Mermaids Sighted on Tybee Island!

Okay, so the title is a lie, the kind of fiction a writer thinks up, something you want to believe, that you wish were true, a fantasy character brought to life. If it were true it could be nice, unless those mermaids are the people-eating kind. Things are always nice until something tries to eat you.

I have a strange superstition that if I talk about things I’m working on, they’ll never come together. Of course, with that attitude, how will I get any hype going? Ha. Gotta have hype. Now I'm going to talk about how I don't want to talk.

I will talk about the online comic we're putting together called Buying the Farm. It's drawn by Jason Clarke. I love Jason's style of cartooning. When the story is not a fantasy, you can be more cartoony. The story is not a fantasy, not the way a mermaid is, and it won't eat you. In fact nobody gets eaten in the whole story, but maybe that's giving things away. Sorry. In fact, it doesn't directly have anything to do with the ocean, as far as I know. I wrote the story because my wife Paula wanted me to write something with humor. (I do know how to be funny. I just don't do it much in writing.)

The story is all about a girl inheriting her father’s farm. Rather than doing the expected thing and selling the place, for money (what else?), she gets old people from the nursing home to run it as a farm. In my mind, I connect it with Trailers, a graphic novel I did with Julie Collins back in 2006, which is funny in a dark dark way.  Buying the Farm isn’t nearly as dark as Trailers, but the characters are from the same universe, not a trailer park, but people dealing with a world they never made. When Nick and I started talking about a webcomic, Buying the Farm rose in my thoughts like a message in a magic eight ball. (Outlook good.) The story didn’t seem to have the right dynamic for a webcomic, though. You really have to watch it with web comics so they don't just become a lot of talking heads.

I spent a chunk of last spring writing a more episodic prequel part. Still humorous, I think. So I guess the webcomic should technically be called Buying the Farm: the Prequel. It's about a girl who somehow just won’t go along with the program at a giant food corporation. So it has two things I like a lot in it, a rebel and a giant food corporation—oh, and it has Dilbertian cubicles. I like those too, I guess. She suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous unprofessionalism. It’s hard to be human and be very professional all at the same time. It's also hard to be professional when no one around you is. Then again, the world is cursed with too many professionals who are self-consciously professional, the bottom-line and best practices crew. (Where are all the apprentices, humans with a sense of adventure?) I've included a snippet here, I hope.

Here's something else I shouldn't talk about, the “Peru story.” That’s the one that I started about eight years ago, and have finished on a couple of occasions before tearing it down and started over. I can't decide exaclty what it is, a graphic novel, a movie, a novel? I don’t know why things take so long for me. Working with flying humanoids takes time. I admire Peru for unfinished architecture and the way that the country makes people responsible for their own lives. There is re-bar sticking out of the tops of lots of unfinished buildings. In Peru, so they say, if you finish a building, you have to pay property tax on it. Everyone makes a point of not finishing. Does that apply to stories?

 I keep leaving the rebar sticking out of that Peru story, and that’s as much as I’ll say about it for now.  I have other things that I won’t talk about too, just so you know.

Keep an eye out for Buying the Farm, though. We’re hoping now that the webcomic will be up around the beginning of August. I'm hoping that if enough of you like the webcomic, we'll bring out the original graphic novel idea and not leave anything sticking out the top. And by the way, I hope I didn't offend anyone in Peru because everything there, including the unfinished buildings, is beautiful. Go see it.

Mark