AN IMPERFECT UNION
Here’s the third new Substack edition pages!
Enjoy!!
And read the full work in progress here!!!
AN IMPERFECT UNION
A graphic novel about a couple, a country, and the gun debate aimed to help heal our polarized divide.
Ambition/Vainglory/Authenticity
When you tell people you are making The Great American (Graphic) Novel About Guns.
They look at you like, well, that’s quite ambitious.
What is ambition?
The etymology of the word is “a going around.”
As in a going around looking for validation and honor.
Such as asking a friend, Rebecca Yeldham, a producer of the adaptations into film of the books Khaled Hosseini’s THE KITE RUNNER, Jack Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD and Che Guevara's THE MOTORCYCLE DIARIES, to include in her blurb:
“This book may well fill the gap for a Great American (Graphic) Novel about guns in our culture.”
She approved it.
But that was my ambition talking.
What drove this strong desire to achieve this, requiring years of determination and hard work.
I don’t know. Or rather, I didn’t know. For many years. And I still don’t fully know.
But I started to know more about why. When I realized the student character now named David Gomez. He was based on me.
What is vainglory?
It is perhaps the desire to have glory in the world.
That is not authentic to what is allotted to you.
That could be status as a great individual.
But also as a great nation.
America itself is ambitious.
Always going around, striving to be exceptional.
But ambition without humility can tip into vainglory.
When we seek greatness without acknowledging the equal greatness of others.
Other individuals, other countries, other supporting roles, other ways of life.
We can become narcissistic, even malevolent.
Some might say America’s ambition to arm itself for greatness doesn’t consider the cost to its own people.
Others might say other countries not arming themselves enough makes America have to continue to be exceptional to help them.
I do not know!
I started this project in 2013.
Which is the same year I started at the talent agency William Morris Endeavor.
It was a screenplay.
I was full of self-assured superiority and status-conscious drivenness.
And also workaholic competitiveness and inferior worthlessness.
I would tell almost everyone I met what I was working on.
And I would use work time and resources to write the project and to email people.
Sometimes the days after mass shootings.
I also had agents hip-pocketing me at times at WME.
Though we never sold it.
The person I was with at the time.
Was a more successful TV writer.
Helped with the project at times.
Sometimes wanted me to remove the high school student character.
Why portray a charismatic talented filmmaker.
Who was also on the verge of becoming a dangerously disgraced villain.
What did that have to do with a story about a couple, the country, and the gun debate?
If you wanted to make the great American story about guns.
But you wanted to sell it to Hollywood producers as some form of a comedy or dramedy.
Even a romantic or marital one.
Why have something like this?
Well, students and schools and the issue are topical and logical.
But the symbolic and personal reasons might be that I was having trouble distinguishing myself.
And it is likely many other people especially men like or unlike me.
Have had this experience.
This project started as one of many comedy screenplays.
That didn’t sell.
Let alone get made.
But with the failures the tone started to shift.
From the silly and farcical to the seriocomic and semiautobiographical.
From the image-conscious and pragmatic to the authentic and honest.
First very unconsciously. Until someone pointed out that I misspelled the word farther in a scene. As father. When I was writing this David character as John White.
It was only then that I realized he was my thwarted shadow.
I forgot it again.
Until I started working with a director.
On a potential film version.
And I mentioned that this John White student character he was named then is kind of based on me.
He looked at me like Duh.
Then his face sunk a little when he saw how little I consciously knew that.
I think a lot of people don’t realize how much they want to achieve something.
It can sometimes be related to how bad they feel about themselves not having achieved it yet.
And that they are therefore willing to do anything.
Deceitful, self-serving, harmful.
But that only perhaps gets you farther away.
Not just potentially from achieving your goal.
But almost certainly from who you want to be.
Not that I know anything about this ;)
I continue to know only that I don’t know!
Here’s a blurb I didn’t phrase for the writer first at all:
“[This book] feels like an episode of THE SIMPSONS - back when THE SIMPSONS was hilarious, sharp, biting. It reminds me of Kyle Baker's graphic novels, with that kind of fine irony that hits you right in the chest. And at the same time, it's a serious portrait of the gun control debate in the US — which is no longer just a left-versus-right issue." —Érico Assis, Award-winning Translator, Editor, Journalist and Author of the Virapágina newsletter
Good huh?
I will continue to accept my allotted share of authentic glory.
While still working to serve others through this book.
No matter how imperfectly.
Receiving admiration is what brought me here.
But giving what I think is the good is what keeps me going around.
Thanks for continuing to read AN IMPERFECT UNION.
AN IMPERFECT UNION
A graphic novel about a couple, a country, and the gun debate aimed to help heal our polarized divide.