Distractions

Just when I'm finally chugging away diligently on The Undressing of America, life decides to distract me. First it was a financial mess, which wasn't particularly welcome. But then came the trip to England, which sent me home wanting to start a new book (among other things), and now comes a graphic novel with my name on it.

This was an odd project: the artist Mark Badger and I were hired a few years ago by a nonprofit group called Privacy Activism to do an ongoing web comic about a blue-skinned college student named Carabella to dramatize issues related to internet privacy. Not the sort of thing a person normally thinks of doing, but that added to its appeal. For a year Mark and I dicked around trying to figure out what to do with this thing, pretending to the people who were paying us that we knew what we were doing, producing a couple of short stories that wobbled between campus hijinks and humorous science fiction. Then this story hit us, about how high-tech interactive shoes might be part of an invasion of Earth that only Carabella could prevent. Actually it came in pieces; I think the shoes were first.

As it came together into a 120-page story, we all realized we really liked it, and now it's being published on actual paper, under the title Networked: Carabella on the Run, by NBM, the oldest graphic novel publisher in the USA. Here's how they describe it: "Some alien invasions are loud and bloody...some are quiet and friendly. The blue-skinned girl named Carabella thinks she's escaping the oppression of her own world, but instead she’s exposing the earth to an invasion so soft and friendly that everyone welcomes it—until Carabella herself sees what's happening and tries to make someone, anyone see that our websites and our cell phones are being used to steal first the privacy and then the freedom of everyone on earth."

(Actually that's how I describe it, because I wrote the blurb. But I was writing as them, which counts for the same thing.)

It just got some very nice exposure in Publishers Weekly's Panel Mania, and now we're working out plans for its release at the San Diego Comic Con late next month. Many distractions from this book, making that 500-word-a-day minimum I've set myself (which I was embarrassed about at the time, because it seemed so easy) difficult and essential. Publication and attention are so seductive that they make the hard work of actually hammering words together into a book seem awfully dull—and yet they're also good reminders that the hammering isn't all there is. An argument, I think, both for and against distractions.