Archive for January, 2010
Posted by jamesviscosi on January 31, 2010
So after getting those encouraging letters from the editor at Eclipse, I had to actually produce the scripts. Fortunately that wasn’t a problem; I was pretty prolific back in the day. However, formatting was an issue. From reading reference books (in 1993, you couldn’t just hop on the Internet to find examples of comic book script layouts), I was aware that when submitting comic book scripts as a writer, you have to format them similarly to a movie script, with the action divided into panels. You have to supply POVs, camera angles, etc., and each line of dialogue is numbered; this is all so the artist will know how to arrange everything on the page.
As you can see from the Eclipse editor’s copious notes, in this early Night Watchman draft, I wasn’t very good at any of that yet.
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Posted in Excerpts, horror, Writing, You Suck | Tagged: 1990s, almost got it, ancient history, comic books, eclipse comics, formatting, horror, markup, near misses, night watchman, scripts, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by jamesviscosi on January 24, 2010
So this week I pulled something really juicy out of my pile of rejections. I may have mentioned before that a number of my books, including Night Watchman and Dragon Stones, started out as comic book series proposals. I was working with an editor at the now-defunct Eclipse Comics on developing several of these. Unfortunately I’m not a particularly good artist, so I was submitting them as scripts that would be illustrated by others. How did it all work out in the end? Well, let’s just say I’ve lived in the San Diego area for eight years now and have yet to attend a Comic-Con.
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Posted in Excerpts, horror, Writing | Tagged: almost got it, ancient history, comic books, comic-con, eclipse comics, horror, missed opportunities, night watchman, writing | 5 Comments »
Posted by jamesviscosi on January 17, 2010

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Posted in Miscellaneous, the early years | Tagged: 1976, children, grandmother, homework, juggler, pirate, queen, reality television, scans, the early years, yodeler | 8 Comments »
Posted by jamesviscosi on January 10, 2010
So in the last week we saw two movies, “Avatar” and “Food Inc.“. I decided to do capsule reviews of them together because they turn out to have a philosophy in common.
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Posted in fantasy, Reviews, science fiction | Tagged: avatar, darwin's nightmare, documentaries, fantasy, food inc., Reviews, science fiction | 7 Comments »
Posted by jamesviscosi on January 3, 2010
The votes are in and the readers’ choice for the next scene of the month is Dragon Stones. Flipping randomly through the pages, I stopped at this scene, in which the kidnapped oracle Tolaria makes good her escape.
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Posted in Books, Excerpts, fantasy, Scene of the Month, Writing | Tagged: dragon stones, dragons, escapes, Excerpts, kidnapping, oracles, prisoners, scene of the month, voting, wizards, writing | 4 Comments »