July 30th, 2010 by Neal

Hello, all!

I have dropped into a cave, seemingly, because I have stopped popping on here to do my daily word count thing. The idea being, to outside observers I didn’t want to project the idea that I was saying “Look at me! I do this many words a day!” which was certainly not the intention. It was more a meter stick so that I could show myself how I was doing and thusly keep myself sane, but I found that I could do that just as easily by keeping a calendar/journal, so I’m doing that instead.

Hal 4 is currently at about thirty thousand words. I have been having a great bit of struggle keeping a regular schedule, so consequently I’ve been hitting about ten thousand words a week, which bugs me, but at very least they’re words, and the funk that hit me last month seems to have gone, so I’m trying to see the best in that. Two thousand words a day is nothing to sneeze green snot at. I just fear the specter of laziness, and/or the inability to discern what’s laziness and what is pre-writing and what is exhaustion and/or the sun, or any one of the myriad of things that makes a writer second guess himself and thusly feeds back, making him or her want to write in the first place. What a malady…

Starcraft 2 doesn’t help this decision, but then, I’m pleased to have relegated my playing until way after my work is done, so no conscience tearing there.

Point being, I am still alive, and I am working, and this will all hopefully pay off some time down the line soon.

I yearn for you tragically.

Yrs,

Colonel A. T. Tappman.

July 12th, 2010 by Neal

Okay… so… I know it’s been a while. That’s the torture part in “tortured artist”. Or at least, the tortured part in tortured dumbass, given present company. But at any rate, I do have news and updates and regular goodness.

First off, the Nightmares of the Macabre book has good news/bad news. The bad news? Well, it was supposed to be out this last week. It’s not. I know, you’re thinking, “Oh God! DELAYZORS!” But no. It’s not a delay, it’s not an inadequacy of the company, it’s not anything comic book nerds hypothesize, it’s something better still and more exciting…. the book is likely being distributed by Diamond now, and I’m gonna be the new regular writer of the series. Ergo, now it’s been juggled a bit so that the book will come out with a wider distribution a little later, and then I’ll be picking up the title as the main writer soon. Booya. More as I know more.

Hal 4 is in progress. I did 14,000 words, scrapped it, rebroke it as a novel from another character’s perspective, then totally redid the plot again, started writing again, and now I’m at 4,000 words. I can’t explain why it’s been so hard without spoiling a major plot point, so I’ll just say I’ve struggled with this one so far. I’m still sitting at the desk and writing every day, but it took a month and twenty days and a lot of screen staring this time. I’ve never really experienced that with something I’m flat-out ready to write. It wasn’t writer’s block, though, it was me choosing to write only one thing at a time, something I’m working on rectifying. For instance, I just finished today’s writing on Hal, so off I go to script some comics. That’s good. It means I can move the juice around to whatever my brain’s feeling up to at the time.

So in other words, yes, long absence, but it was part of the process. More soon.

June 23rd, 2010 by Neal

I know it’s been a while, and there is a reason. I’ve been twisting myself stupid over the new book and a few more exciting prospects. I dealt with a bout of what appears to be emerging depression based around shit I can’t and won’t go into. I also got lazy, which is rare with me, so I indulged it, given that I’ve had a hard time being lazy in the last few years. Well, that and I wrote three books in a year and a damned half, and I’m not even scheduled to start the next novel at my breakneck pace until the beginning of next month.

Hal 4 is started, and it’s called “Live in Hope.” I can’t really say anything about what happens in the book without completely blowing the third book’s payoff, which sucks, but it’ll also help me keep my lid shut.

I will, in the next few days, be posting previews of the new comic. It’s going to be available for the iPad, and it’s looking to come out (as far as I know) on the tenth of next month. It’s also got… wooo… diamond distribution, which is a good good thing.

I am (God help me) more prevailent on the twitter of late. As I get this book going (and I’m only at about the 5,000 word mark of yet, but that should rapidly increase as I get the flow), I’ll be updating more. I’m just posting to let you all know I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, and that if you keep watching, you’ll have preview pages soon.

I’ve seen this whole book, and I think it’s quite honestly the thing I’m most proud of that I’ve had published thusfar. I think you’ll love it.

May 26th, 2010 by Neal

May 7th, 2010 by Neal

I am now 55 in to the fourth draft, my hope is to finish it next week, do another quick read-through for a fifth draft, then send it in by the end of the month.

I’m not changing hardly anything, which is very good, but it’s very easy to spend a last read-through skimming and making sure, all the same.

I came up with what I believe will be the murder for the next book, which is rad. I am also thoroughly intrigued by Columbo, and am considering Hal’s polar opposite, a detective that is much more formal and intelligent. Then again, many have written Sherlock Holmes, so I’ve got a lot to consider.

It’s very strange not to be changing genre every book. I used to do that. Hrm.

In other news, the pages for Nightmares of the Macabre have been coming in, and WOW. You guys will LOVE this book. LOVE LOVE LOVE it. I do.

April 23rd, 2010 by Neal

I’ve done a lot of thinking over the last few days, mostly spurred by a good conversation with friend Will. I’m pondering what I hold to be my concepts of self-worth, I’m looking into the way I focus on things. Constantly trying to prove, I’ve been confronted with contradictory logic in my own methodology of thinking, and I’ve been exploring it a little. I won’t cover much of it here, but one point that came out was remarkably astute.

I’m focusing on the numbers. For me, it’s a tool to give myself a gauge of where I am. I say “Your goal is ten pages, or 3,000 words, or one draft.” Etc. The outward impression, however, I realize, can easily be seen as “Aha! I’ve written two books in a year. Behold, my superior power!” This is not my intention, so I’m seriously questioning my use of the pie charts, especially given that the outward impression (False or true) that could come of it is that I am churning books out less concerned with quality.

As my sunken eyes and broken demeanor prove, this is not the case. I am literally killing myself for these books. Nonetheless, writing is a form of communication, and if I can’t communicate what I feel as opposed to what I am actually doing, that’s a failure of writing. The IDEA was to let people know I have work coming down the pike, and to give them a conceptualization of how hard I’m working to get it out there. The REALITY is that it kind of looks like I’m rushing. I dunno. I worked hard to produce 3,000 good words a day, but it’s hard to conceptualize, I know, on a regular basis.

I’m still not sure what to do, beyond noting what I’m working on in a less numerical way. It springs from my long time obsession with statistics and running numbers. I love baseball statistics, budgeting, word counts, gas mileage, timing trips. It’s an OCD thing I’ve always had I can’t get rid of, but I don’t have to inflict it on others, especially when it might give a negative impression.

I think I’ll keep it up for this book, and then just have a draft number for future books in the “Works in Progress” tab.

It IS quality, not quantity, and I don’t have to justify how hard I’m working to anyone but myself. That urge comes from my past, and I apologize for it. I do my work, that’s all I need to do. Consider it the last hiccup of my earlier predilection to try and fight battles I couldn’t win on message boards. I hope to hell it’s a sign of maturity as an artist. We’ll see.

This is your cue to write “U SUK!” and let me not respond.

I had a startling moment of revelation goofing around on Warcraft two days ago, actually, about this. WoW has this thing called the random dungeon, where, if you don’t have enough people to run an instance (a five character dungeon), you can sign up for random people who also want to do a dungeon. You invariably implode half the time, because getting five sane, normal, intelligent people on the internet is like, I dunno, flipping for heads 200 times.

It used to lead me to rather stirring rage, to the point that I quit the game for years. Now I’m more calm. Reassured. I can just drop out of a group of assholes and not give a shit.

Anyway, back to two days ago. I was in this instance, and I was JUST level 80. Part of the endgame is spending tens of thousand of hours grinding for gear, and when you just hit 80, you’re going to be low in “DPS,” or damage per second. I drop in, and the first thing I see is some leet geared DPS guy typing incoherent phrases and sentences. Like, this is some of the worst grammar I have ever seen, even on WoW. He says something fractured about asking why my gear sucks. I write one sentence, “Just hit eighty. Trying to get geared. That’s why I’m here! :)”

The response, verbatim: “ur to stupid to insalt” sans period.

This is like “your retarded” taken to the point of trolling, but he’s absolutely serious.

My response was to just laugh, leave the group, and move on to something else. A while back, I would have probably engaged the guy and used my command of language to try and smite him. I didn’t, and I’m very proud of that.

Now, as Will would probably chide me, “Why the fuck are you talking about it two days later, then! Stop telling us how much it’s not affecting you as a way to tell you how much it’s not affecting you.” True. I cite this example more as a piece of humor.

The truth is, I’ve found me sweet spot where I don’t care any more. It took so long. I still have hiccups. But I realize the last time I talked about something ruining my day, making me lose writing because of bullshit, was almost a half a year ago, and that was an isolated incident.

I’m also past a lot of the dysfunctional shit that pervaded a lot of my thought process. Each year I can look back and see improvement. I regret things I used to suck at, but I’m glad things are getting better. I’m learning to interact in ways that were beyond me years ago, and a lot of that maturity and change comes of the decision to let go, come to Portland, and find a new life.

Even when I’m feeling down (and I have a lot, of late, at random times, mostly because Kristen is gone a lot at work and school, and I’ve had some shitty bills killing me), that’s a point of optimism.

The next Hal book, not coincidentally, is called “Live in Hope.” I don’t know if I’ll write it next (I have a few ideas I’m mulling), but it’s there, nonetheless, and important.

Hope.

Things get better. They do.