― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing/life. A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

AI Statement: at no point do I use generative AI in any way to inform, create, or assist the publication of this newsletter, nor the life lived behind it.

2026 -- whatever.

A new TPB on the horizon - BLACK BEACON

Yes, finally, the sci fi insanity from Sebastian Piriz and I, from the depths of the Heavy Metal vaults, will find itself with a trade paperback collection released in November! Here’s the brand new cover from Seb:

He’s so damn good.

But here’s the thing: you need to place your order with your local comic shop by October 12 so they know to get a copy in for you - and preorders really help these kinds of things because if a store gets 1-2 preorders then they figure it’ll have some kind of chance of selling and so they’ll order 1-2 more for the shelves, and then the store is happy, new customers browsing can be happy, and Seb and I will be ecstatic.

The book itself is a huge sci fi idea - with an intergalactic beacon summoning every species in the universe to convene and unit, but by the time humanity reaches this centrepoint the party is over, the iniquity has set in, and there’s nothing enlightening or sacred left to find. Like Contact if it took us to Saga.

Seb and I had a blast concocting strange species, and ideas, and science, and this was initially serialised in the Heavy Metal magazine, but it got buried in the one-two punch of Covid, and the magazine grinding to a halt. But now it’s back, and so are we, to finally collect this tale into the final form of a tpb.

Click here are more details from when we were launching

But the preorder info is right here - so please consider speaking to your local comic shop and asking for: the Black Beacon tpb from Heavy Metal, by Sebastian Piriz and Ryan K lindsay - and general tpb details can be found clicking here

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Cons and New Books to Sell

I have some convention appearances in November coming up, and will have some new books on the table for those into that sort of thing.

The appearances are:

• GeekExpo Canberra Saturday November 21

• SCAMP Sydney Sunday November 22 - for the marketplace

And the new books on the table are these delightfully diverse editions…

CHUM 10th Anniversary HC

This is not only so nice to have back on the table, but this edition is the true final deluxe form. We got the Justin Greenwood cover as a die-cut beauty, we got extras galore, and we got it oversized.

Sami Kivela and I, with Mark Dale colours, brought together this purely pulp surf noir crime comic to ComixTribe so long ago, and it was a book that really opened doors and of which I was really proud - it’s one of the times I’ve really pushed to just work within genre, and play with the toys and tropes, and yet still make it my own.

I haven’t had this on my table for quite some time, so I hope people are down for it, and yet another delicious hardcover from the RKL Vaults.

THE UNDERGOD

I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve only tabled with it once so far - and it was a nice one-shot with a kind of old school EC sci fi vibe that flew off the table.

Adam Masterman is the hero here as his painted cover is just phenomenal, and his interior pages are such a delight. This tale of an intergalactic wanderer lost alone on a planet who soon becomes entangled in the murky depths of their belief system includes the entire script in the back.

West Coast Catcher: How Boogie Nights Explored An Updated Holden Caulfield

This one’s a swerve, but hear me out: Boogie Nights damn well IS The Catcher in the Rye. And Dirk Diggler is the west coast 70s Holden Caulfield. And America just keeps getting worse at giving positive role models for its youth.

If that interests you, then I’ve got about 10k of words on this in a full literary journal essay you are going to need in your life - plus, that Sami Kivela cover is going to look great in the ‘zine form it’ll be published in.

Plus: I’ll have copies of STAIN THE SEAS SCARLET, and the EVERFROST tpb! As always, it’s a blast just to chat and hang with people, so I’m looking forward to one very busy weekend in two very awesome locations.

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Writing about the things I dig.

I recently [well, earlier this year] read the first issue of IF DESTRUCTION BE OUR LOT… by Andy MacDonald, Mark Elijah Rosenberg, and Matthew Rosenberg, and I absolutely loved it. The sci fi tale of an animatronic Abe Lincoln caught in the robotic end times of the world/humanity is a great sell for me, but then I found I couldn’t stop thinking about the intersection of history, destruction, despair, human learning, and purpose found all through that first issue.

So I did something I love doing, and wish I could do more, and I wrote about it. I wrote a short ~1000 essay about it. Then I pitched it to SOLRAD, the comics literary journal, and they were amazing enough to accept it and now it’s been published on their site.

HEAD HERE TO READ MY ESSAY ON IF DESTRUCTION BE OUR LOT… ON SOLRAD

The over/under on my thesis is:

“The comic creates an argument that history is to be remembered, learned from, and its echoes constantly battled through knowledge. Purpose is positioned at the forefront of existence as something that needs to align with humanity, care, and the fight against decay, which, it feels sad to admit, might just be part of the entropy of life, but acceptance is the first step to addressing this problem.”

If you dig comics essay, please enjoy, and if you enjoy what you read, please go buy the tpb of that book, which I believe is out this week!

I always dig so you should always be ready for their next book. Comics that make me happy, and make me think, and make me write - not much more we can ask for in this world.

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Sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that chase you.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College Head of English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

Recently took the family for a spin in Europe. Some solo highlights [bc posting family pics online feels like feeding them to the AI beast at this stage, beyond any other issues I spent a decade waving away in the past].

Me at the Acqua Alto bookstore in Venice - crazy nice place.

Me outside the Hemingway cafe in Malaga, Spain - and then me imbibing the Special Hemingway off the coffee menu, but uncertain if it was hooched up, or just with the hooch flavour.

Me with the statue of John Donne at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a poetic connection across space and time.

All events to refill the bucket and push me into some more writing [hopefully].

― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

-------

This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing/life - I aim to account/atone for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

AI Statement: at no point do I use generative AI in any way to inform, create, or assist the publication of this newsletter, nor the life lived behind it.

2026 -- whatever.

Geek Markets Next Weekend with a New Comic

I’ll be tabling at the Canberra Geek Markets next weekend, July 18-19. It’s a good stack of comic people attending, and I’ll be there with Louie Joyce, which always brings me joy.

I’ll also have a new comic - a short story one-shot with the entire script and thumbnails process in the back half. Behold: THE UNDERGOD

This is a Philip K. Dick inspired short story about a space traveller lost onto an unknown planet and who finds themselves wrapped up in the slippery slope of beliefs and deities found there. I’ve tried for a nice balance of short story landings; like a good ending, some nice prose, and room for the art to sing - because - Adam Masterman illustrated this and it’s so damn beautiful.

Adam’s pages consistently gave me a sense of wonder and joy, and his hand-painted cover should let you know just how much care and love he poured into this one.

The single-issue, staple-bound, full-colour, process-packed comic will be available on my table for its debut run. I hope some people pick it up and dig it.

It was nice to bring something short, punchy, and beautiful to life, and then pack the whole script in for people who might dig that kind of thing. Here’s page one, just to let you know the inner beauty, too:

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Half Time

Hitting that Winter Solstice makes me think about half a year down and whether I’m halfway through or towards…something. Gotta be more than just a calendar year, right? And shout out to John Lees for the solstice reminder in his incredibly productive newsletter [though, this tells you I started writing this a few weeks ago and only got to finishing it now - which tells you a lot about this year, honestly].

Reflection often needs to go hand-in-hand with intentionality. What did I set out to do with 2026? I used to be really good at this - I’d have clear goals and projects at the start of the year, I’d map them across months, and weeks, and days. I was precise, and probably not shocking to me: I got shit done.

So, I don’t have a clear list of 2026 So Far to really check off, which means I’ll just have to vibe it. The over-under would be: it’s a good year, for many reasons, and that’s enough to celebrate.

I also sold an essay this month, which was nice to do, and on a comic I really dug recently. It should be live soon.

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Refilling the Tank

I still feel like I’ve got a big project in me. There’s something I’m tinkering with that feels genuinely special, and so I’m trying not to rush it. Treating it more like the massive projects my favourite authors work on for half a decade and try to get right, rather than just one bullet in a Gatling gun I’m hoping to spray out upon the world of editors, collaborators, and readers. I just don’t have that pace in me anymore.

As such, I feel like I’m spending a lot of time refuelling my tank with films and books and such. Maybe a good excuse to be giving it more time, or maybe just the best excuse for doing such a thing.

I recently saw Disclosure Day by Spielberg and co and found it…a really complex and beautiful mess. I wrote a review on Letterboxd I’m really proud of [or “of which I’m really proud” if I want to write more gooder].

I found the film thematically really fascinating. The film itself is, well, not a mess, because I was all in throughout, but it’s messy, and perhaps simplistic, and I feel like it needed another few drafts to pick what it was doing [or maybe just what I wanted it to do]. I wish it was a more harrowing political thriller, with less schmaltz and deus ex machina aspects. But maybe it’s all by design and Spielberg knows what he’s doing. Maybe - check the review to see my take on the theme, which I believe goes well beyond just “The media should be more truthful, and if it were we’d all listen and be better for it.”

It goes way beyond that - and uses my favourite: intertextuality.

I also recently watched All That Jazz and have subsequently been unable to get the final number, and its conclusion, out of my head.

Other ones informing my way of thinking and writing lately are: Suddenly, Last Summer because the characters are just so Big and the hidden concepts so skirted around and my love for Tennessee Williams grows and grows; [500] Days of Summer because I’m a sucker for structural play in stories; Mother Mary because I appreciate David Lowery and the things he tries to say through the symbolism in his work.

Wrapping all of that up with Fellini’s 8 ½ really makes me want to infuse this coming comic pitch with something personal and moments of depth.

Alongside that, I have been reading a lot of Cormac McCarthy recently as I prepare to teach The Road once more, and his prose continues to astound. I found Child of God to be a really engaging and ultimately brutal take on the thin line between social civility and the underworld of depravity that exists and of which we don’t have a handle on it in any true capacity. The book captivated me and took only a few days to read because I kept returning to it in every possible spare moment. Then I hit Outer Dark and it just slowly escalated for me. You hear McCarthy touted as Faulknerian all the time, but this one truly felt in conversation with As I Lay Dying in the mythic quest as discovery of self and also of the world around you. The book feels more esoteric in narrative drive, but the final chapters really pull it together into something quite special.

I’ve also been mainlining academic readings about The Road and it’s allowing me to consider the small choices we make in stories, and the multitudinous readings we can allow and hint towards. There’s a level of control and landing in certain moments that matters.

Putting all of that alongside Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus as they tumble through my brain this year has me consistently thinking beyond plot and aiming for something more in my work.

Where all this will ultimately lead, I have ideas, but am uncertain, but I have to admit: the ride is just about worth it on its own.

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Sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that chase you.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College Head of English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

There is going to be an anthology of short stories set in The Overlook Hotel coming out next year - and, alas, I won’t be in it. It’s from the crew that brought you the anthology of stories set in the world of Stephen King’s The Stand.

Submission details were here

This one is going to have Daniel Kraus [recent winner of the Pulitzer], Mike Flanagan [renowned King adapter to the screen]. Chuck Plahniuk [Fight Club], and it looks rad.

So I did submit something to this open call they ran, and without too much detail can confirm I cleared one hurdle, then cleared another hurdle, and then could easily be seen in the photo finish of the final selection round - but did not mount the podium.

Gotta admit, I really wanted it - The Shining was my favourite novel from my teens into my 20s - but I also knew I’d have no shot. Having multiple readers pass my story through to the next rounds, though, was genuinely exhilarating and a real shot in the arm.

If nothing else, it was a nice ego boost. But, man, it sure would have been cool.

Perhaps next time - they could do an anthology of stories set in the world of The Dark Tower, or in ‘Salem’s Lot, or on The Long Walk, or previous contestants on The Running Man, or other calamities from the Pet Sematary, or previous interactions with Pennywise [which as I type it, feels like the one that would get the most eyes/press/traction, right?], or other walkers of The Green Mile, or other people who have stumbled through the time portal in 11/22/63 and I’d take a genuine run at any of these.

Though my real hope would be for other students at the university in the Hearts In Atlantis novella, but that one seems like a stretch.

This crime comic came from me and Sami Kivela co-creating and illustrating and Mark Dale colouring, Nic J. Shaw lettering, and Dan Hill editing.

GET THAT CHUM HC

I absolutely loved making an old pulpy crime story and everyone brought their game to make this something special.

If you are an Early Backer then you get access to a cheaper bundle of the HC with a signed art plate and a slick bookmark. Savings money in this economy is a necessity, especially on the necessities, like hardcover die-cut gorgeous crime comics.

If you’re excited at adding something special to your library, thenh ead across and back the campaign early to lock in that lower price and get us to fully funded on Day One [we are 80% there, so if feels pretty prime to happen, but only with you also taking a dip with us].

CLICK HERE TO GET SOME EARLY BACKER ATTENTION TO THE CHUM HC

And you can read all the news in the ComixTribe newsletter right here!

The ComixTribe Dispatch

Take a BITE!

Okay, the calendar tells us spring is here (even if it did snow yesterday here in New England.) We’re going to ignore that little detail, because our sights are already setting on warmer things…

Read more

7 months ago · 5 likes · 1 comment · Tyler James

I love working with ComixTribe - I’m working with an artist currently doing absolutely phenomenal work on our collaboration which will come out via ComixTribe later and it brings me great joy - and I’ve been working with Tyler James for over a decade to create a variety of stories.

I started by doing a short story in their Oxymoron anthology with Daniel J. Logan on art [and much later getting a story into the second volume, too, with Tyler himself illustrating], and then they published CHUM in issues and a tpb, then they published SHE: At The Tower of All That Is Known with Chris Panda on art, and recently they published A Fistful of Pain with Louie Joyce co-creating with me.

The collaboration with Tyler and his publishing empire always feels connected and safe and satisfying. So when he said that a 10th anniversary HC release should happen, and we should flood the book with crazy extra back matter and material, I was all in.

Which brings us to this Kickstarter - ComixTribe uses Kickstarter as Phase One of all publishing, and they treat it like a celebration for the book and for the readers.

I love the way Tyler crafts these campaigns [I stole a lot of ideas from him for my seven or so successful campaigns] and this one is going to be awesome.

Tyler has the campaign in pre-launch mode now, but the more people who sign up to follow the campaign and be notified when it goes live, the more cool things everyone gets, check it out:

What I most likely here is that all Early Backers get the benefits, whether or not they signed up, and inversely you can just click the notify button and then never back it, but you’ve made someone else’s day better with more swag for their early purchase.

So click here to see the notification page and sign up!

I’d also appreciate you sharing it with your friends - CHUM is a pulp noir paperback come to life. Sami and I worked on this early in our collaborative relationship and we really brought as much heat to the page as possible. I love how this crime tale just winds tighter and tighter to the very last page.

I think you’ll dig it, too - so stay tuned and I’ll no doubt send out more detailed missives in the coming weeks.

― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing/life - I aim to account/atone for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

AI Statement: at no point do I use generative AI in any way to inform, create, or assist the publication of this newsletter, nor the life lived behind it.

2026 -- whatever.

Happy with less.

Making comics conditioned me to consider, value, and personally demand exponential growth.

I started writing scripts, that went nowhere. So when I made a short comic story under 10 pages and got it drawn and published, that seemed amazing. I eventually put out a 22 page one-shot, cover to cover. It’s ostensibly also a short story - and I loved that. Man, that was 13 years ago now.

Then I got a miniseries picked up. That took a year. But we put it out. So I wanted more. At one stage I was tracking how many pages I published per year, and I watched that number grow. More miniseries, graphic novels, short stories and one-shots on the side.

In my mind, it had to escalate - that’s what other successful creators seemed to do. More miniseries again, maybe sequels, peppered short stories throughout, leading towards either longer miniseries [maxi, I believe the term would be] or an ongoing.

But the rub was probably two-fold. I don’t know that I’m cut out for such things [for a variety of creative reasons], and I also started to realise I wasn’t pushing as hard in that direction as I had been the miniseries and such that had come before. A large part was me realistically not wanting to quit my day job. I love my day job. So trying to write 12 issues of something alongside it, or get an ongoing that would run for years wasn’t actually what I wanted [I don’t think].

Then Covid, a job change, older kids, a withdrawal from social media, and I feel in a different spot, but it’s shown me different appreciation.

There’s a 10 page comic short coming together that I’m in love with. I wrote a 5000 word short story from last year into this year and I feel really proud of it. I wrote a 9000 word essay and I’m so excited to share it. I got a small lovely email about a thing and it was enough to remind me about the ‘why’ of me getting up, writing in the morning, thinking about these things, etc, etc.

These are different things, and smaller things, but they fit into the hustle of life, and they still bring me joy - and I’ve realised that’s what getting me into the office each morning. It might be paying fewer bills, but it’s still very cool. And I like doing things that I consider very cool.

It wasn’t a mindset that changed instantly, and that I accepted instantly, but I’ve noticed it this year and it’s made me smile. Make of it what/however you will.

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How to Die

I finally released a fantasy zine I’d made a while back which covered some of my favourite fantasy rpg creative writing type exercises - whether you play, DM, just read the rule books, or only read fantasy [or I’ll even argue if you don’t read that genre all that much], or you just like creative writing and thinking - this has some good ideas for you.

Click here to go buy the How To Die digital zine for zero dollars [it’s Pay What You Want]

I love spitballing the kinds of things this asks you to do, so if anyone wants to have a lash at it, or wants to use it in the classroom or with their kids, please fill your boots. Little much else would bring me as much joy.

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‘Salem’s Lot Article

I wrote a short piece about ‘Salem’s Lot not being a horror novel because I deeply believe that Stephen King’s small town vampiric masterpiece is very much not about horror at all - it’s about small town American in the 70s, and all the problems King sees with it, and the horrors, too, yes, but those horrors are not fanged in form and are not visiting from distant lands.

I’m currently shopping it around, which is a new kind of fun for me. I have no clue what I’m doing, or where I’m going, but sometimes that is the fun itself, right?

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A long read.

I decided to crack into all 700+ pages of The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky and I’m over halfway through, and it’ll probably take me a few more months to finish it, but I am really digging it. The voices, the character work, and the insight into the existential views of that world and time are fascinating.

Though I do have 2 weeks of semester break coming up, and I’m looking forward to maybe a little more reading, especially as the weather will be turning cold then.

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Sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that chase you.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College Head of English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

Am always looking for more short stories with punch.

Prose in like 4 pages or less.

Comics in like maybe 6 pages or less.

I love the structure, the punch and the bite, and the beautiful teachability of them.

If you have any good recommendations and where I can find them, I would be much obliged. I know I should somewhere house a bunch of links of them together just to get them all lined up.

― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing/life - I aim to account/atone for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

AI Statement: at no point do I use generative AI in any way to inform, create, or assist the publication of this newsletter, nor the life lived behind it.

2026 -- whatever.

Deer Editor Goes To The Awards

There’s something about being able to describe one of my books as “award-winning” that brings me a specific kind of joy, while also making me feel like a very specific kind of fool. Honestly, I’m happy to take either.

On the last weekend of January, I was honoured to have DEER EDITOR, my comic with co-creator Sami Kivela, win a Comics Arts Award of Australia - there are three tiers of awards where the best of Australian Comics can be honoured and we took home a Silver Ledger.

DEER EDITOR is a book that lives close to my heart. It’s a collaboration with Sami Kivela, who is one of my favourite people. It’s a weird book and something that I did that kind of felt like it could only come from me, and might only be for me - an anthropomorphic lead, in a crime/horror mash up, also a journalism newsroom story, and one that’s as much about the world around us as it is the main character and their journey. I cannot thank Sami enough for coming along on the journey with me - as well as Lauren Affe for the colours, Jim Campbell for the letters, Chas! Pangburn for bringing it across to Mad Cave Studios, and everyone and anyone who ever read a copy.

The awards night was great - it was at the State Library of NSW, which is a truly beautiful venue. On my walk there, I took a photo of the crown shyness of the trees in Hyde Park and it seemed to calm me and my imposter syndrome in a way nothing else in my head was.

It was nice to catch up with some other Aussie comic creators before, during, and after the show. Particularly my best mate in Aus comics, and co-creator of last year’s Silver award-winning A FISTFUL OF PAIN, Louie Joyce.

Many, many years ago Louie and I attended the awards in Sydney where I took home a Bronze and he received a Silver and we took this photo… [I cropped out Louie’s kid in his arms just for privacy reasons, even though he posts him on his own socials]

Which we then decided to recreate with our latest awards as he won Silver alongside me for his GODZILLA: SKATE OR DIE book this year.

It’s nice to be recognized, and sometimes it’s just nice to reflect on the work you’ve done, and the person you are, and the people who helped you along the way. In my speech I thanked Sami for everything he brought to the book, and my wife for everything she does that helps me balance this writing and life, and also my kids for sleeping poorly resulting in my wandering my neighborhood at night with my daughter in a Bjorn which was how I wrote the first issue of this on my phone.

If you are interested in the book, please ask your local comic shop to order you in a copy [or if you see me at a convention this year, I’ll probably have one].

The award now lives on a shelf alongside other gongs, and a full display of everything I’ve ever had published in any form.

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I didn’t have anything published last year, so I won’t be up for these [or any] awards for the 2025 year. But I’m hoping to change that for 2026.

I’m currently collaborating with Adam Masterman on a short story that has us both excited. Here’s a little peek at his work, that I am digging greatly.

And then I’m tapping away at a few small things, all for different homes and in different forms, but aiming to have a larger story pitch ready to push out at some time whenever it decides it’s ready for this world.

Honestly, I’m actually just enjoying getting out in the office and working on whatever. An essay or two, a short story, a short comic script - they are all scratching an itch in those hours that brings me a lot of joy. Then I’ll see where I can place them.

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I had a cracking January summer break and used my time wisely. Card games and board games pretty much every day. A bunch of walking and gardening [I harvested my first literal handful of cherry tomatoes this week].

And I also read and watched a lot of stuff.

I read TRAIN DREAMS by Denis Johnson. It’s a good book, really well written prose, though I think I liked the adapted screenplay and film a bit more.

I read HELEN OF WYNDHORN by Bilquis Evely and Tom King and really loved it. This tale about someone diving into the family history of their father who wrote sword and sorcery stories, and their grandfather who might actually be living them, was a gorgeous book on every page. And then the concept that the stories we tell and read matter, and they build who we are, and sometimes all that matters is how they land for us and what they add to us was kinda just beautiful and definitely the kind of thing I like to read and consider.

I’m currently a hundred or so pages into Dostoevsky’s THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and I’m massively digging it. The way he lays out the four key family members and you get to know them is really well done, but it’s the voice of the narration/prose that has me quite well gripped. The book reads like salacious gossip, like he’s talking to you, and it’s just a delight to read. This will be my Term One book project, and I’m really into it.

I also caught some really great films this month.

THE SUBSTANCE - bonkers, and just completely threading the needle on where it needed to be.

RYE LANE - So funny, and so beautiful. I was all in on this.

SEMIOTICS IN THE KITCHEN - Saw this t our local art gallery - funny, and scathing.

CORPO CELESTE - Really dug some of the imagery in this one.

MR SCORSESE - Five hours of this was exactly what my soul needed to fuel more creativity.

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF - caught this on the big screen and it was a massive revelation and delight. Felt silly for never having seen it before.

BICYCLE THIEVES - Heartbreaking.

CLEO FROM 5 TO 7 - This one really worked for me. Fantastic ending.

THE RIP - Bet they wish they had a time machine so they could release this in the 90s and become billionaires. Also: I dug that they had some deal to get the whole crew a bonus based on views/performance, so I hope they got there.

MIDNIGHT RUN - Still awesome, but also still holds up so much better than anything else back then.

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN - This has some really jaw-dropping moments.

IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU - Byrne is phenomenal, and the symbolism lands.

THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR - Just a delight of old school espionage games.

I have more in-depth reviews over on Letterboxd.

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Sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that chase you.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College Head of English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

In my middle age, I’m becoming a sunrise/sunset guy. Not bird watching, not IPAs, not my own podcast. Just the colours of the sky.

Maybe I did see this coming.

I watched 310 films in 2025 - that’s more films than I have watched in a calendar year for as long as I can remember [I never really counted before, though teen Ryan probably landed somewhere close, room-dwelling screen goblin that he was].

I track my films on Letterboxd because it’s the only social media that matters.

Here are some things I noticed about films, film, and myself this year. Rapid Fire style.

REAR WINDOW - took the kids to see it on the big screen. Glorious.

THE BRUTALIST - saw it on the big screen and fell so deeply in love with it that I just got excited about movies and cinema again. The intermission giving me and my kid a chance to go grab sushi and talk about the first half of the movie is a core parenting memory now.

DRIVE AWAY DOLLS - proof I’m ride-or-die for Ethan Coen [ever since Teen Ryan watched a bunch of the Coen bros films and then found Ethan’s Gates of Eden short story collection in hardcover out in Brisbane one day, bought it, read it, and loved it] and I’ll follow him anywhere/everywhere as I dug this.

HIT MAN - the moment I realised I was all in on Glen Powell.

BEFORE SUNRISE - my kid had been raving about this trilogy, and I had missed it, so I gave it a shot and fell in love.

FRANKENSTEIN/BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN - hell of a double bill on the big screen. Got to go for a between-movie walk around the university grounds on which we were watching them - glorious.

UPSTREAM COLOR - poetry on the screen and I was floored by the storytelling style/choices. Genuinely inspirational.

ROPE - just peak Hitchcock that I had missed as a kid. Foolish, I should have devoured every single one of his flicks back then so nothing as good as this could escape me.

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES - a gruelling cinema experience, but I came out really intellectually jazzed. Completely brutal and smart film.

NICKEL BOYS - lives up to the book, and that means it’s one of the best things to come out recently.

HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS - this flick would have slaughtered when I was a teen, and it still landed for me now. The intelligence behind the presented stupidity is the kind of control I wish I could ever have.

COHERENCE - dear lord, do yourself a favour and check out this low-budget, high-concept sci fi brilliance.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE - so good. Way better than Teen Ryan could connect with [a constant refrain as I rewatch stuff and realise what a doofus I was in earlier times (probably still am)].

LA CHIMERA - I really liked this, but have now been sent on an Italian Cinema bender [similar to my reading of the Russians] and then I want to go rewatch this to more fully appreciate it.

A GHOST STORY - this landed so strongly in its intertextual exploration of the life we lead and what we leave behind - contender for my Top 10

PERFECT DAYS - also brilliant, probably will make me cry every time, and steps into the ring to fight for a Top 10 placement

THE DAMNED - Visconti’s brutal take on the lives of the rich behind wars is really damn good.

BOOGIE NIGHTS - so good I’ve gone and written ~9000 words about it. Coming soon.

THE CONVERSATION - caught it on the big screen - better than I remembered.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP - that opening shot where it transitions through time was that ‘leaning forward in your seat’ meme for me.

WAR OF THE WORLDS - revisited Spielberg’s remake and it hit way harder than I thought it would, just really strong stuff.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE - watched it on a frozen Tasmanian island just to set the perfect mood. Really love this love story.

FAIL SAFE - didn’t even know this existed, despite it being a Lumet/Fonda and 12 Angry Men reteam - needless to say: bloody spectacular. Top 100 stuff.

BLOW UP - the Austin Powers inspiration I’d never caught, but then that final sequence just had me all in.

HARAKIRI - lives up to the hype. So good I now want to teach it in 2026.

MIAMI VICE - new contender for my most disliked film.

TARGETS - Teen Ryan binging on old horror never should have missed this.

APOCALYPSE NOW - on the big screen with amazing sound for the Final Cut - it’s a modern work of art.

PEEPING TOM - I always saw this on Top 10 Horror lists from the 70/80s [the lists made then, not of films from then] and this flick was always so high, but I was a fool and thought it must just be some old classic people loved and so I avoided it. To be fair, Teen Ryan would have fumbled this, but I was all in.

HAPPY AS LAZARRO - slowly reeled me in and then destroyed me, so many tears. Another one I just loved the experience of watching for its intellect and beauty, and another hot contender for my Top 20.

BURNING - I couldn’t stop thinking about this for weeks afterwards. The Murakami and Gatsby infusion that just stuck with me. I stole a frame from this for my new desktop image. And this is also another contender for my Top 20.

TRAIN DREAMS - film of the year for 2025. Easily. Loved the thought and cinematography and Edgerton. Had me in tears in the final sequence.

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST - had to sit with it, and chew on it, and do some talking and reading, and then I deeply loved it. When you see it, see it with people, and then go for coffee and discuss every single little thing for a few hours. It’s genius.

EYES WIDE SHUT - I remember seeing this as a uni student and just feeling let down that I couldn’t hold it up near Kubrick’s other masterpieces. I think I even actively disliked it. But on rewatch, boy was I wrong. This punches hard, and is so well designed and delivered.

It was a good year for new flicks. And I enjoyed watching more film and way less tv - instead of some reality show that’s safe for the kids, we’d throw on a movie; and for a rainy day, play a board game, then watch a movie; and exercise each morning has a quarter of a movie in it.

I did look at my Letterboxd stats and consider some other aspects. For instance…

There’s something to be realised from options of diversity. It’s wild to get to see my most watched directors and realise that 80% fit a very similar aesthetic, with even more specifically bearded white men being half of the crew [no shade, I count myself among their numbers].

I have been blasting through a lot of the film canon with my kid as he dives deeply into the world of Champagne Cinema [itself still heavily infused with the Film Bro Canon] and this made me realise how few female directed films I watch - at the moment. If the canon has less women represented, then we are going to hit less by following that path.

Now, we have strayed from that path and hit the films of many women - I watched 17 films directed by women, but that’s only 5% of the year’s viewing, which is wild when you state it like that, and not something I’d consciously clocked any time I picked a flick - and one issue is that rarely are those women 8+ films deep into a catalogue, like Scorsese. So I guess it’s a matter of amazing women in film being given the career opportunities to have longer careers and have multiple titles and then me consciously swerving out into their work..

2026 is something I’d like to consciously control and watch more film by women because I know they did have those careers before, and they just don’t always land as deep into the canon as people like Cronenberg and Spielberg, etc. Having Mubi would help this as their selection is genuinely staggering for its breadth and quality.

Just the kind of thing to get me to think and to branch out more. So far in 2026 my watching has reflected this as 9 out of 26 films logged have been directed by women, and I could shout out The Substance and Rye Lane and Cleo from 5 to 7 as some that I deeply loved.

Overall, 2025 was a good year of flicks and I probably spent just as much time talking about those movies with different people in my life, which makes me very happy.

Here’s my StoryGraph 2025 round up of books read - I’ll comment on a few:

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO by George Saunders [USA]

• Really dug the structure of this, and thought it made an interesting commentary on how we glean information from social media and how we consider reputable sources

• It’s also a great study of grief

THE KISS, AND OTHER STORIES by Anton Chekhov [Russia]

• Deeply into my Russian bullshit

• ‘A Case History’ is a personal favourite as it explores capitalistic abuse as a kind of literal disease, and I find it fascinating that we clearly worried about this kind of thing a long time ago

THE GREAT SWINDLE by Pierre LeMaitre [France]

• Read this due to a new xmas tradition - a book swap with the sister-in-law

• Everyone should organise book swaps with people in their life who read

• This book was good, and has a moment I still see in my head probably once a month

THE CARTOONIST’S CLUB by Raina Telgemaier & Scott McCloud [USA]

• Absolutely loved this - it’s about young people making comics, and in telling their story the book tells young people how to make comics

• The perfect blend of Telgemaier YA comics and McCloud deep comics lore instructional comics

• THE perfect gift for any creative youths [and older] in your life

A YEAR OF LAST THINGS by Michael Ondaatje [Sri Lanka/England/Canada]

• My first dip into Ondaatje’s poetry - I loved it, he’s got a really good emotional flow through these poems

• I could see myself teaching his poetry in the coming years

A MANUAL FOR CLEANING WOMEN by Lucia Berlin [USA]

• A collection of short stories - and when they pop, they are blindingly brilliant

• Each is short, so you can clip through them, but they also form well to tell this semi-biographical tale of Berlin that’s so emotionally astounding

• There’s one sequence/paragraph I think is just one of the most beautiful moments in literature - and I deeply want to reference it in my writing one day

ALIENS: BISHOP by T.R. Napper [Australia]

• Dare I say a perfect addition to the Alien world - Napper lands the character of Bishop [in various incarnations] so well and the plot is gripping

AS I LAY DYING by William Faulkner [USA]

• Shocking no one, classic book is a classic for a reason

• The tale of a depression era family trying to transport their dead mother to her hometown for burial is so brutally sad when it gets really low

• My favourite 1-2 chapter punch where they complement each other so perfectly in focus, voice, and construction [they are the coffin details and the “My mother is a fish.” duo]

• There was one quote I read to my family over breakfast because I thought it was beyond beautiful - “The air smells like sulphur. Upon the impalpable plane of it their shadows form as upon a wall, as though like sound they had not gone very far away in falling but had merely congealed for a moment, immediate and musing.”

THE SAILOR WHO FELL FROM GRACE WITH THE SEA by Yukio Mishima [Japan]

• The prose in this is so brilliant, and structurally it’s very well put together

• This was my first Mishima and I can see my reading more from this

IN THE SKIN OF A LION by Michael Ondaatje [Sri Lanka/England/Canada]

• Had to go back to this to see if it’s still my favourite novel - and it is [is it the best? actually maybe, but is it my personal favourite? absolutely]

• The structure and wandering narrative just capture me every time, and the way Ondaatje writes about moments and people and the way life is built like sand blowing upon a shore just thrill me deeply still roughly 25 years after first reading it

• It’s nice to go back and see something hold up [my reread of I AM LEGEND by Richard Matheson showed it to be a mean and misogynistic book, that wanders far too slow, and yet packs just a brilliant ending punch that it lands and will remain, but the whole of the book is barely worth that journey]

KING SORROW by Joe Hill [USA]

• Ended my teaching year with a 24 hour audiobook of this tome

• A rocking story of a dragon summoned, death, a friendship group over decades, and I loved every minute of it - just “a very, very good read” and I loved ending the year with that

• I feel like Hill’s work is often in conversation with Stephen King’s work [20th CENTURY GHOSTS is his NIGHT SHIFT, and THE FIREMAN is his THE STAND, and STRANGE WEATHER is his DIFFERENT SEASONS] and this is very much in league with IT - and like all the others, the connection is loose and Hill absolutely does his own personal narrative and thematic take on elements that form into his own brilliant work

It’s been a good year for it, and I really love hitting my reading chair in the window on a slowly warming sunrise and getting through a few pages. I have set myself the goal for 18 books in 2026 and am currently 5 in so that’s a good Summer break - though am about to slide into the behemoth that is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamozov so that will slow me down. Mostly, it’s just nice to look back at this because I appreciate every minute I get to spend annotating my paperbacks, leaving notes, reading aloud to people, and generally getting lost in the words.

Here’s the final StoryGraph round up:

― Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing/life - I aim to account/atone for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

AI Statement: at no point do I use generative AI in any way to inform, create, or assist the publication of this newsletter, nor the life lived behind it.

2026 -- whatever.

Not a wrap up, also not pointing out to deep right field - just a new year.

It’s been a year - in so many ways. It’s been strange/awesome to reflect that it’s been a personal favourite of a year for quite a few reasons - though most of that is personal and so probably won’t make it onto the page/screen here. I have enjoyed my first year in a new gig as the Head of an English Faculty at a new school. It’s taken up a lot of time and mental load, but I love challenges, and working with data, and supporting people, and teaching - so it’s been an excellent year for all of those things.

My family is also rad, and there’s nothing more important than that - art as a support system for life, not the other way around [thanks Stephen King]. 2025 has been a year of good connections, long walks, laughs, tears, and plenty of movies. Honestly, blessed land. My word for 2025 was ‘appreciate’ and I did just that. Nice.

Writing output was quite low [very low, the kind shorty got] in 2025 - EVERFROST landed in trade at all fine comic emporiums. I really love the work Sami Kivela and Lauren Affe do in the art in this book.

I had a prose short story appear in the Lone Wolf Anthology Vol. 2 ‘Echoes of the Past’ and my short was titled The Gravedigger’s Legacy. I really liked that story - you can buy it here.

And I think that’s it.

Overall, I’ve immensely enjoyed 2025 and I hope other people have found moments within it worth keeping around, too.

Interestingly, this is in the face of a big project for 2026 being cancelled before it could appear. Creatively, devastating - and yet I’ve survived. I have been watching the Mr. Scorsese documentary and in it I saw that early on Scorsese lost a decent gig and he was frustrated, and hated that, and yet he bounced back in time, so I am happy to be doing the same.

In fact, losing this IP gig has made me consider what it is I want to write moving forward. It’s given me a touch of clarity - especially around things I can control and that which I cannot. As such, I’m putting together a few things right now, and they’re actually weirdly very disparate:

• A brilliant 10 page short with an old collaborator [it’s coming along damn beautifully so far]

• A pitch for a story that’s grabbed me by the collar and must be told [the kind of things where I say to myself “if I only get to tell one last story, what would it be?” and it would be this]

• A zine for a 9k word essay I just finished Draft Three on right before New Year’s Eve.

I plan to make 2026 more personal and quirky in my writing and I’m really looking forward to it.

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The previous year in content consumed.

I’ll go through my reads and watches in a later update. There was a lot of all of it,

For anyone who wants a quick peek at my films watched, head over to Letterboxd - you can track my list here.

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Writing Curriculum Refresh.

I wrote a short story this year that ran in second in the Teachers as Writers’ category for the ACT LitLinks Awards.

The story is Sunkiss’d and you can read it here.

I had a blast writing this. It’s a short piece about someone shipwrecked and adrift in the ocean whereupon they spot a mermaid [or are spotted by it] and that moment of connection fills their heart, but it is fleeting, and they wonder if they’ll ever have it again, or ever have it believed [do we really believe them?].

I wanted to play with subtle elements of form and show some influences while using a larger structural framework.

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Buying my RPGs.

I have some small one-age RPGs up on my itch.io page - so feel free to download at your leisure [or pwyw].

I will finally release WITHIN THE KIND RED BUILDING on there this month, and maybe a few other smaller things soon, too.

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Sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that chase you.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College Head of English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I often say to students [and anyone else who asks] just write what you dig. Whatever gets you to sit down in the seat and bang out the words [instead of the near limitless anything else out there vying for your attention] then write that thing.

We only get a short time, so spend it doing what you dig.

And also stop doomscrolling and checking your social. There be dragons.

― Ivan Turgenev

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing/life - I aim to account/atone for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

AI Statement: at no point do I use generative AI in any way to inform, create, or assist the publication of this newsletter, nor the life lived behind it.

2025 -- appreciate.

How do you fill half a 2025?

Busy. Just busy. Life busy. Good busy.

I’m writing one thing at the moment; it’s not announced yet, but it’s pretty much my dance card for the year full. I’m loving it. I’m also always waiting to be fired off it [my brain will never stop being that lol-machine].

I feel like I spent quite a long time this year in the mines of getting ideas, smushing them together, plotting and planning them out [and repeat that tumble dryer for a long, long time], putting it all together into a tight pitch package, sending it out, waiting…so it’s good to have spent August actually scripting something. Scripting pages is another game, and I love the problem solving of it, the Jenga game of captions and panels to control the ebb and flow of the moment just right.

I’m having fun at the desk. Though if course crashed head first into the usual flow of: write a few pages, feel good, return the next day, realise I’m garbage personified, stew on the pages, find one tweak that makes an improvement, come back another day later, see what I need to fix, fix it, write the next page, repeat.

I look forward to seeing the year out having the same amount of fun.

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Teaching good things.

Beyond that, a lot of energy has gone into the classroom/s. I still have a blast teaching The Catcher in the Rye and it brings me joy when students comment on how much I seem to enjoy picking it apart. If nothing else, that’s the energy I want to bring to the room.

I’m currently teaching Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and getting to have huge existential conversations. Creating a thesis on the fly informed by Heidegger and Nietzsche and Camus, with a sprinkle of de Beauvoir was just garage band levels of fun [it linked facticity to eternal return to Sisyphus’ happiness, with a feminist focus].

I’ve just taught some basics of film and can vouch for two segments of Paris Je’Taime being worth your while. The Loin du 16e segment about a young woman working as a nanny for rich clients is so small and low key and heartbreaking. Then the 14e Arrondissement segment genuinely gets better with each rewatch and gets me all choked up each time. I also taught the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the hominins and the monolith and the bone. It is so damn well crafted, and to unpack Also Sprach Zarathustra with the class and link it to Nietzsche and consider how his works also inform the sequence was a blast.

I’m moving into BlackKklansman next, which I am looking forward to. The film as an argument for inclusive representation informing and changing society for the better is well crafted.

In my uni Intro to Creative Writing class, we are doing a term on poetry, and I always love dusting off some John Donne and diving in. Weeks of playing with words and structure is not just another skill that’s awesome to hone, I always line it back up with comics. The pacing, the flow, the precision, and the placement/structure. I recently saw [and then taught] Frederik Hornung’s GHOST comic and it landed well, and you should also read it right now.

It’s a job with a lot of hours put into it, but if you focus in the right places it also brings a lot of opportunities for joy.

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Writing Curriculum Refresh.

I was randomly wondering when Michael Chabon was going to deliver a new book and I stumbled across two things: his next book should be 2026 [which is insanely awesome], but he also has his own fresh newsletter and I’ve always dug his author voice, so these new posts have been a joy to dive into, check it out here:

I also recently watched HARA KIRI for the first time and I’m annoyed I had no clue this film existed back in my teens. It’s a samurai tale, but it plays like an old courtroom drama at the same time, and the balance between pathos via conversation and then heartbreaking flashbacks and then of course some really well filmed blade fighting action was not only a delight, but I was shocked at how scathing a take this was about the history of Japan. Genuinely cannot imagine seeing this in Japan at the time, or imagining how it landed back in the 60s. I won’t spoil anything, but it’s just a work of both art and genius.

It instantly made me want to sit down and write [and lucky I am in the middle of doing just that thing for a thing].

I had someone at a convention recently ask me which social media to catch me on, and I had to explain that my business plan right now is to be pretty much inactive on all of them [because I am a jeaneus] and then I realised I was heavily active, on the only social media that matters, and I directed them to my Letterboxd account. General chuckles ensued - but seriously. It is more fun, informative, funny, inspiring, and without toxicity over there than anything else I’ve ever looked at before.

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Sydney Oz Comic Con

I’ll be there later in September with a whole restock of books:

• A Fistful of Pain HC

• Deer Editor tpb

• Speed Republic tpb

• Stain the Seas Scarlet one-shot comic [reprinted for the first time in years]

I’ll also have all those books with me at the Geek Markets Gungahlin Pop Up stall on September 05 for a few hours in the day [tbc]. It’ll be a nice little chance to get out, and then have Father’s Day follow it up [where my annual tradition of choosing a long ass movie reigns supreme - after Seven Samurai and Lawrence of Arabia, this year will be Visconti’s The Leopard].

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Sometimes the stories that matter most are the ones that chase you.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College Head of English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I wonder if anyone ever took long service leave from their job just to read books?

I wonder how many I could get through in 10 weeks?

Until then: find the things to read that bring you joy - whether someone’s newsletter, or an old short story, or some poetry analysis, or someone’s Letterboxd reviews - flood the brain with the opposite of ragebait hate reads. There’s nothing better than that euphoric high from reading something well crafted and inspiring in some element of your life.

― Ivan Turgenev

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

2025 -- appreciate.

Nothing to complain about.

Getting one of these out before I enter the end of semester darkness of marking and final admin and then prep for next semester. It’s always a good time - reading interesting student work, putting whole packets of work to bed, thinking up mad literary schemes for the coming semester- but it’s busy and I know I’ll have my head down.

My writing has been focused on one thing. I’ve been taking notes and tweaking and moving this thing around. It’s been a fun process where I try to problem solve and some out with something I’m still in love with and honestly, each iteration has become better than the last. It’s this stage of story/character Jenga where the good stuff gets ironed out - why are characters doing what they are doing, how should they best interact [how, when, where, why], and what will it all build to.

I’m appreciating the chance to play and it’s making my mindset as I come to this something of wonder and fun. I feel like there’s one last hurdle to get past and then the rest of my year will be spent running alongside the dominos and ensuring their fall consistently and successfully.

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Reading - it’s good for the soul.

I finished Northanger Abbey and it was an interesting experience. I found it really difficult to read at night when I was tired because Austen’s prose just doesn’t click with my brain then. The sentences are long and she often says one thing and means another and you have to be sharp on your wits to keep up and tired Ryan is not that.

I was chipping away at it, but when I was sick recently I gave myself some time to read in the day and found I finished the final third in a few days [after weeks of short night jabs at it] and I found it so much more clear to really appreciate the layers. I really dug the central conceit of how Catherine’s perceived status is created and destroyed by the men in her life. It’s a really strong series of moments that unpacks a lot about the time.

I then took the opportunity to get back to a quick Russian and read Ivan Turgenev’s double novella collection of Faust and Yakov Pasynkov.

I love the design on that cover and would love to track down the others in this series. But besides that: both novellas were good. Each a consideration of the power of love where events occur that genuinely surprised and delighted me. I’m finding it really interesting how much the Russians write about the human experience/condition and how their 19th Century lives and world creates a place where this existential thought about how a life could/should be lived was so openly put onto the page.

The consideration of literature unlocking the heart [and the consequences of this] is a really interesting ride, and Yakov has one turn I really thought was powerful and left me thinking, so I can only imagine how well these landed nearly 200 years ago. There is something to human interaction and reaction that will always be fascinating in story.

I then finished off Michael Ondaatje’s A Year of Small Things,which is a book of poetry, but also some short form prose/response style work. At its peak, it is peak Ondaatke, putting it above pretty well anyone else out there.

Like all good poetry, some lands with you and some does not. There were numerous pages where I absolutely dove into what Ondaatje was saying and considered how articulate his eye is at drawing together details that create a specific moment with a mood.

I’m now entering the mid-year season reading Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women and a Ray Bradbury biography because the more I teach his work the more I want to infuse my understanding of the man himself - something I find really powerful for the reading process, and the teaching process. Also: not the kind of thing AI does well or deeply, but a classroom [nd reader] deserves.

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Film is alive and well [in this house].

I’ve watched well over 150 films this year and have loved how many of them have managed to delight and dazzle me with their high quality filmmaking and belief that good and new story is still out there waiting to be unearthed.

Particularly, A Ghost Story by David Lowery and Perfect Days by Wim Wenders have both jumped out and shaken me in the choices of focus and story, and how they are shot and presented. I can think of small shots where the camera is used intentionally that I find staggering artistically. Each might find their way into my Top 10,and that’s nice to see when that list sometimes feels like it’s more really old stuff than new.

But The Fabelmans by Steven Spielberg also having maybe two of my favourite cinematic sequences, and The Brutalist by Brady Corbet also being a massive victory of intent and meaning, has left me hungry for good story that’s clearly still being made and every other massive franchise puzzle piece raking in billions can help fund. I’m left inspired to write just from my heart and see what spills out.

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I think I need to write more snippets. When I’ve been reading short stories, I keep short 1-3 sentence reviews/reminders of them in my phone. It helps my brain process things, but also inspire future things as I can go back to how something made me feel and why/how it did that.

I should write more short stuff like this - and go both short review and short creative burst from it - and just save it on my phone. The more we use muscles like this, the stronger they become.

Plus: it’s fun.

I’m going to sit with this.

― Ivan Turgenev

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

2025 -- appreciate.

Lots of Little Things

The second half of a school term becomes busy for me. There is marking to do, while still teaching, and my new role means I support others in their marking and timelines and what ends up happening is I have a lot of plates spinning. A lot.

I use Google Keep to track it all and have it make sense each day. My percentage of letting people down is probably only 10%, so that’s a huge win, right?

I did read one student piece that really rushed through me, gave me that feeling when you read something clever and really well considered and damn effective. That’s a huge perk of the job.

I kept my reading strong and consistent. I have a French sister-in-law who loves to read so for Xmas we did an international swap. I gave her Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites as an example of great modern Aussie writing and she gifted me Pierre Lemaitre’s The Great Swindle.

I finished it this term and it was fantastic. The writing sings so well, and each chapter seems to end on a brilliant moment/line, but it was the heartbreak of the two main characters that captivated me. Really strong stuff about post-WWI France and the social class divide that still existed.

Aurally, I blasted through Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which recently took home the Book prize. It has some nice turns of phrase, but didn’t grab me as much as I wanted it to. I also clocked Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and found it delightful enough, and it’s clear why it has endured as the plot is just so well constructed.

Then I listened to Duane Swierczynski’s California Bear and loved it. Just gripping crime, great twists and action, something I could ‘see’ in my head the whole time as I enjoyed all the main characters. Swierczynski always delivers action and fun. My favourite modern writer just delivering electricity on the page every time.

Which was all a way of getting me to land in a recent position of needing to pick new reading material - which I love to do. It’s all based on mood, and the previous books for balance, and what time I am in around teaching/marking/holidays, so I went to my shortlist shelf:

I ended up grabbing Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Been about 20 years since my last Austen [Pride and Prejudice and Zombies not really counting, I suppose] and I’m enjoying it so far. The metatextual commentary on novels as a form is delightful.

Then I decided to go for The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler in audio format. Also good so far, and so brilliantly purple in places that it makes me smile on multiple occasions.

Which is probably all to say, it continues to be a good start to the year, though into the fourth month means pretty far from the start, right?

I wrote another short fiction response to the April Furious Fiction Challenge - and as usual, wrote it at the eleventh hour on my phone in my bed and I actually unlocked one interesting and honest little piece in the piece. These challenges are worth it for nothing else than to sometimes just let my brain keep turning something over until a secret little hatch opens up under the scrutiny of my thumb and gives me something new to consider or play with.

I took one of these from last year and pinched a few sentences off, and reworked the ending, and gave it a polish over the past months and now I’d really like to shop it around.

I also took a comic pitch for something that makes me really happy and got two rejections and one very solid “How can we make this work?”

Then I got an invite to pitch on something that came out of left field, but instantly had my attention, and my creativity, and got me very excited about possibilities. It’s something you know, which is kinda cool and terrifying all at once, but it also means more to lose if the company doesn’t end up liking the options I sent through. Ah, well, can’t hang my hat on this stuff, honestly.

So there’s currently nothing else I’d rather be doing and no place else I’d rather be than here and now. Yes, I had a stress dream so hard my neck needed a heat pack for a whole day, and yes there was a frustration so large recently I could have just slammed it all down and walked away, but that’s life. What matters for me is the bounce back. Can I turn my back and look at something else I appreciate or love? Can I choose to do that?

I’ve got two weeks of no classes coming up and plenty to keep me riding this bullet of a rock with a grin on my face. My wife and kids keep me honest and just loving each day. I’m mapping out two weeks of reading, and movies, and some gardening [tearing out the final summer plants and setting the winter crop up for success, maybe trimming one tree way, way back], and I’ll plan out my uni course with whatever tweaks it needs.

I’ll also walk every day, and pick up fallen sticks and debris from the neighbourhood to use in my firepit to toast marshmallows [for the kids] and toast sandwiches [for me] and just sit around and yarn.

Even at my most stressed right now, I still sit back and think…this is all pretty good.

///

Greg Rucka - Thank You

Rucka wrote a newsletter about why we should read/write and it was glorious. Honestly, glorious.

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New Anthology Short Story - Oxymoron

I got one of my earliest starts because Tyler James at ComixTribe sent me a cold call email asking if I’d be interested in pitching a short story for the first Oxymoron anthology collection. This random link up became that short story, then Sami Kivela and me doing CHUM over there, then Chris Panda and me on SHE, and Louie Joyce and me on A FISTFUL OF PAIN, and the partnership is nowhere near over. I love doing business with Tyler, and I want to have many more ComixTribe books under my belt in the coming years.

This anthology is the second round of stories about Tyler’s character Oxymoron. I wrote mine quite some time ago, and yet the political nature of it feels like I’m reacting to headlines from the past month. Which is a kind of interesting and strange aspect to fiction sometimes. Like people who thought the THE HANDMAID’S TALE show was just a vicious reaction to Trump [which, just, lol - what a bunch of clowns].

I only have a literal handful of copies of this to sell at cons, so if I see you and you want it, you better snap it up quickly. I’m going to be in Goulburn April 26 and then Wollongong on May 24 - will also have trades of DEER EDITOR and some other things.

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I recently watched the first MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and after I logged my review on Letterboxd my screen went black and then it started typing out some secret spy message to me.

Genuinely: huge thrill. Ah, sweet nerdy Easter eggs on a sweet nerdy site/app. Fills my heart with joy, and now I just want to find all the other ones [but only organically].

― Ivan Turgenev

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

2025 -- appreciate.

Things could always be better, doesn’t mean they aren’t great.

I recently showed someone my office and they were so excited to see a shelf of comics and graphic novels that I have written. They thought it was very cool and amazing and I had to admit to them that it never felt like enough, but that I was working on that feeling, because I know it’s not right.

This seems to be a familiar refrain from me, so I won’t bang on about it - I’ll just be conscious of it for one more year. Usually knowing is half the battle.

Consider the below, now, just a sitrep, for those who are interested - and a reminder for me of what to appreciate.

I’ve spent 2025 running an English Faculty at a really great school. It’s been a massive opportunity to try new things and support more people and I’ve really loved it. My classes are all fantastic, each in different ways. I’ve been teaching fairy tales and vignette writing and am about to dive into a great comic and The Catcher in the Rye. All wins. Plus my uni class kicks off next term, so I’m already looking forward to that.

I’ve watched over 80 films so far this year and they’ve been an assortment of excellent. I recently had the opportunity to watch Blue Velvet on the big screen with some friends and I was blown away with how thematically rich it was and so consciously crafted. I’d not seen the flick since I was a teen and I can see why teen Ryan didn’t catch it all, he was a real dunce, honestly. I’ll hopefully be catching Sunset Boulevard next week.

I’ve read a few books and they’ve been really great; I’ve listened to a few books and they’ve also been enjoyable. I was delighted to find Lincoln in the Bardo lived up to hopes for it as it used structure to its advantage to draw some parallels and be a delightful read. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is another reason to add her to my top writers of all time list. Then I read a collection of Anton Chekhov’s tales and I find reading them alongside reading about them [in this case, with the notes from the front] really enlightening. The more Russian work I read, the more I fall in love with so much of its view of life and ways of presenting nuanced ideas, values, and beliefs.

I’ve got some writing to tinker with, and that’s always fun. Nothing I can talk concretely about just yet. So, that’s the plan for the year - definitely with no expectations.

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I wrote a short story for Lone Wolf

This is so cool and you can now buy the anthology of short stories where I contributed my own take on a strange little anti-war mongering tale set in the world of Lone Wolf - which is an old school series of solo role playing books from the 80s [very like Fighting Fantasy, for those who also know those]. Scope this cover!

The whole thing was edited by work-a-holic multi-media master Shane Walsh-Smith, and he got so many awesome submissions that he ended up splitting his stories into two volumes. My story is landing in Vol. 2 and you can buy the hardcover right now - and you might want to also line it up with the HC of Vol. 1, too.

This was massive fun to get to contribute towards, and I hadn’t written a lot of fantasy before, but something came to me and I’m really pleased with how this one came out. I also haven’t written a lot of prose [well, haven’t had a lot published, but back in the day I wrote 4 unpublished novels and a bunch of short stories, so the quest was always lying ahead of me] and this was just a joy to sit with and write last year. I got to do something fun with the structure of the story, and that kind of formalism is always my jam.

I’m looking forward to sliding this HC into my shelf and having another little writing notch to my belt that means so much to me.

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Taxi Driver, being passed down.

I’m about to watch Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver with my kid. I set a challenge [to read 1000 pages this term] and it was absolutely met so they get to view my favourite film with me [and yes, when I word it that way, I actually love how megalomaniacal it sounds].

They read 1984, The Road, The Nickel Boys, and The Old Man and the Sea. All were conducted with constant discussions about character, theme, and overall enjoyment [and strangely enough, all were enjoyed]. My favourite moment was easily being compared to the Man in The Road. I was told, “He’s just you. Every time the Boy asks a question the Man responds with a question back to him.” To which I responded, “Do I do that? I wonder why I do that?” I guess I am a troll in real life just as much, ha.

I got to thinking that parenting is sometimes about being the support and the guide, and while I can’t ever effectively be the rod or the shining star, I can continue to offer up opportunities and present excitement for these things in the world. I was recounting my opening lesson for The Catcher in the Rye and my kid instantly got excited to read that soon, too. I think have energy for something and sharing that energy can go a long way in this world. Because, yes, I do come home and talk excitedly about what I teach.

So we will watch De Niro and co present an old view of Manhattan. And I will talk deeply of the way the script and the music and the camera guide us through this toxic wasteland of humanity and what we can learn about it from the other side, and 50 years, of it all.

That final moment is going to really leave us chatting, and I cannot wait. Maybe I should throw the Waxwork vinyl on to really set the scene :]

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

///////

Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I too often convolute myself with plot. I shouldn’t.

I recently watched Deliverance for the first time in decades and I was struck by how simple the plot really is, but how much that’s fine with me because the characters are so subtly rich and they ultimately serve the messaging of the story so well. It’s a beautiful film, and it’s swinging for some really big explorations, and it’s probably limited by the kind of early cultural meme-ness of it from the “squeal like a piggy” scene. That scene is harrowing, and it speaks volumes to the meaning of the film.

I’d like to find that balance - have characters and situation talk to the thematic richness, then present it in a powerful way, and don’t overload the plot. If we care enough, we'll follow characters through whatever plot mechanics work.

Here are some rapid fire thoughts - if you’ve read any of these, I’d love to know what you thought, and if you are thinking of reading any of these I hope my thoughts assist you in any directions :]

DEVOTION by Hannah Kent

I really enjoyed the prose of Kent’s Burial Rites and found much the same in this novel, though it does still run second to her debut. The characters grab and there’s a good plot swerve halfway through I did not see coming and the second half is all the better for it. Overall, an interesting experience of queer sexuality in the early Australian colonisation time.

THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’d never read this classic and wanted to rectify that. Usually that goes two ways - I either don’t see what all the fuss is about, or I nod my head and enjoy the ride as the world opens up to me just that little bit more. Strangely this book sat just left of the latter - I can see why this is such a beloved classic. It’s so beautifully written, and the language and style and meaning all shine through. It’s a novel that feels consciously made, which is a delight, and yet…in the end it just didn’t feel like it was completely for me. I can see how I could easily teach it, and probably even grow to love it, but it didn’t land with that impact books like this sometimes seem to. Though I do feel it would be a text better still studied while read as then the time could be taken to explore aspects of it in greater detail.

EXPIRATION DATE by Duane Swierczynski

A fun ol’ crime book about travelling through time to solve a murder in the family past and also reconnect with family. Swierczynski will always be a favourite of mine, and he rarely misses. This was a grand old time, and it makes me wish I could get my hands on his latest novel California Bear in Australia in any easy/not $50 capacity.

BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy

Another book that came with a lot of weight of expectation, and completely lived up to all of it. A decimating study on the “Cowboys and Indians” mythos America loves so much and that McCarthy presents in all its horrible and nigh unfathomable toxicity. I love the way he opens every chapter with a precis so you know just how many terrible and violent moments are coming, and probably even how many pages away each will be - it’s both a content warning but also a signpost to let us know that the ghastly stuff we came for is definitely always coming up soon because that what we signed up for because that’s what we love, isn’t it, sickos that we are? It’s a big mirror into the face of American exceptionalism and instead highlights the long-held lust for violence and destruction and oppressions, and it’s sadly not going anywhere.

MAPS & LEGENDS by Michael Chabon

This has some good essays in it. I find Chabon’s authorial voice pleasant and engaging. Some of it is more insight into him and what he selects to focus on, more than insight into the things he focuses on, but it’s a nice read that leaves some breadcrumbs to other concepts well.

A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN by George Saunders

I’ve long been looking for a copy of Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo [and fret not, I found it recently and am currently halfway through it and absolutely loving it], so when I heard about this book from mate/writer Jack Heath’s newsletter I knew I had to pick it up. Basically, Saunders teaches creative writing at Syracuse University, and he focuses on Russian Literature. So in this book, which seems conceived as a release valve to Covid lockdowns, Saunders takes 7 Russian short stories he likes to teach, from 4 Russian masters, and he presents the stories entirely [as they are now public domain] and then follows each up with why he loves them and how he teaches them.

This book makes me excited to read, write, and teach - all in one. It’s a staggeringly sharp book, that reads really clearly and personally, and yet contains some wild depths to it. Honestly, an absolute must read for the writer’s curriculum canon. I can see me rereading this in the near future [and I could only ever hope Saunders ever does something like this again, though I fear he would never get the time/opportunity to do so again]. This is easily in my Top Ten Non-Fic books of all time.

It definitely made me want to read more Russian Lit [and you’ll see one appear below] and to also teach creative writing with even more vigour and passion. I did try to consider what my focus would be if I taught some prestigious Lit course. You can go to Saunders for Russian Lit, and I’m sure others focus on Woolf and Hemingway and others, so what would my focus be? The shortlist for consideration would be either the short stories of Philip K. Dick, or the works of Michael Ondaatje, or maybe something to do with comics, though I couldn’t lock down what or whom.

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE by Shirley Jackson

I’ve long loved The Lottery as both a short story to return to rereading and to also teach. I’ve been hoping to read The Haunting of Hill House for as long as it’s been since I first saw it quoted in Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot, and yet I’d heard barely anything about WHALITC.

Which probably made the reading experience even better because I went in cold and absolutely fell in love. This tale of small town isolation and fear and witchcraft and family is a staggering work that genuinely took me back. The control and flow with which Jackson writes is both engaging and exceptionally thoughtful. I was glued to the book for a handful of days, and at the end I knew it was not only one of the best things I’d ever read, but it was one of my absolute favourites. What a delight for something no one had told me to go and seek out before [and how had no one? Insanity!].

I love teaching the opening page and how Jackson sets up Merrikat as this isolated and dark figure. I also love seeing it land with every class as they realise just how precisely Jackson has controlled everything on that page. I have a paper I want to write about her use of polysyndeton in the book, and I hope 2025 gives me time to properly write it and shop it around.

If I can give but one single recommendation from this list, it’s that you seek out this book and enjoy your time with it.

HEART OF DARKNESS by Joseph Conrad

A short part of the canon I felt compelled to try mostly on the back of it inspiring Apocalypse Now. I’ll be honest, this one didn’t grab me. Thankfully it’s short enough that I didn’t feel like I wasted more than a few days of my life delving in and not really digging it.

REVIVAL by Stephen King

I try to always hit one King each year, though he continues to write them quicker than I can read them. However, this one came with a decent ‘dark horse’ wrap, and then completely did not live up to it. Which was a shame, because it didn’t just disappoint, it actively seemed like it came together poorly. Even for King readers, I would not recommend.

THE MEMORY POLICE by Yoko Ogawa

My kid clued me into this being an upcoming film adaptation from Charlie Kaufman and Lily Gladstone, and then the cover completely caught my eye, and then the blurb sounded wild. So I read it and I loved it. This was one I got lost in the world of, and found the ending lingered with me for some time. A really engaging read that definitely swept me up in the central premise of the story, which is that on this island things become forgotten and people collectively no longer know about these things or how to use them. Genuinely, pretty brilliant.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin

This absolutely pops. I found myself very much sunk right into the characters and their interactions and world. A love story that’s actually about friendship and support is a really interesting way to play this that sets it apart from any other rom-com formula. There’s a whole mess of heart in these pages, and the exploration that video games are just another medium in meaningful literature was really refreshing to see.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

This book about clones raised to be harvested for their organs is a great display of how to do genre and yet only focus on the characters. For such a wild concept, it never feels like the sci fi it truly is, which is an interesting eye on this kind of story. Everything revolves around relationships, and the allegory gets to play itself out behind that. I know this book is top tier for some, and it sits just below that for me, but it was still a great entry into Ishiguro, so I look forward to sampling some more.

THE BLOODY CHAMBER, AND OTHER STORIES by Angela Carter

This is a damn fine collection of short stories where Carter takes known fairy tales and such and uses a feminist lens to rewrite them. I’ve taught The Werewolf many times over and it always pops, but here I also dug the Bluebeard one and The Company of Wolves.

FIRST LOVE by Ivan Turgenev

Me diving into some Russian Lit solo via this $1 slimline purchase. I thought it was pretty bloody good. It’s low key, and context of the time helps a lot to recognise that a story of someone having an extra-marital affair is very shocking to them all [should still be shocking now, but somehow feels less scandalous in my mind], but it was the ending that completely wrapped me up. I followed along with the young boy and his love of the neighbour, but then in the final sections there are just hints everywhere at the truth of what plays out, a game of clue for you to unpack why Turgenev focuses on these things and what they might imply, and I found that incredibly intriguing. I eventually have my theory on this one, and I know it’s not accepted canon, but it was fun to build it.

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY by Michael Ondaatje

This collection of discovered recollections about Ondaatje’s family is pretty raw, and really insightful, and absolutely beautifully written. You can see the writer he’ll continue to be here as he works through internal and familial trauma to try and discover some kind of truth or salve.

FIESTA, or The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Someone who loved the Russian masters, and mentions Turgenev in this book, and it shows in that way he controls the reader’s focus on the page. This poignant tale of two lovers who can never quite be lovers is really well laid out, and also a brilliant insight into post-WWI Europe. I enjoyed the book, but have even more enjoyed sitting with a personal theory that Lady Brett is pregnant at the end and then just exploring whether the text can support this. I’m probably wrong, but it’s fun to play with a text and look back through it and see if there’s more there - it’s just another way to sit with a story and engage with it and get to appreciate parts of it yet again.

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

This is a brutal dive into the true story of young African-American boys casually beaten and murdered in institutions that should be aimed at rehabilitating them. And yet somehow it never feels lascivious about such things and instead brings forward character, and has a final reel plot swerve that genuinely levels this already great book into something fairly special in a way that ensures it’ll stick with you longer than you’d think. Also: great prose, especially in the character descriptions.

OLD SCHOOL by Tobias Wollf

I borrowed this off a good friend as it was short and they were interested in my thoughts. It’s about schoolboys vying for the company of Ernest Hemingway and it’s simply delightful to read, I think especially if you dig literature or creative writing. Bonus: my kid picked it up as I was reading it and also read it, so every few days we’d have a debrief chat about it [I’d love 2025 to bring me more of that sweet action].

EDENGLASSIE by Melissa Lucashenko

A dual narrative between Brisbane now and also ~170 years ago. The older story captured me more, in both character and historical facts, and I found myself blasting through this as a cruisy Xmas final book of the year.

AUDIOBOOKS

SPUTNIK, GOODBYE by Haruki Murakami

Seemed like a good place to start with Murakami. This is a weird tale, and I mean that with some reverence. There are a lot of good moments, and this held up as an audiobook I found I could concentrate on and follow along with it, huzzah.

THE BEE STING by Paul Murray

I read this because a student was doing a paper on it, and I’m really glad I did. Not only is the book genuinely fantastic and engaging, but also the student’s take on it was very well put together and a joy to take in. I ended up feeling really invested in these characters, and I’ve been sitting on the ending ever since and turning it over in my head a lot [though I know I need to now hold the book and explore certain points to then draw back to the ending page, and this cannot be done in audio form - lame].

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT by Wilson Sloan

This was a staggeringly good read in the way it unpacks the mindset of post-WWII men. I constantly kept thinking about American Psycho throughout as it’s this exploration of murder and capitalism and what it means to be a modern man in the modernity of your specific context. Lowkey harrowing, surprisingly engaging for all of the suburban and workplace drama folded into it, and ultimately somewhat sad to see how war brings regular people fairly low in so many ways.

*******

And with that the year’s reading of novels was done. Some Top 10 all timers, some definite recommends and gifts, and a resolution ticked off. Time to do it again for 2025, 12 novels is the goal yet again, and I just finished George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and it’s setting the bar really bloody high. I’ll also hopefully better track my comic reading on the shelf below.

I genuinely hope your year has been filled with some favourite pages, and that 2025 only delivers more. If you want to track your reading as I have below, I recommend StoryGraph [as it is not Amazon owned, so Goodreads can go screw].

My 2024 at a glance:

My 2024 in covers:

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. ♫

The Sun Rising, John Donne

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It’s been a long time.. Thinking about looking back at the year, and into my brain, and, yeah, the title feels as apt as it ever did…

2024 -- dig it.

Yes, I did [dig it].

It’s been a wild ride of a year, and I’m all the better for it. My writing isn’t. But that’s also fine, in a way. My writing has sat to the side, and sometimes you never know if something is fermenting, stagnating, rotting, or just kindly waiting patiently. You have to dive right back in to find out.

If I think about 2024, I think a lot of positive thoughts. If I think about my writing in 2024, it’s not crowding that plate. I think a younger Ryan would have been unable to manage that, such separation of Writer and Man was impossible, but in some blissful miracle, despite some pitch knockbacks, some things taking me longer than they should, and a fairly gaunt 2025 outlook, I’ve loved a lot of this year.

I think my key has been allowing myself to shift and not be so rigid in who I am, what I do, and what success must look like. This man in his 40s must [and should] be different from the young buck in his 20s who was writing up a storm.

So I sit atop 2024 [I know it’s only the start of December, but I’m very much winding down in many ways] and I see a lot of good stuff and I smile about a lot of things. What more can you ask for from a year?

I’ve watched a lot of awesome movies, read a bunch of amazing books, had some great times with the family as wife and kids have remained awesome [and dare I say improved on all previous awesomes], finally got DEER EDITOR collected in a beautiful trade collection through Mad Cave, sold some comics at conventions and caught up with friends, and taught some excellent lessons and students. I’ve kept fit, happy, and energised, and I’m left really excited for 2025.

Although, fair play, a large part of that excitement stems from a promotion at work, which will impact the writing considerably, but which is something I’m really ready to sink my teeth into. Those who have heard me speak about my teaching know it’s something that also brings me a grand amount of purpose and joy, so I can confirm it’ll be doing a lot of that in 2025 with a new leadership role I’ve taken on at a new school.

Which begs the Q: what’s up for 2025?

Straight up: this promotion takes centre stage. As it should.

Comics: I’m excited to push a certain sequel for a certain rad character of mine closer to becoming real. Also excited to share more visuals when I know more.

There are a handful of graphic novel pitches I’m tinkering with. I know what I want, which is always a difficult place to start from, but I’ll work towards those goals. Timeline: :super shrug emoji:

Prose: there are some short story ideas and flash fic pieces I have/want to write, and I’m mapping out possible pathways for 2025 to be more productive in this arena.

Essays: there are currently three essays I want to write, with one really crowding my mental plate, so I’ll see what can be done on that front.

Adventures: the year ahead should bring more opportunities to explore the world. Just looking for a high to match going on a long rock walk with an old friend and seeing these crabs just hiding and chilling.

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A Fistful of Pain wins a Silver CAAA

This was pretty awesome, I won’t lie. Louie Joyce and I put a decade of ourselves into this comic and so many times it felt like maybe it would be too difficult to complete, or it wouldn’t come out just as we wanted, and yet we pushed on. Because we loved it, and I can say working with Louie is a process I absolutely love. We were so lucky when ComixTribe came in to pick it up and turn it into the hardcover beast of a book it ended up being. Thomas Mauer lettered it, guest artists dropped so many good images on up as pin ups, and the result was a book we adored with our whole broken hearts.

So to see it win Silver at the Comics Arts Awards of Australia was a huge boost. That award is for the book, but mostly for Louie’s art [don’t worry, I would never delude myself of anything else], but it’s also an award for our friendship.

You can see the livestream recording of the awards here - our award is 37 minutes in.

It’s my second CAAA award [previous the Ledger Awards], and Louie’s 3rd, and I do feel honoured to have another, but it’s better to have it with Louie.

I currently have one copy of the hardcover left, so I might put it up online to sell next year [unless someone desperately wants it as a holiday present to someone they know and reach out here].

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Everfrost TPB?

For those of you who have been patiently waiting, I have pseudo-good news. The trade paperback collection is indeed still coming, and is a solid step closer to appearing on shelves, so, uh, stay tuned…?

I do so love this weird and wonderful book I did with Sami Kivela, Lauren Affe, Jim Campbell, and Dan Hill over at Black Mask. I’m assuming a shelf date of early 2025 will be confirmed…soon.

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

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Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

Summer just kicked into gear, and so far it’s been humid amid heat and rain. For me: this means early morning walks and excuses to watch mid-afternoon movies to beat the heat. For my garden it means: a lotta growth.

The raspberries are already popping, the tomatoes showed the first signs of life in little green fruit this weekend, and my blueberry house seems to be keeping the hungry animal hordes out so far because we just saw the first signs of a round bauble turning blue yesterday.

It’s always a nice life and place for me in the morning cool tending to the things and taking edible stuff inside. I wish you something similar, in however you find it, for the wind up to your 2024.

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. ♫

The Sun Rising, John Donne

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

2024 -- dig it.

Melbourne Oz Comic Con This Weekend

Don’t want to bury the lede - I’ll be down in Melbourne this long weekend for Oz Comic Con!

Ah, one day I’ll find a good photo of me for a con. One day. First, check out the other good photos and people who’ll be at the show.

But if you are on Naarm land, please pop into the show and say g’day. It’s been like 5 years since I’ve been down to Melbourne for a show. I’m bringing the whole family crew and am really looking forward to making it a time. It’s also my birthday long weekend [the old royal birthday public holiday is always very close to my day, so I claim the whole weekend] and I’m really looking forward to trying out a few secondhand book stores in Melbourne’s CBD, as well as finding odd foods to throw into the kids after our hotel buffet breakfasts, and just general wanderings and such.

I’ll also be bringing along some comics to sell, the main ones I’ve never had out in Melbourne, so keep the peepers locked onto these wondrous chunky tomes of my additions to the ninth art:

DEER EDITOR - the trade finally came into existence in the last month, so I have a stack of antler noir from me, Sami Kivela, Lauren Afee, Jim Campbell, through Mad Cave Studios to distribute throughout Melbourne in exchange for coin or card taps!

A FISTFUL OF PAIN Hardcover - this kung fu sister/dragon showdown masterpiece of Louie Joyce’s art and my words landed last year, so it brings me great pleasure to take a box down south to the erudite arts appreciation hub of Australia [the world], Melbourne.

I’m thinking of keeping the table stripped back and just having those two beats, instead of the usual smush of other single issues and such. It’ll make flying and family bags easier, too.

Beyond that: I’m just excited to hit up Melbourne again and take in the city and the sights. Maybe even some of the local comics, wherever I find them on the show floor. If you are around, I look forward to saying g’day and having a chat about how things have been.

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Deer Editor - The Trade

I can’t even stress how good this is to have the crazy comic Sami and I cooked up so so long ago finally out wrapped up into a trade collection, and what a beautifully designed and created collection it is.

As always, this marks the end of a long road, from inception to playing with ideas and scripts to getting it onto the page to finally [via Kickstarter and a dormant period of being stubborn and waiting and landing the right publisher and worldwide release] the tpb.

This one has always been special to me, and to push it onto my shelf of RKL writings was a poignant joy.

Mostly because I had this feeling it could be the last thing I ever slide onto that shelf.

Although, I still have two series not collected, but surrounded by talk of possible collection, still - yes, there is some hope for EVERFROST and BLACK BEACON, but not the kind of hope that ever keeps me up at night with the thrill of possibility.

Then there’s a short comic I just saw inks on, so there’ll be that.

Plus, I just got a thumbs up on another submission of a very different kind that I cannot talk about yet, but it’s this small rad little project and it made my heart do a little flutter of excitement.

So there’s a chance there’ll be more to the RKL Shelf. But it felt like ol’ Bucky was the end of an era. Those days of hustling so hard I nearly broke my [insert proof of hard hustling here] might be over, and they’re definitely on some kind of hiatus. Which is something I honestly thought I’d feel worse about, but everything in moderation, and a season for everything, and [insert pithy quote more aimed at helping me than you, sorry].

Life does its thing, and I’m enjoying a lot of it, so I’m going to keep following it. While keeping some plans - I have things on which I shall tinker - and keeping family at the centre of it all.

Plus, the TV deal I’ve long had, and keeps getting silently renewed as they try to crack the code for small screen success, just got renewed once more and that’s always some good approval for the heart, and a wink and a prayer into the old skyrocket.

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Been reading and watching a few things.

THE BLOODY CHAMBER by Angela Carter - I’ve taught ‘The Werewolf’ so many times, and it rocks, so I’m finally reading the collection it’s from. There are some great stories in here, and a few that haven’t landed with me, and some I realised would benefit if I went in with knowledge of the base story it’s riffing on. In total, a good time, but ‘The Werewolf’ might end up remaining the high point, but maybe just because I’ve analysed it so much I enjoy it down to its very dot matrix dna on the page.

SHOGUN S1 - have nearly finished watching this with one of my kids as we tap away at half an ep each morning with some exercise. I’ve been digging this. It keeps unfolding, and I know there’ll be more intrigue, and I’m keen to see how they’ll wind it all together at the end.

OBLIVION SONG Vols 1 & 2 - this pseudo-post-apocalyptic story alternate reality jam from Lorenzo de Felici and Robert Kirkman is good. I find Kirkman’s books just always enjoyable/easy to read. There’s something here not quite popping for me, but it’s not taking it all away, and de Felici’s art is quite stunning in so many moments.

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

///////

Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I’ve finally discovered how to use Google Keep as a daily to do list/task place and it’s helped my brain at work so much.

After 21 years of teaching where I just scrawl a new daily list each morning - and often build it from an A$ sheet with subheadings that has a list of things for various jobs I have around the school [that gets updated weekly onto a new sheet] I’ve mastered Keep.

My trick, and I don’t know why this works, or only works now, or whatever - it’s to put a daily header and drag stuff into it.

W17 Wed

• Mark 3 papers

• Type meeting notes from JL AI

W17 Tues

• Set Creative Writing Task 4

And other such boring shenanigans. I tick them off as done, I drag up to a new day as needed, and I park in other subheadings when they aren’t urgent. Then I never lose/forget them, and I get to bask in there being about 300 completed tasks since the term began. Which is 24 work days, which is about 12 major items a day :|

Genuinely - it seems stupidly easy, but it finally clicked into place. Also: I can have links with each heading if needed to a doc or site.

Ha, nearly typed “hyperlinks” like some kind of old man. I’m not old, I’m just inching towards…my mid-40s? What th–!

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. ♫

The Sun Rising, John Donne

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This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

2024 -- dig it.

What’s next?

Ah, the dead zone of my brain is right in the sweet spot of this question - “What’s next?”

I’ve taken to being honest - I have absolutely no clue. Nothing is greenlit.

I have the DEER EDITOR tpb landing this week. I am sending out the finalised and printed zines of WITHIN THE KIND RED BUILDING. I have no scripts due. I’m sending a pitch around, of which I’m quite fond. I have an inkling of two new ideas to explore.

But when I get into the office each morning, I’m really wondering what my answer for this one should be. When nothing is greenlit is usually the time I fire up anyway and make something happen - new pitches, a cheeky Kickstarter one-shot, something. But my focus seems scattered.

It’s probably a wave, and I should ride it. I have in the past. But when your work landscape is your brain, and your brain feels [insert appropriate arcane worrying alien lumpy word here] then it’s hard to get to work.

Which is not to say there’s nothing, check this:

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What’s really next?

I got these two ideas and for these two I want to really run with something a little wild, and very meaningful. First ideas and thoughts need not apply, I’m digging beyond layers on both. Honestly - I just need the time to be able to dedicate to sort the wheat from the chaff around what I think about this one.

I must admit, Within The Kind Red Building reminded me how fun the rpg stuff is, so I’m keeping my mind open about putting something else together. I’m soon going on a Writers’ Camp - this is where I’ve assembled a roster of 5 presenting authors, and have 30 students to take, and we all assemble in a campground out of town and just nerd out for 3 days. It’s a whole mess of coordination - the plethora of email and the 5 figure budget keep me moving - but once we get out there I often get to allow the creativity to just flow and vibe. I’m hoping to drag one rpg idea and one of the above stories through this fertile space in my calendar.

I’m wondering if my brain just needs to do more reading to top up the creative tanks. I certainly know I’ve enjoyed reading much more this year, and have been finding a bit more time for it, so I’m considering just servicing my brain for the coming months ahead, too. Which segues into the next point.

Short stories. So far this year, I’ve taught sci fi short stories, I’m currently teaching short stories 101, and this term I’m moving into teaching myth retelling/adaptation and then really short and meaningful stories. My brain is away with shorts, and I’m wanting to read more [Angela Carter’s THE BLOODY CHAMBER is up next] and I’ve been tinkering with writing some. I’ve always loved the short story form, which leads into this cool thing…

The Australian Writers’ Centre runs a monthly challenge called Furious Fiction, and last month I submitted one that ended up making it into the Longlist for that month’s challenge. This means my title and name were published [and there’s never any money involved], but it was nice to be seen.

For that month, the challenge was to open with a question, having something being pulled, and then include the words ‘post’, ‘tear’, and ‘thunder.’ I wrote a Fighting Fantasy-style second person piece that gets interrupted by a Post It note where one brother tells his younger brother how to survive and then says he’ll see him in a few months after he finishes his tour [tour could mean army, could mean music, I was happy to leave it open]. Considering you get about 55 hours to do it all and it’s under 500 words, I was really happy with The Cacophony at Cawthorne’s Castle - though, spoilers, my entry for this month came hard, late, and terribly. But I got it done.

This focus doesn’t shock me because I’m starting up my Intro To Creative Writing course again this month for the rest of the year at my local university. Prepping and planning for that takes a bit of time away from the usual work, but I’m more than happy to do it because I find it so enriching and fulfilling.

To sit alongside the busy extra work, I’ve spent the start of this term acting up in the role of Faculty Director for English at my school and it’s ensured my days are busy - though I’ve also really enjoyed this role, too. Finding a balance between the writing and a full time teaching role, and the extra stuff I do at that school like running the Writers’ Camp and online creative writing challenges and some other small roles, and then taking on the uni course, and then still trying to chill and exist with my amazing family has never been “easy” - it always means I prioritise and there are things I can let fall aside, and parts I refuse to give less. That balance has been a focus for the past decade, and so long as I’m not crashing and burning then that’s the success at times.

All of which is to say, well - What’s next? Plenty. But I also don’t know. I guess there are worse ways to be.

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DEER EDITOR TPB in stores this week!

I don’t yet have my hands on my copies of this, but it’s been a decade in the making and I am AMPED for it!

A sleep-deprived, pun-fuelled, noir-injected dream of antlers and indie comics. Sami Kivela and I had a dream, and we stuck to it. The result is now bringing on board Lauren Affe for colours and Jim Campbell for letters, and Mad Cave Studios to sling it around the globe.

If you hit up your store this week, please give the tpb a flick through, and if you dig it then take it home and let it give you a weekend of crime, vampires, newspapers, and one fresh buck trying to better discover who he is and how that person can best help the world around him.

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

///////

Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

I’m going to the ComicGong show in Wollongong this weekend. Alas, it doesn’t look like my copies of the Deer Editor tpb will be with me - but I do have full runs of the 3 issue mini, and some of the variant covers, so I’ll be slinging those alongside some other good reads like A FISTFUL OF PAIN, ETERNAL, SKYSCRAPER, and more.

This show is always one of my favourites, and there are plenty of people I cannot wait to catch up with, alongside driving in with an old friend to catch up with.

Should be a good weekend, and I hope I see some of you there.

If you aren’t there then maybe I’ll see you in Melbourne for June’s long weekend :]

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere. ♫

The Sun Rising, John Donne

-------

This newsletter goes through what I’ve been up to in my writing - I have to account for myself and what I have to show for my efforts recently. Have I been productive, or not…? A map of my brain, so to speak, and here be dragons.

2024 -- dig it.

Dabbling, here and there.

Three months into the year, and I’ve got things to show for it, here and there. I mean, my desk has four random sheets of paper on it with notes for different things on them, and my bullet journal, and a story notebook, and a receipt - things are happening. Even when they aren’t.

It’s fascinating to feel incredibly busy while also being mildly uncertain if you’re doing anything at all. This could be the knuckle tatt of my way, though.

Obviously, the past month was all about the Kickstarter during ZineQuest for WITHIN THE KIND RED BUILDING. Over 200 backers, dollars shy of 200% funded, and now I begin the roll out phase. The money is being processed now, I’ve got the files into their final phases, and then I’ll work on printing/collation, which will then yield the assembly phase - last time I assembled print/postage for a Kickstarter I watched most of the first season of THE WITCHER. I wonder what I’ll mindlessly watch this time?

I was, honestly, really pleased with reception to my sci fi rpg - it’s a different swing from me, but one I really appreciated people following me on. I would dearly love to get another zine like this ready for next year, but I’ll see what the year brings me, and if inspiration strikes [which it just did while tabling at the Goulburn Geek markets, let’s see if this bears fruit]. WTKRB took about a year or more to plan, write, and format. I love it, so I’ll want something just as good to sit alongside it.

Then there’s DEER EDITOR - and the first two issues are out, #3 lands this week, and then the trade is up for preorder for a May 8 [MATE!] street date. Beyond hyped for that to be in my hands, and the press and retailer contact mines shall now be entered.

But what else am I working on right now?

Well, I have no clue. Except I do have some ideas/thoughts.

I’m currently kicking around 3 new story ideas. One I have a full pitch doc scripted, but I’m giving it a minute to lie fallow so I can come back to it out of the heat of the creative burst and see if it makes sense and if it pops. But I like this one, it’s weird, and deep, and anti-corporation, and the characters make me smile. All the things I like to write.

Then there’s an idea I’m still kicking around that I had before the one above, but something just isn’t lining up, and I still need that ingredient to mesh in. I shall trust in the process to get it there whenever it happens.

But then another idea came to me recently. A situation. See, I never really know where a story might come at me from. The one at the top here was me seeing something and wondering what was happening and instantly having a character wonder the same. Deer Editor stemmed from a joke about a typo. WTKRB was all about a character walking towards a building on a snow planet and me wondering what was going on in there, and why they wanted to go in.

This new idea - it’s a big situation. I have no characters, yet. I have the world, but I love the set up. So now I’ll be making notes and notes about who might be there, who they are, what they want [need], etc.

It’s a fun time, it’s play. I could choose to see it as pointless, or I can see it as the unfettered part of the job. Right now, this world is ripe, and it’s my job to tend to it with secateurs and the right balances of lime and composted materials and time and love.

Sometimes these end up just fizzling out, and sometimes they blossom. Only one way to find out.

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Short Fiction - just to stretch those muscles a little.

There’s a monthly competition run by the Australian Writers’ Centre called ‘Furious Fiction’ where on the first Friday of each month you get given a set of prompts and then 55 hours to craft something under 500 words that hits it all. 

Last month, they wanted a ‘pop’ and some other elements - you can scope out the winning entries here. There’s no prize [far as I can see], just pride and love of the game. At school, we’d set this as a possible writing challenge for the students to enter to hone their skills, so I thought I better put my money where my mouth is and I entered the latest one.

The prompts were: to have someone revisit something, to include the words CAMP, FAST, and SPARK, and then to have the same colour in the opening and closing sentences.

It’s a fun way to get the brain thinking. I knew I wanted to do something not too obvious, and so eventually settled on a short about a jealous partner dealing with a new invention: a perfume that allows people to return to their most important memory and relive it like they are there.

I don’t think mine is going to win, or is particularly great, but it was nice to blow some dust out of some corners and see what I could come up with. And it’s nice to treat a little creative writing with that sense of fun at its heart.

I’m now waiting for the April round to open and I’ll have a trundle again.

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Reading/Writing/Reading/[Probably Watching, Too]

I wanted to start the year strong with some reading under my belt. I hit 6 books for the school holidays, though the final one took me into the first term a little.

I found BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy to be a fascinating read, though obviously as brutal as everyone suggests. I found myself discussing the ending page with a friend and we had different views of what it meant, so that was exciting. For my money [spoilers, maybe, kinda, I don’t even know]: the end is about America being oil farmed, and that this capitalist hope/dream could only happen once the original owners of the land could be hunted off enough that they could no longer stand in the way. Ah, history!

I’m currently reading A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN by George Saunders where he breaks down 7 Russian short stories he’s been teaching in his Russian short story class for 20 years. The stories are reprinted entirely, then he breaks down his thoughts and teaching strategies on them and it’s honestly a fascinating read. Saunders’ voice is just naturally erudite and easy to engage with, and the stories are not the kind of thing I’d naturally read, so it’s awesome to see how/why he tackles them. Huge recommendation for this one if you like: reading short stories, like writing, or perhaps like teaching.

I’m watching THE BEAR each morning when I exercise and the second season is really warming up. It’s a different beast from the first one, which is good, characters need to transition and progress, and I’m thoroughly ‘in’ on everything that’s happening.

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Be one of the good guys, because there's way too many of the bad.

///////

Who is Ryan K Lindsay?

I’m an award-winning Australian comic writer. I’ve been published by Black Mask, Dark Horse, ComixTribe, Mad Cave, IDW, Heavy Metal, Vertigo, and a few more. Kickstarter has been a home for many short comics. I often get to collaborate with great mates, and this brings me joy.

I write about balancing this creative game alongside a full teaching load [currently College English and University Intro to Creative Writing] and a lovely family load and the forever melting brain that is modern man. I think about a lot of stuff, I still don’t know if it’s the right stuff. ymmv.

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POST CREDITS SEQUENCE

Starting to realise I care just as much about being passionate about something as I do about having success with something. Having a thing in my day I get jazzed to do, a genuine thing I look forward to interacting with [and this can be a book to read or a unit of lessons to plan or a comic script to add 2 pages to] is such a joy.

Where something will go, or take me, I can never know - but having something to do that I love: sublime.

Get the full preview details here

A John Doe slaying lures a journalist into a world of political intrigue, a wi-fi-enabled grotto, and a station locker full of secrets. For Bucky, an editor of the crime beat at “The Truth,” it’s all in a day’s work…

…but he also happens to be a deer.

Will he chase down his last story in this antler noir series? Deer Editor is perfect for fans of Blacksad and Chinatown.

Illustrated by Sami Kivela

Coloured by Lauren Affe

Lettered by Jim Campbell

Written by Ryan K Lindsay

Edited by Dan Hill & Chas! Pangburn

Published by Mad Cave Studios

This comic has been a constant in my life for over a decade now. To finally have it collected and be able to land in the hands of readers in one satisfying chunk of a read is so pleasing. Sami and I have waited so many years for the right way to do this and Mad Cave Studios have absolutely nailed it.

If you want to hear me talk about Deer Editor, and other things, you can listen to:

The Cryptid Creator Corner Podcast - part of the Comic Book Yeti network. This one goes deep into inspirational texts and quality Aussie stuff.

22 Panels Podcast - an excellent chat about Bucky, and just so many other things.

You can also be swayed by the social proof of these reviews:

“This a captivating, energetic first issue, moving at an unstoppable clip…a must buy for everyone who loves a hard boiled mystery.” 10/10 - Theron Couch at Comic Watch

“Deer Editor delivers Fletch with a deer.” possibly my favourite pull quote, from Brett Schenker over on Graphic Policy

“Like an antlered version of Edward R. Murrow, Bucky is determined to use his talents to better the world.” and “Similar to David Aja's work on Hawkeye, Kivelä's thick black lines and dark shadows add to the noir elements of the story, making Deer Editor a graphic, deer-journalist version of Carol Reed's The Third Man—and John Doe is Bucky's Harry Lime.” both make me smile, thanks Ben Boruff over at Comic Bastards

“Honest reporters is almost as fantastical an idea as a talking deer!” Johnny “The Machine” Hughes makes me laugh with a 10/10 over on Comic Crusaders

Or maybe you like to hear from creators you trust. We’ll, here’s what some kind people had to say about Bucky.

The DEER EDITOR tpb is out in May [MAAATE!] and I’m going to push this as my biggest tpb launch ever because this is what readers deserve [and then maybe we’ll get more Bucky stories in the future!].

Make sure you tell your local comic shop to preorder and set aside a copy of the collection for you in May. If you read the single issue then you can tell them how much you dug the book and that they will sell a bunch of the tpb to those who slept on it, or were trade waiting.

You can also buy copies for birthday presents. Just have a lazy stack of 10 Deer Editor tpbs sitting around and then when a birthday rolls around, BAM!, it’s comic present time. Or, maybe your book club needs a new read. Buy a copy for each member and then talk about the crime genre influences and consider the book through a critical reading lens [a Post Colonial lens could yield all kinds of interesting discussion points].

I always appreciate the support, and it means a lot to me that anyone ever checks out my writing, so thank you.

I’ve also been a lot of shilling lately [sorry, maybe] so I owe you all a real life update. I’ll send that one next through the tubes :]

We’ve had an amazing February with nearly 200% funding drawing closer as a final ending place, and over 150 backers, so maybe you can help us hit 200 backers and go beyond 200% funded!

This solo journaling rpg is about a sci fi building crawl where you flee from one threat into the multi-levelled endlessness of so much more/worse/more and probably won’t ever make it out to live another day.

CLICK HERE TO BACK WITHIN THE KIND RED BUILDING AND GET YOURSELF A COPY!

The pledge levels vary - you can buy in from $3, or go as high as $60 - it’s completely up to you, and here are those pledge levels!

CLICK HERE TO SELECT YOUR PLEDGE LEVEL NOW :]

I have to say: I had no idea how this campaign would go. I usually make comics and Kickstart comics, so it was a little bit scary to step into a different arena. It’s been really nice to have so many people check out the game, reach out with kind words, and support me to such a huge success. This month has been a real eye-opener for me and it’s energised me to keep creating and playing in rpgs alongside the other usual stories I write.

I also find every time I run a campaign I have someone message me within days of it closing saying they only just heard about it, so hopefully that’s not you and this message lands in time. If you want to share it with like minded mates, absolutely go for it.

The campaign ends on Thursday night [my time here in Aus]. It’s been really heartwarming to see the campaign continue to catch eyeballs and interest all month, as that’s what things like Kickstarter and ZineQuest should do, they act as a beacon and a hub and people come in for it all.

As a reminder: if you like these types of sci fi, then this rpg is for you:

This is the final 36 hours - so if you've been thinking about this writing game, then now is the time to click across and see which reward level is for you.

Click here to grab WITHIN THE KIND RED BUILDING now, before it’s too late.

I’m excited to then start the wheels of commerce and make this thing a reality!