The Early Years: Jim Can’t Swim. Or Run.

So this week I reached into my pile of ancient elementary school paperwork and pulled out this one:

Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part II

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.

Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part I

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.

Blast from the Past: Response Times

The other day, I was poking around my old web site in The Internet Archive looking for some information, and I happened to notice my “Response Times” link. This was a report that could be spit out by my old Manuscript Tracking database and which I used to upload from time to time just as a point of interest to show how long it was taking to get responses to submissions. Obviously this information is now completely out of date and utterly useless, but I thought it would be interesting to post its state as of the last time I updated it, over ten years ago. And so, here it is, in all its retro Web 1.0 glory:

Stumbling Into The Horror Field

In the comments for my “Pinch Bobby ‘Til He Bleeds” post, Almostgotit asked how I got into writing horror and why I got out.  Like many things in life, I just sort of stumbled into it, but getting out again was a little more complicated.