I love a good cover song and only recently got exposed to The AV Club's Undercover series. The Decemberists' version of Sugar's If I Can't Change Your Mind has basically been my jam all week.
It's so cold in Brisbane at the moment, like, icy cold (well, for the tropics anyway), and it's totally making me yearn for summer. It doesn't help that most of the world's at that time of year again too, breaking in the season of string bikinis, flowy, cotton dresses and sunny sandals. This collection from Spanish designer, Kolonaki, is all the things I love in warm weather fashion. It's bright and cheerful and this perfect blend of modern fabric with historical silhouettes. It's loooovely.
I'm a pretty big fan of Alison Bechdel, who's perhaps most famous for her invention of the Bechdel Test. And I mean, that's pretty great, but Bechdel's work is brilliant outside of it too. My Old Flame: Gradual Impact is a short comic she wrote recently for The New Yorker and man, it's pretty special. It chronicles a short lived relationship with a woman in her martial arts class and explores those tender, strange fleeting moments that reveal our own self-worth and difficulties with intimacy. It's pretty wonderful.
Barbara is a girl on a mission. Mean, driven and too smart for her own good, she's almost totally friendless, left with a whirl of imaginary ones who help her in her bid to slay the giant she knows is coming. Things are fine until two new people show up in Barbara's life, neighbour Sophia and psychologist, Mrs Molle, and Barbara finds herself having to face up to the real demons, instead of those imagined.
Ugggghhhh, this hits so many of my buttons narrative-wise. Interesting sibling relationships, fantasy as a means of handling reality and strange friendships that hit when you least expect them. All things I love! It helps that Joe Kelly and JM Ken Nimura do such a great job of telling this story too. They're understanding of Barbara, both narratively and illustratively is totally charming, and it makes her less kind moments (and there are a few of them) emphatic and more vulnerable than you'd expect.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the thing (and give it the honour of being the only graphic novel outside of Saga to make me cry), it would've been nice to see the other characters more rounded. Barbara's the star of this show, and she lends weight to every panel she's in, but we don't get to see enough of the others. Her brother, Dave, for instance is virtually pointless within the narrative, seeming to have the sole purpose of exposing Barbara's rage and control issues in an early scene. Similarly, we get hints of brilliance in Barbara's sister, Mrs Molle and Sophia, but none of them feel entirely rounded enough to make me feel for them as much as I do for Barbara.
That said, it's a pretty special book, and one worth checking out.
I am completely in love with this collaboration between Frances May and Church & State. The styling is close to sublime and partnering the model, clothes with the flower backdrop is pretty damn perfect. Plus the clothes look sort of ridiculously comfortable, which is definitely an added bonus! Check out the full collection over on the Church & State site.
June is National Young Writers' Month in Australia , and I've been floundering around with a few of my writing goals lately, so it makes for a great opportunity to get back on track. In prep, I FINALLY bought a new desk (my old one's legs gave months ago), and have set up a workspace that hopefully means less procrastination, less interruptions and more writing. SO, goals for the month are:
1. Finish putting Lost Girls together, the mosaic novel.
I feel like I've been working on Lost Girls forever. It's a novel of interwoven short stories with recurring characters, places and themes. I'd been on track with it at the start of the year, with only three stories left to finish to complete it, but my engine lost steam on it and I ended up dabbling in other things. I'm hoping to finish drafting one of the stories today (!) which'll put me in good stead to draft the other two and then put the sucker together by the end of the month.
2. Finish drafting Homebodies, the screenplay.
I've been messing around with this one for a while. It's a feature-length indie film screenplay about two sisters reunited when the older one's life falls apart. I've got a strong outline for it at this point and character bible's for the main cast, but I'd love to actually get a draft done this month.
3. Finish plotting The Belt, the graphic novel.
I'm a little looser with this one, but it's an idea I've had since highschool. Space military! Inter-planet politics! Aliens! Warfare! It's also always been a graphic novel in my head which, y'know, I have plenty of experience reading, but not a whole lot putting together. I'm not quite ambitious enough to want the whole thing done by the end of the month (hahahaha), but I really want to get it plotted out and the character bibles written and character designs drafted.
So pretty big tasks! I'm aiming to write for at least two hours a day, every day throughout the month (which I more-or-less do now). If I stick to this, hopefully I'll get shit done. To try and keep me on track too, I'm going to be posting updates every Monday, so you can expect to see that too.
