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Felt a bit weird turning down a job offer today from a TV production house I’ve worked with fairly regulary, but it couldn’t be helped. They had some kind of reality show thing happening and while they were looking for writers (Which wasn’t a big deal) they were looking for researcher/interviewer/writers who could take appointments with prospective subjects for the program and do interviews during normal business hours of the work week (Which was a big deal). Since I’m actually at the GameAxis offices from Mondays to Wednesdays, this would have severely affected their production schedule considering how hectic and quickly these things move, and for me to say “Yeah, I know you’re going into the shoot on Tuesday and edit on Wednesday, but if this guy is only available for interviews in the afternoon, I can’t do it ’till Thursday” would have been incredibly unfair to them. Plus it would have given me an ulcer from all the stress worrying over how to squeeze a week’s worth of TV work into two working days.

Oh well, while it’s too bad I couldn’t take the job, it’s not going to really make me cringe with regret over lost opportunities either. The extra money would have been nice, but admittedly, I’m already busy with other writing, like the Maxim stuff that occasionally comes in, the kiddie comic (Of which I have a looming deadline for the 11th, which I’m pretty sure I can make for this next set of stories) the pilot episode for the animated series which is 90+% done, and then there’s Nowhere, a new little 5 pager I want to write called Money-man, (Comic, not short story), a potential new other comic storyline to explore involving (AGAIN, at least for me) ghosts and, oh yeah, wasn’t I writing a novel?

Switching Gears

It is hard to write a comic book with your preferred sensibilities and then suddenly find yourself switching sensibilities when money jobs roll in and you find yourself doing kiddy stuff. Going from character exploration to “AAH! THE MONSTER IS CHASING US!” is a bit of a flip.

The Fluke

I somehow jumped from averaging 10% completion on Cowboys From Hell in Guitar Hero to 80%, but only the one time. I have no explanation for this.

Terrible Pun Of The Day

After enjoying a day at the Celtic festival a group goes back to the costumed valet parking to find they can’t locate their auto. They go to the valet and ask, quite sensibly, “Druid, where’s my car?”

Yes, that is hideous, I admit it.

The Writing Continues

It seems a bit contradictory that for a writer, I’m not actually writing much. Blog-wise, anyway. Yeah, sure there are daily updates (Sometimes seriously post-dated to make up the lack) but otherwise, the entries are faily short, just little blips on the radar.

The reason for that, of course is the writing.

Aside from GameAxis which is now keeping me busy with a lot of articles on a monthly basis, there’s also all the other projects that are ongoing. The kid’s comic book is entering into round two; it’s actually 12 parts, 4 pages each, and I’ve done parts 1-4 already, with parts 5-8 coming up in August. I can now safely say that this is the first professional comic I’ve ever done if, by professional, you mean you were paid by a genuine mass circulation publication to write it. It ain’t DC, Marvel or Dark Horse, and it ain’t even in America, it’s for a local children’s magazine in Singapore called Kid’s Company, but hey, their checks don’t bounce.

Still there is a kind of warm, gooshy feeling (However small and unwarranted it is) to actually see the Wife draw the pictures and then see them colored, and then see them printed out and think, “Hey, we made a comic!” It’s doubly cool that this something we can work on together, even if neither one of us is particularly over the moon about it; I mean, it’s not like this kid’s comic is our Great Work, but we’re getting paid for it, and it’s a good learning experience. At the very least, we learned that we can work together and still sleep in the same bed and eat meals with each other rather than screaming about the insensitivity we show to the other person’s art.

The other thing is the pilot for the animated series, which should be wrapped up before the end of the week. I’m still curious to see how this one will go since it’s a relatively new thing, and to be honest, I have very real doubts about whether it will fly, but I’ve written something that I can admit to and think “Yeah, that’s not bad, I like it.” Whether it will actually stay in that form is another question all together.

It’s not like the previous animated script I wrote, which was for a “short subject” style animated program called Nano-Boy. That program was actually two 12-14 minute segments shown together, so the episodes moved EXTREMELY fast. This time around I get the full 22 minutes to play with, meaning I can actually set up 3 act narratives, though I still find myself wishing I just had zero limitations the way I do with novels. Still, I can’t talk too much about this one at all, since it’s all hush, hush and may very well come to nothing in the end, but I will give this utterly meaningless hint; Arabic Noir.

And then there’s the Great Work, which is Nowhere. I can’t talk about this one too much either, not plot-wise, but I will say that this is pretty cool to work on. The idea actually belongs to the Wife, she’s been nursing the basic seed of Nowhere for years, since she was teenager, and even went so far as to draw the first issue and disribute it to local comic stores when she was younger. Since then it’s sort of been sitting in some obscure shelf in her mental bric-a-brac space, collecting dust as careers, complications, relationships that didn’t work and relationships that finally did, came into her life. Nowhere was actually one of those things that kind of helped us to bond together early on, because it was thing that was incredibly dear to her, and when she talked to me about it, I talked back to her about it and she liked the ideas that were bouncing back at her. It was that point that she sort of decided that not only did we have some common ground, but I had ideas that she could respect and the pragmatic part of her brain kicked in and hinted, “It’s lot easier to write a comic book when you own the writer,” and that was that.

Over the last 3-4 years, we’ve talked about Nowhere in fits and starts, and very early on in the relationship we even did a test run with a short 7-8 pager. It was here that I learned a few things about comics and how I write them. 1) I write WAAAAAY too much dialoge for one panel and 2) I try to squeeze WAAAAAAAAAY too many panels into one page. This, I thought, was exactly what Neil-O did until I went back and looked at the kindly ones and saw that lo and behold, he was going with 5-6 panels per page, not 14 with paragraphs and paragraphs of dialog. The reason I did this, I suspect, was because I was convinced that the Wife had a TARDIS like pocket dimension generator that she could use on every page of comic she drew and when it was revealed to me that I would have to make do with old fashioned Newtonian physics, not a quantum particle or super-string to be had anywhere, I grumbled and learned how to not make characters have rapid-fire, witty, snappy, Kevin Smith-esque, cracking wise exchanges that were somehow expected to convey the first quarter of War & Peace in one panel.

But this one is really cool to me because it’s a REAL comic. As in, it’s one that I’m making myself, not entirely out of whole cloth, since the back bone of it is still the Wife’s genesis, but she insists this is ours and not hers, and so I’ve been happily making characters, adding new plots, and throwing in liberal amounts of 80′s aesthetic so that girls have massive, massive hair.

This is the project that, almost involuntarily, the Wife finds herself spending a lot of time on. I can’t blame her; this is like a decade’s worth of “I have a story to tell” welling up inside her. And I find it extremely cool to see the rough boards, and then to see the first pencils and then see the finished product with word balloons and everything. Here, everyone is talking the way I want them to talk and doing the things I want them to do with no restrictions about “Make sure it’s politically correct and pleasing to children.” And I have no idea how long this is going to take, or even what we’re going to do once the first part is done.

Oh well, guess we’ll worry about that later. Worst comes to worst, there’s always independent publishing. Hell, if Dave Sim can do it…

Dazed And Confused

Sunday got a bit whacked out as a result of staying up all night on Saturday. The reason for that being to try and get back into some kind of normal body clock rhythm, since lately, when I don’t have to be in the office, bed time has been roughly 5-7 in the morning.

As a result the entirety of Sunday was pretty much a blur of hunting monsters and not even being sure whether progress was being made in this PSP game…

Too Curious For My Own Good

I have to admit, after reading on IGN that an award winning porn film about pirates is not only the most expensive porno ever made, but has now also been recut for a rated “R” release, I am insanely curious to actually watch this thing and see what it’s like. Unfortunately the odds of this happening are extremely low since pornography is illegal in Singapore.

No, I am not making that up.

Yes, you can be charged and arrested for owning porn. And again, no, I am NOT making that up.

A Very Pleasant Surprise

Man, I love it when this happens. Going into a movie with zero expectations and then finding out that it’s the kind of thing that could potentially stay with you forever.

Having picked up High Fidelity at the local DVD store because it was surprisingly cheap and because it had John Cusack in it, I put it in to watch it.

Brilliant. Funny. Painful. Real. Poignant.

I can’t believe I’ve never seen this film before, and yet it just rocketed into one of my all time favorites.

Whoo Hoo!

This means absolutely nothing to people who don’t play Monster Hunter Freedom on the Playstation Portable, but I consider it a major accomplishment that I can now kill the blue Kut-Ku on 4 star guild missions. That thing is just insanely hard, and I’m now terrified of how bad the game is going to get when it actually starts throwing out missions labeled “hard”; this one kept killing me over and over again as it is…

Insomnia Still Rules

I’m actually getting sleep, but it comes in fits and starts and so have been spending the last few days operating on a fairly unreliable schedule of consciousness. That would also explain the rather sporadic posting.

But things are still under control work wise. Articles are getting cranked out, and the comic that the Wife and I are working on is coming along nicely. She’s being super productive about it, so the pages are coming out thick and fast, but I guess I can’t really go into too much detail about it until we get closer to having more complete and ready to show.