Hey guys, it's Scott.
It is Tuesday, August 8th, and I am back from my trip with my 16 year-old and 12 year-old to L.A., to Vegas, and everywhere in between. I am completely wiped. We got back at like 2 to 3:00 in the morning last night, but I am crazy excited to dive back into work and to things with you guys and we have great stuff ahead. So a quick bit of housekeeping. Tomorrow night, Wednesday at 9:30pm EST, we're gonna do a mini-class. I wanted to do this big class called How to Write a Superhero Comic. And it's all set, I even did like, for me, high-tech, which is like, I did whiteboards and I pulled up PDFs (or had Ty, the greatest assistant, help me pull up PDFs) and pages to use in this. And I have a whole presentation about it, like, a master class, kind of like the biggest class that I've done so far with you guys in that format. And it's all about like, if you have a chance to do licensed stuff, Batman, Godzilla, anything, what are the priorities, you might want to approach it with? So all the stuff that I've learned, the stuff that I screwed up, the stuff that was surprising to me, but I'll walk you through my experience with it, and the things that I think are important to bring to it. And then we'll go through the construction of one of them together. So it should be a lot of fun, I'm really excited. But I want to put it on hold because I'm gonna do it for free, let everybody in, I want to just sort of do something celebratory as a thank you.
And so for the paid thing tomorrow night, I'm going to do a mini-class on how to write a mystery because it's a topic that has been brought up a few times now in the Discord, people seem to really want to know how I go about constructing a mystery, like in Clear or Dark Spaces: Wildfire or Court of Owls. And so I'm gonna go through my process for that and I'm gonna try to actually use the new book I'm doing,—Dark Spaces: Dungeon with Hayden Sherman, my amazing co-creator. Without giving too much of it away, I'll show you how I come to build the initial infrastructure for a mystery like this and then I'll use the books that are already out to finish that thought, to show you how that completes itself on Court of Owls and Clear and stuff like that. So it should be a lot of fun. Again, it'll be everything that I've screwed up, learned, and now use. So I can't wait to try it. Tomorrow night, 9:30pm EST, never too late to sign up for a paid subscription, give it a shot, we'll have a lot of fun!
So going back to life. This trip, it's always a balance. Jeanie, my wife, wants me to be careful about sharing too much on here. And I am generally careful, but there's also a desire to let you guys in because you've been there for me from the very beginning. And I like giving you a window into what it's like to balance life and work for everybody that's an aspiring creator, but also just because you've been a part of my story, both as a writer and as a person for many, many years. One of the great joys of going to conventions these days is having people come up and say, “I've been following you since this time,” or “I was a kid when I started reading your comics and now look at me, I have a beard!” All of that kind of stuff is a real joy. So I'm going to try and find a balance here with it. So all summer, I've been trying to find a trip to take with our 12 year-old, and I thought about bringing him to San Diego, but it's just a total beast and I had a ton of work meetings and things set up. And a lot of really cool stuff coming, I promise, we'll be talking about it soon, but I decided not to do that and instead asked him where he wanted to go a couple weeks later and he said he wanted to go to L.A. and see some big nature. And so we decided to go to L.A. and then from L.A. to drive to Vegas, all of this in like three days. And so then he really wanted his older brother to come and we said okay.
And so it was me and the two boys and we started off by going to L.A. We went to Disneyland, which is amazing and they hadn't really been to Disneyland, I’d been very briefly with a 12 year-old, but the 16 year-old had never gone, and we went there and ate lots of Mickey ice cream and junk and did thrill rides and did slow rides and it was a blast. And then after that we went through an Angels game, my 12 year-old is a huge baseball fan, as I've said a bunch of times, and I surprised them both with tickets that I had happened upon. And we got to see Shohei and it was just awesome. It was great.
And then from there we drove out into the desert. And for me, I know I've said this before, but bear with me for a minute because this is kind of the point of the post, is that I think sometimes here, in America in particular, the fact that everything is so young compared to Europe, compared to other places around the world. We're a young country, and that a lot of the architecture and the things around you are hyper-young, right? They're strip malls or fast food or buildings that are only from what, the 50s to the 90s, and it creates this kind of hall of mirrors, this magnification of importance. And it can cause me, I'll speak for myself, to think of my problems a lot of the time, or my anxieties, as bigger than they are, or at least makes it very hard to find a sense of smallness, a sense of connection to history in a different way, than just knowing it. Just feeling tiny, the sacred feeling of that, of feeling connected to everything from the past and that's going to happen and yet also feeling very small in that way. That feeling is something that I think is really special in life, and when you can find it, it's inspiring.
So anyway, taking them out to the desert, that spot, that whole area, the four corners and everything, is a place that I've gone to many times and I really love in life—the majesty of the Red Rock, the absolute barrenness of the desert, the towering mountains you find in Zion, all that kind of stuff is just unbelievable. So I drove them out there, they made a playlist, it was super fun, we barely fought, it was good. We stopped along the way at all kinds of crazy rest stops and got alien jerky and ate it. Apparently it’s definitely from a real alien from Area 51 and not a cow.
But then we made it to Vegas and it was a blast. The first time I've ever been to Vegas and never gambled. But it was a lot of fun showing them around and going to the Hershey Museum and seeing the sphere and just sort of overload. And those extremes were fascinating to see on a kid's face, the absolute smallness you feel in the desert.
And on the third day, we went to the Grand Canyon because they felt they wanted to see more nature, which was very exciting to me, instead of staying in Vegas. And then the absolute opposite, the whole city that’s saying “everything for you, everything that you think and do, and everything is important in your life,” just the absolute opposites of that was, for me, seeing the kids react to that and choosing to going back out into nature was really heartening, even though we had a blast in Vegas and it was fun and all of that stuff too. For me, my favorite thing about Las Vegas, personally, and I've been there many times, is that I love gambling, particularly craps. Anyone that's a friend of mine knows this. Whenever I go to a convention and there's a casino anywhere near, I love going to play craps. I went to school to college and Providence and my very good friend at the time, the guy I wrote Severed with, Scott Tuft, he was at school in Middletown, CT. And this was back when they were first building the Native American casinos and we used to drive halfway through and meet each other on the weekends now and then gamble. At that time Mohegan Sun was just getting on its feet and Foxwoods was more established. So we would go to Foxwoods and if we won anything, we would stay there and watch their show, and if we lost, we go to Mohegan Sun, where the show was basically free at the Wolf’s Den. But that’s a story for another time
Bigger point, what I love about craps in particular is that it's a game where you're betting on somebody at the table. You feel an energy. If you don't know how to play craps, essentially the whole game is you roll the dice and if you get a four through ten, you're trying to get that number again before you get to seven, and everybody at the table, unless you're an asshole and betting against you, which is a rare thing, but happens, is basically betting that you will do that. So you're a team. It's one of the few games in the casino where you're betting and depending on each other and there's an energy to it that's palpable. And I am not a big believer, I'm not particularly religious, I don't subscribe to any structured religion. But I'm a very big believer in this idea that there are things beyond the physical world that we are incapable of understanding. I had the same thought when our oldest kid was like, a baby and thinking about how incredibly dumb he was at that time. Like, he didn't know anything about math or the internet or “this was America” or anything. His brain was absolutely physically incapable of understanding those things. And I remember just thinking like, I'm probably like that when it comes to these huge metaphysical things. It's like a cat trying to understand the Internet. So there's a release that comes with that, a feeling of smallness that I really cling to personally. I like thinking, well, if I can understand death as just this physical experience where you drop dead and that's the end, then it's probably not that, it's probably something bigger. If I can understand it as this very defined heaven, then it's probably not that, it's probably something else.
And so all of this is to say, I believe in these kinds of energies and I believe in things beyond our capacity to understand them. And it's a feeling of humility. It's a feeling of giving yourself over and understanding that you won't understand, and that every now and then you'll feel a feeling or you'll get a glimpse of something that you feel as a connection to those energies, to those things that exist beyond the norm and loving those moments. And I know it sounds insane, but being like, at wedding surrounded by people you love, sometimes you feel it there, a kind of energy where it's like, this is something metaphysical or supernatural. I think sometimes in moments of intense grief, moments of intense sadness, you experience things outside yourself. But also, I have felt it. I love playing craps in that way where I know it's insane, I've definitely felt it when I go to Graceland, I felt it with my own sort of totemic love of Elvis and things like that. But gambling, there's an energy sometimes a craps table where you're betting on somebody and you're like, “you look like you have had a very rough couple of months. I believe in you. You're gonna get that four, which is a hard number to make, and you're gonna get it again before. You get that seven and we're all in it together, you can do it and I'm clapping for you.”
And sometimes in the middle of this sunbaked, barren, desolate desert in Nevada in this weird town that's built like itself, like some judgment day thing, some strange castle in the sand where everybody also dresses like they're going to meet their maker. It's like put on your craziest best outfit. And this bizarre contradiction of places, like, you can feel something deep that feels like you were in it together, you're these tiny specks betting on this thing and surrounded by death and desolation and the immovable, tectonic landscape of Death Valley. And yet you were there at night betting on this thing. And I don't know, I believe in it. So I did not gamble but I love going for that reason. And I feel that that same thing, tapping into things greater than yourself, feeling small in the face of things that feel unknowable or too big to process like the desert like Zion National Park, like the Grand Canyon, which again, I was so thrilled my kids wanted to go see instead of staying in Vegas on our last day.
It just reprioritizes things and you come back energized. For me. It made me come back feeling like I can't wait to get to work on all these things that I have in front of me. Anyway, that was the trip. It was, again, fantastic. I'm back now, though, for the week, and I'm gonna dig into everything. And tomorrow night we will talk mysteries. I feel inspired. I hope you do too. I'm also probably going to Baltimore Comic Con. I am gonna go, but I'm not announced yet. If you're anywhere near the area, you should go. It'll be fun. I'm going to try and set something up for the Best Jackett people, so I think we'll have a good time. Anyway, thank you guys again. I love doing this with you. It means the world. And yeah, we'll talk tomorrow. Mysteries!
Newsletter #152: Life's One Big Gamble