The Demonweasel Speaks

All I needed was for the Texans to make that field goal, take it into overtime, and have Bironas make another really long fieldgoal for the win and I’ve have won my Fantasy Football match this week. Or Brian Cushing could’ve been more active on the defense. Or I could have not benched Manningham since the Giants had been playing so lousy.

Five frickin’ points, man. After putting up record numbers last week.

Bummer.

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I’ve been so low energy these past few weeks I don’t know what to do with myself. This month has been hard on a lot of levels, and even now as I make it through them I’m still really drained. Every day is kind of a struggle to get out of bed and very night is a struggle to go there. What am I doing? Not much. Losing the computer totally killed a lot of my writing momentum, and there have been a lot of little tasks that I’ve felt I’ve needed to do to get things back “to the way they were.”

I don’t even remember the way they were at this point, which is kind of lame.

The sad fact is that when I sit in front of the computer, the last thing I want to do is be creative. I don’t know why, but I just want to anything but. It’s more interesting watching episodes of the Guild and figuring out how zune marketplace works. That’s not going to help anyone.

It’s lame and I need to get over it, but how exactly that will be and what shape that takes is anyone’s guess. I need to find a time to be creative that’s not way late at night when my attention wanes, and I need to place to be creative in my days off that’s not my work (where I’ll get sucked into, y’know, working) or my home (where I’ll get sucked into, y’know, screwing around).

I’m ahead enough on the various comic projects (waiting on three different artists, all in various stages of readiness) that those aren’t super pressing. It’d be nice to have more stuff written on them for when proposals go out, but we’ll see. Plus, there’s the whole “I want to be really ready, because if something gets picked up, I want to have enough work in the can so the book comes out on time.”

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I don’t know when the anthology I’m getting published in is coming out. It was supposed to be October, but it’s been pushed back.

I’m trying not to get bummed out by this.

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I was a good husband and we went to go see NEW MOON.

I’m tired of talking about NEW MOON

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So yeah. I feel like I’ve fallen into a deep winter malaise, but it’s only November and still kind of 60 degrees around here, which does not bode well for the Earth.

However, I’ve been reading Stephen King’s new book UNDER THE DOME, which is really good. It has a lot of the same energy of early King books.

It’s nice to know someone out there has energy.

So much for excitement and danger this NaNoWriMo. The only thing that couldn’t handle it was my computer, apparently. It crashed out on the morning of the 3rd and it was at least a week before the damage was fixed. Of course, part of that fixing was going in and having to re-install Windows, backing up and then restoring almost everything. As irritating as a re-install is, in some ways it’s kind of cathartic, just getting rid of all the old junk that you don’t need and starting relatively fresh.

Of course, I can’t get the on-board sound card to work and I forgot to back up all my fonts, but other than that it’s worked like a charm.

The real downside is that I feel like it completely took me out of the 50,000 words in a month game, which really blows. Even worse was the fact that even after the system was up and running I was all “Well, I’m out” and didn’t work on it for a couple of days, and that probably really took me out. Of course, the month is still young and I’m going to keep working on it, but damn that was a bummer.

Yesterday was the first day of National Novel Writing Month. I spent it reading the first part of a book I started writing for that two years ago and trying to keep from hitting the delete button.

My fictional pursuits have been mainly of the comic-book variety, but lik most things in that arena there is only so much I can do before art gets made and I can do lettering and what-not. The what-not is the hardest part, because it involves doing things like showing it to people and probably having them tell me it’s not good enough. It’s normal, and that’s fine, but it always makes me cringe and hold off on hitting “send” on that email.

All that being said, I feel like I’m in a better position for writing than I have been in a while. I’ve received just enough encouragement to want to keep working and I have just enough projects on the stove right now to keep my creative ADD in check. I suppose that is the nice thing about working with comics and other people, is that I can frogger from one thing to another as I wait for stuff to get done.

I’ve gotten back on the query wagon after getting knocked off pretty hard. I was looking in my email to see who I’ve already queried and when, and I took me by surprise how little of it I’ve done. I haven’t even broken 20 queries a year in only three years of querying. Before this most recent round, it was less than 10 for this year alone. Granted, I spent most of this year editing and waiting on one query, but still that’s pretty lame.. There are two months left in the year and I intended to query heavily. Why else would I have spent more than a decade working on this one book to then just sit on it in shame and not try to make something of it.

So where does that leave me with NaNOWriMo? That is an excellent question. I’ve got one book that I’m querying, I’ve got one comic miniseries that’s completed with a full issue of art, one comic miniseries that’s just getting it’s first issue of art done and the rest of the series being written and a webcomic series (for Zuda) that’s still in the design stage. None of those things require sitting at the computer and writing the way writing a book does. Am I a little overextended? You bet, but this is the life I want.

So let us begin to begin again.

This week has had a lot of quiet melancholy to it. I don’t know why I’m glum about getting older, but I am. A little bit. Not a whole, crippling bunch, but enough to kind of make me do the deep sighs every now and again when I think no one is looking.

It probably has a lot to do with eating a lot of crap (and erratically, to boot), not writing and not exercising as much as I should. These are all really easy things to fix, and nothing cripplingly horrible, but it still manages to give me grief. At least it’s stuff I can easily fix. I’ve been kind of mentally holding my breath and waiting to hear back about the revisions to SHADOW OF THE PAST, and I’ve read that most of the stuff should be read through the week of the 14th. So next week, at some point, I should hear something. It’s also funny because after I’d gotten permission to re-submit the manuscript, the agency made a blog post about resubmissions and how they were really not cool and if you get rejected that’s it, don’t try to resubmit. I read this feeling like a total ass, until I got to the end and it said “Unless we say you can resubmit with changes, then it’s fine.” I took a deep breath. I don’t know if that means I have better chances or not, but I’m just glad to get the nod to resubmit. Hell, I’m just glad I went back in and made it a better book. Even if I don’t get the tap, I’m going to query with a little more confidence now.

Oh, who am I kidding? I’m still gonna query like a nervous spazz, but that’s just how I do everything.

I think I’ve mentally stalled myself until I hear about this re-sub. That’s kind of dumb, and I kind of need to move on.

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Speaking of getting old, I think my beard is calling my bluff. When I was younger I thought to myself that I’d grow a beard until I started to get white hairs in it, and then I’d shave it off. Well, the white hairs have come (and in greater numbers), but the shaving will not.

Well played, oldness. Well played.

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I’ve been listening to a lot of MF Doom lately. I put the whole DANGERDOOM album on the store MP3 player, and both Zane and Max made me CDs with other Doom albums on it. It’s pretty cool of them, even though I clearly can get them myself. It’s the thought that counts, and those two are dope. You have to love a man who bases his man rap persona on Dr. Doom, and samples to old Fantastic Four cartoon and the Herculoids. The motherfucking Herculoids!

God damn do I love the Herculoids.

If I could write one property in my time here on Earth, it’s the Herculoids. A serious, PULP FICTION-esque Herculoids. Like rebooting STAR TREK, but with more rock apes and laser-eyed dragons.

“AND YOU WILL KNOW HIS NAME IS GLEEP, WHEN HE LAYS HIS VENGEANCE UPON YOU!”

Yeah, that’s where it’s at.

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I joined a fantasy football league. Not just any, but with the StandardAttrition.org people, including awesome comic writers David Lapham and Jason Aaron. Virtual elbow rubbing with people that I respect and admire in the industry I want to work in make me feel all special.

I will probably feel less special when I come in last place and horrible embarrass myself.

Good times!

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I started this post when I was 32. Now I’m 33. And so double-30 begins…

When all is said and done, I’m in the best place I’ve ever been in my life. It’s the best birthday present I could ask for.

Sometimes when I get stressed out or worried or what have you, I get into this manic, rapid fire joke mode where I’m just making dick jokes about everything. I’ve been doing that a lot this week, as things have been kind of wild, really pushing me to the bounds of my creativity and tolerance. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that summer finally decided to finally really raise the temperature and it’s been muggy and humid as balls. I also wonder if its because I’ve fallen back into just editing and researching writing stuff and not actually doing any real creative activity, and I think it’s making my brain run around in my head too much. I know I’ve been bummed out by a rash of break-ups among couples I thought were pretty rock-steady, and that’s really filled me with sadness. I found myself nearly moved to tears thinking about far-away friends and break-ups the other night. Kind of lame, but I’m going to attribute it to the weather and the general malaise of stress and creative blockage.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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When I was thinking about blogging on the way home, I wanted to write about how I can’t stand how most blogs, especially comic book blogs, are so fucking negative about everything, and are just there to complain that things aren’t the way they’d want them to be. I know I’ve done more than my share of that in the past on here before, but one of the reasons I stopped writing in here was that I was tired of complaining about everything.

The thing is, the more I thought about it, the more I realized the only appropriate title would be “I hate blogs that complain about everything, so I’m going to complain about them in my blog.” And that’s just dumb.

I did find out the other day that a guy that I argued with on the internet lives in Columbus. I had a sudden urge to invite him down for a drink so we could hash out our differences/disagreements in person. Then I wised up and realized that’s just a recipe for awkward-filled disaster. Then again, maybe that’s what the internet needs more of. The only message board I really go to nowadays is STANDARD ATTRITION.org, which is filled with really great comic people, both comic readers and writers (the really good ones, like Jason Aaron, David Lapham, Brian Wood, Brian Azzarello, G. Willow Wilson, Peter Milligan and Jeff Lemire). Even there though, I’ve watched people spiral into the pit of Internet Miscommunication, and it always gets worse, not better. People accuse others of putting words in their mouth or misunderstanding the argument or re-framing the argument and things just become nonsense. And these are well-intentioned smart people, not trolling internet fuck-ups who exist only to ruin things for others.

Why must the internet exist only to frustrate and corrupt, as opposed to enlighten and uplift? This is one of those “How many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center?” questions, isn’t it?

Been a wild summer.

Creatively it’s been immensely successful, finishing up what should be the final major draft of SHADOW OF THE PAST and getting the first issue of GIFTED penciled, but also getting what’s being published in WICKED TALES extended from the ten-page preview to the full 22-page 1st issue. The final pages were drawn in a burst of creativity and deadline drama by Lee, and they turned out really well. This burst at the end (with him drawing 9 pages in 10 days, after only doing about 3 pages in 10 months) really helped solidify our commitment and our confidence in this. With the rest of the issues already written, we have a chance to keep moving forward on this momentum and then get a real shot at submitting it other places as well. The WICKED TALES deal is nice, but we need to have a place where issue 2 can go an live as well. Who knows, maybe it’ll be time to look into on-line publishing.

With SHADOW OF THE PAST “done” I can work on submitting it, and it is in fact sitting with an assistant whose very kind rejection helped push me to really make it work, or at least work as well as it can right now. I have more confidence in sending it out now, but I hope that the edits were enough to push it into being accepted for representation. If not, I can still send it our other places as well.

I haven’t touched THE CORNER in a while, but I can refocus on that, as well as my other comic project that I have an artist working on, INFERNAL VELOCITY. It’s nice having multiple levels of stuff that can be worked on. Hopefully, there will be a dam break and I can start getting all of this stuff out there in waves. I know a lot of that is wishful thinking, but that’s really the only thing that works (when you couple it with hard work, of course).

Much of my work can be attributed to me coming home from the store, eating, napping for an hour or so, and then staying up until 3-4am writing, lettering or researching. It’s become habit to work on stuff, not a chore like I used to see it as, and I’m very thankful for that change in mindset. I used to work a couple of hours a week on stuff and feel like I was really hot shit, but after several long weeks of late nights and really putting it to the grindstone I feel like I’ve finally gotten a work ethic that makes success possible.

Or at the very least I can look at myself in the mirror and say I tried my hardest.

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We’re getting ready for a two-year anniversary party at the store, and when I look at the folks we’re inviting, I’m reminded of all the people that have moved away this summer. Gavin, Lee & Maddi, Jason & Emily, Andrew. It’s weird to have finally gotten to a place where I actually have real friends out here, and now a lot of them are moving. Of course, Travis is moving into town, so that takes some of the bummer out, but still…after almost a decade of pretty solitary living and work only friendships, it’s nice to have a circle of people that I can be friendly with an hang out.

Even better is celebrating two years of being married, and the longest relationship I’ve ever had. Lot’s of wild rides, but Kenzie and I are so very happy that it makes life really worth living. Wanting to provide for her and be ready for when we start a family is what pushes me to work those late nights and work so hard.

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Of course, with the good there is always bad. I’m worried a lot about my folks, the house they live in and my dad’s health. I haven’t seen them in two years, and the house in at least three and it really bums me out. I wish I was in a better position to help them, either financially or geographically, but that’s just not the case. That makes me want to work hard too. I worry about money, and I worry about Kenzie’s job amidst all this health-care reform (knock on wood!). It can’t be all great all the time, I know, but when you’ve been trying to climb out of the broke pit for so long, it gets to be a little depressing.

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I hate to say it, but I miss TV badly. We discovered TOP GEAR this summer, and that’s great, but we’ve already eaten up four seasons and it can be a bit much after a while. TRUE BLOOD and the HBO shows are great, but there hasn’t been anything worthwhile on for forever. Movies have been pretty much shit as well, with the exception of STAR TREK and HP. DISTRICT 9 was good, and I have high hopes for INGLORIOUS BASTERDS. Kenz and I are seeing it tomorrow after an anniversary dinner. Celebrating with violence and swearing; a perfect fit for our marriage. ;)

I should spedn more time with my blog, but I’ve been so much time at work, and working on the book (SHADOW OF THE PAST), the comic (GIFTED, being published in the Wild Wolf anthology WICKED TALES this fall) and the new comic (INFERNAL VELOCITY) I’m just awash in working creative nonsense.

In the meantime, you can find me on Twitter (at the sidebar, or twitter.com/demonweasel) or on Facebook, (facebook.com/demonweasel)

It’s where all the cool kids go.