HOW I TAUGHT A ROCK STAR TO USE THE SOCCER MOM APP

the most pinteresting woman you know

Feb 11, 2025

Hello! It’s been almost a month since we last talked, and I hate that! But between a last-minute trip to see family, various personal responsibilities to loved ones pulling me hither and yon, and running a GoFundMe for a very dear friend that I’d like you to pause and check out right now—

—I’ve been busy. On top of all that, I’ve been working my tail off on over half a dozen projects, each getting closer and closer to announcement and launch. On that note-

Here I am at the Forum Shops, broke and stone sober, as Vegas was meant to be enjoyed, of course

I try not to do the Subscriber Dance on here too often, but! As you may have noticed, my release schedules for books on shelves have gone from Very Regular to Less Regular but More Substantial.

This year I’m writing more things that are creator-owned, things in graphic novel formats, and some things that aren’t comics at all. So! With that in mind, this newsletter is the best way to support me directly. Your $7 a month (minus a few cents for fees) goes directly to me and the projects I’m working on now. If you were a monthly subscriber to one of my projects that are no longer running, it would mean the world to me if you were to consider subscribing here.

Next up for you paid Scorpio Roommates all is my first bit of horror prose fiction since my turn in Razorblades, a story called Dogside that I first wrote over a decade ago and have recently given a new coat of paint. After that we’ll be continuing to post bits of Word Soup and Salad, my writing process series, as well as other fun essays and things. Thank you so much for considering!

For an example of what I’ve been enjoying doing behind the paywall, I recently unpaywalled my Megalopolis essay because people really seemed to like it, and I discovered I like writing about movies and plan to do more of it.
If you’re in the mood to be supportive but you really want something in your hands to show for it, there’s always the TiniHoward.com shop! Signed comics and trades, and more to come.

Subscribers get 10% off every day with code SCORPIOROOM!

Enough of that!

Today I thought it would be fun to show you a few glimpses behind the curtain. It’s been really tough to not talk about everything I’m working on the past few months. Over the past few years I’ve been working at a crazy speed, I can barely keep up with teasing every issue as it comes out, especially when I’ve been writing multiple books on a monthly schedule. There’s just barely any time for promo.

Now, I have chunks of time where I want to talk about my work and can’t, which is hard! Especially as several of them enter production, but it does give me a lot of opportunities to talk about my process and how I work. And I realized, I can’t show you outlines or scripts or art, but…

I can show you my Pinterest boards.

If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, somehow, it’s a ‘pinning’ app where you can look at photos/links and collage them together on a ‘board.’ It’s a digital version of the kind of visualization exercise that is unfortunately much harder to do in the analog world.

I’m an analog girl in a lot of ways. I like notebooks, planners, stickers, et cetera.

Rewatching Nosferatu while I write in my leetle notebooks

Those things just feel better to me offline. But collaging isn’t nearly as easy. Sourcing images is hard work, and how to know where to start looking for images - magazines, old books, a very nice inkjet printer? - when you’re not even sure what to write yet!

This is the core of why I like using Pinterest for pre-writing work. It’s a great way to get an idea of what might unite seemingly disparate elements, for those of us who are working in visual media (comics, film, animation) but might not be artists ourselves. When you tell an artist you want something to feel ‘like church,’ you can include pictures of what you mean specifically - is that a tambourine-shaking megachurch or a Catholic Latin Mass you’re referencing? And what of the unnameable stuff you want to mash together but can’t draw yourself? Sometimes it isn’t until you set your sandwich down next to your umbrella that you realize they’re the same color, and that visual relationship tells you something.

This can even be pre-pre-writing, as I’ve talked about before. The ‘crockpot’ stage where you aren’t even sure what the story is, but there’s something - a relationship between two concepts or visuals, perhaps - that compels you into looking deeper. Say you know you want to tell a story about robots, but also about true love, and there’s a specific aesthetic you have in mind, but can’t quite put your finger on it. And it isn’t until you pins pictures of robots next to pictures of people with hearts in their eyes that you decide - you want your lovebots to have heart-shaped eyes that change color with how they’re feeling, and that’s a secret you can use in the storytelling. Something like that.

My favorite anecdote about Pinterest is a little namedroppy, but if you’ll forgive: back in the day, before billionaire and Platonic-Ideal-of-a-Terrible-Ex-Boyfriend Elon Musk bought Twitter, we used to have a lot of fun on there talking comics. Fans and creators, great and small, used to mix it up for fun. It was good, mostly!

At the time, I was also having a lot of fun doing a short story in the back of a Young Animal comic. Young Animal, if you don’t remember, was a short-lived DC Comics imprint that saw My Chemical Romance lead singer and comic writer Gerard Way heading up a revival of a bunch of classically weird DC properties with a modern, alternative ethos. Gerard himself wrote Doom Patrol, plenty of other folks wrote and drew great books, and I was lucky enough to write a two-age Dial H for Hero backup in the pages of Shade, the Changing Girl.

I had a great time with my short contribution, and I have lot of great memories of this era, not the least of which was a weekend at North Carolina Comic Con with the whole Young Animal crew. After a dinner with the team, I felt like I’d made friends with everyone in the room on the level of weirdoes who just love comics, including the literal rock star among us, who was cool enough to come by and pick up a copy of my first creator-owned book, The Skeptics.

Anyway, it was some time later when I was tweeting out chunks of my Pinterest board to be mysterious about projects I couldn’t yet talk about that G reached out to me with questions about it. So I happily talked him through how I used it in a few friendly DMs. It was the kind of interaction I’ve always loved - the kind that reminds us how similar creative people are, how we’re all just looking for the cleanest, least painful way of sharing with the world the nameless thing inside us. It’s heartening and fun, and I’m grateful for his kindness. But if anyone asks you, hey, is Tini Howard cool, you say yes, she taught one of our actual remaining rock stars how to use Pinterest.

For the record - there isn’t much to teach, it’s pretty basic: I just create a new board and to it, pin anything that makes me think of the project. That can be stills from movies, fashion runways, sculptures and strange avant-garde art pieces, photographs. Pinning one item instructs Pinterest’s algorithm to show you similar things you might also want to see, which sends you down some interesting rabbit holes. Occasionally I see things that make me start another board entirely, a go back to this later, or file under I for Interesting section. Sometimes I type in something as silly as ‘green castle’ or ‘sad woman’ to get ideas into my head so I can begin narrowing down my mind’s eye - this one, not that one, etc. By looking at a screen of green castles or sad women, I can decisively thumbs down some things, and with that, the thumbs up (and the shape of the project itself) becomes clear.

There’s also something to be said for the collecting phase and the culling phase. Maybe you aren’t sure which of the three green castles you like, so you pin them all. But later, once you have them next to some other elements, it becomes clear that one castle stands out as the one closest to what you see in your mind. Sometimes I’ll add 100 images to a board, sleep on it, come back and cut it down to 25.

One final note before I show off my own Pinterest - these are inspiration boards. Replicating or directing your artist to replicate exact images created by others is, of course, plagiarism. But in the era of AI, this is one of the best ways possible to follow your mind’s own curiosity down paths. Instead of asking for sterile algorithms to give you ideas, see what path your mind takes on its own, and before you know it, you might have a story where there was none before.

On to my projects, which I can only talk about in code. This message will self-destruct...

PROJECT A.

It’ll be announced in a few months, and it’ll be a fun, strange new experience to be done writing a project before you’ve even heard about it.

There’s not much I can show you or talk about here, but we’re well into the art phase, and I think this book is going to knock everyone’s socks off. Here’s a glimpse into some inspiration I sent over regarding a new character’s design because showing you anything else would probably give things away:

PROJECT B.

After months of waiting, we have finally, finally landed on an artist and kicked off on an incredibly exciting creator-owned projects. It’s an artist I’ve wanted to work with since I first started putting this project together and I’m thrilled we’re finally in production!

This book was borne from me really just brainstorming what do I think comics needs right now that I would have fun doing, and I’m so glad that I have an editor and a publisher who is really on board. I can’t wait to show you some of the character designs here, but until I can, here’s a glimpse into the vibe of that one:

PROJECT C.

This one’s in a little bit of limbo at the moment, but I just have to show you this inspiration board:

PROJECT D.

A project from outside the world of comics, this one might be my favorite—

See what I mean? Many of those images are unrelated to one another, but all in one they begin to create a vague sense, at least-something you could write about, or attempt trying to describe.

Not every project gets a Pinterest board - it doesn’t mean they aren’t important, but some projects require more visualization on my end than others, and when they do? Pinterest boards are just one part of that, for me.

What about you? Do you have a go-to unconventional way of brainstorming for writing or other creative projects? Let me know in the comments!

Stay weird, talk soon -

-TH 2.10.25 16.21