It's Zomburbia release day -- let me give you something

My book hits store shelves today. This brings up huge feelings for me that will probably lead to tears (mine) if I talk about it. Instead, let me send you a free something.

I'm doing readings in both Portland and Salem for the book's release, and folks will also be able to get their books signed at these readings, if they want. But I don't have any other events planned right now, so how might a person who is geographically-challenged get a signature from me for their book? With these lovely bookplates that I have designed and had made which I will send to you free of charge. All you need to do is ask for it.

I'm especially happy with this piece because I got my buddy, Todd Demong, to supply me with an original zombie sketch. Todd is the artist with whom I created the comic 100 Girls, and he's truly amazing. Please don't hold it against him that he's Canadian.

You want one, right? Well, all you have to do is email me your meat-world address using this here email address and I'll sign one of these bad boys and put it in the mail to you.* Just like that. Once you get it, just place the sticker in your book and you'll have something that book-selling site like AbeBooks considers just as valuable as an original signed book. Not that you'd ever consider selling your copy of Zomburbia, right? Right?

*I think I'm going to have to restrict this to North America only as postage anywhere else would probably break me. Sorry, four-fifths of the world's population...

What's been happening?

Since last we spoke, some stuff has happened. Some of that stuff took up so much of my time that I failed to update this blog. For instance, I finished up the draft of Zombified, which is the sequel to Zomburbia. I finished it, I got it to my agent, my agent gave me notes, I made changes based on those notes and sent it off to my editor. Just yesterday, I heard from my editor. She accepted the manuscript with no major revisions. All the notes she had will be incorporated along with the copy editor's notes on the production draft. The process I just described took up a good chunk of May and all of June.

I may go into more detail about this process at some point, but maybe not. I'm not being coy, I'm genuinely trying to suss out how I feel about what I just went through and how much I want to share. So, you'll have to wait and see, I guess.

What else? Well, despite the fact that the manuscript was just accepted yesterday, there's now a cover for Zombified. It was photographed by Blake Morrow, the same guy who shot the cover for Zomburbia, and I think it's just as great. Ready to see it?

Terrific, right?

Zombified is already in Kensington's catalog and it has a pub date in January. Believe me when I tell you that I'll keep you informed as that date gets closer.

And I'll also be doing some promotion-type stuff for Zomburbia as well. Watch this space later in the week for more on that.

That's all for now, I suppose.

Man, my blogging skills are rusty...

Words, words, words

I've really had my head down lately in an attempt to get some stuff done before Baby 2.0 arrives at the end of June/beginning of July. Let's see, there's homework to be done (two papers to write, a bunch of books to read for the next residency); I've started to meet with a friend whom I hope will be the producer of the short film I plan to make next semester, and I've been trying to get a lot done on the web comic I'm trying to get off the ground. The novel I started working on is going to sit and marinate for a while. Something had to give way and that seemed like the easiest thing to set aside.

The web comic is really taking shape on paper. I've never worked this quickly on a comics project. Last week I wrote a pitch document that included character descriptions, a description of the world and the general shape of the story. I also plotted out and scripted the first chapter of the book (26 pages!) and got all of that to the artist. Best of all, he likes what I've written and didn't ask for any changes. This is a rare and magical occurrence. Over the last two days I've worked out a very basic plot of the rest of the first book (in a perfect world this will be a story told in three volumes). I wanted to work far ahead on this project because come the arrival of the baby, I'll probably have to set it aside for a while. I want the artist to have lots of material to work with while I settle into my new life. Also, the more material there is, the easier it will be for me to hit the ground running when I get back to the project. I think I'm at a place where I can leave it alone for a while and concentrate on homework.

Thanks for indulging me and my sporadic updates. As a reward, have a video of Jenny Owen Youngs performing one of my favorite of her songs live. Take it away, Jenny.

In which the novel is discussed and the title is revealed

I have a habit of not talking about what I'm writing. There are two parts to this. 1) I often feel like talking too much about something I'm writing robs it of a lot of energy. Sometimes I can talk so much about something that I feel no desire to actually get it on paper. And 2) I don't want to jinx any of the projects I'm working on by mentioning them. If there's something I'm excited about and mention it to a lot of people, I don't want to have to go back to this people later and explain that it's not going to happen should some disaster befall the whole process. I've been burned by both of those in the past. Or, perhaps I should say, I have burned myself with both of those in the past.

Such was the case with my novel. Which, for the past few months, I have been calling simply, "The novel." I didn't want to mention too many specifics here as I wrote it. And now that a draft is done and some people have asked about it, I want to talk about it in more detail, but it feels really awkward. Like when you want to bring up something in casual conversation, maybe something you are really proud of -- some accomplishment -- but there's no graceful way to steer the conversation that way and so you just end up bringing it up and you feel like an ass, but you just can't help yourself. Or maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I know that no one mentioned novels, but hey, let me tell you about the novel I just wrote! For starters, it has a title: Zomburbia. It's a YA novel. Here's the elevator pitch:

Zomburbia is about a smart-ass sixteen-year-old girl trying to navigate burgeoning first love in a world infested by zombies.

That log line is a work-in-progress, but it's nearly there. Also, I am very proud of myself for having spelled "burgeoning" correctly on the first attempt.

So. A zombie novel. I resisted it for a long time. I know that zombies are everywhere right now and that makes me think that they are about to disappear. I did think about something else as a first novel, but everything I thought of interested me less than Zomburbia. Nothing inspired me in the same way. So I decided to go with my gut and hope I was doing the right thing.

The world of Zomburbia is different than other zombie stories in that the world never ground to a halt because of the zombie infestation. Of course, they were never able to get rid of the undead either, so now they're a threat, but one that everyone is familiar with.

Here's a little bit about where the idea came from. This may be of interest to exactly no one, but what the hell. I live in Salem, Oregon. Salem is about an hour south of Portland. There was a time when my wife and I drove back and forth to Portland a lot. We'd see friends, catch a rock show, go to eat, see plays. Portland is a nice place to go and experience some culture that isn't available in Salem. On one of these trips, I sat in the passenger seat and just watched the scenery roll by. The area between Salem and Portland is open fields for the most part. Agricultural land, and not all of it along the highways is developed. Sometimes it's easy to watch that empty land roll by and imagine that there's not a single person alive out there. I was thinking that very thing on that trip and, as is my wont, I started imaging why the land would be empty. Naturally, for me anyway, zombies were the first thing to come to mind. One of the things that's always bothered me about zombie movies is the way civilization just grinds to a halt. I think that humans have overcome way worse things in its history than the dead returning. (Before everyone rushes to tell me about it, I am aware of a film out there called Fido, which posits the same kind of world. Friends told me about it after I had the general outline to Zomburbia done and I was willing to talk about it. But I have purposefully avoided watching the movie because I didn't want to be contaminated by it.) I started to imagine a world where zombies had come back, but that still functioned. What would that world look like? How would you live in it? And then I imagined a bored teenager living in this world. She would think of zombies as just another nuisance in her day to day life right along with boys, her friends, her teachers and parents. Zombies might be more deadly than any of those things, but they're still just one more hassle to try and avoid as she goes about her business.

And after I knew what kind of girl this still unnamed character was, the story just sort of came to me all in a flash. Her, her friends and her dad, I knew what kinds of characters they were. I knew the broad outlines of the story. I knew what she would have to overcome by the novels end. I knew practically all of it. That sort of inspiration has never come to me before, and I remember getting home that night and writing away in one of my notebooks trying to capture all of it. It's at this point that I have to admit that I did rework that original outline. If I was given the story from A to Z, I actually used everything from, say, A to W. I changed the ending, made the girl more sympathetic and less of an outright psychotic. She was pretty dark in the original and I brightened her up a bit.

And I think I'll stop there. I don't want to discuss too much more. I'm going to start rewriting the book next month and so things might change, but the basic world and concept will stay the same.

So, if you've been wondering what I was working on for the last five months, there you go.

*The picture that goes with this post is a still from the seminal zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead, written directed by George Romero.

Numbers, November 13 edition.

For these keeping score at home, here are the numbers.

Daily word count: 1,750 (1,031 novel, 719 story)

Monthly word count: 16,333

Novel word count: 85,593

Getting it done getting it done getting it done.

I wish someone had told me this a long time ago...

Uncle Ira Glass reveals the ugly truth. If you are engaged in any kind of creative endeavor, then you will spend a lot of your time making shit. And you have to go through that shitty phase before you get to the point where you are creating good stuff. Stuff of which you can be proud. Ira will tell you the long version. This is worth listening to:

It's my two-day, two-city world wide tour!

Gear School II is being released today and it seemed like a good time to remind everyone that I'll be doing a couple of signing's this weekend.

Saturday, October 2, 12-5

Tony's Kingdom of Comics

5420 River Rd N

Keizer, OR

(503) 463-1142

In addition to me signing and straining the limits of my interpersonal skills, the Corrosive Comics gang will be there; the local 501st Stormtrooper garrison will be on hand; we'll be collecting food for the Keizer food bank and we'll hold a drawing for Shiner's hospitals.

Sunday, October 3, 1-3

Cosmic Monkey Comics

5335 NE Sandy Blvd

Portland, OR

(503) 517-9050

This time you just get me, but if you rub my belly and offer me a treat I'll do tricks!

Quixotic

I have been thinking a lot about digital comics. That is, making digital comics. A little more than a year ago I was gearing up to take one of two paths. I thought that I would either do what was necessary to create and sustain an online comics anthology. Four stories with four different artists. Or I would go to grad school and work toward an MFA. Well, I got accepted to one of the best creative programs in the country so I decided to put the digital comics idea on hold for a while.

But now I'm wondering if it would be possible to do something a bit more limited in scope. What about doing a single story that would update once a week. Say, four-to-six pages every week with a few skip weeks built in. I'd need to find an artist who could handle that production load. And who wouldn't mind working free for a while. The way I see it, one could post free weekly updates and then either try and attract a publisher once enough material was extant, or one could try and self publish. Or, hell, maybe even use a direct-to-print service like Lulu.

Others have done it. Warren Ellis has been writing FreakAngels for a few years now. Though, to be fair, he's fucking Warren Ellis, and I am not (it should be mentioned that it was a post on Ellis's site that made me start to once again consider this ill-considered path). Let's see, the guys over at Penny Arcade do it, R. Stevens does it with his Diesel Sweeties. And those are just the few that come to mind, I know there are others doing it, too. So why not me and whatever poor schmuch who decides to hitch his wagon to my nonexistent star?

Tempting, right? But wait, we could also share copyright and any profits this project would generate. That's something, too, right?

I know this requires more thought, but I feel like the bare bones are there. And I know that I've been threatening this for a couple of years now, but I really do feel like the next comics project I work on will be published to the web. It feels like the right thing to do.

Gear School short Trailer

Below is the trailer for the Gear School short film produced by Bamf! Prodecciones. Bamf! are a subsidiary of Estudio Fenix. And Estudio Fenix are the studio that handled the art on the comics version of Gear School. Bamf! are getting ready to start submitting the short to film festivals around the world. I'll be watching with interest to see how the film does.

The same spirit

Originally posted 12/09:

I'm thinking back on the year, which is not something I'm prone to do--the end of December seems a relatively arbitrary to for self-assessment. I guess I prefer to keep a running tab on my successes and failures. But after talking with Todd Demong this week, I looked back and discovered that it was sort of a crappy year professionally. Todd assured me that this was fine, and that one only really grows and learns when one fails--that successes teach you almost nothing. Viewed in that way, this year must have taught me a ton.

The same day I talked to Todd I was reading some poems by Walt Whitman (yeah, I read poetry, wanna make something of it?) and I came across these lines:

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall—battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.

And Whitman knew a thing or two about losing the day, you know?

I'm attempting a few things in the new year. I suppose I'll have more opportunities to succeed or fail.

I know which I'm hoping for.

UPDATE: It seems like things are holding steady since I first posted this, nearly a year ago. Successes and failures and things I'm doing to improve myself and make the successes happen more frequently. I'll write more about all of this soon, I'm sure.

Profit and Loss

First, let me say that Profit and Loss would be a righteous name for a super hero duo. A sort of corporate-themed vigilante team. "We're here to help investors and creditors determine the past performance of their enterprise, predict future performance, assess the capability of generating future cash flows, and clean up the streets!" It would have sort of a Watchmen/Dark Knight feel to it.

Anyway, I believe I've mentioned costing as it relates to comics before in this blog, and I thought I might go into it in some more detail. This may only be of interest to those looking to get into comics. And maybe not even them. This will be a "how the sausage is made" type entry.

At any publisher, your project is going to go through the costing process before it is given the go ahead for publication. Or more likely, your project is going to go through the costing process and there it will die an unceremonious death mourned only by you and, if you're lucky, your editor. It's not a kind process and, given the current state of publishing and the economy, I can only imagine that it's become even uglier than I remember it. For the sake of example I am going to talking about my memories of the costing process at Dark Horse Comics. 1) Because I worked there in the editorial department for a time and 2) because I've had a book go through the process there myself.

Once you have convinced your editor that your idea for a comic is a good one (no mean feat and perhaps worthy of an entry of its own), your editor will take the idea to the Costing Committee. The Costing Committee is made up of a mix of senior editors, financial people, marketing and advertising. The editor will give to the Costing Committee any relevant material that you have given him: your pitch document, art, etc. And the first thing the Costing Committee does is have a Profit and Loss sheet (P&L) made up for your project.

This part of the process is sort of like magic to me, but the individual making up the P&L plugs lots of bits of data into a spread sheet. The creative cost, the parameters of which were discussed between you and your editor; the cost of producing a book of a given page count; whether the book is color or black and white; and etc. And all of these things are broken down into print runs of various size. This tells the costing committee, for example, that a color book that is 120-pages long with a print run of 5,000 copies will likely sell X number of copies in a year and so will ear Y number of dollars. If X and Y are high enough numbers, then your book will be published. In today's publishing climate, I'm guessing that X and Y being high enough is becoming increasingly rare.

I should mention some more about the creative costs and the the discussions that go on between you and your editor. Your editor is by no means an accountant, but he has a fairly good idea (or should) of what kinds of budgets he can get approved. And that budget figure is going to be different depending on if you are just starting out (a low figure) or are an established creator who's name on a project means a guaranteed level of profit (potentially quite high. And this discussion between the two of you should be a back and forth and you have to understand that when your editor will not give in to your every request, he is doing so not because it pleases him to disappoint you (at least that's not the only reason), but because he knows what sorts of budgets are being approved by the costing committee and how much chance of success your project has of going through at a given dollar amount.

You may wonder why I'm thinking so much about the costing process. I will be honest: it's not just for your education and edification, but because I have a book currently going through the process. Writing this entry is helping to remind myself that the process takes time and that there is, ultimately, nothing I can do to speed it along. I just have to hope that the numbers my editor and I (and my co-creators) agreed upon are ones the committee will find agreeable.

I'll keep you posted as the situation develops.

I feel like I don't have much to say lately. A lot of things in process. At stages that aren't that exciting to talk about (because I know that my readers have come to expect pure excitement from this blog).

One thing I should mention is that I got a part-time job. I'm now working as a projectionist at Salem Cinema, Salem's only independent theater. It specializes in indy and art-house movies. So far, except for the time it takes me away from Melissa and Oscar, it's a lot of fun. But it's helping to make ends meet, so it's hard to complain.

I've never worked a projector before, so it's been interesting learning the skill. I like machinery and the chance to get my hands inside of the projectors is great. And I think I take more satisfaction in having threaded the film properly than I likely should. Learning a new skill makes my head feel clear, which is nice. It's been a while since I learned anything new.

On the writing front, like I said, things are in process. Dalton is being considered for publication, which always turns into a hurry-up-and-wait situation (and I'm reminded that I need to write an email to the editor looking at it with my and Todd's ideas about publication--an email that will likely kill any chances the project has of moving forward). Todd is drawing an eight-page short story, but, because he has a day job, it's going to be a while before that's done. I need to start designing an actual web site for my self, but I am lazy and will probably put that off until... who knows when. I sent a query letter off last week to a literary agent, but that's another situation where I just have to wait for a response. Finally, I should be looking for artists for a couple of new projects, but with so many things up in the air, I'm reluctant to start anything new.

Maybe I'll just sit back and try and finish a book. Something I haven't been able to do in more than a week.

Stay tuned for more thrilling posts once things develop.

The awful truth

I suspect that if you read this blog, you are either a close personal friend of mine, or you are interested in comics and, perhaps, would even like to make comics some day. If you are in the latter category, I have some advice for you: get on twitter. Then, start following the plethora of comics professionals who post there. Mixed in with the usual banal offerings -- i.e., what folks had for lunch, their opinions about the latest bit of pop culture phenomenon, etc. -- these folks will often dispense pearls of wisdom related to the business and art of comics.

To whit: Dark Horse Comics editor, and my former boss, Scott Allie, replied to someone asking how a writer can break into the comics business. I liked the advice so much, I decided to steal it.

Here's what Scott has to say on the subject:

Start with the small press or online. Comics writers can't know how to write comics until ...

... they've seen their stuff drawn, even if only badly. I wanna see your stuff drawn, and know you've seen it drawn ...

...before I take your pitches seriously. So get some comics done, learn it that way, and then you'll be ready. Then ...

...show me or Marvel or DC the best of that, and even if the art's weak, we can assess your skills. If it's great ...

...it can find an audience through the web or the small press, and put you in demand even before you're pitching to me.

Or start a hugely successful rock band.


Scott is the editor of Hellboy and Buffy and other very successful comics and he knows of what he speaks. He has a lot to teach folks who''l take the time to listen. As my former boss, he taught me that comics will break your heart, but that one should only cry if one won't be seen by anyone else.

Good times.

Things I'm thinking about that are most likely unrelated to one another.

Item 1: I have what I suspect is an annoying habit. Well, more than one certainly but just one that relevant to the discussion here. I don't like to talk about projects in any detail until they have actually come to fruition. On the other hand, I like to mention when I have finished my end of a project. This coyness on my part may very well be infuriating for the reader. For that I apologize.

However! I just finished writing an eight-page script for an unspecified project and I sent it of to Todd Demong. When he's done drawing it we are going to see about entering it into an on-line comics competition. This is something that Todd and I have talked about doing together for going on five ears now. It's nice to finally start writing it; to start seeing it come alive. If this project moves forward from this point, I will definitely write about it in more detail in this space.

I should mention that collectors of the original 100 Girls comics series may find a clue to what project I'm talking about in the letters columns contained therein. There.

Item 2: I can become obsessive about things. Those who know e well may not be surprised by this. Authors and film makers, books, movies, television shows. I can watch certain films again and again. I can listen to certain songs endlessly on repeat. A couple of years ago, I found some videos by the band Ok Go and, for a few months, I had to watch those videos at least once every day.

And now these. A pair of videos by the band The Decemberists. A band I've paid very little attention to before now. I even have one of their albums, but it never grabbed my attention. But a week or so ago, I was on youtube and stumbled across the video for "O Valencia", and quickly followed it up with the video for "Sixteen Military Wives". And I've been watching them compulsively ever since. I don't even feel the need to watch any other of The Decemberists videos. I just need to watch these two over and over again. Soon the spell will be broken and I'll leave them behind and move on to some new obsession. And I won't even remember what it was that appealed to me so strongly about these little gems. But for now, here they are. Let's watch together, shall we?

And a bit of useless trivia. In the video for "Sixteen Military Wives", Ezra Holbrook, songwriter and lead singer of one of my favorite local bands, Dr. Theopolis, shows up at the 4:10 mark. He's sitting behind the drum and wearing a light blue sweater vest. Perhaps that fact will enhance your enjoyment of this video as it did mine.

EDIT: It was pointed out to me by two faithful readers that the video of "O Valencia" I chose wouldn't play. That has now been fixed.

The not-so-Sacred Moleskine

The image at Left is from my notebook. The Sacred Moleskine, as Jim Woodring calls his. Though mine is not nearly as sacred as Mr Woodring's.

I have the artistic ability of a woodland creature -- most likely some sort of rodent; a squirrel, perhaps -- but for the last couple of years I've found it a great help to sketch out pages after they've been plotted but before I script them. I find and fix a lot of problems that way. For instance, as in the example shown, there is way too much dialog. There is always too much dialog in my initial outlines and scripts. My characters cannot shut up and I find I must cut their speeches with a ruthlessness that would make Gordon Lish proud.

Also, even at the size I draw them, I can figure out when I'm asking for something that is impossible to draw. This often means that something I want to be one panel needs to become two. And I get a good sense of the rhythm of a page with these thumbnails.

All in all, I think that scripts have become easier to write, and the scripts themselves are better, since I've started sketching. And some day, when I'm a big star, those sketches are gonna be worth something! Right?

In which a terrible discovery is made!

I was so impressed with myself today. And then, not.

I got away for a little writing time this afternoon/evening and I had one goal: to write a first draft outline for a short story that Todd and I want to do together. Normally if I have one goal I work on everything else under the sun (including the all-important task of checking facebook and twitter every five damned seconds to make sure they haven't updated). But today I remained focused and got the work done. After a few false starts.

I was starting from scratch. This is a brand new set of characters and a new story. I wrote a draft of something for these characters months ago, but when I showed Todd he didn't like it and thought it should go in a new direction. I didn't know how to do that so I set it aside for a bit. I've been feeling for the last few days that it was time to bring it out and work on it again. My brain had done one of those things where it was apparently thinking about the story without seeming to and I had some new ideas.

But being altogether new, it took a few attempts to get comfortable with the characters and the situation. And the tone. The tone is mostly what Todd was concerned with, so I concentrated on that. After a while, however, the words started coming pretty easily and then it stopped feeling like work and just felt fun. Always a good sign. And I did it. An outline with a beginning middle and end, something that would be easy to turn into a script should Todd say he liked. Yea, me.

Except. Later as I thought about, it started to dawn on me that I hadn't really written chapter one of something; I had written chapter negative one. The chapter that happens right before the action should start; lots of exposition and characterization and talking, talking, talking. My characters love the sounds of their own voices. Which is totally different than me, by the way.

Anyway, now I have to scrap what I wrote today, or at least set it aside and use it later down the line. Now I have to write an entirely new first chapter. Or, I suppose, I could lower my standards. I could do that, right?

No? Okay, I'll be over here bitterly writing a new piece...

Talking therapy

I feel like I've been experiencing a fairly low ebb emotionally. Not that I'm going to unload on you folks, but I thought you might like to know why I haven't been posting a lot on this here blog. Everyday, at least once a day, I have a I-am-going-to quit-comics rant and then I somehow find myself furiously scribbling new plans for comics I could do. I am nothing if not wishy-washy.

Something that always helps is to talk to other comics folks. Last weekend I visited with Greg Means at the Portland Zine Symposium. Greg edits the excellent comics anthology, Papercutter. If you have not read it, you must. Last year's Best of Comics anthololgy included two stories originally published in Papercutter. Greg and I commiserated about the comics biz and he is always interested in what I'm working on, which helps a lot. Hello, Greg.

Earlier this week, maybe Wednesday, I had a phone conversation with Todd Demong. I had many suggestions and questions for Todd and I received a satisfactory response or answer to every one. Hearing exactly what I want also makes life easier. We have now set a few things in motion that, should they come to fruition, will be very exciting. For now they must remain vaguely annoying because I don't like to talk about things in any detail until they are real. So there.

I haste to add here that a Dalton short story by Todd and I should be up next week at either darkhorse.com or myspace.com/darkhorsepresents. I will, of course, alert the faithful once it is live.

Finally, this evening, I had a great phone conversation with comics writer Dwight MacPherson. I've never met or spoken with Dwight before but we have, for maybe the last year or so, been communication via twitter. Re-reading that last sentence makes me shale my head. Anyway, Dwight is the writer of too many things to mention, and a super nice guy, and very easy to talk to despite having almost diametrically opposing political views from myself. I think it's because Dwight is one of those rare humans who actually speaks his mind and hopes that everyone else will, too. It's refreshing. Dwight was giving me advice about one of the aforementioned plots I am hatching with Todd. Talking with Dwight gives me hope we can be successful.

So, yeah, for the moment the pendulum feels like it's on an upswing. I hope it last a while. At least long enough to finish half the things I've started.

The points, they are bulleted...

• Today marks the last day of visitors at our home. More than a week of guests. For someone as hermit-like as myself, it was a little hard there at the end.

• One of these guests was my mother-in-law. She watched Oscar for a week and cleaned our house and made us dinners and generally made life very easy for us. Just so that you understand I am not complaining.

• She also paid a very nice young man to mow and weed our entire yard. Lord, there is no way we can repay her.

• The day today was capped off with a mad dash to the Portland airport because our friend TM left her wallet at our house and she would be unable to board her flight without it. It was a lot like every romance movie you've ever seen. Minus the romance.

• This week I did manage to letter the Dalton short story that Todd and I are doing for Myspace/DHP. I am happy with the results and hope the editor is as well.

• I realize that I need to get serious about writing. Is there a pill I can take to make this happen?

• I purchased much music this weekend via the Interwebs: albums or EPs by Arcade Fire, Jenny Owen Youngs, Au Revoir Simone, The Pixies, They Might be Giants, Bon Iver, Spinerette, and The New Pornographers. That's a lot of music I need to find the time to listen to.

• I can't stop thinking about new comics. This is a problem because I can't concentrate on already existing ideas.

• It is not, per se, a bad problem to have.

That is all for now.

Ignite recap

I'm sitting in a darkened hotel room right now. Melissa is off somewhere having dinner with some of her family. Oscar is asleep just a few paces from me and I have nothing but time on my hands. These are the moments I find to write in now. It's not a bad life.

Last Thursday, the 18th of June, I spoke as part of Salem's first ever Ignite event. Twelve speakers, each with five minutes to declaim on any topic of their choosing. Each also had to have a 20-slide Power Point presentation to play behind them. It was a fun and interesting night. The topics were varied and some down right intrigued me, but the best part of the night was meeting some of the other presenters.

This being the first such event in town, there were some technical glitches. I think only about half of my slides played behind me, but it was still worthwhile. I spoke about a subject I've been thinking about a lot lately, using the Internet as a content delivery system. I've written about this topic on this blog on more than one occasion. Basically, I'm trying to talk myself into it and using this public forum to state my intention is one way to do that.

I thought that my talk might be of interest to someone out there, so here it is. (And please note that I am not subjecting you to my PP slides, but I will sometimes break from the main body of the text and tell you some of the information that was on them.)

My attitudes about New versus Old Media can be summed up with this analogy:

Old Media are the Roman Empire. New Media are the Visigoths.

Which basically means that while Old Media isn’t dying, its power is waning and becoming decentralized. It also means that New Media isn’t necessarily the thing that will replace it, but it is making everything messy and interesting.

What this means ultimately is that things are in disarray and that individuals who want to create something and get it in front of an audience can use this to their advantage.

Provided they have something to say. I chose to characterize that something to say as an obsession in the title of my talk for a reason. It’s not enough to just want to make something, and it’s certainly not enough to want to make the same old things that have been under construction for the last 50 to 100 years. You have to want to make something new and personal.

Creating art of any kind may be fun, but it’s also a slog. And it can often feel like a curse, because it is something you feel compelled to do no matter what.

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

George Orwell

So, let’s say you are so compelled. You’re creating art, you’d like to have it seen by an audience. For various reason (such as how hard it is to break into established media, having to give up editorial control over your work, sometimes having to give up ownership), you decide that Old Media is not the avenue you want to pursue to get it seen. Maybe you want to give this Internet thing a try?

There are a lot of folks out there already using the Internet to broadcast their stories. But there are even more people out there who are waiting for new content. A recent study by the Harvard Business Review looked at the microblogging site, Twitter.com, and found that 90% of it’s content was generated by just 10% of its users. And it’s probably a similar story with the rest of the Internet.

There are an estimated 251 million households with Internet access in America. Using the 90/10 formula (which I realize is a gross over-generalization, but I’m going to do it anyway), that means that 2.5 million households are generating most of the content on the web and more than 240 million are consuming it. This is an amazingly large potential audience.

Of course, no one is going to attract the attention of all of those users. The most successful will only be seen by a small percentage of them, and how will they attract and keep those folks’ attention? By, again having something to say, by having an obsession.

Those entities that are already on the web attracting an audience are doing so because they have a clear, strong theme running through their work. Some examples of this are on the slides behind me.

But if these folks, or you for that matter, hope to make any money out of these endeavors, just putting your stuff up on the Internet isn’t enough. One of the advantages of Old Media is they have all these people and department in place to take your work and design, print, market and sell it. In the New Media, you get to do all of that. Seriously, keep your day job for a while.

On the screen behind me, six examples of web sites I feel succeed in the New Media model of content delivery flashed by. Those sites were:

Penny Arcade

Hark a Vagrant

Overcompensating

Diesel Sweeties

Katie West

Wondermark

All of the examples flashing behind me have found ways to monetize their work. They print or otherwise collect them and sell them, yes, but they also create merchandise, some of them are absolute monsters when it comes to publicity. They maintain presences outside of their own web sites. It sounds an awful lot like work.

“I think the growth of the business has been directly geared to my ability to take the whole endeavor more and more seriously. In other words, approaching the work like a professional has made it into a profession -- the attitude always comes first.”

David Malki!

creator of Wondermark.com

But the advantage of this method would be total ownership of what you create and total creative control(two things that are hard to come by in the world of traditional comics publishing at least). But with total control comes total responsibility.

I’m bringing this all up because I think it’s part of the obsession , too. You have something you want to say, and you want to say it so badly you’re willing to take on all of this enormous load of work to get it out there and make sure people see it. But if you can do all of this, an audience will find you. Then it’s up to your talent to keep those folks interested.

My area of interest is comics and I’ve focused most of my talk on that, but what I’m talking about can be applied to number of disciplines. There are any number of free blogging sites out there, each of which is better at certain things. You could publish fiction, poetry, memoirs, photo galleries. You can make videos and post them to youtube or vimeo. Record songs and throw put them up for everyone to see. The potential of the Internet as a means to get your work seen reminds me of ‘zine culture times about a million.

And there’s one more thing I feel compelled to mention. I decided to make this the topic on which I’d talk mostly because I’ve been thinking about taking the plunge into the world of New Media myself. Despite some success in the world of traditional comics publishing, I’ve been feeling a certain disappointment with many of the processes involved in it. I’m thinking about putting my money where my mouth is and joining the ranks of entrepreneurs on the web. All I need is to convince some artists that they need to come along with me.

All I need is to find some folks with a similar obsession.

Dalton

This is just to say that Todd Demong, my collaborator on 100 Girls (do I have to say that every time I mention his name?) and I have sold a short story to an unwitting publisher!

Dalton is a brand new character from us and should go live in the August issue of Myspace/Dark Horse Presents. Provided we hit all out deadlines. Which we totally will, no problem. I think.

Dalton is something Todd has had in mind to do for a number of years, so we're glad to see it get a shot at some kind of life. In fact, it was an eight-page Dalton short story Todd submitted as a sample that convinced me I wanted to work with him. I remember at the time thinking that if everything worked out between us that I'd like to ask Todd if I could work on the character with him. It's nice when things work out, even if we did have to wait a few years for it to happen.

Now we need to figure out what other new projects we'd like to work on.