Bullshit Freddy Krueger Science

May 13th, 2010 | by Thacher Cleveland
Posted In: General

One of the things that’s nice about not sleeping is the weird natural high you get from it. Today was chock full o’nuts. Lots of fun, but it gets rock in the late afternoon when the wheels come off and it becomes less about me collapsing people with my inappropriate hilarity and more about keeping from falling into crazy insomnia micronaps. It makes for a fun day, even when you’re working ten hours and they they start with the door coming off the hinges. Yeah, don’t ask.

The bad thing about “no sleep” is that after the crashing happens and I nap from 8:30 til about 10 and then it’s up until about 3-4ish and then up at about 10 to head into the shop. That works alright, I guess, but I’ve been trying to get in earlier so I can maybe write/edit in a more structured environment than the wild loosey-goosey-ness of home. This may mean a more constrained, normal sleep schedule so I don’t go on some berserk, non-REM sleep having spree. I doubt that’ll happen, but Nightmare on Elm Street and Star Trek haven’t ever lied to me before.

One of the things I like about GLEE is it doesn’t just fulfill my dorky, bad music, musical loving needs, but if I’m lucky I get two to four new songs to add to my iPhone as I walk around. Nothing says “dreadful soundtrack of your life” like teenage show choir covers of pop songs. Seriously, there’s shit on that phone that will turn you white. Just glance at my last.fm feed over there if you dare.

Meeting about store podcast today went well. Just need to get the mic situation settled and then I think we’re ready to record next Monday. Y’know, I used to hate the sound of my own voice (and I still kind of do), but maybe being on the PoP Cast a couple of times has changed my attitude. One way or another, having a show is going to happen. Maybe my narcissism has finally outweighed my discomfort/nervousness.

Good lord, this could end badly.

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Wee hours

May 12th, 2010 | by Thacher Cleveland
Posted In: General

It’s 4:45 in the morning and I just spent the past hour laying in bed, wide awake. I’ve got to be at the shop tomorrow morning by 9am to receive the new comic shipment, so this isn’t exactly what you would call a good thing.

I’ve found that I’ve been running on less and less sleep as I’ve gotten older, which makes me wonder if I’m doing some kind of weird Benjamin Button type thing with my sleep cycle.

Wow, Benjamin Button? That reference was dated even back the last time I updated this thing. That was also the not-subtle nod to the fact that I’m aware that I haven’t written here since last November. Those references to how long it’s been since I last blogged are one of the main things that keep me from writing in here after a certain amount of time passes. I feel like I can’t help but acknowledge it, but I hate how lame it sounds.

You’d think I’d be used to it, since I’ve been blogging for over a decade now. I suppose I could actually go back and check, but there’s no need for that. Those records from the dark late 90s/earlyNaughties have been digitally sealed for all time. Best forgotten, most of it.

Now I’m writing this on my iPhone, which I love but also kind o hate in some ways. I was so keen to get one, but at the last minute I almost bought a netbook. I just wanted something that could do Internet very well, play music as I walked to work and maybe have cool toys. Internet? Check. Play music? Check, something the net book wouldn’t have been able to do easily for my five minute walks to work and th grocery store. Cool toys? Well, I am writing my first post in months in the middle of the night on it, so that’s got to count for something, right? If this goes well perhaps we’ll see a return to more regular updates. But what did happen with my iPhone? Dropped it three days into owning it and cracked the screen diagonally across. It still works but now it’s ugly as sin qnd probably won’t last out the two years before I get to upgrade. Maybe by then AT&T will have droid.

See what else was in there? The other thing I hate about long abscences: the promise of more regular updates. I have the attention span of an infant playing with car keys. I’m often doing five tasks at once and feel lucky if I finish one of them. This is why Twitter is perfect for me and my addled MTV generation cronies.

So, we’ll see what happens. I don’t even know if the WordPress app will work to publish things, and I don’t even remember if I have this set up to republish to Facebook or Twitter, the real places I hang out online. Y’know, not the domain that I actually pay for.

We’ll see what happens. Who knows, maybe I’ll get comments on here and not feel like I’m just shouting in the wilderness.

Things on the horizon: Still working on GIFTED with Lee, which may be published online here as we soldier our way through the first arc. Working on two other comic projects as well, both of which (“Whig?” Really iPhone? That’s not even remotely a party anymore…) are in various stages of waiting for artists to work on them. I have high hopes though. Well, hopes anyway. SHADOW OF THE PAST has an agent looking at the full manuscript, so that’s something. It’s been almost a month so we’re gettinn close (maybe) to nervous email checking time. Finally, plans are underway for us to do a store podcast, so those of you that haven’t heard me on the panelsonpages.com podcast occasionally will get a chance to heat me talk up nerd shit in my own forum.

“Those of you who haven’t heard me…” Good lord, it 5 in the morning. No one is up this late. I shouldn’t be up this late.

Go back to bed.

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Monday Night Failball

November 24th, 2009 | by Thacher Cleveland
Posted In: General

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.

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Missed it by *that* much

November 12th, 2009 | by Thacher Cleveland
Posted In: General

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.

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NaNoWriMo: You Knew This Job Was Dangerous When You Took It

November 2nd, 2009 | by Thacher Cleveland
Posted In: General

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.

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