friends of yeah write: David Gallaher and Steve Ellis

for writers who blog and bloggers who write

Let’s get in the wayback machine

Lately I’ve been reminiscing about this time last year. Then, we were planning our trip to Long Beach Comic Con, the first major appearance of yeah write outside of the Internet. By August, when we announced here that we’d be at the show, and then when it was over, we gave you recap and winners post here.

One of the things that makes our writing community so important to us is that it gives us the opportunity to meet and engage with other writers and artists who are passionate about what they do. Sharing those connections and helping to spread the word about the work being done by others is an honor and, frankly, what community is all about. Writing can be solitary, but it can also be quite the opposite in a most wonderful way.

As we’ve mentioned before, we had the pleasure to work with David Gallaher and Steve Ellis, the great minds behind The Only Living Boy. The graphic novel is available on March 8, 2016, and centers on 12 year old Erik Farrell, a runaway who loses his memory and finds himself struggling to survive on a patchwork planet. You can purchase the book through our affiliate link here.

LBCC prizes by Steve Ellis

Steve was kind enough to provide two sketches for our winners of the onsite LBCC microstory contest. You can read the winning microstories in the recap post. (Seriously though, how amazing are these?)

Interview with David Gallaher

David sat down with us to give a little insight into his process.

yeah write: What are you doing with Only Living Boy that you think is unique and special? 

david gallaher:  For me, it’s a lot of things — honestly. The Only Living Boy is very much a book that I want to read — both as a kid and as an adult. It’s like the Frosted Mini-Wheats of adventure stories. It’s filled with mermaids, dragons, floating cities, mad science for the kid in us! But it’s built on themes of death, loss, identity, and isolation — to satisfy the adult in us. We put a lot of thought into building out our world and making it feel engrossing and enriching.

yw:  How is working on a project like this, with a team, different from working on your “own stuff”?

dg: I love collaboration and the honest and open exchange of ideas. Stories build themselves faster when Steve Ellis and I work on them. While I’m wildly delighted about the work we do together with our studio, the work we do on our own stuff is a little more broad. For nearly a decade, we’ve been building stories together. In our studio Bottled Lightning we engineer action-adventure fiction and graphic novels. On our own, we work on movie posters, television scripts, advertising, and broad range of different projects that scratch different creative itches.

yw: Do you usually read work that’s more similar to or different from your own? Can you give us some examples?

dg: As I was working on The Only Living Boy, I read or re-read over forty books in the span of seven weeks — Flash Gordon, The Jungle Book, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Uses of Enchantment, Fault In Our Stars, A Wrinkle In Time, A Princess of Mars, and Bridge To Terabithia, for example. In some ways, they are all similar to what we’re doing in our series, but they are also radically, radically different from our book and from each other.

yw: What’s your pet peeve? What’s the deal-breaker for you when you’re reading something, that will make you put it down?

dg: I really don’t enjoy nihilism for nihilism’s sake. I have a very thin skin when it comes to cruelty to animals or children, non-consensual sexual relationships, or drug addicts. I’m pretty much over cynicism and smug, snarky characters. Give me something sincere — it doesn’t have to have a happy ending, but it has to have heart.

yw: What’s the one thing you think you overuse in your own writing, or the mistake you have to watch out for? (example: super-long intros to scenes, long shots, ECU, characters thinking instead of talking, a particular misspelling)

dg: Earlier in my career, call it either an experiment in youthful blasphemy or inexperience, but I used to love destroying everything I built. I’d destroy a lot of stuff: killing characters, blowing up cities, burning down homes, and stuff like that. Maybe it’s why I don’t enjoy reading about that sort of mayhem in other stories anymore. Most of the stories I write revolve around identity; it’s a theme I love to play around with from HIGH MOON to BOX 13 to THE ONLY LIVING BOY or GREEN LANTERN CORPS. I wouldn’t say that I overuse it, but it is a common thread through most of my work. Am I close to overuse of it? I’m not sure. In terms of things I absolutely overuse? The names “Daniel” and “Molly” find their way into my work a lot. More than I care to admit. I always, always, always type the word “because” wrong. I know how to spell it, but I apparently don’t know how to type it correctly. And, on occasion, I have been known to transpose a letter in my character names. I really hate that. I wish I were better at catching typos, too.

yw: What part of your work are you most excited to do, and what do you hate doing? How do you make yourself do the parts you hate?

dg: I hate proofreading my own work. Like I mentioned, I wish I were better at catching typos. I read through my work all of the time, but I really need a second pair of eyes on it all. I proofread my stuff anyway because the fear of typos and my own crazy perfectionism doesn’t tolerate mistakes. They happen, but I hate it. In term of the stuff I enjoy — just about all of it — honestly! From working with Steve Ellis on building our worlds to the conventions to the intensity of writing the scripts. It’s all remarkably thrilling for me.

Thanks!

Thanks to David and Steve for being a part of the yeah write community! We’re glad to have you here and wish you much success with The Only Living Boy!