I think that it is about time I get a move on with Sirion Diaries again. Sometimes I worry that the comic industry is so engrossed in making stories about the future, and stories that are plain outrageous and bizarre enough to stand out in the crazy noisy mess of a market, that mine wouldn't stand out as much.
I have been inspired by artists who made art works that are just mind blowing and crazy that it does demand enough attention from people. That is fair enough. But most stories today that exists on the racks are stories that are other worldly. Like a child robot out to destroy a robot system gone out of control affecting all robots around the world, or people controlling 100 feet tall machines that walk about as vehicles. Or about demons and angels fighting over a soul. Or about strange weird things that are just strange as strange can be.
Don't get me wrong. I do respect them, and appreciate them.
But Sirion Diaries is a simple story about a person and his friends and his feelings and the places and his everyday stuff, living in a school on the Himalayan mountains. That is simply about it. No ghosts. No horror. No sex (haha, who knows, but thats pretty normal anyway). No robots. No UFO's.
I know people (who are encouraging me) will say it will stand out because of the quiet confidence it has on the story and attract attention because of its silence, rather than the amount of noise it creates. I believe in that. But it is a risk. Sirion Diaries is not a story. It is not just a novel. To me it is a mindset. To me, it is a way of thought that I need to get into. It is no trivial matter.
The opening quotation in Arundhati Roy's book 'God Of Small Things' sums it all up for me:
"And never again will a story be told, as though it was the only story to be told."
Ben Ning, Creative Practitioner