Ian

I learned to photoread a couple of years ago and it’s insane. It’s completely insane and strange and surreal and I don’t know why I haven’t been doing it.

I think I read maybe 4 or 5 books this way.

I’ve started taking the course again and I’ve found that since I haven’t used the skill in a few years, my recall skills are terrible.

I can still enter the state of photofocus, but I’m very weak on mind mapping, super-reading, dipping, and skittering.

Teach me to let my skills get dull.

I’ve been working on a novel… originally a comic book, then a photocomic, now an illustrated novel.

I bounce ideas and dialogue off a friend on this one and we decided that we wanted it to be handwritten, so, I’ve been handwriting it in monoline calligraphy, trying to make it look like it was done by a typesetter in typewriter-esque lettering.

I started working on it today at folio size and decided that, since I have a friend who likes to be told stories, I would write a page or two at a time and mail them to her.

It’s coming well. Working in chunks is very manageable and having the goal of giving a story to someone else in pieces is kind of fun and kind of motivating.

I’m also learning more about laying out the text from doing narrative calligraphy in monoline than I ever learned from my blackletter work, which is the bulk of my calligraphy background.

The closest I can think is writing in Humanist Bookhand, but it still doesn’t have the learning potential attached to it of monoline.

I should have listened to Friedrich Neaugebauer from the beginning. The more fool I.

I tend to have thousands of ideas all at once and before I can articulate them, they start joining together like mitosis in revers (I think that’s phagocytosis) until there’s only 20-30, then those ideas slowly fit together like a puzzle.

Right now, I think I’ve got somewhere in the vicinity of 30 ideas that have gone through that process and become… workable.

One of them is a screenplay and we’ve got a 3 act structure down, the principal characters, and some plot twists.

I’m collaborating with someone on this and she’s handling the formatting, structure, and the characters while I handle the specifics of the plot and the dialogue.

After 2 weeks, I think I’ve got Act I structured and enough of Act II in mind that I know where we’re aiming.