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December 12, 2023 ONE YEAR of 3rd Voice today, can you believe it. You have a sense of what I’m going for now, I think??! I have gotten a lot of this comic out there in the past year. THANK YOU for reading, and making this a feasible thing to work on so far. I’ve been struggling to get together some promo material to make a big deal of this anniversary, but have been too busy... Some new multimedia stuff soon, though.

Scene this week feels like a big one; love the moving parts connecting with each other. I’m gonna be breaking for a week or 2 now. I just made 317 pages of a comic book practically nonstop and I’m excited to keep at it, but just give me a minute. Thank you folks.

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Latest Letter Column

You can email me something at 3rdvoicemail@gmail.com and I will maybe get to it here.

I had originally believed the concept of “scrip” was a fantasy device, but I just learned about coal mining scrip in Appalachia. Your bio states you’re from N.Carolina, was this an intentional connection? Additionally, all of your work has a distinct anarchist philosophy towards it, with stories challenging authority and ownership (similar to The Dispossessed by UKLG). I guess I’m wondering if this background and its history play any part in your work, consciously or unconsciously. Thank you! S * December 4, 2023

I try to keep an eye out for weird words that call attention to themselves and communicate a slightly different-than-expected angle on a particular idea… Like I think I’ve trained into myself an aversion to small-scale dialogue cliches, so I’m always trying to think of unusual ways to say things in this comic. “Scrip” is a cool word and I wanted to use it because it’s unusual AND because it has this implication of a substitute currency for use within a limited context— it foregrounds questions of the rationale for Ansporruk’s authority, and drills a little bit, also, into the bigger ideas of a disorganized, decentralized political system in this setting. I probably am familiar with it because I’m from the South but wasn’t thinking too hard about the coal mining company scrip.

I have spent a lot of time trying to unlearn various systems of authority & objectivity. I am living and thinking outside of some of the reassuring/dominating ordering life-structures I used to live inside. A lot of my convictions are in an anarchist direction (not that I do Enough with those convictions necessarily); as time has passed I feel like some of this has become more deeply integrated into how I think. Le Guin has been a huge inspiration in using genre to articulate these sorts of politics.

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