The Incredible Hulk

Man…I’ve rewatched this film the last few days, catching bits and pieces of it here and there.  It’s a good, but not great, movie.  It’s not quite up there with Iron Man, although I think that’s only for two reasons.  Tony Stark is just a more fun character than Bruce Banner, and this film relies on CGI to render people (assuming you consider the Hulk and the Abomination to be people), and the tech’s just not quite there yet.

Still, I just watched the end with my brother, and he asked the same question I have…is there gonna be a sequel?  I know that there are rumors that the Hulk will play a big role in the upcoming Avengers movie, but I’d like to see another Hulk film.  They certainly set the Leader up well enough.

Just sayin’, is all.

Days off

It’s funny.  I had yesterday and today off.  My plan was simple: get a shit-ton of writing done.  Of course, that is not how my days have played out.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done some writing, but not the pages and pages that I’d intended.  I did some important career oriented stuff as well…I touched base with my soon-to-be agent so he can get me the paperwork I need to sign, and clarified what is certain to be my next important writing project, something that will likely push further back the screenplay I’m intending to write.

I think that the truth is, I need my days off to be days off to some degree.  I like to goof off, and I have been really good about not doing so much of that lately.  My productivity is definitely up.  But I’ve been going pretty much nonstop since before Comic-Con, and when we got back from San Diego, I hit the ground running, both with the tending of bar(s) as well as with the writing.  Shit, I wrote the most important thing of my career thus far, I’d say.

So I’ve been a little pooped.  I feel tired right now.  There are still changes I need to implement, disciplines I need to further apply to myself, my activity and my schedule…but I need to take my mental health days too.

Blogging

I guess it’s time to start doing this again.

Things are changing rapid fire in my life.  I’ve been changing my diet…well, mostly.  I am going out for steak tonight, but I’ve been changing my habits.  No more late night eats, no carbs after lunch.  Drinking more water.

Little to no drinking, either.  I’m on the wagon as far as most of my coworkers are concerned…no more going out for drinks after work because that’s what we do, or because it was a rough night.  I need to save my money, mind my health, and be able to get up and function in the mornings.

I’ve been much more diligent about the writing.  Getting a lot done lately.  Not all of it has been good…I wrote a particularly bad episode of this web project I’m working on, but I’m rewriting it (and rewrote an earlier episode, just to set this up better) and moving forward.  Comic book pitches and planned screenplays and web video…all are underway.

I’m doing some shit, here…making changes.

I know I need someone to share it with, I need a partner.  I think I’m ready to commit to something…to someone who is like-minded about most things and will have my back as I have theirs.  I feel a certain loneliness.  We’ll see.

Hopefully my next blog post, tomorrow, will be something less heavy and personal.  And maybe less rambling…more grammatical.  Can’t have everything, though.

In case you didn’t know…

…I hate being sick.

Starting Over…

Well, life is pretty damn strange.  

Much has happened since last I used this blog.  Hopefully I will begin using this more often.

For now, the following things are true:

1. I want to get into the Marvel Studios Screenwriting program.  I don’t yet know how I’m going to accomplish this, but I’m gonna try.

2. I want to get ONE of these damned comic ideas of mine off of the ground.  Right now, I’ve got chances to move forward with Cassie Cometstail, Rocket-Girl and the Wrench, and just maybe Prize Possessions.  What I need is for none of my art teams to shit the bed on me…I need them to do their part and keep me motivated.

3. I weigh 384.4 lbs. as of this morning.  That’s got to stop.  The goal is to drop 100.

4. I’ve been drinking too much.  Chalk it up to drowning my sorrows or to celebrating and being social.  I daresay both have been true.  But it doesn’t help my weight, my blood pressure, or my wallet.  So I have to stop.  Not entirely…but drinking for no purpose, drinking just because it’s what people are doing…gotta stop.

5. I need to eliminate my debt.  All of it.  It’s gonna get worse before it gets better, I fear.  But doing something about it must be my main focus, financially speaking.

My whole life has been overturned.  I have not yet righted it.  But I am. I will.

Battlestar Galactica – The Phenomenon

I guess by this point, it goes without saying that I am a huge nerd.

I’ve been getting more and more excited about the 4th season of Battlestar Galactica, which kicks off tomorrow night.  I mean, it is by far my favorite show on television.  I have a few genre shows that I watch regularly and enjoy: Lost, Smallville, Pushing Daisies.  Battlestar blows them all out of the water; it’s the only show to vie with The West Wing for my favorite show EVER.

But again, I’m a huge nerd.  I’m SUPPOSED to love good SF.  I mean, I’m a trekkie.  I love Star Wars. (I’m getting to Firefly, I swear…)  But this show is GOOD, I mean unrelentingly good.  It’s the sort of thing that I feel compelled to spread the gospel on.

My wife has no interest in science fiction, beyond enjoying visual spectable from time to time.  Her favorite movie is Love, Actually.  Tonight, we watched Blade Runner the Director’s Cut.  On a scale of 1 to 10, she gave it a 3, and this movie is one of the true classics of the genre. 

But I got her to watch Battlestar.  And she loves it.  Next to Oprah and Real Time with Bill Maher, which don’t count because they’re about the real world, it’s her favorite TV show.  (Pushing Daisies is probably next.  Me too, in fact.  We can’t wait for it to come back.)  I convinced her best friend to watch based on her recommendation (and my constant badgering).  The three of us were watching the first season together, and I turned around to find the girls in tears, clutching each other. 

It is a show with real resonance, with true drama.  The beauty of really good science fiction is that it allows the creator to explore the issues of the day, the stuff that divides us, but leave those divisions at the door.  Only in science fiction can the heroes use tactics like suicide bombings, the stereotypical tactic of the wild-eyed Muslim terrorist, and have an American audience open their mind to what it must feel like to walk in shoes that desperate.  To cling that utterly to an ideology. 

Unfortunately, SF is too often simply escapism.  Hey, I write comics, I thrive on escapism, but any story that takes me to a new world…which I later recognize as my own…that’s special.  It’s something to treasure.  Star Trek managed it on its best days.  The Twilight Zone was a huge success because of it…and Battlestar Galactica pulls it off routinely.

I cannot overstate how good this show is.  It’s better than anything you’re currently watching, in my opinion.  If you read my blog or journal, and you’ve never seen this show, you must.  Rent the first season and watch it.  You’ll thank me.

There are rejections…and there are rejections

It’s a truism of the writing life, and probably of ANY career in the field of entertainment, that you’re going to deal with massive amounts of rejection before you can become successful.  Lord knows, I’ve dealt with my fair share.  In fact, I was supposed to empty my rejections folder, throw away all of the old rejections I’ve gotten from various editors and companies in the publishing field, but I haven’t gotten around to it, and that’ s probably for the best.

Not too long ago, I sent a copy of Blue Beetle to a bunch of editors at a few of the more prominent comic publishers.  One editor in particular represents the feather in my cap.  This editor is the foundation behind a number of creator-owned projects that I have incredible respect for, and those comics are among the best known and best respected independent books on the market.  I sent this person a query about checking out MY creator owned stuff, specifically Planet Pantheon.  Today I got the rejection.

But what a rejection it was. I impressed this editor.  I did a “great job”, and the editor will be “definitely keeping [me] in mind.”  The strike against me is that I’m solely a writer, while this editor works almost exclusively with writer/artists.  In some ways, that feels arbitrary, but when I think about it I realize that it’s about working on and representing a singular vision, while my material will always be the product of more than one mind and more than one sensibility…because I can’t draw worth a damn.

Between this “rejection”, and the inroads I’ve made at some big companies over the last few weeks, and the number of people in the business I’ve gotten to know, and the number of talented individuals with whom I’m currently collaborating (five pencilers now, plus an inker and two colorists)…it’s impossible not to believe that my time is coming.  My time is now.

I think of people like Rick Remender and Robert Kirkman.  Their careers are like future echoes of what I hope my career will soon look like.  I don’t think I have a whole lot more rejection to slog through. 

Recovery? I think so…

Okay…I’m reluctant to go into details about how things went for the rest of Wizard World LA, other than to say that I made a lot of connections, got my work into the hands of some people with serious juice in the industry, and made some headway in terms of getting one of my books off of my computer and into the grubby little hands of readers.  So all of that is good.

I followed up with Dan DiDio, and while I didn’t get any more satisfaction exactly, I felt as though I redeemed myself somewhat, and I got some clarity as to why he didn’t seem keen on what I was pitching.  So that was good.

Most importantly, I got some motivation, and I hopefully reached an understanding with myself about what it takes to reach my goals.

 All in all, it was an EXCELLENT con, if no other reason than I replaced the Rocketo Volume 2 TPB that one of my cats peed on. 

Gah!!

I suppose that there are ways I could have screwed this day up more, but off hand, I can’t think of any.

 I finished lettering all of the Planet Pantheon pages late, late last night.  For many of them, I just have pencils (my editor got me four new inked pages this morning, but too late), but I have 15 inked pages, five of which are also colored.  Enough for a submission.  Anyway, I was seriously tired, so I decided I would sleep in and go to Wizard World late.  I had nothing pressing in terms of time.

So, my printer can’t handle massive print jobs, and I’m looking at 110 pages for five Planet ashcans.  So I decided to take my ass to Kinko’s, with all the pages loaded onto my flash drive.  Well, the Kinko’s was worthless.  It took me half an hour to get print outs of five of the pages (five times each, but still), and at that rate I was going to miss the DC panel at 4:00, so I decided to bag it and do it later at a different Kinko’s.

So, I get to the LA Convention Center, paying $20 to park somewhere that was about a 15-20 minute walk away from the con.  I got there, got on the floor, and walked around, and bumped into Dan Didio on his way to the DC panel.  I hadn’t taken the time to settle myself down, and to make a long story short, I failed to impress him.  I don’t want to make it sound worse than it is…I mean, he knows I can write already, and he told me that my relationship with Joan was a good thing that should be cultivated.  But he wasn’t buying into what I was selling.  After he got up on the panel, I realized that I’d left out the biggest selling point for the project I was discussing.  I also did manage to pique his interest just a little in something else, but I got the vibe that my idea was a little big for a newbie writer.  Sigh.

So I hit the floor and wandered around Artist’s Alley.  I found a few people I know, and hit it off with a small press publisher from San Diego, Strange Matter I think it’s called.  The main gal there is named Rebecca Hicks, and we ended up having a nice conversation about being on the fringes of the business.

I left the con early to go to a show starring one of my best friends.  She was fantastic, and the two of us went out with a bunch of past and present Hard Rockers and friends to have some dinner.  That was a good time and I left invigorated.  It was pretty late, but I decided to try a different Kinko’s and print up my stuff for tomorrow.  I promised to show the pages to a few people, and I really wanted to keep that promise.

Well, I drive from Hollywood out to the west end of the valley, and get there only to find that I left my flash drive at the OTHER Kinko’s!  Dammit!  I drive back (this one is up by Universal), but there’s no sign of it.  Wasted time, a lost flash drive, and now someone has all 22 pages of Planet Pantheon #1.

So, I went home and collected myself.  Fed the cats.  Then I burned my 22 pages to a CD, and brought it to the good Kinko’s.  From the sound of things, my print job just finished…I’m at Kinko’s as I write this.  I’m damned proud of this book, and I’m gonna show it off a little tomorrow, come hell or high water.

As for Dan DiDio…I’ve got another shot with him.  He does an informal panel on the last day of the con that I will certainly be attending.  I’ll give him the best points of my pitch some time before or after that panel, and the chips will fall where they may with that.  It’s weird for me to “need to settle down.” To be nervous.  I guess that speaks to how much this means to me.

The good thing is, I’m not at all discouraged.  I’m irritated with myself, but this has been good for me in one very fundamental way.  It’s reminded me to approach my writing career with MY BEST.  I think I’ve been on cruise control a bit, in part because this are proceeding slowly on the art front, affording me time to goof off.  I’ve slipped off my game as a result, and that’s no good.

I need to write more, and I need to be really on top of my professionalism and my preparation.  Becoming a professional comic writer is hard, harder than becoming a screenwriter according to Mark Verheiden.  I can’t let my successes or the long waits dull my edge.

So this was a really shitty day…and I’m glad I had it.

WTF???

I think I’m nervous.  I’d like to say that I have every right to be, but I’m not supposed to be that guy.  I have chosen a persona of strength, of composure, of poise, or at least that’s what I’ve tried to choose for myself.  I think I usually pull it off.

The day after tomorrow, however, I’m probably going to meet Dan DiDio to discuss working with DC Comics.  For those of you who don’t know, Mr. DiDio is the executive editor of DC Comics, the home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League, etc.  Ostensibly, we will discuss my ideas for one of their B-list characters, someone less popular than Flash or Green Lantern, but at this point more popular than Aquaman.  Martian Manhunter.  He’s a character that they’ve had a hard time spinning into successful series, but I love the character, and I see a lot of potential for telling stories.

Anyway.  That’s not what this is about.  I’ve been experiencing creative constipation lately.  My mind is still producing ideas, but I’ve had a hard time getting them down, a hard time developing them from idea to story.  I can’t figure out what my problem is, either.  I think it’s stress, but I’ve got get over that shit.

So I’m nervous.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Being cocky never works for me in poker, and this is at least as much of a gamble.  So maybe the fear will make me smart.  That’s what I tell other people when dealing with their fear, so…

Gah.