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As a writer, you can't learn much from David Lynch.

I mean, you can do whatever you want, but I wouldn't advise it.

And yes, I've read Catching the Big Fish. I've read Room to Dream. I enjoyed them, but I mean it as a compliment when I say I don't think they're useful for craft at all.

Lynch was a singular mind. He was wired uniquely, and what resulted from that was a style and tone of art with a cool-as-fuck aesthetic. This can be aped- even aped successfully. But for every Donnie Darko there's ten Neon Demons.

Lynch had a huge effect on me as a creator, particularly early in my career. If you look at Limbo, my first book with Caspar Wijngaard, you can see Lynch's fingerprint all over it from my end. That tends to be the way with a creator's early work. Mimesis is how we learn, but must be abandoned so we can grow. And I'd figured that out even by the later issues of that book.

Lynch's style had an undeniable authenticity, which I posit more intrinsic to his success than his surrealism. In attempting to make things like Lynch, there's a tendency to throw stuff at the wall. To use his quirks as license to not follow an interior logic, as long as things look cool and his style tilted at. Askew dialogue. Cheerfulness contrasted with uncanniness. Weird fellas in armchairs speaking in aphorisms. But these are not the things stories are made of, and can become a crutch to lean on, meaning one can dodge the hard work of structure under cover of artiness.

Lynch's structures made sense to him, and we forgive him a lot because of it. The spinal decades-long plot of Twin Peaks being solved by a deus-ex-machina magic gardening glove does not work if you are not David Lynch. (Apologies for The Return spoilers, but let's face it, that tells you nothing.) We accept it as an audience because around all that, you'll find moments that strike to the heart of the human condition. That's an instinctive knack that's hard to replicate, and one you're likely to miss if you're trying to make things like Lynch- if your focus is on facilitating an aura of the strange.

Lynch's singularity is what came across when he did try and write or speak on craft, and that's my point. Maybe I'm wrong, and catching ideas like fish in a state of meditation will be your thing. But I've never met a writer who's told me it's theirs. Let him inspire you to find your own way, but do not copy David Lynch.

Goodnight and Godspeed to the Big Dream. There will never be another.

Batman: Dark Patterns #3 came out yesterday. The reaction to the book has been beyond what we expected, so it's pleasing to see people seem to think we stuck the landing on our first three-issue arc. It ends with a scene I couldn't wait to get to. I love it when the character gets nasty, and he does so here in a way I haven't had an opportunity to write before. Fire and brimstone Batman.

Many of the Dark Patterns arcs are loosely inspired by real-world events and situations, and in this issue you can most clearly see what inspired the We Are The Wounded story; I don't want to spoil it if people haven't read the issue yet, but I'm often surprised how little the Love Canal tragedy seems to affect the public consciousness.

Also out yesterday, Cyberpunk 2077: Psycho Squad #1. Dark Horse released preview pages last week, so here those are:

I'm not much of a gamer these days, to Caspar's general chagrin, but I had played this one and watched the show by the time CD Projekt Red approached me for this title. So though I wanted this to be a fun, relatively breezy book, I knew we had to step up to the plate narratively. The world allows for an elasticity of tone, and every team who's played in this world has created something strong and unique.

So of course I decided that in our take, the streets of Night City must run red with expletives, blood, guts, and chrome. 4 issues. 4 cyberpsychos that need taken off the streets. Go.

For Christmas my wife subscribed me to the New York Review of Books, which means they send me a novel every month. I'm currently half way through February's book, Antonio Di Benedetto's The Suicides, and thoroughly enjoying it.

I recently finished January's: Augusto Monterroso's The Rest is Silence.

I loved it. It feels akin to Pale Fire, which is my favourite Nabakov by far, and there's touches of Vonnegut and Borges in there to boot. It's a book told in fragments about a fictional writer, though it's clearly Monterroso poking fun at himself. It plays with levels of authenticity and fictionality throughout. This peaks in a chapter wherein an anonymously written poem is critiqued by a pseudonymous critic, and it becomes apparent both are the author the book is about.

I often find writing about writing becomes navel-gazey. If you're a person who sits at a desk all day and writes, the easiest thing to write about is people who do the same... and the people it's most likely to appeal to are other people who do it too. In that direction lies a world in which writing, an artform that can talk about anything and everything, becomes solipsistic, and the industry of books just becomes writers swapping texts with each other.

But this was just fun.

Earlier this week I finished writing Nightwing 128. I'm now working on Dark Patterns 11, and putting the final touches on Nightwing 127- we needed 127 & 8 ready at the same time, since they're being drawn by two different artists, Dexter Soy and Francesco Francavilla.

I've been spending an awful lot of time in Gotham and across the bridge in Bludhaven in the first half of this month, so if I can get this all wrapped before going out for dinner this evening, I can pivot to other worlds and make some up out of whole cloth for a few weeks.

Wish me luck. Oh and Happy St Valentine's Day. Hope yours ends better than his did.

This has been thedeadairchannel. A transmission from the desk of Dan Watters. Please do subscribe.