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.

****

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.”

****

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.

****

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

I’m tired of talking about NEW MOON

****

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.