Meeting Joe Keatinge...

Once again I come to report on great tidings of yet another grand signing event that I have been part of. This time I had the pleasure of meeting Joe Keatinge, who is the writing genius behind the current Morbius: The Living Vampire ongoing for Marvel NOW. He is truly a stand-up guy that is quite the writer as evidenced by the personable chatting we underwent while he signed my comics. In addition to the normal cover that he signed, he was also good enough to sign my Skottie Young variant cover of the issue while also giving nice little Morbius sketches in his signature. He was quite the man and showed himself to be a fervent lover of comic books just like myself. I truly shall delve more into reading things Keatinge has written in the past, for prior to this event I had never read anything he had done prior to this signing. A fun night as simple as it was fast, but memorable as always!

Where did you meet him?

@YourNeighborhoodComicGeek: One of my LCS's...

That's pretty neat!

@YourNeighborhoodComicGeek: Trust me, if you get the chance to go to a signing of his, do it! The man is just amazing. Only thing I felt bad about tonight was how few people actually came to see him! I swear...there were probably less than 40 or so that came, give or take. O_o

Wow that sucks. He doesn't seem exceptionally popular, although that doesn't mean everything.

Still thinking about writing some fiction?

@RazzaTazz: I am. I'm just at a loss of what to write exactly. My issue is the subject of originality. After all, what has been written that hasn't been done way another in the past already? Not that I'm giving up or anything. Just the thinking process can be frustrating at times.

@RedheadedAtrocitus: Just write anything, if you want to bounce ideas off of someone, here I am.

@RedheadedAtrocitus said:

@RazzaTazz: I am. I'm just at a loss of what to write exactly. My issue is the subject of originality. After all, what has been written that hasn't been done way another in the past already? Not that I'm giving up or anything. Just the thinking process can be frustrating at times.

The best thing to do in said situation is to grab the idea you feel strongest about and devote yourself to it. Continually put one word after another until you finish, focus on nothing else, and just get the words out, because no one will really care about your first draft. First drafts are meant to be fixed and you can always go back to them later and then fix them, just focus on nothing but getting the words out.

On the subject of everything has been done before remember this: There will always be someone who does something better than you. Someone will be able to plot better, someone will be better at characterization, and there may even be someone who you think tells the most clever stories in the entire world. The point is there will always be someone better than you, but you have to get past that. You have to tell your story, because no one will be able to tell your story like you can.

@Delphic: It is all good points, more so there are a lot of tricks to getting to writing. Like re-imagining a character. I have written a 160k words book (160k so far) out of doing so.