Ladies and Gentlemen, the second comic in the One Human, Being series – Priority Green is here! I’ll be releasing one every week from now on, with alternative covers and a few tweaks 🙂
I went through all the script of this one with the intention of really overhauling it, but you know what, in the end I only changed about 5 speech bubbles – turns out that though Bob is a bit ‘preachy’, it’s at least consistent with where the comic goes, and he kinda needs to be like this.
I’m finding reading through, it’s quite nice knowing where a series goes – in terms of overall plot but also character development. Seeing where they go as people. One Human, Being was a series I wanted to be created completely subconsciously, just to see where it went – unusually I didn’t plan it nor write out the full script, I literally just setup each scene and saw where it took me. And I’m really glad I did, I think that often works well for creative projects, where you let the art/medium kinda flow and just see what happens. Then check-in now and then and see what you notice about your own creation – that can work well with everything from creative writing (like write as fast as you can, zero judgement) to oil painting to music production! Art’s in us all, we just have to find the ways that work for us (my way is boobies).
There’s a lot to be said for the opposite approach too, of course; planning everything out and making sure the plot works and stuff, but yeah, in this case I made One Human, Being as a complete exercise in the autonomy of my subconscious and I’m honestly really proud of the series overall because it seriously goes places I had NOT expected.
I feel like this second comic is probably a low point in the series – it’s not a bad comic per se, it just needs to do some world-building, and I suppose I was kicking about for getting under the skin of the characters …
Though it’s not my favourite comic in the series, it turns out that one of the most important/formative parts of the series is to be found here – page 16/17 – Steph says of space, ‘It’s all DARK’, and her optimistic sister Jen chips in ‘with twinkles’. Turns out that is the master arc of the entire series and I wrote the rest of the arc with this discussion in mind, because I was really struck by the naturalness with which Steph seemed to focus on the darkness – something no doubt all humans can relate to, sometimes. I certainly do.
In fact I think this can be a sign of our adolescence; our propensity to polarise things. I think maturity is more about nuance and paradox; and some people never get there. The steps to maturity are, after all, necessarily immature, and we love to pretend we’re grown-ups with all the answers. It is after this ‘adolescent’ moment of Steph’s that we begin to explore her darker side, and it is through this struggle we discover her freedom; eventually encompassing both light and shade …
… so yeah. The series goes places I hadn’t planned. Honestly proud of where it goes.
(+ I’ve been having fun rebuilding the covers …)
Download comic 2, read it, share it, enjoy 🙂
[Got some thoughts? As always, you can leave feedback anonymously if you’d prefer 🙂 ]
Editing sucks. I’ve written two novels I’m very happy with, but I haven’t shared them because they both desperately need editing, and I suck at editing.
The first one started totally by accident, when I joined an early Mastodon node with an ST:TNG theme. I decided to role-play as a Sclazi-esque Red Shirt who was just reporting aboard. Only nobody replied to my early posts! So I kept posting (as personal log entries) about how the character had beamed aboard a suspiciously empty ship. It soon turned into an escape-room kidnap mystery story, with each entry falling within that early Mastodon post size limit.
Then the solo protagonist took over the writing, with my role being relegated to that of his amanuensis. The more the character took over, the better the plot became, and the more his personality developed, though once in a while he’d get himself into a plot box that he’d ask me to open. No worries, glad to help.
However, as things started approaching novel-length I began to wonder if he’d ever run out of steam (I liked it better when I was in charge). It soon became evident that the only way the story would ever end would be with his death. Which I plotted accordingly. Whew! Done and dusted.
I was at peace for almost 6 months. Then, during a lucid dream, my dead protagonist reappeared, saying, in his best Monty Python voice, “I’m not dead yet!”. Sure enough, I woke with the opening chapter fully formed in my mind, with a rough view of the story arc. This second story was significantly better than the first in several ways. Amazingly, there were several nuggets within the first novel that served as seeds for the second, totally unplanned and accidental. Best of all, my protagonist and I wrote it as a team. As the ending approached, I had learned my lesson. Rather than try to kill him again, I sent him off on an endless journey, perhaps to be documented later on.
It’s been 5 years, and I still haven’t heard from him. I’m free! But the two files still sit there, mocking me.
I’m reaching the point of wondering if AI would be able to help me get at least an initial edit done, especially for the first novel. Mainly to help identify plot gaps/failures, and perhaps to bounce it against Memory Alpha to help detect any non-canon elements. Also, being a personal log, I need to assign accurate stardates to every log entry!
Available for editing. In fact I can’t stop editing, except for Sindy’s work, which is about as close to perfect as it comes. English only.
Bob – yeah I love that, when you get to the root of a character and then they get a life of their own and writing becomes very easy – so funny yours took on too much life and you had to send them off on a Jason-esque quest! It’s funny how perhaps these characters appear and the ones that stick seem to do so because they have something to tell us at that time. STFW went into this when God’s talking to Tom – in the last comic he says something like “You have the answers written into you … and literally in the book that’s in your hand. They were always there.” or words to that effect. I echoed this feeling in Lithium a couple of times, either with Skylar talking to Bob, or (more likely) God talking to the kids.
In terms of AI helping – it might to some extent, but just be aware of AI psychosis, where you can get dragged into an echoing prison. Pretty serious stuff. (eg. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/26/ai-chatbot-users-lives-wrecked-by-delusion – lots of good stuff in that article)
Mark – aw what a cool suggestion to help Bob with the editing! Yeah you guys could put some emails down and get started 🙂
Mark – Thanks! I’m in the midst of a relentless remodel that is sucking the marrow from every creative bone in my body. Imagine being terrorized by having to choose PAINT COLORS! Meh. I’ll be in touch once my home becomes more livable.
Sindy – I have a semi-professional interest in many aspects of AI, primarily as functional tools rather than companions, therapists, friends or any of the other socio-emotional aspects and risks. Those aspects certainly can be fun, but have little practical value during these still-early days.
At the moment, I have 5 AI models running in my home, on hardware I own, largely to support my nascent home automation system. TTS (text-to-speech), STT (speech-to-text), vision (video frame content), a reasoning assistant (to determine what inquiries can be resolved locally vs needing, say, a web search), and a coding assistant (for writing automations and performing log analysis).
The AI model needed as an effective editing assistant is far larger than I can run locally, and I don’t really want to feed my novels to something I don’t control. Fortunately, there are now some AI services that claim to not retain user prompts and system replies, though I haven’t experimented with them yet, as all my mental bandwidth and cash is being absorbed by my friggin’ remodel.
I really wish I an AI could handle more of this remodel for me. Maybe I should look into that first.
Elmore Leonard used to spend a couple of months creating characters and fleshing them out (where they went to school, job history, life story etc). Then he’d throw them into a scene and just write. He knew what they’d do in every situation so he said the books wrote themselves. Took him a fortnight of actual writing time to come up with gems like Get Shorty and Rum Punch (filmed as Jackie Brown). Looks like you were following a similar method to come up with what’s probably my favourite series of yours.
Ah that’s really interesting thank you. I think I’d find it hard to write someone’s backstory without seeing them / how they start to interact but I guess that’s the hard work bit for Elmore’s process. I guess if the backstory is all there ready and waiting you can get cracking with the good stuff – whereas my OHB series takes a while to find its feet! Glad you enjoyed it 🙂