Writing Through Hurricanes, Grumpy Spouses, And Maniacal Bosses: Finding Your Default Self

 [The following blog was first published at mylifemybooksmyescape on  Monday Aug. 29th, 2016.]

The universe is trying to keep you from writing. It will throw all manner of distraction and chaos at you, bind you with obligations--girlfriends who cry neglect, boyfriends who threaten to step out on your monogamy, bosses who insist that your not getting the work done in 40 hours is your fault not the workload. You will try to reason with the universe, work out a mutual arrangement where you borrow three hours here and two hours there to ply your craft--but the universe is a fickle bitch that knows full well you need uninterrupted blocks of time with which to craft your tales--time to let your story ferment and then time for revisions. You need a thousand hours to write two hundred decent pages. Lie to the universe, steal the time you need, sacrifice personal pleasure and socializing, and then maybe...maybe, you will have a story of note at the end of the run.

Free Art For Profit

Vincent Van Gogh: Starving Artist

On a seemingly innocuous Website called Internships.com resides an ad titled, Artist Needed for Graphic Novel, asking for an illustrator to help develop a 90-page graphic novel for free. The average illustrator can produce one to two comic pages per day, so at minimum, this is a 45-day, full-time commitment. To non-creative types, this internship looks innocent enough--the ground floor of something potentially career enhancing. But those in the creative fields know better, and ads like this in American business are a dime a dozen. 

To paraphrase my old friend Kevin, a working illustrator with a family: "It's infuriating enough that this guy is asking to get a 90-page graphic novel developed and drawn and is calling it an 'internship'--but the real jewel comes near the end of the pitch, when he casually drops the suggestion that the book will get shown to a *gasp* Hollywood producer, but fails to stipulate whether the artist will have any profit participation in a film deal, which of course guarantees none."

My 2011 New York Comic Con Experience

Signing books at the Tor booth.

I and many fellow comic book and sci-fi/fantasy fans, made our yearly pilgrimage to the Javitz Center on October 14th to partake in New York Comic Con’s 2011 opening. What made this year different for me is that this year I was there as a published author promoting my first fantasy novel Awakenings.