I just start these things whenever I get ideas; they don’t necessarily go anywhere. Putting up even partial drafts is a good way to make sure you get stuff done, any stuff. For more on that, have a look at the Cult of Done Manifesto. Then have a look at this guy’s assertion why the Cult of Done can kiss his ass. Then, make yourself a vodka gibson (for best results, just rinse out the glass with vermouth) and draw your own confusions.
She paused for a moment after exiting the cab, looking around to take her bearings, to get a feel for the neighborhood. At left, a slightly modernistic parking structures, its high prices a holdover from better, more economically insane times, when shiny SUVs driven by open-collared venture capitalist-types holding a cappucino in one hand while talking on bluetooth earbuds terrified commute traffic. Natasha Sheherazade Roubichev, who for some inexplicable reason went by the innocuous name “Janie”, had never particularly understood those little earpieces. Like bicycle clips, cell phone belt holsters or pocket protectors, they seemed like a wonderful idea when considered purely logically. And like those other things, they made their owners look utterly stupid. That, or frighteningly insane, as they walked down the street, spontaneously gesticulating and shouting at the invisible magic demons, when all they were really doing was complaining to their plumbing contractor how, goddammit, the repairmen had tracked crap all over the recently cleaned carpets again.
To the right, an empty sidewalk was abutted by a run down coffee shop. An elderly black homeless woman talked to herself, while a thirty-something white guy with a three-day stubble stared listlessly at his Macbook. Ordinarily, Janie would have pegged him for a marketing wonk or sales account manager who’d snuck out of the office to “work” remotely. In these times, the pale light cast by the laptop’s screen onto his face through gloom of a cloudy afternoon was more likely the reflection from some social networking site or similar time-waster for the shell-shocked recently unemployed.
Ahead, a short set of stairs rose into a vaguely scummy 5-story building, probably put up in the ’50s or ’60s, which inevitably attracted mid-sized shipping companies, travel firms or other nameless third-tier outfits with a need for cubicle space. Space to house the legions of middle-aged secretaries that haunted the city’s subway at rush hour, clad in tennis shoes to be exchanged for sensible pumps at the office, clutching a cup of coffee in one hand and a bright blue oversize fake leather purse in the other. Who answered phones, organized the company christmas dinner, spread office rumors around the water cooler, put pictures of their nonexistent cats on their cubicle walls, and retired at quitting time to evenings of pajamas, Sex and the City, and ice cream. The kind of person, in short, who stereotypically infested the sort of company that Janie desperately hoped she was not about to set foot in.
Dressed stylishly but not excessively so, unsure of the expectations of the 20-something crowd of with-it t-shirt-clad, soul-patched hipsters she expected to encounter having the run of the place, she brushed down her skirt and approached the double glass doors at the end of the dusky hallway, infused with a brew of dim daylight spilling through the frosted windows topping the other office doors, and indefinable office sounds. Telephones, keyboards, muffled voices all speaking of human daily activity hidden in the offices of innumerable lawyers, therapists, accountants, headhunters, detectives, consultants, scattered throughout innumerable office buildings in innumerable cities, creating the strangely calm atmosphere of work through which Janie walked through the doors.
OrionWerks Ltd. was one of the flood of publishing operations devoted to comic books that had sprung up during the nineties, in response to an Internet-driven combination of talented, doodling high school kids bored stupid by their biology teacher and able to spread their drawings to other, equally bored kids, and a seeming epidemic of short attention spans leading to the decline of anyone actually wanting to pick up a “book” and parse “text”. All pretensions to luddite elegance aside, it always seemed like such a vastly more practical way to convey concepts when compared to sitting in front a computer screen, droolingly taking in mascara’ed emo types whining about political concepts they barely understood.
To be continued?
