Wow, I know I like to say “Feast or famine” a lot to describe my professional life but jeezum crow give me a break.
Currently: gearing up for this season’s news at my regular job. From September through December, I’ll be producing a four-minute video every week. That’s my mornings right there. Then shows Friday and Saturday night. 7 to 8 evenings per month running audio for the live broadcasts of various city functions (though the guy I replaced on these is out of the hospital and may be easing back into those duties).
That’s my basic work template. I stay busy. I get bills paid, sometimes even on time. But I’m always looking for more, because, hey. Things need doing. Dental work. Car’s eleven years old. I haven’t had a check-up in 14 years. Home repairs I am in no way qualified to even attempt.
You know. Life’s Rich Pageant.
The last couple of years haven’t been good for my workflow. The beginning of the year marked an upswing when I contracted to help write a book that was an ethics training course disguised as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. I eased back into prose writing, eventually wondering why I wasn’t writing for myself anymore. The major problem being I don’t want to write something that’s not in at least some respect original, and I’m pretty dry at this point. There’s the germ of a novel I’ve been trying to tease out for more than a decade and it just ain’t coming. So I decided I’m going to do the obvious thing, and swing at it for NaNoWriMo, and see what happens.
Well, what happens is that work starts coming out of the walls.
First, the people for whom I wrote that ethics novel are gearing up for something later in the year (or early next year) which would involve writing an episodic short novel entirely int he second person and avoiding personal pronouns. I like a challenge as much as the next guy, but that really sounds like some thought experiment you read about on Boing-Boing.
Then, the guy who gave me my start in video production has an interesting idea he wants to run by me, and yes, it is interesting, and yes, it is something I’d be interested in doing. The idea is developing rapidly, beyond my ability to keep up with it and still keep my regular juggler’s balls in the air. He calls, wondering why I’m not inundating him with excited e-mails.
This morning: I had agreed to do a small role in an ongoing film project in which my wife is involved. One of the other actors has gotten hospitalized, and they need someone to do the role this Sunday. Am I available? Am I a quick study? Can I do this?
I’m very tired. The wife’s cat has made it his hobby to see how loud a noise can be produced at 4:00am, with whatever props are available. I need to be digitizing video, but my eyes won’t focus. There are many things I would rather be doing right now. Memorizing lines for Sunday are an “A” priority right now, but so is an excited e-mail or two. Sleep would be good, probably with the Horrible Mutant Cat safely locked in a padded cell. I’m fooling myself, however, as I what I really want to be doing is continuing my re-read of Powers.
Powers is a comic book (me, reading comics. Fancy that!) by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming that I got hooked on about issue 6 or so after passing it over repeatedly because I found Oeming’s art “too cartoony”. Frankly, I still do, but I can’t imagine the book without it now, and his panel layouts are often incredible. But what has always made it for me is Bendis’ dialogue. I love his dialogue, and people may whine about his tendency to “decompress” stories, but bah phooey on them.
Powers is a police procedural taking place in a city where there are super-heroes and villains; our protagonists are two homicide detectives who specialize in cases where people with powers wind up dead. The series has twists and turns a-plenty – some of which, predictably, pissed off readers – and now it’s being turning into a TV series. During the run-up to that, the book has come out less and less frequently, so it’s time to re-visit it.
That seems to be the mood I’m in, once more: re-reading an entire series and seeing what I get from it, years after the fact. I did this a few years ago with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Scott McCloud’s Zot! and Jeff Smith’s Bone. Those are all amazing, and I got a lot more out of enjoying them as a whole rather than serialized story. After Powers it looks like I’ll be revisiting Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher, which is, shall we say, unique, and I’m now crawling through used bookstores and my collection to drag together a complete run of James Robinson’s Starman.
After the movie-watching orgy of T-Fest, I’ve found it hard to get it up for another movie, but last Saturday I finally got to see Troll Hunter, which is the best Blair Witch Project I’ve ever seen. Comparisons between the two are going to be more than inevitable, but Troll Hunter has humor and likable characters on its side. That and the fact that you get to see something, but that’s just being mean about Blair Witch‘s zero budget. It would probably be nicer to call Troll Hunter a better Cloverfield.
Anyway. Rather be home right now reading funnybooks. But when hasn’t that ever been the case?
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