The Long and the Short of it.

So I'm having hair issues. I grew my hair out starting over 3 years ago and its now quite long. The problem is, it's hot out, I keep lying on it and it gets tangled... I know, cry me a river right? Well, I'm trying to decide if it's time to cut it off. I even posted a poll on Steve Niles board to see what they thought... I am going to go get my hair cut on Thursday, but I still don't know if it's going to be a severe cut or just a trim.

Meanwhile, I finished up both the children's book and the stuff I needed to do for the licensed property. I kind of goofed off today. Well, took my truck up to the dealer... AGAIN... but then I just goofed off. Watched some old Ellery Queen episodes and a few other programs. I need to get back to Lucius Fogg tomorrow and then switch over to the novel I'm working on while I'm waiting for other things to get approved.

Overall I've never been good at waiting. I like to jump in and get things done which is odd since I seem to procrastinate about everything else. Hell, I meant to post this last night.

Where did this week go?

I seem to be asking myself that question a lot lately. Every Thursday night I go over to my parents’ house for a few hours. My brother also shows up and this is how we stay connected as a family. The night has become known as ‘Six-pack Thursday’, which I find intrinsically funny since none of us actually drink beer. Well, Six-pack Thursday always sneaks up on me and I find myself asking 1) where did the week go and 2) what did I do with my time.

This week is a little easier to figure out. I spent time on my third and hopefully final draft of the children’s book I’m working on. I also spent part of a day reformatting three scripts so my co-writer can do his job easier. Good advice for writers who are collaborating, discuss and agree upon a format for your script prior to starting. You’d be amazed at just how different people set up their scripts. Monday was a wash since I was sick and part of Tuesday vanished for that as well. What I never got to this week was swimming or playing my bass. It’s a shame, I have three basses and they are collecting way too much dust.

The one highlight of the week came yesterday when I discovered that a licensed property I had pitched for but didn’t get suddenly changed and I am doing it. I am very excited about it since it’s both a title I love and a title that the average person on the street knows. It’s going to be a lot of hard work but I think the storyline is very cool and I get to play with a lot of great characters.

My final thought of the day has to do with the lunch I had yesterday. A friend of mine is about to pack up his family and his belongings and head off to Arizona. Part of me can understand the idea of going someplace that doesn’t cost a fortune to live and getting a house three times the size for less money… but going to a place where it’s very hot, you have to check for scorpions in you sheets and where you know nobody seems like quite a jump. How many of us see our friends and family on a regular basis? If I moved I would lose Six-pack Thursday… but how rare is it that people see their family once a week? I’m pretty sure yesterdays lunch was the first time I saw my friend since maybe February. So has the increased modes of communication actually lessened the need and desire for face-to-face meetings? Is it easier now to move away from everyone you know because in truth you really don’t see that many people, other than say co-workers, on a regular basis? There are far too many friends I can think of right now that I have only seen once in this calendar year… and far too few that I have seen twice or more.

We really are becoming a society of hermits.

Six Months As A Wordsmith and Counting…

Today’s an anniversary of sorts for me. Six months ago today I walked out of my last job and became a freelance writer. I sent out an email to everyone I knew saying I was a full-time writer and figured the offers would just start pouring in. I got response after response offering encouragement and assurances that I would make it. Everyone seemed to just know I was on the verge of success; funny how that works.

I gave myself to just after Comic-Con. Figured by then I would either have something good lined up or I would have to go back to a day job. That would be five months, plenty of time to make things happen. And I would have Wizard World LA to help make deals. Everything was great. I even won the poker tournament at WW LA; I was sky high and writing everyday.

April was an amazing month too. I got offered things I had never even thought about: a shot at a licensed property, a movie adaptation, and a history book. I even had editors from Marvel and DC responding to my inquiries. And to top it all off, I signed with an agent. Suddenly the possibility of Hollywood money made the full-time writing thing seem even more legit.

Them May came along and the majority of things that had popped up in April suddenly vanished or got seriously postponed. I went from having a half-dozen different irons in the fire to having absolutely nothing to work on. And when I couldn’t get things moving forward again, put me into a very dark June. Seeing nothing happening and my time quickly running out put me at a stress level like I have never dealt with before. I have done a lot of different jobs in the past, some of which the stress level was extremely high… but a situation where I had no control over anything was something new to me. I couldn’t work harder or push in new directions. It was all out of my hands and a day job seemed imminent.

By the time July rolled around I had resolved myself to enjoying the last month of full-time writing, going to the con and then going job hunting after. I thought the only thing that would prevent this would be a miracle. Well, a miracle did not happen. If this were one of my fiction stories than DC would have offered the hero a monthly title or Hollywood would have bought a concept. But this is the real world.

What did happen was I found just a little bit of hope somewhere on that con floor. I don’t know if it was talking to a couple editors who seemed to not only know who I was but actually wanted to talk, or maybe it was talking to the Hollywood types and having them know who I am. I walked out of the show with nothing more than a few doors cracked open just enough I may be able to squeeze my foot in.

It’s not enough to stave off the ‘day job’ indefinitely, but just enough to buy me another two months of trying. And maybe in those two months I can find something that will buy me a few more months. I learned a lot in the last six months, I learned that this is really what I should be doing and that I need to keep at it. I also think I improved as a writer. Trying new things… a children’s book, a novel, a prose mystery project. Things I would never even have thought of in the past. And the longer I can hold out, the better chance that something may happen with the Hollywood types.

Maybe I got my second wind or maybe I’m just too stupid and stubborn to know when to throw in the towel. But each day that I go upstairs to my loft to write instead of climbing into my truck and fighting traffic to get to a cube farm… well, I just feel more alive.

Jim Lee Cost Me Money

If you look over at Newsarama right now you will see Jim Lee talking about the poker game in Chicago. Well I wasn’t in Chicago but I did play in the Wizard World LA and Comic-Con games. I’ve also played in one small tournament besides that. I actually won both the small tournament and the Wizard World LA game (much to the chagrin of Nick Barrucci) so I’m pretty good at Texas Hold’em.

It’s important at this point of the story to tell you what I did with my winnings from LA… I bought two original art pages and page for my hotel room for the weekend. The two pages were both Jim Lee pieces. One from his run on Batman the other from his Superman run. Jim Lee is pretty much a comic GOD in my opinion.

Well, the Comic-con game came around and I went up to play. The room is filled with everyone from retailers to creators to editors and company owners, a pretty interesting mix overall. We get our seating assignments and I size up the table. Mainly everyone there was from the business side of comics and all very nice guys. Well, as I’m sitting there waiting, one last player shows up late. Now this is a player that everyone was waiting for… Jim Lee. Mainly they were waiting because we were all in his hotel room. Well Jim pulled a card to see where he was sitting and sure enough, he sits two seats from me.

So my first reaction was: “Oh wow, it’s Jim Lee.”

I took a deep breath, thought to myself that this is a group of people in the same industry sitting together for a nice game of cards. And Jim Lee, thought very talented, is just another card player.

So my second reaction was: “Holy shit, it’s Jim Lee!”

We played a few hands, a won one or two and then I had to explain to Jim exactly who I was and why I was there. It’s funny but that’s how it goes. No one cares who you are unless you start winning a few hands and then it’s: “Why are you here?” Explaining that I wrote a book for IDW seems to quell the curiosity enough to get back to the game.

Oh, and Nick Barrucci put a bounty on my head.

Now to speed up… I got a little goading to play more aggressive… some of it SEEMED to come from Jim. And the end result was I played the worst game of my life. I went fishing on hold cards I should never have even thought about holding.

The bottom line is out of 8 people at my table I was the third one out. Out of the 48 people playing I don’t think I made the top 40… But I had one tiny bit of solace…

Jim Lee went out before me.

And he is still a comic book GOD.

I wish I had written that.

Most of the time when I finish reading a comic or novel, my mind starts going over the story and seeing how I would have done it differently. Where I would have zigged when the author zagged. How I would, egotistically improper, improved the work. I think the more you write the more you do these kinds of things.

Very rarely do I put down a book and think: “I wish I had written that”. I wish I could write that type of story. A story that shows the author has gone to a place mentally that no one else probably has ever gone. I got that feeling last night. I had just finished reading the latest SWAMP THING trade LOVE IN VAIN and it left me with just one question:

“Josh Dysart… who hurt you?”

It’s a love story in the same way that Lord of the Rings is a “road movie’. Josh brings a very twisted take on Arcane and really makes him the centerpiece of the story. Swamp Thing has really become like an occasional god who sits and contemplates his navel until someone goes just a little too far and then he lumbers in to deal with it. The story is more about the things around Swamp Thing than about the title character himself and it works better that way. No disrespect meant to anyone who has touch the character in between, but to me this is the best Swamp Thing story since Alan Moore finished his run.

I actually sat and talked to Josh a month or so back and we talked about the art on the book. I’ll be honest, the art of Enrique Breccia made it hard for me to read the Andy Diggle trade and I told Josh as much. Well, I would like to retract this statement. Love in Vain is actually two stories, the first is Breccia the second is Timothy Green II and I know and really like Timothy’s work… but when I got to the second story I had gotten so into the story that I was missing Breccia’s work. He has such an organic feel to his work that it not only enhances the supernatural aspects of the story, but it gives you the feeling that you are reading an ancient epic. After writing this I’m going to go dig out the first trade and read it again.

If you haven’t been picking up the individual issues, then treat yourself to the trade. And if you have got the issues… by the trade anyway… we want to keep Josh and Enrique on this book for a very long time.

Trying it again.

I did this blog about three years ago just when I was beginning to try my hand a freelance writing. Well, it seems like a good time to fire it up again. So lets see if I can make it work this time.

Haven't decided if I'm going to kill off all the old posts or not...

More to come.