The Writer Is Tired

Either I’m getting old or else the PSP withdrawal is finally getting its claws in, but the ride to and from the office today seemed EXCRUCIATINGLY long and by the time it was over I felt extremely sleepy.

Finished a feature for GameAxis which I can’t talk about since the issue isn’t out yet, finished some minor changes to a television script which has been largely approved (I reeeeeeeeeally like it when producers and directors are working on a tight deadline, then they only make changes when absolutely necessary rather than on sheer whimsy) and added a few more pages to Nowhere, which is now116 pages.

To think, before I started on this project I stupidly believed that working on a comic would make my narrative leaner and less verbose. OH WHAT A FOOL I WAS!

Now I’m going to bed to suck on my thumb go into fetal position and hug a decapitated teddy bear.

Television Day

Since I’m not at GameAxis writing articles, I’m now at home, writing scripts. I have also just hit page 100 on the Nowhere script. When I say that, I mean the actual comic itself will be 100 pages, the actual page count on the script itself passed that barrier ages ago.

Lately I’ve been wondering what to do with it. On the one hand, the traditional option would be to get it published as a comic. That would mean hitting Image, Oni or Darkhorse or someone else that’s willing to look at non-superheroic, non-Jim Lee/Bryan Hitch stories and artwork. In this case you only need about 5 finished pages, and we’ve got that. Also, depending which publisher you send it to, they may want only a paragraph that sums the entire story line, or a more detailed outline that can run between 3-5 pages.

The other option is to do what Sarah Ellerton has done and just create a web comic. Her Inverloch web comic is–depending on where you look on the web–currently the #1 comic on the ‘net, and as a result of that popularity, she got an offer from Seven Seas Publishing to compile and put it out in trade paperback. There is a certain attractiveness to this because then the comic can be done at its own pace, but of course, it’s also free, meaning you have to be pretty certain you’re doing this as a labor of love and not with the goal of getting it published, since there’s no guarantee you’ll get picked up the way she did.

And of course the final option is to just self-publish. For whatever reason, in comics, self-publishing does not seem to carry the same stigma as it does in book publishing. Indie titles like Cerebus, Poison Elves or Bone have all been thought of as bold, welcome experiments rather than the work of a hack who couldn’t cut it in the “real industry,” so this idea is not without appeal, though it’s a costly one.

Oh well…

Saturday Night’s All Right For Writing

I should have been working on the TV series script and instead I spent pretty much the whole day on one hell of a roll for Nowhere. That crazy comic is now officially up to 83 pages scripted, and the end of part 1 is in sight. I’d say it’s roughly 80% done now. Of course that’s just Part/Volume/Whatever Literary Dvision Unit You Prefer 1, there’s still at least four more in the pipeline.

Somehow, I thought I’d be able to keep my novel-y sensibilities under tighter rein for a comic, but nope, the damn thing still balloons out. There has been talk of putting it online, though nothing has materialized in concrete fashion yet, so we’ll see how it goes. It’s probably got a built-in audience though; since the content has some definitively adult aspects to it (Nothing X-rated, but I think we may be pushing a pretty strong “R” at some points) there’s going to need to be the obligatory “Warning/Enter/Leave” front page. Any male under the age of 20 that sees that AUTOMATICALLY enters, but what can ya’ do. I supposed a sex starved, teenage audience is better than none at all…

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…

Some Random Facts

I have now watched War of the Worlds, March of the Penguins and Domino, in that order. Of them all, it was the Penguins that was actually the coolest.

Tomb Raider Legend is shaping up to be a very good game, and a long awaited worthy successor to the original Playstation phenomenon. Since I’m not doing the review for GameAxis, I can post a capsule review of my own thoughts here, which I’ll do once I’ve finished it.

The Wife and I just this rainy afternoon went down to a part of the neighborhood we never suspected held a small gallery of replica arms, including period firearms, blades from actual historical periods, and fantasy weapons which are either of original design, or inspired by various sources, such as The Lord of the Rings. Since the Wife is doing comics and other illustrations now, and since I’m writing Nowhere which involves the use of katanas (That is to say, the traditional blade used by Japanese Samurai) we now have something like this in the house.

I have already chased the cats around with it while muttering things like “YOU HAVE NO HONOR! DIE! HAAAAI!” and “EVIL SHALL PERISH BY MY BLADE!” and it’s more fun that I had suspected. There is something incredibly cool about having a sword in your house…

The Mother In Law’s Birthday

In which Eurasian food was consumed, apple strudels were eaten, and there were long walks in the hot afternoon sun.

Other than that, the only other things I plan on doing today are getting more writing done in various things, including this blog, the other blog, the children’s novel and the comic book-…

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I’ve started on a comic book. It’s actually the Wife’s idea, and one we’ve talked about on and off for the last couple of years, so the main story is actually “finished” in my head, it’s just a matter of getting it all out now. I had stupidly begun writing the script in Microsoft Word until I realized I didn’t have to anymore, since I now have a script writing program, something I didn’t have access to a few years ago when this project was first thought up.

Anyway, it’s called Nowhere, and… that’s all I’m going to say about it at this point, really. I have no idea what’s going to be done with it after I’ve written the first part, but at least it’ll be in the world, and that’s somethin’…

Vice City Is My Bitch

Yep, after neglecting the girlfriend for days on end running guns, running drugs, running people over, Vice City is at long last my town. Once again, my obsessive compulsive gaming disorder just wouldn’t let me walk away from the game without getting 100% completion, an act of supreme tediousness, but with large, LARGE payoffs, like the AH-64 attack helicopter, or the Rhino tank. It was a good game. One of the best I’ve played in years. I get on my knees and worship at Rockstar’s feet, for a game like this shall not soon grace a console again.

Which means that it’s time to start working on other things.

No, not games.

There’s the question of employment. I suppose I’ll have to schmooze off friends (Are you reading this, people?) or troll through the magazines once more and churn out turgid reviews for Cleo and Her World. Sigh… it’s a living, I suppose.

Me: So, tell me why you prefer to have your armpits unshaven.

Militant Lesbian: IT’S A STATEMENT AGAINST THE FASCIST, PATRIARCHAL REPRESSION FOISTED UPON US BY THE GENETIC DEFECT KNOWN AS MAN!!

Me: Couldn’t get a date for the highschool prom, huh?

ML: FUCK OFF!

This sort of thing will never appear in my author’s bio.

And of course, there’s the ACTUAL writing.

The third novel Suzy & The Shifters (Originally the first novel was going to be titled that, but then my agent and the publisher both had misgivings, as they felt it sounded like a cheesy 50′s band and I said, “YEAH! COOL ISN’T IT?!?” And they began to seriously question my credibility, thus we have Shift for novel one. Suzy & The Shifters works better as an anthology title anyway, since it is about Suzy and her various shifter friends) is still waiting for completion. I’m in no big hurry, because novels one and two have yet to see the light of day, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come to pass eventually, and I can stop being an obnoxious, pretentious wannabe novelist and be a pretentious, obnoxious novelist. The Suzy unicorn short story is nearly done. The Jen serial killer story has more or less written itself in my head. The Canadian Anthology open spaces has rejected my Suzy story, but they said they liked the way I write, so they’re breaking their own rules and asking for a third submission, since the submission date has been extended to April. Since they liked Jen so much, I guess I’ll just crank out the Jen serial killer story (SOMEONE! HELP ME! I SUCK AT TITLES!) and give them that. In other writerly news, Flashquake.com, the website that publishes stories of 1,000 words or less, has told me that they’re considering Famine & Pestilence Go To Dinner and to sit tight for the final result. Anyone who hasn’t read it, just e-mail me and I’ll send you a file, since I think I’d get in trouble with them AND my agent if I start posting stories here.

Ah, and then there’s Nowhere…

This is going to be fun. The first issue is nearly done. I have to wait for the girlfriend to finish up her four issue mini-series with an American Indy comics company, but once that’s done, she’ll pencil issue one, possibly do the cover, and then we’ll shop it around to the various publishers and see if there’s any interest. I sure hope this doesn’t turn into one of those things where the comic comes out before the novels do. Then EVERYONE would accuse me of pulling a Gaiman to a ridiculous degree. I think it’ll be a fun title. We’ve got two Elf brothers, one a super-cool assassin type by the name of Fenoril, and his younger sibling Judas, who is sarcastic, video-game and geek-movie obsessed spellcaster (Remind you of anyone you know? Of cooooooourse nooooot…) who’s ultimate battle cry when conjuring up fireballs is either “SO THERE!” or “Shooooryuken!”

Then there’s the popculture junkie/amazon Cheryl, who learned everything about the world of man through cable television (When she gets angry, she screams “Kaneeeeedaaaaaaaa!!”) and C, the vampire chick who prefers taking her blood in ice, 7-11 style with the paper cup and protective plastic lid on top, straw included. I think it’s going to be utterly deranged since we already deranged Scottish bands with songs like The Bitch From Ipanema (Opening lines, “Tall and tanned and young and lovely, that BITCH from Ipanema she dumped me, and when she told me we’re done, I went and screamed Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!”) the infamous One Dollar Man, a deranged Chinese merchant (“I sell you good gun! One dollar only! No find gun like this for one dollar, but you, I sell you, one dollar! Buy gun, stupid white man, I sell cheap!”) and Spanky the Ouija Monkey (“Spank me or I’ll kill you.”). Oh and a clone of Jesus running around, hooking up with frat parties and break dancing on the pool or cheating at chugging contests by changing the beer to water as he drinks it.

“Chug, chug, chug! Jeeesus! Jeeesus! Jeeesus! GO!”

The arc of the story has more or less been figured out. In a perfect world, we’d tell the entire story in about 100 issues or so, with three major arcs. We’ll see whether we can make this happen or not.

Oh well… anybody looking for freelance work?