Production of episode three of Farewell, Hello is moving along at some sort of pace. In the meantime, I’m kicking off a new weekly series of posts titled “Excerpts From Lost Branches.”
In the podcast, I’ve been exploring the various branches and threads that have led to my comic book, Blood & Corn. A narrative is already emerging amongst the chaos. Some of the branches and threads I’ve explored throughout the outlining process have amounted to a whole lot of nothing. Others tie into the broader narrative but aren’t crucial enough to be featured on the podcast. “Excerpts From Lost Branches” aims to highlight the threads that didn’t quite make the cut.
Each week, I’ll post an excerpt from something that I wrote or created in the past. Some pieces have a tangible relationship to the comic. Others will seem to have zero connections. Who knows what threads will emerge from following these severed threads?
The Good Times Are Killing Me (2022)
In an earlier post, I wrote briefly about a film I spent multiple years trying to make called Latimer. The film, initially titled The Good Times Are Killing Me, followed the final case of a failed private investigator named Hal Latimer. His objective: track down and deliver a letter to the estranged teenage son of a former flame in Burcliffe, IN. However, his plans deviate when he stumbles upon a gruesome murder scene as soon as he arrives.
The film never came to fruition, but many of its elements and themes carried over into what would eventually become Blood & Corn.
I’ve always imagined that I would revisit this film. Amongst all of the projects I’ve worked on, it’s probably the nearest and dearest to my heart. I will eventually cover this extensively in the podcast (as well as the crucial involvement of pod-guests and collaborators, Caleb Haydock and Chip Potter).
In November 2022, I took a swing at resurrecting Latimer from the dead - in the form of a novel. I’ve never written a novel. I don’t believe I’ve ever even attempted to write a novel, but my co-worker, Jamie, and I had challenged our students to participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and I couldn’t resist the temptation.
Here is a brief excerpt from that attempt (fair warning - I was teaching Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men at the time and I was suffering from McCarthy-Syndrome, a common disease that causes any writer who is reading Cormac McCarthy to do a poor imitation of McCarthy’s prose)…