ref: b9fbb17c04e4ccfb2021dac818e514351ca8f646
dir: /troff/0705.ms/
.LP \& .sp |4.25i .ce .ps 12 .CW EMBITTERED B\-MINUS COMPETITORS .R .PP .ps 12 Hi, it's me, SL. .PP .ps 12 In my capacity as author I have followed the ACTRON characters from my second grade year up until the present day, through photocopied comic books to literary novels to... whatever .I this .R is. Both the primary "living" protagonists\(em\fIActron,\fR so named for an automotive diagnostic tool, and .I Piro, .R so called because he was a pirate\(emwere in fact christened by my cousin, Brandon. We collaborated on a succession of half\-baked (and usually unfinished) comic book series starting in 1986. ACTRON was the most successful, in the sense that I managed to complete drawing, scripting, reproducing, and distributing at least seven full issues during our initial burst of heedless enthusiasm. Brandon co\-plotted (process: we traded off writing a paragraph-length description of every other comic book page), and, again, insisted upon inking, even though he otherwise did not draw. .PP .ps 12 As I say, Actron and Piro were and are alive. Fractally ever\-present, verbally demanding, and definitely annoying. Writing about them is essentially transcribing an ongoing hallucination, although who is doing the hallucinating and who is ultimately being hallucinated eludes me to this day. .PP .ps 12 A few weeks ago I decided to stop. .PP .ps 12 Around 2003, I had resumed writing prose fiction. As an exercise, I strip mined reams of stories churned out since childhood. A chapter from my first novel written as an adult, 'Towards Mythologizing The Coming Resurgence Of Covert Warfare,' was lifted, wholesale and barely altered, from a novella I wrote for the Young Author's Conference in the fifth grade. None of its characters were alive, so to speak, but the .I voice .R stood up and walked all by itself. I built upon that skeleton, eventually piling hundreds of pages of semi\-related nonsense atop the frankly inadequate scaffolding of my grade school writing. Rickety dwelling, no insurance, inhabit at your own risk. But it breathed, and, finally, walked all on its own. .PP .ps 12 In 2005, I decided to commemorate ACTRON's upcoming 20th anniversary by creating a new ACTRON comic series. Or rather, a new ACTRON comic book. It took the better part of two years to finish this less\-than\-twenty\-page story (with ample assistance from my pal, colorist, and cartoonist in his own right, Pete Toms). Piro and Actron picked up their running dialogue as if no interruption had occurred, and they haven't paused for breath since. I've continued writing novels, comics, zines, short stories, and skits featuring these same obnoxious characters from my youth for something close to an additional fifteen years. You may have noticed the pattern. .PP .ps 12 It's now late 2020, and I'm beyond tired of listening to this shit. No memory of why I even started up again. .PP .ps 12 And you know what? .PP .ps 12 I quit. SL