Hey,

There’s this thing copywriters say: stories sell.

Now, copywriters are not fiction writers. Not most of the time, at least. In case you don’t know, copywriters are those people who write things like ads and other marketing stuff. And they say you have to be a good storyteller, because writing good stories sells.

Get emotional, connect with the reader, etc., etc.

Stories sell.

I remembered this this morning when I was doing my Duolingo session. You see, I like learning languages, so I use Duolingo every morning to learn German and Italian. They’re not paying me anything, I’m just naming them because I do use it and think it’s good stuff. Except, in my opinion, for the “stories” part.

If you’ve used Duolingo, you’ve probably seen that there are a bunch of characters, and you have to read “stories” about them and do some vocabulary and grammar activities to complete those stories.

The problem is, man, the stories are terrible. Well, not all of them. But most of them. In my opinion. You may disagree. But in my opinion, Duolingo stories suck.

And I think I know what the problem is.

Most characters are just annoying.

You can have annoying characters. An annoying character is not a bad character per se. But a character that is only annoying, man, that is a bad character. The same with a character that is only funny, or only frightening.

Because a good character, a memorable character, doesn’t provoke just one emotion in you. If you can provoke curiosity in your reader, then make them laugh, and then make them shed a tear, the reader will remember that character much more than if you just make them laugh. It will feel much more real.

So, good characters can be annoying sometimes. But a character that does everything right just because it’s THEM, man, that’s a kick in the balls. And there’s so much of that in today’s fiction. Bad writers try to elevate a given character, and they make them morally inexcusable and incapable of failing. Always the perfect reply, always the timely joke, and it’s always them who bring the solution to the problem.

Annoying in real life, annoying in fiction.

Because you can’t connect with someone who never makes mistakes.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, year two.

52 stories of The Condor. 52 mistakes. Because, you know, the guy’s not Batman.

$9.99, just for more ten more days.

Hey,

the other day I wrote about haters and what to do when you see one.

I think it’s important to know what to do in that situation, or what not to do, but I also think there’s something more important, and I didn’t mention it.

Haters are not going anywhere. They’re as ubiquitous, as predictable and as simple as the rain. You don’t exactly know if it’s going to rain today, or at what time, but you know that sooner or later it’s going to rain.

And I don’t think education and empathy and all that stuff will eliminate certain behaviors from society.

Education and empathy can make things better, but there will still be people who laugh at you and mock you out of jealousy or whatever. Because we as individuals are still free, and being free means having the chance of choosing to do the wrong thing.

And that isn’t going to change anytime soon, luckily for us.

The thing is, it’s much more important that you are not that kind of person. Yes, you.

Don’t become one of them.

As I said the other day, who cares about them? Who cares if you didn’t come up with a smart reply to their comment? What matters here is that you don’t become one of them.

There’s not much value in outsmarting a smartass, even though it’s nice sometimes. The real value lies in dedicating your life to something you consider important. Something you would do even if no one were watching. Something you would do even if absolutely everybody else mocked you.

Don’t worry, that won’t happen.

But even if it did.

Living a life on those terms is much more rewarding than looking around you and seeing a threat in everyone who shows the slightest sign of authenticity, talent or vulnerability.

Because that’s the situation of most of those people, in my nonexpert in human behavior opinion.

Being out there trying to bring down other people is a sign that your own life sucks, that you’re resentful and envious, and that you’re not willing to do anything to improve it.

And you don’t deserve to live like that.

Man, I don’t know you, but I know you don’t deserve to live like that because nobody does.

-

PS: Yesterday I launched The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Year Two. A beautiful paperback that collects the last year of the strips I’ve been sharing in this newsletter.

It’s an ideal purchase if you happen to be a resentful and envious loser: you can use it to mop the floor, or throw darts at it, or whatever it is your kind of people do with the things they envy.

If, on the other hand, you’re a sane person who happens to enjoy this newsletter, you can actually read it.

It’s fun as hell.

Here.

just a quick announcement: the second volume of The Condor comic strips is available on Amazon.

In print.

It’s the work of the last 52 weeks. The work you’ve seen week after week if you’re subscribed to this newsletter.

52 strips + 9 short stories in prose + the story of the mysterious visit of The Condor to Hell.

At $9.99. It’s a special launch price. If I were you, I’d get a copy before the price goes up.

Look here: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Year Two.

You don’t need to have read Volume One to enjoy it.

That’s all I had to say.

Today is a beautiful day.

this, in my opinion, is the best way to make books in these days of self-publishing and social media: you produce something, a short story, an episode of your novel, a comic strip—and you send it to the members of your newsletter. Once a week, minimum. Minimum!

That way, your audience will be waiting for your next email, and that will force you not to skip a deadline. The best part is, you set your own deadline. Every Sunday. Sundays and Wednesdays. Fridays and Mondays...

Me, I post a new comic strip on Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Mondays. Knowing that there will be people waiting for the strip makes me write and draw even when I don’t feel like it.

Because who cares if you don’t feel like it?

Unless you’re clinically depressed or have been through some kind of tragedy, “I just don’t feel like it today” shouldn’t be a good enough reason to decide you’re not going to do something you should be doing.

Ah, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, “Man, I don’t have an audience yet.”

Well, the best way to get an audience is to forget for a moment what you want to produce and give other people something they want.

I, for example, share tips and reflections that other writers find useful. You do the same consistently over a period of time, and people will start reading you because you will be a source of help to them.

So, let’s say you don’t make comics, but you’re writing a novel about a band of dogs that save the world from nuclear war.

Then, in your email, say, every Saturday, you share something about how to pet a dog, or how to play with your dog, or anything that people with dogs will find valuable.

And, in the same email, you share a short chapter of your novel.

I’d say keep the entire email to less than 1,000 words, but that’s just me. People get easily distracted nowadays.

But again, that’s just me.

And after you have finished your novel about planet-saving dogs, you keep sharing your tips every Saturday, along with a link to the print version of your book in a store.

And then you can write a continuation, or something else that’s related to dogs. Or move on to cats.

But I guess you get the idea.

You show up regularly, people get to know you, and you have something to offer them.

That’s what I’ve been doing since I started this newsletter, and so far, it’s worked wonderfully.

Now, I’m not rich or famous, but people have been buying and reading my books, so I can say it’s not only a system that works, but it’s also a very fun thing to do.

All this is to tell you that you can read, on Kindle, all of this year’s strips that I’ve been sharing here, plus some extra strips and nine Condor short stories in prose.

All this for $4.99, which is a special launch price for you, who have been reading these emails.

In a few days, the price will go up to $7.99.

And also, there’s the print edition coming soon.

That’s all I have to say.

This is what I do with this newsletter, and if you’re an indie author, I’d recommend you do it, too.

I think it’s much better than doing your thing in obscurity and waiting for an agent to discover you.

The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, vol. 2.

It’s a collection of comic strips, so you don’t have to have read vol. 1 to understand or enjoy it.

Hey,

if you’re a creative person, you may have felt that AI has come to replace you.

I think we all have, at some point.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that, even if an AI could someday completely imitate my talent, or yours, or Shakespeare’s talent, the fundamental answer to the matter would still be: who cares, man.

I’m not
exaggerating, and I’m not turning a blind eye to the problem. I really mean it.

Who cares.

The fundamental quality of being me isn’t that I make comics or my day job or the color of my hair or that I use the word “man” too much in my emails.

The fundamental quality of being me is my experience.

The person who is typing these words on a Saturday afternoon in a small South American country is me, and only me. It doesn’t matter if the AI could do it someday, too, or do it better, or have access to all of my life experiences and could make an email just like this one butten times better.

It doesn’t matter if the thing takes my comics and starts writing and drawing them better than me and everyone chooses those over mine. Or maybe it does, okay, but not compared to the fact that what I am is much more than a collection of particularities.

I am having the experience of being me, right now. Me and only me. Not an AI, and not anybody else.

I think much of the fear and paranoia surrounding AI is that we think we are just parts of a big machine. “I will be replaced,” we think. Come on, man.

How could a machine or even another creature from another planet or dimension replace your experience of being you?

The experience of existing, of being who you are, is unique to you, and it would still be unique to you even if you got out of your house and everyone else on the street had your same face and physique and voice and dressed just like you do.

We can’t be replaced because we are not machines. We are not cogs in a mechanism. A person is not a means to an end, a person is an end in itself.

Ah, but “I will be replaced.”

Come on, man.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 2 will be out soon. Or very soon. In the meantime, you should take a look at The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 1.

Hey,

this is the comic strip that I was supposed to share in yesterday’s email.

Like all the ones I’ve posted this year, it will be included in The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 2, which will be on sale in a few days.

It will be an awesome book, let me tell you.

Just like this one.

Enjoy.

there are writers who produce several books a year, there are writers who produce one book every year, and there are writers who produce a book every five or ten years.

Or more.

Me, I like them all, so I’m not going to tell you which kind of writer is better. I would count myself among the first group, because of my personality, I guess, and because I grew up reading comics, which were published monthly.

But also because we live in a world that rewards the immediate. Everything has to be now, life is now, there’s no time to waste, etc.

And although you shouldn’t let the world dictate what kind of writer you’re going to be, you cannot completely ignore it, either. It’s there, all the time, on your phone, on TV, reminding you that you should be writing, or submitting, or hitting the publish button.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Thomas Pynchon’s gaps between books are half a decade to a decade.

But there are even better examples.

Juan Rulfo wrote one novel, Pedro Páramo, and a bunch of short stories that became classics of Latin American literature, and then quit to work the rest of his life as a historian.

Goethe spent whole decades, almost all of his adult life, writing Faust, which he published in his eighties.

I’m sure there are more, but I’d have to google and I don’t want to interrupt myself. You get the idea.

I think there are good reasons for publishing every four months, once a year, or once a decade, but internet anxiety shouldn’t be one of them.

Me, I’m going to publish a volume that includes the Condor strip above this text, along with the rest of the strips I’ve been sharing in this newsletter for the last year. So that’s a mix between immediacy and patience, I guess.

And I’ve already told you I spent seven years making the graphic novel that tells the life of The Condor.

In any case, the world will tell you all the time that you should’ve hit the publish button yesterday.

It may be right, or it may be just shouting nonsense, as it likes to do.

-

PS: In a few days I’ll hit the publish button and the second volume of the Condor strips will exist on paper. In the meantime, if you don’t have it, you can get the first volume here, for less than the price of a pizza.

PS2: This is the cover of the upcoming book. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Hey,

earlier today I heard that Edgar Allan Poe came up with the idea of the Big Bang (you know, the origin of the universe) eighty years before George Lemaître. It was in a poem called Eureka, which I haven’t read.

The thing is, the man wasn’t a scientist, he was a writer.

But writers’ minds are rare things. Or, some writers’ minds.

That’s probably why nobody took him seriously.

To be fair, nobody took Lemaître, the physicist who first proposed the idea, seriously until astronomer Edwin Hubble backed it up with data from his own observations.

The thing is, if scientists have it hard being taken seriously in today’s world, you, oh dear writer, will probably have it much harder.

You see, innovators who become rich and famous and admired by their contemporaries are the exception, not the rule. Visionaries are generally understood a couple of generations after they have died.

Am I saying you shouldn’t think too hard when you’re writing? No, of course not. You should do what you should do, and no one should know better than you.

I’m just warning you.

And, hell, I may be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Edgar Allan Poe did make money at one point in his career, as have so many geniuses, so I guess you can be a very different creature and still do well.

What I’m saying is, brilliant ideas are not always recognized as brilliant ideas.

Do with that information what you will.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Volume 1. Not a tremendously original comic, but neither a formulaic hero owned by a corporation.

PS2: Volume 2 will be out next week. Probably.

Hey,

I talked about haters last Sunday, and, oh, surprise, one hater commented on one of my posts yesterday.

Timing couldn’t have been better.

I was thinking of talking about the characteristics of haters today, and the Internet came in handy with an example for me to use. So, first of all, thank you, Internet.

I posted a question the other week on Substack. The question was “Why are you here?” and it got dozens of beautiful answers. And then, this:

“...did you write that yourself? It’s clearly not smart enough to be the product of AI.”

Now, the first thing I thought was, this is an AI bot that got offended. I hurt some AI’s feelings.

But it’s probably a real person, too. In any case, bot or not, this is a lame attempt at getting attention. We all need to be seen by others, and I guess that’s why most of us have Substack accounts, but this isn’t the way.

It’s not smart, it’s not sophisticated, it’s not beautiful...

Haters mock or insult people because they have ruled out all the legitimate means of getting attention from other people.

Maybe they think they’re better than the rest of us, so they don’t need to make an effort to produce something worth being seen. Or maybe they think they will never have what it takes and so they attack those who do, out of jealousy and rage.

Whatever.

You’ve seen a hater, you’ve seen them all. They think they’re special, yet they all have the same modus operandi.

And it’s not that I think I got this hate comment because I have many followers, or because the post had a lot of interactions.

Maybe it was just because I have what it takes (balls) to say what I think and show up as a real person and not hide behind a character.

Now, you don’t need many followers to do that.

If it didn’t happen to you, I’m sure you’ve seen it: someone with almost no followers makes an honest comment on something they genuinely think, on any social media platform, and the only response they get is someone mocking them.

That’s not envy of someone who’s popular, that’s envy of someone with a pair. Someone authentic.

So, my practical piece of advice: if you get a hate comment, don’t react. That’s what they want.

Yeah, I’m reacting to a comment here, but I think it’s for a good cause. It’s not the first one I’ve gotten, and I usually just ignore them.

If anything, some hate comments once in a while are only good as confirmation that you’re doing something right.

-

PS: Another thing that I’m doing right is the second volume of this: The Flight of the Condor: The Sunday Strips. I think it will be out in one or two weeks, at $12.99.

PS2: In the meantime, you can enjoy The Flight of the Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 1. It’s clearly not smart enough to be the product of AI.

Hey,

there’s a reason you’re not writing what you should be writing.

Well, sort of.

It’s not that I know you personally or that I can read minds (I can read minds), but it’s a very common problem amongst writers, artists, and people in general:

Sometimes we don’t say what we have to say because of what other people may think.

Now, I’m not a big fan of “what others think of me is none of my business” because we humans are social animals and, even when we know we shouldn’t care too much about other people’s opinions, we’re made in a way that we just can’t help it.

What I am a big fan of is living with the fact that other people will not like what you have to say, and you won’t like that they don’t like it, and it will be uncomfortable, and you go and say it anyway.

That’s, in my opinion, a more realistic and mature approach to the situation.

And it applies to life in general, and it also applies to good writing.

You may have your own definition, but my definition of good writing today is writing that’s technically well done and expresses an inner truth by the author.

That means you write well when you use the tools of the language to give life to something that’s inside you.

And you can’t do that if you’re too worried about what other people will think.

So here’s a harsh truth for you:

One day, you will write something that’s going to be the most personal and vulnerable thing you could possibly share, and some idiot with a keyboard will laugh at you.

You will feel like you’re walking naked in front of a lot of people, and someone will point the finger at you and mock your saggy butt.

That’s it.

That’s life.

You know, there will hopefully be more people reading your thing (the thing you wrote, I mean), and the vast, overwhelming majority of them will feel connected to you and will congratulate you for your bravery, which, if you do the math, is obviously well worth having to go through that weird moment of exposing yourself.

But there’s always the idiot with the pointing finger.

There are reasons why those people exist. I may feel like talking about those reasons someday, but not today.

Today, I want to share something that helped me a lot when I was starting to share my strips here, and will probably be of help to you if you find your fingers suddenly freeze on the keyboard when you’re going to write about something you care about.

And that thing is this:

Who cares, man.

It’s okay.

Who cares about them.

You hit the “publish” button anyway.

What you’re doing is ten thousand times more important than them and their stupid pointing fingers.

It’s scary at first, yeah.

But only at first.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, vol. 1. This beauty exists because I care much more about my art than I do about certain people’s opinions.

PS2: The second volume will be out in a few days, collecting the second year of these strips, including the one at the top of this very email.

Hey,

I’ve told you before about that thing Ray Bradbury said: you write one story a week, that’s 52 stories in a year, and nobody, no matter how bad they are, can write 52 bad stories straight.

So some of those stories must be good.

Now, before I had this newsletter, I used to have a blog. And, for about a year, I wrote a short story every single morning and posted it. The blog didn’t have many visits, but some people did read those raw, unedited stories, which were between 500 and 1,000 words long.

A couple of weeks ago, I revisited that blog because I remembered that some of those pieces of prose were about The Condor.

And, oh surprise, Ray Bradbury was right.

I found several of those stories good, or very good. So I polished them a bit, not much, and I’m going to publish nine of them in the upcoming print collection of the strips you read in this newsletter.

But I didn’t write only Condor stories. Most of those were about the first thing that came to my mind in the early morning. It was usually the first thing I did after waking up.

So, many of those stories were written based on an idea that I’ve talked about in previous emails: you start writing whatever it is that comes to mind first, filtering nothing, and then, after a few minutes, you have something worth writing about.

Well, actually, you have something other people may think is worth reading about.

Not that everyone will like it, but then, no work of art is universally liked, so what the hell.

I may do something with those stories someday. But even if I didn’t, I’m a guy who wrote hundreds of short stories at one stage in his life.

And it’s not that I’m recommending it, but perhaps that’s one type of person you would like to become, too.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 1, a collection of the first 52 comic strips featuring The Condor.

Some of those are good stories.

Just ask Ray Bradbury.

Hey,

I want to talk about an idea I had some time ago, about persistence and quitting as an artist. I don’t think there’s a line that you can easily cross. I don’t think there are people who persist and people who quit, and you’re either in one group or you’re in the other group.

You see, earlier today I was writing an intro to the second volume of The Sunday Strips, which is coming out in a couple of weeks or so. And I remembered when I wrote and drew the first one of these, already more than a hundred strips ago.

As of yesterday’s email, more than 8,200 people were subscribed to my email list. The number of people subscribed when I started?

Zero.

That’s it.

The number of people who got the first Condor Sunday strip in their email was zero. Hell, the number of views that first strip got was zero.

Now, that’s a very good reason to call it a day. To quit for good. To say, “No, this won’t work.”

But the truth is not that I didn’t quit. The truth is that I had already quit a few times before.

I’d had my Substack account for a year or two prior to that, and I’d already written a few posts that no one read. So, before that first Sunday Strips post, I’d already tried a few times before. And I’d failed to get those posts seen by anyone, too.

The thing is, if you try once and you quit, but then a few months later you give it another shot, did you really quit the first time?

To me, both answers, yes and no, are good answers.

To me, defeat exists, is real, but is never definitive. Unless, you know, you die or something.

So, I spent like two and a half days writing and drawing that first strip, posted it, and no one read it.

But once you fail enough times, you get to know yourself, and you get to know you’re going to try again.

So I decided to try again the following week instead of the following year.

Okay, the following week the results were not much better. But by the fifth or sixth week, things had slowly started to move.

The subscriber list started to grow. And it kept growing.

And now, two years later, I can say I have a pretty big one.

I’m not saying persistence guarantees success. I don’t believe in that.

But I do believe that persistence does increase the chances of having any success.

And more importantly, what I’m trying to say is that the difference between persisting and quitting isn’t as clear as we tend to think.

That perhaps you, at whatever you were attempting to do, thought you had quit, when you actually hadn’t.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Vol. 1. The fruit of my persistence, volume one.

The second volume will be out soon, as I said. And it already has a cover.

A beautiful cover.

This one:

Hey,

today, I’m sharing with you a few stories of success from writers.

No conclusion, no moral, no nothing. Just some stories that have made me smile in the past, and that helped me keep making art when no one was reading:

ROBIN WOOD.

I’m almost sure you have never heard of Robin Wood.

He was born in 1944 in a poor rural community of Scottish immigrants in the Paraguayan jungle.

As a young man in Buenos Aires, he worked for a very, very low salary as a day laborer at a factory, but was obsessed with reading and art.

Once, a friend encouraged him to submit a story to a popular comics magazine, which he did. He never received a response, so he forgot about the matter.

That is, until one day he came late to the factory, and the owner didn’t let him in.

As he was a day laborer, he told the owner, “If I don’t work today, I won’t eat,” to which the owner basically answered that he didn’t care.

Wood, wandering through the streets under heavy rain with no money for the bus ticket, suddenly saw in a newsstand the comics magazine to which he had submitted a story: his name was on it.

So he presented himself in his worn, dirty, and soaked factory clothes at the offices of the publisher.

The editors recognized his name, told him they had been trying to contact him to write more for them, and paid him for the story a sum that equaled more than five months of what he earned at the factory.

Robin Wood is now known mostly in Latin America for being the creator of the comic Nippur de Lagash, which he wrote for more than 30 years as a nomad, living in many countries around the world as he wrote the scripts and sent them by mail to the publisher.

ALAN MOORE.

In 1970, Alan Moore, the genius behind the graphic novel From Hell and the novel Jerusalem, was expelled from high school.

He was apparently dealing LSD, so, you know, it’s not that he was unfairly treated.

But Moore says the headmaster contacted all the high schools in the area to make sure no other institution would accept him.

So the man had to work at low-wage jobs, like cleaning bathrooms and skinning sheep, before he had the chance to start his writing career in the British comics industry.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ.

In 1966, Gabriel García Márquez had to pawn his heater to send the manuscript of his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude from Mexico City to a publishing house in Buenos Aires.

However, with the money he had, he could only afford to send not the complete novel but only half of it.

When García Márquez was leaving the post office, his wife, who was very, very angry, said “Now the only thing left is for the novel to be bad.”

-
PS: The Flight of The Condor. The Complete Saga. Written and drawn over seven years when which no one was paying attention.

Hey,

last week I posted a note here on Substack where I asked, basically, what do you want?

First of all, thank you to all of those who answered. I did it for a reason: so I could read what people say they want. You know, what we want and what we say we want are not always the same thing, so I shouldn’t really trust you.

Or should I?

The post has, at the time I’m writing this, Saturday morning, 156 replies, which is a lot. A lot, man. So you could say, as a rash conclusion, that people respond well to the idea of being asked their opinion.

We love to be asked our opinion, right? And that’s because we all want to be heard. We want to know people are paying attention to us. We want to know we are part of a group.

And that desire to be heard was the most common response in the post’s comments. Most people commented things like they want to share a message, share their writing, find an audience... you get the idea.

And also, in that regard, some people commented that they could write freely on Substack because, unlike other platforms, they felt they wouldn’t be harshly judged.

So it’s not only that we want to be read. We want to be read by people who feel like friends. Or at least people who like what we write. That’s, you know, being part of a group.

So, to answer my own question, why do I write?

Come on, man.

It’s obvious.

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Volume 1.

I write because I want to sell my comics, too.

Like this one.

Take a look at it. It’s a great comic.

Hey,

there’s this study I read a few years ago that talks about the way your brain works. Reread it again for today’s email and hey, there is good news.

Look, it seems fluid intelligence, which includes the capacity to make abstractions and think fast, peaks in your twenties. Which, if you’re a creative person and you’re already past that age, may seem like bad news. Because you need to be smart and clever to create.

But wait.

There’s two things.

The first is that crystallized intelligence plays a role in your art, too. Specifically for writers.

Crystallized intelligence includes your experience, your vocabulary, and your knowledge. And the study says crystallized intelligence peaks in your 60s and 70s.

That’s because most people keep gathering experiences and knowledge as they age, even if the brain starts working a little slower.

That’s why you may notice that there are more great novels written by older writers than there are written by teenagers or young adults.

And the way to strengthen your crystallized intelligence is to just keep reading, keep learning, and keep having experiences with new people.

I know most writers enjoy solitude more than normal people do, but hey, meeting new people and having new experiences is good for your brain.

It is what it is.

And the second thing: there is a way to preserve most of your fluid intelligence. You know, the one that peaked in your twenties.

But to preserve it, you must do some things that your everyday life conspires against: eat real food, sleep well, walk a few miles every day, and build muscle.

Which, you know, ouch.

But again, it is what it is.

I’m not telling you this so you go imitate the Rocky Balboa routine starting Monday, but…

-

PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Volume 1. A good read for your crystallized intelligence for less than the price of a pizza, which isn’t that good for your brain anyway.

Hey,

today I want to talk about how to get your reader’s attention.

I just ran across something singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell said about Bob Dylan. If you know the woman, maybe you already know what she apparently said.

Now, I’m a big Bob Dylan fan and I like some of Joni Mitchell’s songs. If I had to name one, I’d name A Case of You. But I digress.

The thing is, Joni Mitchell basically said Bob Dylan was not a very good musician.

Or so I read.

In an Instagram post.

A post that immediately caught my attention and had me googling the quote for ten minutes. Ten minutes in which I was supposed to be writing a newsletter about how language evolves in the brain as we age. I suppose I’ll save that for tomorrow’s newsletter.

Now, why did I waste ten whole minutes googling something that, even if it were true, would have deserved a “who cares, man” on my part?

Because it touched me.

I really like Bob Dylan’s songs. And to hear a good musician say that the man’s not that good, it made me question my musical taste. So, in a way, Joni Mitchell was talking about me.

And if you’re a Bob Dylan fan, I’m sure the words “Musically, Dylan’s not very gifted; he’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player” do strike a chord in you.

You feel she’s talking not to you, but about you. About your taste. About your whole personality.

Now, it was just an Instagram post. Who cares, you know. But when we read something that touches us, most of the time the reason you feel touched is because you feel someone’s talking about you. So you stop whatever you’re doing or about to do, and you pay attention.

Now, it can be cheap clickbait that leads you nowhere, and ten minutes later, you’ve forgotten about it. But what if a good writer gets your attention?

I think that’s why telling the hero’s journey is a good idea. All of us are walking the hero’s journey in a way, or would like to. You tell a good story, you are talking about your reader.

The fact that you don’t know them is irrelevant. You tell a good story, you are talking about your reader. And the moment the reader sees that, they’ll stop doing whatever they’re doing, and they’ll read you.

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PS: The Flight of the Condor: The Sunday Strips, volume 1. The hero’s journey, told in more than sixty strips. A book about adventure, loss, tragedy, and hope. Guess who this book is about.

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PS2: The second volume will be out in a few weeks. Just so you know.

Hey,

the other day I read something that absolutely blew my brains out of my beautiful head.

There was this guy who wrote a crime novel, and sold it for, I hope you’re reading this sitting on a chair or couch, two million dollars.

That is, the $ sign, a number two, and a lot of zeros next to it. You know, a lot of money. I had never heard of anyone who got such a high advance for a book. And listen, I think it was their first book.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

What I wanted to tell you is this: the buyers put the book into one of those “programs” that tell you how probable it is that you’ve used AI to write your text, looked at the result, and cancelled the contract.

That is, from zero to two million, and from two million to zero. Another way of seeing it is that the buyers took away the number two in the offer and left only the lot of zeros next to it.

Now, my question is: why would anyone in their right mind use AI to write a novel? I mean, come on.

Remember what I told you last week about an experiment a famous Spanish copywriter did, who counted the amount of subscribers he lost when he sent emails written by an AI?

The heart of the matter was the way AI takes any sign of personality from your writing and wipes it away, making you look just exactly like any other writer. Not too bad at writing understandable sentences, not good enough to show his personality through the writing.

So, today’s piece of wisdom is practically the same as last week’s: be yourself, man.

If you’re absolutely terrible at writing, learn to write. It’s not that hard (nah, I’m lying, learning to write well can be very hard, and it’s a lifelong process).

But if you got any talent: be yourself. Don’t hide behind an AI. It doesn’t work.

People want to connect with other people, with its imperfections, their mistakes, and their stupid ideas you wouldn’t agree with in a million years.

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PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, volume 1. A collection of 60+ imperfectly and authentically made Condor strips, just for you, for less than the price of a pizza.

Hey,

this is yet another email about Alan Moore’s writing advice. There’s so much wisdom inside this man’s head that I could probably make fifty emails, but three emails are more than enough. For now.

One thing I remember reading him say somewhere (sorry, I don’t remember where, so I can’t quote the source) is that you should make your readers work.

He said that, obviously, if your work is too complex, you’ll lose a portion of your readers, but the ones who are left will enjoy the work more, and that’s because they will have made an effort to understand it.

Because we only value those things we’ve made an effort to obtain.

That’s how we are, human beings. And art is no different.

Too easy to understand, and maybe you’ll have a good time, maybe a laugh or two, and then you’ll forget it. You know, like so many of those TV series out there nowadays.

Too hard to understand, and you’ll get confused, maybe angry, and move on to something less of a headache.

But read From Hell and, oh, surprise, you’ve hit the sweet spot.

Yeah, it may be a bit too difficult for you if you’re not used to reading complex stuff, but the stuff inside it that’s too complex can also be understood with a bit of patience and a second or third read. Or even a bit of research.

And then, after having read and understood what a masterpiece From Hell is, aside from having enjoyed it immensely as the great story that it is, you’ll close the book with the feeling that the writer, this immensely talented and intelligent man, treated you with so much respect that he wrote what he wrote with the conviction that someone like you could be on the same intellectual level as he is.

And that’s much, much more than just enjoying a great story.

That’s something that stays with you, man.

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PS: The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips, Volume 1. It collects the first 52 strips that I’ve been posting here every Sunday, plus several strips and a prose story that you won’t find anywhere else. Volume 2 will be out soon, so stay tuned.

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PS2: If you haven’t read Alan Moore’s From Hell, do yourself a favor and get a copy as soon as you can. The Condor can wait. Hell, everything else can wait.

Hey,

welcome to another post about writing advice from the great Alan Moore.

I said yesterday that this man has been my biggest writing influence, so why not talk about his infinite wisdom again?

I want to tell you about something I remember him saying in an interview that’s out there on YouTube. I’d link it, but there are so many that I can’t quite remember which one it was. Watch them all, I’d say.

He said, “Treat your writing like a god.”

Easy to follow, right?

Treat writing as if it were a real god with real power, Alan Moore said. Pay tribute to your god of writing as if it were real. Give it nothing but your best effort. Make a real sacrifice. Give it your best.

He doesn’t say, “Give it your best and it will reward you with fame and fortune, and veryone will love you.”

He says, “Give it your best.”

Not only does he not guarantee success of any kind if you do as he says, but he warns you: give it something that is not your best, try to trick the god of writing, and the god of writing will f#ck with you in ways you can’t even imagine.

Do it for fame and fortune instead of for the glory of writing, and the god of writing will f#ck you for good.

(Just so you know, I write “f#ck” because I think it’s in bad taste to write the word “fuck” on the internet.)

Me? I don’t know how mean and resentful this god of writing might be, but I do think this approach is a very good way of taking the craft seriously.

So, as always, I try to do as the man says, and I hope I’ve explained it well enough that you do, too.

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PS: The Flight of the Condor: The Sunday Strips, Volume One. A compilation of the first year of this newsletter’s strips. The second volume is coming out soon.

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PS2: If you already have this volume, maybe you would consider writing an honest review on amazon. Even a short one helps. Thank you.

Hey,

Today I want to talk about one of Alan Moore's best writing tips. Because unlike the mysterious bearded man in this week’s strip, the magician and genius writer doesn’t keep his writing advice to himself.

Quite the opposite.

The man has shared his wisdom in interviews for decades, and if I had to name a single influence on my writing, it would be him, both for his brilliant work and for the way he sees the world and the place art should have in it.

In an interview a few years ago (here), he said that one of young writers’ biggest temptations today is the idea that they’ll create a gigantic epic that will end up as a movie or TV franchise, making them rich and famous. And that’s a terrible way to learn the craft.

Instead, he suggested something much more rational and much less glamorous: start by writing short stories.

Now, in my opinion, it’s less glamorous if you’re thinking about selling millions of copies and taking pictures with famous actors. But if you’re truly thinking about writing, it’s a far more interesting life.

If you’re starting out, Moore says, you should learn to solve all the problems that writing a story demands you solve, and you should be able to do it in just a few pages.

I remember when I started making comics. I began with six-page stories. I made several of them, and I absolutely recommend following the man’s advice.

Short stories build the muscles you need to write longer works.

And the strips I’m serializing here in this newsletter are a great creative exercise, too. I’ve come up with some strips I’m very proud of, and they exist, in no small part, because I followed that advice.

So, to make it short: daydreaming about having Nicolas Cage and Scarlett Johansson play your beloved characters is a bad idea. Focusing on the work, the difficulties, and the pleasures of writing, on the other hand, is a very good one.

And starting small is the best way to tackle the task.

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PS: I’ll hopefully be publishing the second volume of The Sunday Strips sometime next month. A whole year of short stories created by doing exactly what I just talked about. Just so you can see how good the man’s advice is.

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PS2: You can get the first volume, which collects the first year of the strip, here:

The Flight of The Condor: The Sunday Strips.