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.