Warm up

I received notes from my buddy, and manager, Julian, for some comics project pitches and I'm meant to be working on those right now but all I seem able to do is look at random people's tumblr blogs (I quite like this young lady's Musings), play Lux Deluxe, make furious scribblings about the web comics thing (which I've taken top calling Flagpole Comics in my wee brain) and, of course write useless blog posts.

I'm feeling parenthetical tonight it seems.

Working on pitches kills me. Getting the idea down in a condensed form that might convince them to actually pay me money and publish the thing. When I write pitches, I wish I could just rip open my skull and let the theoretical money-person peer inside to see what I intend to do with an idea. When it's locked away in my head, it seems so cool and then as I start to put it down on the page, it just seems to whither. The key is to get it all down before it just shrivels up and dies. (Thankfully, after the pitches are written and I move on to the next steps--outline and script--the ideas generally rejuvenate; like fruit that plumps up on the vine after a Spring rain.)

One of the pitches has actually reached the point where I've abandoned it and decided it would be best to just start from scratch with something new. I won't throw it away, and will, more than likely, come back o it after it's been allowed to lay fallow for a while, but for the moment it's dead.

One of the nice things about my creative engine, is that I can generate big, general ideas fairly easily. So after I decided to kill pitch A, I came up with material for pitch B fairly easily. I just needed to start combing through some old notebooks and I found something pretty quickly that I think would be cool. And that I think could survive the process of writing and revising the pitch.

And I have to apologize about the general abstract way I speak about these pitches and the ideas they contain. I have always been superstitious about talking about story ideas and plots with too much specificity. If any of these ideas I'm working on make it through the selection process, I'll share all the steps I go through. How about that?

It'll be like an early Christmas, right?

Okay, now that my fingers and brain are limbered up, I'm going to go back and try and catch these ideas, wrestle them to the ground, and have my way with them.

Wish me luck.