A Week and Half Into Ten

It's been a busy first week and a half of 2010.

Which is, actually, a good thing, as it means that I'm being productive and getting work done. In the last ten days or so, I've wrapped up the script and lettering for the first new Captain Midnight comic book story in decades, plotted another one, and, with very little preparation time, re-built my DVD Late Show site from scratch & re-launched it yesterday with five new reviews. I expect to have at least one - and maybe two - more articles posted before the end of the week.

I'm still transferring old reviews to the site, but there are now almost 250 articles in the archives, dating back to March of '05, when the first incarnation of the Late Show debuted at filmmaker Kevin Smith's now-defunct Movie Poop Shoot site. (If you're curious, that very first review was of the Mexican horror flick Alucarda.) It'll probably take me another month or more to track down, revise and re-post all of my old reviews.

One of my other pop culture blogs, Space: 1970 saw a surge in traffic this past week, thanks to a link on Grognardia, a gaming blog. In less than 24 hours, the blog gained more than thirty new "followers," and countless other new visitors. Who knew there were so many other old guys and gals out there nostalgic for the 70's sci-fi stuff I write about?

Tomorrow, I need to dig in on another Kolchak The Night Stalker script for the forthcoming ongoing comic book series from Moonstone, and once I deliver that, I need to knock out a short crime pulp story for one of the publisher's upcoming prose anthologies. My story pitch was approved yesterday, and I have until march to write it and turn it in. I don't want to say which classic adventure character I'll be writing about this time, but I'll give you a hint: he wears green.

I've also been asked to contribute a story to yet another prose fiction anthology dedicated to a classic pulp hero. That story's due in April, and I'm really anxious to get it in the book. Again, I'm not going to name the character right now; I'm trying to stop announcing things too far in advance of completion - sometimes projects fall through, get delayed indefinitely, or I just drop the ball and blow them, and it's embarrassing when folks keep asking when they're coming out. So, at the moment, I'm just saying that I've been asked to contribute a story, and keep checking back here for further announcements.

So, it looks like if I can buckle down and stay on task, I have enough writing jobs (even if they don't pay much of anything) to keep me busy until late spring. At that point, I expect to have a couple of new projects ready to shop around to publishers. During that time, I have other stuff lined up, too - preparing the Femme Noir online strips for publication in book form for Ape Entertainment, lettering my own Kolchak and Captain Midnight comics, etc. (And, as always, doing what I can to facilitate the long-gestating Gravedigger & Planet X books, too.)

I just hope that my unusually high productivity over the last ten days or so is something I can maintain. Late last year, I was finally diagnosed as having ADD. In retrospect, this seems so obvious - the behavior patterns and difficulties I've struggled with since I was a kid are textbook ADD - but it never occurred to me before. My doctor and I are experimenting with treatments, and if we can nail down the right one, I'm hoping to experience a serious improvement in my work habits and, well, just about everything.

I'm determined to make 2010 my best year - creatively, professionally and personally - ever.