Essay Accepted Into Nota Bene, PTK’s Literary Anthology!

Exciting news from the pro-front for me. 😁 One of my creative nonfiction pieces was accepted for publication into the Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society’s annual literary competition, Nota Bene, for the 2019 edition. It was selected as an Outstanding Entry and I’ll be getting a couple hundred in award by way of a Reynolds Scholarship. So I’m pretty humbled and incredibly stoked. The piece is called “A Stack of Bodies Ten Feet Tall on a Hillside Where the Skyline Shouldn’t Be,” and it’s about the destruction of a grove of oak trees on corner lot of my local area. The essay was also published in the 2019 edition of the Sierra Journal (you can contact the editors here if you want a copy!). Nota Bene will be released in the winter. You’ll find it online here.

Last Friday, I also attended a poetry slam in Roseville at the The Fig Tree Coffee, Art, & Music Lounge. You can hear me read my poem “Friend” at around 24 minutes into the livestream, available here (with accompanying guitar by an amazing Mark Brocke!). I was invited by the editor of William Jessup’s literary journal, Metonym, and I just happen to work with her at my day job!

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Triumvirate Triptych

Today I decided to draw my three favorite characters: Hiccup Haddock, The Doctor, and Tony Stark, my life triumvirate, characters that have shaped me tremendously over the last decade. Tony is my darkness, the Doctor is my mentor, and Hiccup is my heart. This year was very special because I got to see on the big screen the final episodes of each of their stories and the Ultimate Sacrifice they each made: Hiccup offered his life for Toothless’ safety, Tony died for the salvation of the universe, and the Doctor humbled himself to death to redeem his soul. I have so many plans for comics and stories with these three; I hope this year and next I’ll get to make some of them happen. I love them to bits.

Posted also at my Instagram account.

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  Hiccup Haddock the Third

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  Tenth Doctor

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  Tony Stark

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light: Art and Thoughts on the Tenth Doctor’s Finale

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

So last night Fathom Events had a special showing of the Tenth Doctor’s final episode, “The End of Time.” I’m still on a Whovian high from from all that and decided to do a painting in honor of my Doctor, David Tennant.

Seeing the finale again reminded me why I still hold Doctor Who on a pedestal of inspiring and beautiful thematic storytelling. Once again, I just am dumbfounded and in awe at the way the entire fourth series and the specials built up so purposefully to this elegant, profound, and ferocious narrative display of gutting humility and selflessness.

Because for the narrative in “The End of Time”, it isn’t enough that the Doctor must give his life to regenerate (thanks Russell T Davies). It’s not enough that he has to repeat the guilt-rending decision of the Time War to save the universe once again. It’s not enough that he has to accept not only death, but the will of prophecy and time on him. Because more than all of this, he has to accept that the ugliest things in the Time Lords he condemned to death for their sins is the same ugly things he finds in himself, and that for this darkness, he must choose to give up his own life. Because sometimes you live too long, and it is a moral right to accept one’s mortality.

“The End of Time” draws on the best classical tragic traditions, complete with a gut-wrenching monologue by Tennant just before he steps into his radiation-induced sacrifice. This iconic scene sees the ugliest side of the Doctor, a side that has him lashing out at Wilf, the man whose life he has to save, the kind old man the Doctor imagines as his father. It’s a powerfully human sequence that hits me in the soul every time and proves that selflessness is not easy and it is not natural.

The best tragedy isn’t just loss, but heroism in the losing. There’s an immense elegance in the finale of the Tenth Doctor’s run that will always inspire me. I can talk for ages about the symbolism, brushstrokes, and meanings in this episode and series. Meanwhile, feel free to watch my voice-over-laden tribute video to the Tenth Doctor:

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The Neil Gaiman Road Trip 2019: An Update

Dave McKean’s wonderful illustration for Gaiman’s book

I’ve been on a huge Neil Gaiman run this past year. I finished The Graveyard Book, explored his early work in Good Omens and Black Orchid, and scattered myself over his non-fiction works and short stories in The View from the Cheap Seats and Trigger Warning. He’s been my favorite author since I first set foot in the Gaiman world with American Gods back in 2017. And small wonder: His works are myth, and they are magic. And they’ve shaped who I want to be as a person and as a writer.

My last stop was Gaiman’s beautiful and many-award-winning The Ocean at the End of the Lane. There’s something especially magical about this book. I came into it thinking it was a “grown-up” story, like American Gods or Sandman, given (well) the cover image and all the hype about it being Gaiman’s masterwork. But really, like it says so insightfully in its pages, “Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”

The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the story of a memory, a boy who touches the face what’s behind the world, through the tutelage of three (ostensibly) farm women at the end of the lane. It crawls up on you slowly, the Gaiman-esque fantasy of this book. Not so much fantasy, but a gentle affirmation of the magic inherent in the earth and in the vastness of creation—an undefined, uncatalogued affirmation that there are things out there long forgotten, a vast world much bigger than our limited minds can imagine. And Gaiman is a sort of guide, not telling us what is out there, or who, just that it’s there, something, and we don’t need to really know everything or remember everything, but just know that it’s there, out there and inside of us.

Myths aren’t “adult stories and they [aren’t] children stories. They were better than than that. They just were.” And that’s what makes Gaiman’s works so wonderful, because like myths, they just are. And they’re wonderful.

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Credo (and a welcome)

Hello, fellow traveller. I’ve hosted a small personal blog for a while, over at my altar ego, inhonoredglory, but a lot has changed since I started posting online over a decade ago. I’ve had a wonderful experience online, mostly from my interactions with fandom on sites like Tumblr, deviantArt, and YouTube. I met so many friends, experienced the most debilitating bouts of depression and the most rapturous wonders of joy. I’ve written stories that people loved, shared my passions with like-minded nerds, and became the self I want to be—all without setting stepping outside my computer screen.

I will always be more myself inside my head and in writing than I can ever be outside of it. Perhaps that’s why I need to be an artist—to let others know who I truly am. My first love is animation, inspired as I was by How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and the love I poured into that fandom. Today, I love storytelling and myth-making in any medium: novels, comics, and film. Sometimes I feel that my interests and potential abilities are so wide, so eclectic, that I could never be an expert at any one thing. And then I look to my current artistic hero, Neil Gaiman, and think, It just takes passion and hard work.

I don’t always have enough of either (that nagging depression keeps feeding off my energy), but I know where I want to go, and I know I need to be disciplined to make that vision come true.

I hope you enjoy following my journey here. I decided to christen my new online presence “Studio Glory” (nom de plume I. H. Glory) because this is what I hope to become: a creator of many things, and a champion of the magic of storytelling in all mediums. Studio Glory is a place where I, and others, can come and create, and create anything. Because stories come in all mediums, and in all expressions, and I will always want to write, draw, and otherwise experiment, to find the best way to tell them.

Experiments in color (a Toothless painting for a good friend of many years). The featured image above is from a How to Train Your Dragon triptych I made in honor of the final film in the trilogy coming out this past February.