02 / Now What?
The Boochomatic Plan...
Now that I’ve introduced myself, let me break down how this story machine is going to run.
Starting this week, Boochomatic will drop two new posts every week — one on Tuesday and one on Friday. Each will have its own flavor, like the different compartments in the Automat.
As I mentioned in the my first post, Tuesdays will be dedicated to my comics. And first up is my very first creator-owned comic series, FOSTER. It was a six-issue run I published in 2012–2013 with kinetic art by Noel Tuazon and colors by me. Over the next 18 weeks I’ll be posting pages from the series until we complete the whole thing together. Alongside the pages, I’ll be sharing backstory and reflections — why I created the book, the headspace I was in, and what the world of comics looked like when it first came out. Think of it as a mix of the work itself and the story behind the story.
Fridays will be something different: essays, reflections, and process notes about my journey as a writer — the mistakes, the detours, the breakthroughs, and the small victories. This is also where I’ll be sharing new, never-before-published prose in the shape of flash fiction and short stories.
The first prose short story I’ll be rolling out is called All the Little Deaths — a meditation on loss, longing, and the quiet ways grief reshapes us.
It follows Danny, a private tour driver in Los Angeles whose encyclopedic knowledge of the city's history — its landmarks, its film locations, its murder sites — masks a deeper obsession with the past. When a mysterious client offers him the chance to literally relive his own memories through an experimental technology, Danny is forced to confront the one chapter of his life he's spent years trying to forget. It's personal and haunting, but also a love letter to the City of Los Angeles. And like much of my work, it isn't just straight drama — the story has a sci-fi element, using the speculative to heighten and magnify the emotional.
That’s a big part of who I am as a writer. I move across genres, from superheroes to crime, horror to sci-fi… but what ties it all together is my focus on character first. No matter how big or strange the world gets, I’m always chasing the humanity… the choices people make under stress, the way past scars shape present struggles, and how hope can survive even in the darkest corners.
So that’s the rhythm: Tuesdays for comics and context. Fridays prose, essays, and reflection. Two drops a week, well-stocked and consistent, just like the Automat.
One More Piece of the Plan
Since I mentioned it briefly in the first post and the second episode also dropped today, I should also say a little more about The Long Road.
That vlog is the other side of this whole experiment. Boochomatic is where the work lives — the comics, the prose, the essays, the finished compartments in the machine. The Long Road is something different: me documenting the process of staying in the creative life over decades.
And I mean documenting it honestly.
The first episode already has a couple small mistakes — I forgot to flip the front-facing iPhone video when I edited it, and at one point my five-year-old interrupts me mid-recording for a very important reason (to her). I thought about fixing it. Re-shooting it. Cleaning it up.
But something clicked and instead I left it exactly the way it happened.
Because that’s the reality of the creative life. You’re trying to make things while living an actual life at the same time — kids, interruptions, imperfect setups and all. I’ve enjoyed the process so far — warts and all — and somehow find the imperfections perfectly me. I can be clumsy in life. Sometimes I mumble (hopefully not too much on camera), and I like to poke fun at myself.
Shout out to self-deprecation!
For better or worse, that vlog is the unvarnished version of the journey. Warts and all. Boochomatic is where the work goes once I got it (mostly) right and it’s made.
– Brian