Tag: dialogue

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Cutting My Comics Teeth

Below is my effort to mimic a comic book. I’ve not written this but paraphrased from an actual comic book. I’m looking to reproduce the feel in my head not to pass this off as my own work.

The motivation for this piece is about ten years of reading comics and the newest version of Celtx. They added a comic book template.

Page 1

Panel 1 Outside a high-rise club in downtown Tokyo

SIDEKICK
Think she’ll bite?

Panel 2 Inside same club; well dressed patrons of all cultures
dance in the background; Sidekick and HERO sit at a
table for two in the fore.

HERO
There are only two ways for this to go. We’ll know
soon enough.

SIDEKICK
Whatever. I’m just killing time here.

Panel 3 Our hero is displeased.

HERO
I didn’t ask you here and I don’t need you.

Page 2

Panel 1 Our Sidekick is undaunted; bubbly in fact.

SIDEKICK
And miss this banter? Clearly you’re a powerhouse
in this scene. How’d you solo this far up the
ladder?

Panel 2 Reverse on our convo from the dance floor

HERO
How do you know I soloed this far?

SIDEKICK
Not sure. You’ve got a loner vibe. As for me it
was time I got my game on. No one else looking out
for Sidekick.

Panel 3 On our hero again

HERO
This scene stands for more than your selfishness,
Sidekick.

Panel 4 Over our hero’s shoulder on angry Sidekick.

SIDEKICK
Pft! Climb down from your castle some time to see
how the rest of us live. We’re scrounging for
position down here and it not getting better, it’s
getting worse. I’m not getting screwed over!

HERO
This scene is about defending the people. It’s
been that way along time. Time erodes our
culture…

Panel 5 Hero’s eyes

HERO
…unless we remember what it stands for.

Word count: 260
Day 242

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By Tearless God

Fired up Adobe Buzzword from Acrobat.com this morning. I needed to port my login over to the new site. Plus a recent article on the Writer’s Technology Companion had me feeling guilty I’ve not given this platform much of a shake.

Of course I’ve been away awhile. I’ve been working on some hefty documentation at work. I needed a break from composing sentences–we all know how painful that is for me.

His body lay face up on the tile floor; his head jammed sturdily in the corner of the kitchen cabinets. Each of his arms spread an even distance from his torso with the hands hooked under the toe-kick. This is the way he would look to a groundling if he were flying overhead. The only asymmetry: his turned head and his scratching fingers.

This man, Travis probably, scrapes gently at the wooden edge running from his left eye to near infinity. He’s been making this one single simple movement all his life. The surface is mostly smooth but for a bit of a burr that catches his nail as he extends the tip fully. His fingerprints catch it, turning the knuckles slightly, as he contracts. Some part of his mind must be counting the strokes, must be calculating when the burr will erode completely while his finger grows fresh skin cells to replace the ones rubbed off in the process. It’s possible that there is, in fact, a number in there somewhere. This man, Travis, has no plans to retrieve it.

He enjoys the solid elevated sensation the tile provides. Travis is sure he can feel the concrete below the tile, the sand below the concrete, the clay beneath the sand, and the whole of Earth below that. He doesn’t have to imagine he’s atop a pedestal of obdurate granite. He is atop such a thing. He’s been place here personally by tearless God or fate or fucking circumstance.

The mundane cabinets balance the centrifugal exertion of everything that’s happened since it happened. Without his arms and hands under these, he’s sure he’d be pressed through the ceiling and attic and roof and into the sky. Travis is not moving his arms from their secure place just yet. He does turn his head to look upward along his anticipated trajectory. If he grows bored of the scratching–or the burr comes loose–and he has nothing better to do but be flung further into space he’d like to be able to roll to the side to align his body with the rafters so he can be passed through the softer parts. A Dole banana sticker on the underside of the counter flares in his attention.

###

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. Let me. Let me. Let me!” Connie begs.

“Constance, you can’t reach the cupboards,” says Travis.

“I can reach here.” Constance dabs the sticker to the underside of the counter top and runs into the living room.

“Get back in the kitchen to eat…” Travis gives up this time.

###

His body lay face up on the tile floor, but now he’s curled and sobbing. The floor does not move nearer the ceiling.

Word count: 508
Day 238

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Thinking of Gwenyth

I watched Iron Man again yesterday. Alone because friends were unavailable and I refused to wait—plus, you only have some many opportunities in this household to ditch the kids and go out at all. I’m not a reader of the comic surprisingly, so I know nothing of the canon. While the X-men which I’ve read heavily run into Tony Stark as Iron Man occasionally, the Pepper Pots’ character remains unfamiliar.

On the drive home I began to fictionalize a conversation that might have occurred between an actress similar to Gwenyth Paltrow and her assistant or agent or whomever in deciding to take the roll. Lines and reactions sprang into my head faster then I could store them for later transcription. It felt strangely like I recalled a movie or dreamt while awake.

I doubt I could now string it together coherently, but I’ll try to arrange the exchanges (mostly couplets) in a likely order. Remember I fictionalized, so don’t picture Ms. Paltrow when you read the following—except when it makes sense too.

“Well?”
“It’s an arm-candy.” Karen Person tosses a script over the cream leather couch to the glass coffee table in the center of the room. The slap echoes quickly in the featureless room.
“When did an arm-candy get thirty pages?”
“Still.” Karen flips her fingers through her beaded dreads like she’s biting her thumb in a Shakespeare play. “When did arm-candy look like this?”
“Exotic arm-candy then.”
“They won’t give it to me. I’ll have to audition like everyone else.”

—

“Thirty pages isn’t enough to get me over the title.”
“Sweetie, no one’s getting over the title on this not even Charlie. We can probably get you a ‘with’ or maybe an ‘and’.
“‘With’?”
“Yeah, they pulled one of the Graingers out of mothballs to play the baddy.”
“John or Robert? Has to be John.” Karen walks to the window overlooking everything. “I can see that.”
“Really?”

—

“I won’t get paid full. Hell, I might not even get the bling.”
“It’s not that much work to get paid that much for. I’ve seen the shooting schedule and most of your stuff’s done in a month. Right here in LA. In and out.”
“‘The Unbelievably Good Kisser’ and ‘Trance’. That’s why I won’t even break two figures.”

—

“We’re shooting this all in the States? That’s where the money’s going.”
“Charlie’s in it.”
“He loves Canada. Didn’t he buy a place there back before?”
Rita gives Karen a blank stare then raises an eyebrow like a question. When Karen still doesn’t flip she leads her. “Before….”
“Oh shit that’s right. He can’t even go to Canada?”
“He can’t leave the country at all.”
“I know it’s not our country Rita. But still, Canada?”

—

“It’s an arm-candy.”
“Arm-candy for Charlie Cross. Richard Paquin on as director.”
“Summer, Thanksgiving, or Christmas?”
“Summer I bet. I think they’re looking to spill Trey’s juice.”
“Mmm, Trey. Why can’t I be in a movie with him?”
“You were already.”

—

Anyhow, that’s all I’m going to bother to transcribe. You get the gist. I don’t know that there is as much characterization in there as there is info-dumping. But I guess sometimes you have to do that too.

Word count: 541
Day 236