbing, listening to anything I could that was relevant. And I took notes. Copious notes.
I have a LOT of notebooks. Many of them completely full. Every idea noted somewhere. I have no idea what's on most of those pages. I'll probably remember most of it when I read it, but right now I could not tell you very much about the contents. It's going to be fun going through it all.
After 2 years of research and ideas, I felt like I was ready to write.
I The though of going through all those notebooks to find the good ideas was daunting, and I was moving house at the time, so stuff was being packed into boxes, and then the new house was supposed to be a temporary stop, but it stretched out longer because viruses and such happened. So all those boxes of notes never got unpacked properly. Just opened and rifled through occasionally. It was not ideal.
To get around this problem, I decided to write the first book off the top of my head, and see which ideas had stuck. There is a lot of detail that I made up on the fly, but the story itself I know is in those notebooks. Somewhere.
I also decided that the idea had gotten too big, and I was scared I'd fuck it up, so I decided to write a practice book. So I thought it would be fun to write the origin story of the main character.
Once I got serious about actually writing this one, I used a website called Airtable to sort all my ideas out. And the script itself is written in Google Docs. I've tried some specialist writing software, but none of it worked for me. Not the way I think.
Once I worked out how to sort my ideas out, I started writing. Sometimes I wrote in the database, and sometimes in the Google doc, and most days a bit of both, and gradually the story took shape. And the characters started becoming real people who I knew and understood, and they spoke their lines in my head and I dictated them. At least, that's how it felt some nights. The best nights.
Writing this story has been an amazing experience. I've always enjoyed writing, and often tortured myself to make everything I wrote as good as it could be. But most of my writing was functional, and much of it marketing related, and none of that was ever as satisfying as writing this story has been.
In writing this story, I've tapped into parts of my brain that I had barely seen before. I've pulled fragments of thoughts together from distant reaches of my memory, and mashed them together with on the fly research. And out came this torrent of words, most of which have been deleted, some of which I am very proud.
In between other responsibilities, I manage to write most days, mostly at night, and have done so for the past 2 years. If you do the math, it works out at about 50 publishable words an hour which is terribly slow.
I blame this on the ADHD. But that only accounts for the distractions and tangents. The obsessive perfectionism is probably more from the Autism side of the equation. And life is a factor too. Sometimes I'm too tired to write. Sometimes I write all night. But the later I write, the more I have to re-write, so maybe that's a false economy.
Anyway, after much grinding and re-writing and editing and obsessing, I've got a finished script of the Prologue of the story. And people are reading it. And some of them are liking it. If enough people like it, I'll keep writing it.
There is so much more story to tell.
TO BE CONTINUED...
I can't remember what the initial idea was, but I know it was some sort of Super Hero Parody. I know it quickly morphed into the fake superhero idea fairly quickly. Within a few days I was obsessed with the idea of a political satire about a fake superhero conspiracy. So obsessed that it completely replaced the story I was obsessing over form many years prior to this.
(That story, The Decline of Empire Saga, may never happen, and I am surprisingly OK with that, given how much time I spent on it without ever writing a publishable word.)
This story came with so much more opportunity. I loved it immediately, and I still do. Even more so every day. The more I write, the more there is to love about it.
That doesn't mean I think everyone will love it. Quite the Opposite. The fact that I love it means most people probably won't. That being my general experience throughout my life. I've always liked weird shit, so it's no surprise I've written something weird.
So what I saw in this story was the chance to mix a superhero spoof with a political satire. I love good superhero spoofs. I love The Tick, and The Boys, and Mystery Men, and Kick Ass, and Howard the Duck (yes, even the terrible movie). And I love good satire. I love Terry Pratchett and Douglass Adams and Tom Robbins and Haruki Murakami and, and I've read Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and 1984 and Brave New World and Honk if You Are Jesus and and Catch 22 and that's the stuff that makes my brain buzz when I read.
It took a very long time to realise that this story had to be told as a graphic novel. I had not read a comic for over 20 years. I was not ever a huge comic nerd. I was a Star Wars nerd. I had all the toys. Kids envied my collection. I digress.
So over about a 2 year period I immersed myself in superhero comics and graphic novels. Spent thousands of dollars and thousands of hours reading, absorbing, listening to anything I could that was relevant. And I took notes. Copious notes.
I have a LOT of notebooks. Many of them completely full. Every idea noted somewhere. I have no idea what's on most of those pages. I'll probably remember most of it when I read it, but right now I could not tell you very much about the contents. It's going to be fun going through it all.
After 2 years of research and ideas, I felt like I was ready to write.
I The though of going through all those notebooks to find the good ideas was daunting, and I was moving house at the time, so stuff was being packed into boxes, and then the new house was supposed to be a temporary stop, but it stretched out longer because viruses and such happened. So all those boxes of notes never got unpacked properly. Just opened and rifled through occasionally. It was not ideal.
To get around this problem, I decided to write the first book off the top of my head, and see which ideas had stuck. There is a lot of detail that I made up on the fly, but the story itself I know is in those notebooks. Somewhere.
I also decided that the idea had gotten too big, and I was scared I'd fuck it up, so I decided to write a practice book. So I thought it would be fun to write the origin story of the main character.
Once I got serious about actually writing this one, I used a website called Airtable to sort all my ideas out. And the script itself is written in Google Docs. I've tried some specialist writing software, but none of it worked for me. Not the way I think.
Once I worked out how to sort my ideas out, I started writing. Sometimes I wrote in the database, and sometimes in the Google doc, and most days a bit of both, and gradually the story took shape. And the characters started becoming real people who I knew and understood, and they spoke their lines in my head and I dictated them. At least, that's how it felt some nights. The best nights.
Writing this story has been an amazing experience. I've always enjoyed writing, and often tortured myself to make everything I wrote as good as it could be. But most of my writing was functional, and much of it marketing related, and none of that was ever as satisfying as writing this story has been.
In writing this story, I've tapped into parts of my brain that I had barely seen before. I've pulled fragments of thoughts together from distant reaches of my memory, and mashed them together with on the fly research. And out came this torrent of words, most of which have been deleted, some of which I am very proud.
In between other responsibilities, I manage to write most days, mostly at night, and have done so for the past 2 years. If you do the math, it works out at about 50 publishable words an hour which is terribly slow.
I blame this on the ADHD. But that only accounts for the distractions and tangents. The obsessive perfectionism is probably more from the Autism side of the equation. And life is a factor too. Sometimes I'm too tired to write. Sometimes I write all night. But the later I write, the more I have to re-write, so maybe that's a false economy.
Anyway, after much grinding and re-writing and editing and obsessing, I've got a finished script of the Prologue of the story. And people are reading it. And some of them are liking it. If enough people like it, I'll keep writing it.
There is so much more story to tell.
TO BE CONTINUED...
The Comedy is in the Details
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