Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for November 05, 2020

I’m waiting for all quarantine movies to come out when this thing is over.

Agoraphobia, The Movie—Coming soon to a theater near you.

That’s not what fiction is about. It’s about making things up. Because, you know, it’s fiction.

Not so bad : Pig didn’t even get ink on his face like usual .

The Life and Times of a Pig in a Blanket

Rat’s version: Today I stayed home and drank beer, then I passed out.Goat’s version: Today I stayed home and sipped white wine, later I had some grass and passed out.

Well, it worked for Stephen King in Gerald’s Game. Except, you know, his happened to involve handcuffs…

Even before the pandemic Pig’s life was nothing to write about.

my job resumés were compelling fiction…

Tonight’s NCIS is about the hunt for a seaman that took his mask off before leaving the building. They had all the evidence they needed, surveillance video, dna samples, witnesses, …

And for you, Pig.

Got up, turned on the news. !2 hours later; turned off the news, went to bed.

In the late 1960s, John Lennon was asked to keep a one-year diary, to be published in the avant-garde magazine Aspen .

Aspen was a multi-media thing that usually came in a box containing prints, cards, photos, audio recordings, and such.

The Lennon Diary was a small booklet containing 365 entries, one for each day of the year.

Each one (in reproductions of Lennon’s handwriting) was more or less like Pig’s little offering above…

Got up. Went to work. Came home. Watched TV. Went to bed.

He also noted when he and Ono made love, never descriptive, sometimes only a couple of one-letter abbreviations for “inappropriate” words.

About a year ago I poked around on the ’net and found that all issues ( six or so) were photographically archived online, for free. I guess they ’re still out there.

Pig get in touch with Larry Croc ! What it’s like to be a Can-E-Date ;-) …. Croc Power !

“I had a little ball, I stuck it on a wall, that’s all”

That dumb Pig has writer’s cramp of the cerebellum.

No one mentioned pocket pool.

It’s called writing what you know.

Hey, Pig. I turned the lights on, then, off. I boiled a pot of water for my instant coffee. I watched Monk on H and I TV while lunching. There was just all sorts of exciting stuff in my day, the kind of stuff that makes a really, really dreadful novel.

Won’t even talk about comic strip fodder. I’ll leave that to Cartoon-Boy, our prize-winning mope….

THANK GAWD you’ve only got four panels. . .hate to think what you would do with four paragraphs. . .four pages . . . “After all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.” Lord Peter Wimsey, Unnatural Death. And fer gawd’s sake, watch your commas and spelling. The Spelling/Punctuation Nazis are BRUTAL. . .And Amazon: PLEASE stop sending ads for those sleazy puerile bad boy romances every time I start my Kindle. . .geezus. . .

Often =! always.

Poor PIG! He needs to get a life….with the help from his friends..er…maybe Pigita can stop by…..

Well I’m going to the grocery store in a half hour. Talk about adventure! Oh, the frozen things I’ll see!

WHY ?? Even try to relive this mess ? Let alone watch a movie about it . What is done is done , please .

My days to a “T.” If it weren’t for comics, porn and bon-bons, I wouldn’t be able to survive.

Write a movie about a pandemic.

Nightmares, Pig. Remember the nightmares.

I have an author friend who initially thought that the lockdown ( in England ) would be great for him. It would give him time to finish his latest novel without interruptions. Not so!

Long story short, it took two months longer finish than he’d expected, and another three months more to get it into print and on Amazon, than was planned by the publisher.

It is indeed.

They say to write what you know.

If you’re a writer, you write. It’s what you do, and there’s very little choice in the matter. You write. You don’t think about writing any more than a fish thinks about swimming or paint thinks about drying. Fish swim, paint dries, and writers write. But if you only think you’re a writer, or that you’d like to be a writer, then environment, surroundings, moods, other demands can get in the way. But if you are a writer, you write, come hell or high water.

“Today I stayed in my house.

Later, I went under my bed."

Try a fantasy study, Pig.

During a panel on writing at a science fiction convention, I was asked why, with my academic background, I wrote popular fiction instead of literary fiction. I blamed it on not having the material to write it. My parents weren’t horrible, and I was aware that any screw-ups I made were my own dang fault. That’s one of the few things that was my parents’ fault.

The End of October by Lawrence Wright was written before the COVID pandemic but it is amazing how much of it came true.

And I’ll bet it was a dark and stormy night, too!

Based on “write what you know” … it doesn’t seem like the world has learned that much.

Down doobie down down down, comic writer down doobie down down down, writing this is hard to-oo-oo do. Hey, come on, as Watterson said, it’s a talking heads strip. Ask Bill how to make people laugh…

Interior monologue is happening, folks.

Hang in there, Pig. I can relate to writer’s block/not moving forward with projects, since I often stall out with my stories.

However, I did make significant progress on one scene tonight … as part of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, in November. More info here:

https://nanowrimo.org/

Onward!

This explains why all of the recent Pearl’s strips are only the characters saying “life sucks” but in different ways