🎉🎉🎉 As of today, my website is officially published and available on the intertubes! 🎉🎉🎉 There's no mistaking that a huge element of this website's purpose is to host my graphic novel, String Theory.
So where is it?
Haha.
The thing about a very long-term project is that until the very moment you have it entirely finished, it looks like you've got nothing. I've already cut my teeth on this experience as a novel-writer, but a graphic novel is far and away more strenuous to work on. A friend of mine likened it to taking on every role within a film's production crew: writing, storyboarding, directing, costuming, set designing, lighting, mise-en-scene, editing, colour-grading, producing, marketing, and ultimately not breaking even at the box office.
It takes a ridiculously long time, is what I'm saying. In fact, I know exactly how long it takes for me to draw 100 fully lined, coloured, and shaded digital comic book pages, because that is what I did several years ago before I realised that I did not like the direction of the story, nor did my art feel up to snuff.
(The answer is about three and a half months if you're rushing, by the way.)
String Theory is coming, however!
I would wager that the first issue should be completely drawn by the end of 2024, if not earlier. I have taken a far more methodical approach since scrapping the initial comic; I am storyboarding it by hand with a pencil and paper, so that I can physically flip through the composition and make sure the panels flow well. It also means I can jump straight to inking once I scan the drafts onto my computer.
I even have a specific outline of the entire comic series' progress, so that I can know exactly how far in I am to each chunk of work I have to do.

And I mean exactly. (Took me forever to figure out how to do this in Excel.)
The art isn't actually the slow part.
Notice how I've got several covers drawn, yet I haven't got any pages? That's because the script isn't finished, but I'm trying regardless to break up the deeply painful monotony of research. Compared to the reading and writing, banging out drawings is actually how I take a break. The covers I've made aren't actually final at all!
I have to be careful not to imply that the monotony comes from boring content — it's actually the polar opposite. It's so outrageously unfathomable, complex, and alien, that I am consistently burnt out by the amount of fascinating information I'm absorbing to write this story.
If I turn and look behind me right now, I can see a great deal of titles lined up on my bookshelf. Stephen Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions, Katie Mack's The End of Everything, David Eagleman's Livewired, Paul Bloom's Against Empathy, Susanne K. Langer's Symbolic Logic, Kitty Ferguson's Stephen Hawking, Charles Cockell's The Equations of Life, Cédric Villani's Birth of Theorem, H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Bill Bryson's Seeing Further, and about a hundred other books that are causing a noticable bend in my DIY wall-mounted shelf. The ones listed have been read (some several times over, vigorously dog-eared and annotated) in order to influence the writing of this story. However, this physical collection does not encompass the amount of eBooks, forum threads, and online academic articles I have also read over the years, which really make up the bulk of the research.
...So, so many academic articles...
Why are you doing so much research?
It's in the name of the comic. Say those two words to anyone and the odds are quite high that they'll tell you they can't wrap their mind around string theory. (I have linked two XKCD strips in one post, yet I feel like that won't be the end of it.)
Many science fiction writers get flack for presenting inaccurate and vague scientific information in order to keep the plot moving. It can be very frustrating when the 'smart' character in a sci-fi blockbuster spits contrived jargon in order to bypass a reasonable explanation of the story's events (and elicit this absolute zinger of a stock-phrase) I needed to be different. I needed to make scientific accuracy my goal.
...I now understand why so many writers throw out jargon and call it a day. It's the difference between a line of dialogue taking four seconds or four years to write, and very few people would be able to tell the difference.
There's this phenomenon where the more knowledge you attain, the more ignorant you seem to become. That's what it's always been like for the entire field of physics. Every time physicists believe they have come upon an ultimate Theory of Everything, which rectifies all the contradictions within established physical laws, some bimbo has to come along and kick their sandcastle. They did it with Einstein's general relativity. They did it with the Standard Model. They even did it to Hawking radiation... :(

Uhh... in English, please? 💀
Ultimately, you loop back around to the beginning. Everything you use to further your plot is entirely based on the latest research in quantum mechanics and astrophysics, yet when written down, it reads utterly identical to the aforementioned contrived nonsense:
The further you look into space, more distant objects start to appear closer than the nearer objects.
Sounds like something I just made up for a convenient explanation of a scientifically implausible plot event, doesn't it?
"The reason for this reversal is related to the reason we can see things that are currently moving away from us faster than light. In the past, when light was emitted, they were closer. So close, in fact, that they covered more of the sky. Even though they're much father away now, the "snapshot" they've sent us has been travelling all that time, and is just reaching us now, showing us the ghostly image of a much closer thing. And the father back in time you go, the smaller the universe was."
— Katie Mack, The End of Everything. (Incredible, incredible, incredible book).
Yeah great thanks.
A foundational element of my comic is the breaking down of these incredibly complex and unintuitive facts about the universe so that anyone can grasp it.
How it works in the comic is that the information is divulged in a particular order, built on prior knowledge, outlined with real-world examples and metaphors, in order for a very ignorant character — who is regardless vital to preventing catastrophic disaster — to wrap his mind around what's going on. Within that already complicated writing, I have to layer everyone's interpersonal conflicts and existential teenage emotions.
A large part of being a writer is suffering so that the reader doesn't have to. I feel like as observers of the universe, we all have a right to understand how it functions, and the knowledge we currently have is so deeply captivating that, if only it were presented more intuitively, perhaps we could all become greater people from comprehending it.
The problem is, that's how people in these fields already think. They want this knowledge to be more accessible, and do their absolute best to break it down, but even they struggle at times. Why should I, someone who failed science in high school, even bother to take a crack at it? ...Something something, do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard...
In conclusion
String Theory is going to take some time to produce because every issue relies on the issue before and after it. I once made the mistake of drawing the comic before I had finished writing it, and wasted an incredible amount of time.
I was so eager to see the project manifest in reality that I jumped the gun and didn't do the concept justice. I will not make that mistake again.
I am hosting this website now not because String Theory is ready, but because it is not ready. Exposing the underside of this iceberg offers just as much, if not more, of a chance to connect with anyone who is interested in this project as it manifests, as well as to encourage other creatives through their own processes — which are far from neat and linear.
I will leave you, finally, with an excerpt of dialogue that sits somewhere within the story. As I do with most of my epiphanies, I've found a way to milk it for content:
If the sky is full of ghosts and the universe is melting, what then? What then if the penultimate state of things is the reign of entropy, wherein time, which depends on decay to exist, will finally cease?Â
What then of your flat dramas, or your Twitter arguments, or the milk that expires on Tuesday? What if we no longer perceived decay as loss, nor ‘negativity’ to be tainted? What then, if we recognise that which repels and repulses as acceptable? As universal? As the goal of all things since their very inception, and their inevitable state once all that can change, has changed? Why fight death when it’s what all life aspires towards?Â
This decay of context, this entropic expansion of fundamental knowledge, makes it plainly difficult to read a job advertisement, to message someone back, to feel pain or love, to take much of anything seriously at all. If all systems are designed to break, and if order is never an accident, and if to keep something frozen means to make all the world around it warmer, what then?Â
Do you think I could ever assimilate? Put myself back in order once order has been lost? Once my sense of order has invariably decayed, and I have lost context, and I have understood my immortality, and I know of infinity as laughably overt, could I simply slip back into the stream, swimming either up or down? It is much like a fish that grew to walk, having glimpsed two horizons, now torn between the land and the sea. All the legless fish, who know only to swim downstream, or fight the current upwards, have no way of comprehending a third option. They must think the evolved fish mad.Â
No problem is too small, yet all problems are too small. Everything is both gravely serious and not remotely, yet neither are also true, yet both are also true. All life is quantum. The topography of life is splayed in higher dimensions than the first, second, third, even fourth. I can know that I am designed only to briefly observe that which designed me, entirely aware I am hurtling toward death, knowing I exist in infinite iterations in infinite universes, and still remain mindful that the milk in the fridge will spoil by Tuesday.Â
Even this decay of context can itself decay. It decays via the understanding that concern towards it cancels itself out; my own concern will decay, therein there is no true decay left to be perceived of the decayed context. Does this make a double-negative? No. It makes an infinity. Which is also a double-negative, oscillating forever over time. Is infinity therefore a double-negative, or is a double-negative infinity? Neither are true, yet both are true.Â
So it’s okay to care about the milk.
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