So 2009 Happened...

This year didn't exactly go as planned. Two weeks in I got sacked from the job I had for the last 5 years. I knew where I wanted to go, but for the most part I was directionless. Leads came up empty, my writing career didn't take off as fast as I wanted, and my personal life was pretty much entirely limited to dodgeball (not that I'm complaining about the latter).

But let's look at what worked:

- I had a back-up story in Witchblade #125 and a 3-page Ragman yarn in the DC Holiday Special. I wrote more, but that's all that was actually published. Yeesh, was that it?

- I edited Josh Fialkov and Noel Tuazon's excellent OGN Tumor, in addition to one of the most challenging gigs of my career, Days Missing for Archaia/Roddenberry. I'm also attached to edit Ryder on the Storm with David Hine and Time Bomb by Palmiotti and Gray, both for Radical.

Of course, the biggest news was the announcement of Broken Trinity: Pandora's Box, the six-issue miniseries I'm co-writing with Bryan Edward Hill. Alessandro Vitti and Sunny Gho are handling art, and Tommy Lee Edwards is on covers. It's a sweet package, and if this year's crop is any indication, will definitely be one of the better books on stands next year.

That's all well and good, but let's get back to the bad. Last year, one year ago to the day in fact, I was getting ready to go out on New Year's Eve with my buddy Bernard Chang (responsible for that darling caricature you can see of me all over the Internets). Suddenly, I had an idea. I won't go too much into it as I don't want to spoil my screenplay, and because the story ended up changing a lot. I wrote up a one-pager, fired it off to Bryan and Brian Buccellato, and felt like I had stumbled upon something I could really get behind. I kept setting deadlines for myself, even stupid penalties like "I won't cut my hair until I finish this screenplay."

I didn't finish. I did cut my hair. I suck.

I haven't touched the damn thing since before SDCC. Sure, I got busy with some paying work and travel and life, but there's no excuse. And that pretty much brings us to 2010.

2010 - The Year Shit Jumps Off

The New Year is just hours away. I plan to have a fun time ringing it in, and maybe even taking the rest of the city's vacation (Hollywood shuts down for two weeks around this time of year) as one of my own. But come 1/4, everything changes. Too many days in 2009 were marred by setbacks. I couldn't write, editing got in the way, money problems got in the way, I was busy hustling, etc. All of those things are just excuses. And in some of those cases, those excuses prevented me from even trying to write. And there's no excuse for that.

I'm not setting any goals I can't absolutely achieve. Saying I'm going to write a screenplay every 3 months isn't unrealistic, but there's the inherent possibility of failure built in. If I write 3, I've failed. If I write none because I get an exclusive contract writing comics and get too busy, I've failed. But no one can stop me from putting in the hours. Sitting down at the desk, cutting out distractions (the Internet, twitter, movies, etc.), and writing. A word, a page, a novel. Doesn't matter.

In 2010, I will write 7 days per week.

Not because I want to (or as is just as often the case, don't want to), but because I have to. When I got laid off, I didn't spend too much time in the dumps. Thanks to the advice of friends and inspired by all of the bad entertainment I've ever consumed, I went straight into pursuing writing as a full-time career with no safety net. That's the eventual goal. Create for a living. Right now I have to do other things to supplement my meager writing income, but I'm getting work. People pay me to do what I'm trying to do.

I already have books scheduled to be on stands for at least the first 7 months of the year, with more potentials in progress. I have artists attached to four original projects. But that's just comics. I want to work in film, tv and video games as well. And I don't expect to make money in each avenue just yet, but I still have ambitions. So what it's going to take to monetize all of them, as well as give me the creative cache and brand recognition, is writing 7 days a week.

My co-writer Bryan is a fantastic role model. He's a workhorse, and he churns stuff out. His initial ideas are generally better than my (seldom) finished works. And that's because he's written out his bad stuff. He just keeps writing and pushing, and his work reflects that. Another friend of mine knows him and is trying to write full-time, and he's using B as a model to pattern himself after. He goes nowhere without a laptop, and he writes as often as he can.

Since Bryan and I have so much in development, I also need to keep up with his output. The scales are tipping in his favor during the tail end of the year thanks to my lackluster output, but I'm bringing it back to 50-50 soon.

Usually I make a lot more proclamations and resolutions heading into a new year. I look back at things and have a lot of regret. I'm not doing that. I didn't write enough this year, so next year I'm going to write more. And the year after that, I'll write even more, and so on and so forth. Whatever it takes for the longterm goal.

2010 appears to be the year things take off. I'm not going to let myself down by not coming through. There's probably more I want to do, but enough talk. I've got writing to do.

GeekWeek Has Arrived

GeekWeek is now a part of the Internet.

What is GeekWeek? Glad you asked.

For those too lazy to click the link, it's all the pop-culture stuff you're interested in one place, well-organized, with lots of original and awesome voices and exclusive content you can't get anywhere else. The beta site is live and is already better than some sites that have been around for years. That's just how they do it.

I'll be blogging over there (for now I'm mainly posting sports stuff) from time to time. I'll post links here to anything related to my own work or that I think is clever, but all the stuff you've come to expect here (TGIM, my frustrations with the industry, general blather, etc.) will still be here at AI central.

Bookmark it, read it, love it, and tell your friends.

Updates! Press! More!

I've been behind. There's a million reasons, but I'll be blogging better in the new year, just maybe not the way you've come to expect. More details on that over the coming weeks. For now, let's do a quick recap combined with some mild whoring. If I don't plug it here, how else will my mother know when to run to the comic shop...

I returned from the icy tundra that was Thanksgiving in Ohio to much nicer weather in LA, got a bit of work done, and then have been largely sluggish when it comes to writing ever since. Been rolling on a few things (comics and film) with the immensely talented Bryan Edward Hill, and we just secured an artist for a new project that should make it a no brainer sale. Now all I need is more time in the day to hit him back with some thoughts on this other story.

Broken Trinity: Pandora's Box has taken up the bulk of my time of late between scripts and idle thoughts, not to mention interviews. Here's the latest on that:

Opening Up Pandora's Box - Part 1

Opening Up Pandora's Box - Part 2

Top Cow Opens a Pandora's Box

Before that hits stores in February, January sees my The Darkness one-shot, Shadows and Flame with art by Jorge Lucas and colors by Felix Serrano on shelves.

CBR interview

Newsarama interview

Last week saw my first writing work published by DC Comics with a Ragman yarn in the DC Holiday Special 2009. Newsarama's Best Shots crew gave it the following review:

Wow, a Ragman story. You don't come across these much. I love how this goes back and forth between the story of the Maccabees and Ragman handing out some street justice. Rob Levin really delivered on the script and Brian Ching just nailed the art.

Look for that in shops everywhere, and special thanks to Michael Atiyeh, who has done some of the best work of his career on this short story. Mike, I owe you one...

I also cut my hair, proving I lied about my promise not to cut my hair until I finished my screenplay. I didn't finish it, but 6.5 months worth of reminding wasn't doing anything to get me going. A challenge from The Hill Administration will hopefully get me on the right track there, but that's a post for another time.

I'll be better about everything soon, it's just been crazy times and I've felt my creativity sapped at times, so I need to put it into work instead of wasting my time writing about who knows what on the blog. Money's still a little tight and there are no new checks in sight...

That's all the plugging I can stomach for right now. If you're still reading, thank you. 2010 really feels like it's shaping up to be a break-out year for me. If you're curious as to why, stay tuned to this space and the twitter.

TGIM - Free(-ish) Wi-Fi

On the road working from my grandmother's house, and unsecured Wi-Fi is a hot commodity in Ohio it would appear. I have to be upstairs, in the farthest corner of the house. I thought I had found a solid connection when I went to load up this blog... And it was dead. I've found another connection but I'm hanging on for dear life right now, hoping I'll have enough juice (and as I type that sentence it's gone again) to update this post.

I downloaded a free Wi-Fi app for my iPhone that tells me of free hotspots based on location. I knew about the Panera down the street, but no one else will eat there (they're all dieting) and I don't have money to go on my own. The Ohio coffee culture isn't the same as in LA, so I'd likely be the only person sitting there not drinking or eating, taking a solo meeting with his laptop.

I'll figure something out. For now, TGIM for the secret corners of grandmother's houses where you can for a scarce moment connect with the outside world.

P.S. Has anyone had any problems downloading jpegs from your iPhone email (CMYK) and then trying to export them into iPhoto, but it says it didn't recognize them? Not having WiFi I can connect both the iPhone and MacBook to, it's increasingly hard to pull random files back and forth.

Let's Just Say It

Last night's episode of Sons of Anarchy was a "disappointment."

You'll note my use of quotes above. I watched the episode (at 1am, probably not a good idea), and just couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't what I wanted given the events of last week and where I thought/wanted last night to go. But then I took a second and thought about everything I'd just seen and my jaw fell open a bit. The episode was pretty damn good, just not in the way I expected.

I think it's safe to say, when Sons has an episode as they did last night that really did two things - delayed gratification for those of us wanting bloodshed, and spent a LOT of time with its characters - they are setting the bar too high for television. And if you watched the promo for next week, everything I wanted to happen last night is going down, and it's going to be bigger than I imagined.

If you're not watching Sons of Anarchy, there's either something wrong with you or you don't have cable. The latter I can excuse, but just have one word of advice. DVDs... The former, get with it people. I've only seen Season 1 of Mad Men, which I thought was very solid, but it doesn't hold a candle to the epic build that has been Sons of Anarchy over the past 2 seasons (with 2 episodes remaining). I can't think of another scripted drama series that's currently on the air and coming anywhere close.

I also spent about 15 minutes on the phone yesterday just talking about how great the series is. Kurt Sutter and company, today we salute you for bringing it week in and week out. Long live Samcro.

Bang on my roof, why don't you...

And that's what the workers above me did, from about 9am until around 4:45pm.

I answered emails (I think I checked them about 62 times today), went to a meeting, and a had a call. But I couldn't get any writing done with that damn racket going on. I tried and I tried, but to no avail. I thought the people above me were noisy, but them moving out and carpeters (carpeteers?) were even worse. Hopefully they finished today and won't come back ever. Every room I tried to hide in they found me.

I don't like a day spent working in which nothing gets done. Makes every project feel like an albatross.

TGIM - Pushing Through

Some days work kicks your ass. You're not blocked, but you can't find a rhythm and that means you're just plodding along, working around problems instead of through them. And nothing ever seems to get any closer despite how much time you've already put in.

At 7:30 pm you tell your editor that though you were shooting for today, you want some extra time to make it spiffy for tomorrow and solve a few little hurdles. You go off for a bit, enjoying some recreation and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Then you get back to work.

At 1am, you tell your editor that the whole thing has started to unravel. You're not asking for help, you're just letting him know that as close as you thought you were, you may as well start from page 1.

You break it down on paper. Find the essentials, arrange in rough order. See if anything crops up with distractions limited. Then you find an empty breakdown doc template and fire it up. You do the same thing here, with more emphasis on structure. You're getting warm.

Finally, at 1:37 am you finish typing. You've still got one major, gigantic gaping flaw in your story, but you're feeling much better. The story has returned (along with your mojo), and you tell your editor a minute later that all is right with the world. Because sometimes all you need is a sounding board or someone to vent to, and you don't get no lip at 1:30 in the morning.

That was basically my day, with a lot more editing thrown in the mix early. And to think, if at any point I had stopped, I might not be a couple hours work from getting this treatment revised, sent off, and a miniseries in production.

Moral: Even when it feels like you're not making any progress or doing terrible work, push through. Keep pushing until you get a breakthrough, because it's bound to come at some point, when you simplify or make things complex. It's out there, waiting for you to find it.

Say, don't I have a screenplay that could use that same sage advice...?