Without Fear

This week on thoughtballoons the chosen comic is HEADSPACE – this makes me greatly happy.

But let me back track, fill in the details, really make you care. HEADSPACE is the comic I’m writing at Monkeybrain Comics with Eric Zawadzki and co. I love it so because it’s my best work to date. Now thoughtballoons, well, that’s a longer story.

thoughtballoons is a scripting challenge website I started about 4 years ago. I was writing plenty at the time and getting nothing made and I found I wanted to get better and also wanted to stop screaming into the void. So I dreamt up thoughtballoons as a writing equivalent of Comic Twart or any of the other sketch jam sites that we all know and love. Iassembled a crack team of writers and each week we’d tackle a comic character/place/thing/title and each write a one-page script about it. The aim being, we’d be writing at least a page a week, and we’d have this forum to critique each other and get better.

I wrote 104 straight scripts over two years before I eventually had to bow out because of other work. And in that time I grew as a writer like crazy. I figured out what would work, what didn’t, where my strengths were, and what I could work on there in a safe environment and make a strength over time. I wrote some of my favourite things that I’ve ever written. I wrote some dreck. I helped establish the site with Ben Rosenthal who I tabled next to last weekend at a con, and I met a writer in our comments, who went on to join the site for a time, Dan. Hill. You’ll notice his name because he’s now my editor on HEADSPACE, as well as a few other upcoming things. The site did me well and I love that it’s still going strong.

So this week the crew of writers still honing their craft each week is going to tackle HEADSPACE. I look forward to seeing what they bring to the table and how they view the world and characters within it. Mostly, it’s just an honour to think people might care at all.

Head over to thoughtballoons now and see what the crew cook up this week with one page of script a day until Saturday in the world of HEADSPACE.