The Demonweasel Speaks

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.