Tag: Chaos

Brand New Day – Week 3 – Caught Between the Bell Curves

It’s Thursday night. I want to knock out a post before I get to bed; I’m going to Queens Comic Con tomorrow with Kenney Broadway and Chaos Mechanica. It’s an outing that was pretty exciting until I 8PM hit earlier and I realized that I somehow didn’t get anything done for my book today.

I know that’s not exactly fair—I made business cards today. And edited a few of next week’s posts. And worked out my schedule for Comic Con. And worked a bit on my big contribution to this year’s Con (a post for Infinite Ammo that’s still incredibly unfinished considering how complicated it’ll be to execute [thankfully Darth Healthcare {we’re just full of code names on that site} volunteered to help, but even the third of its writing portion, which I started months ago, is still unfinished and needs a ton of tweaking]). Still though, the goal was to roll out of bed, lay down on my couch and do that weird thing where I brainstorm by staring up at the ceiling (and maybe dozing off) to figure out exactly how the next chapter is supposed to work (which always leads to me crossing out the first few pages I get from the brain storming session and rewriting them later, after I discover the way the chapter should really go while doing something as unrelated as, say, petting a cat [as far as efficiency is concerned, it’s about as roundabout a way of writing as using brackets within brackets to steer myself away from a point {I swear I’ll stop this now}]). I was set to wake up and write just as I was ready for this whole Brand New Day thing to be relatively simple.

Relatively, as in I knew it would still be hard, yes. But I didn’t know I’d have so much work to do for Infinite Ammo that I’d realize the sun went gone down and wonder where the time went on a daily basis.

It doesn’t help that I feel determined to be unhappy; when I’m home, I wish I was outside. When I’m hanging out with friends, I wish I was out walking (I have a weird thing with taking walks and traveling), or home writing. And it’s not like I’m ungrateful or don’t want to hang out with my friends, I just want to do everything at once and I can’t. It’s really frustrating. Now that Chaos Mechanica and I have made a site that’s still going strong and has gotten nearly 3,500 hits, it’s lost its professional luster; all that there is for me is finishing this novel and possibly starting other ventures I’ve considered lately. There’s now a gratification curve to what I do, which, now that I say it, is possibly the same reason why I probably don’t feel completely gratified when I hang out; it’s not that the people I spend time with are lame or unfulfilling friends. It’s that… Well, you’ve probably loved someone so much that you didn’t know what to do when it didn’t work out with them, no matter how hard you tried.

Well, I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m caught between the bell curves and it’s a silent kind of unhappy that I try not to talk about to anyone. I want to finish more of this book every week. And I love her and miss her so much that I’m writing about it on my blog like this is high school.

Okay. Deep breath. One of those problems I can fix. The other I can ignore.

It’s time for bed; I can brainstorm/write on the train (where, oddly enough, I do my best drafting). I can spend a few hours at this Queens Comic Con, meet up with other friends afterward, hopefully go to Occupy Wall St. like I’ve wanted to. All of that is important.

One day at a time.

Infinite Ammo

The weeks since my last post, “The Turning Point”, have been pretty hectic. Work is, naturally, depressing, and afterward home is—more so than before—a constant effort to get as much professional work done as humanly possible.

Why “more so than before”? Because directly after “The Turning Point”, I rallied Chaos Mechanica to start on that new gaming/comics/nerdy stuff website I’d mentioned. After a pretty insane weekend of non-stop work, we released Infinite Ammo two days later on the 25th, and it has totally dominated my time since, even though Chaos Mechanica has been an awesome partner in the effort.

The question, “Why the hell would you start a website when you already have so much else to do?” probably springs to mind. I think the answer is simple: I really needed some instant gratification. Work is a constant string of people asking me when I’m going to be out of a job; why wouldn’t I need to do something that I can admire five minutes later?

Of course, it didn’t take five minutes to make the site what it is now; the weeks before and after the 25th were a really tentative dance with a bunch of talent who—thankfully—agreed to work on the site even though they aren’t getting paid anything. I’m ridiculously lucky to know people who are so willing to chip and are also all great, charming, and knowledgeable writers. I want to make this something awesome for them as much as for myself.

The complications that come out of an effort like this are pretty surprising though. But then, so are the stupid, stupid perks; Mr. House and I have had to divvy-up responsibilities (the insanely charming Mr. House getting the HR spot while I took on editing/designing tasks) because problems keep cropping up everywhere and it was immediately too much work for one hero to handle (not that Mr. House is my sidekick; we’re more a Batman/Superman type duo [also I’m Batman]).
Anyway, my point is this: I was preparing an introductory email to prospective writers, full of info they’d need to know to work with us. I’m there writing the “Feature Image” bit, explaining how they can get headline images to use on their stories and this happens: “The best thing to do is aggressively Google Image Search for a good, hi-res shot of your topic. So, say if you’re doing an article about Spider-Man, then I want you to get me pictures of—” O_O “… Yes. Pictures. I want you to get me pictures of Spider-Man!”

It’s the little things, people.

Important: I will occasionally post new reviews and special interest articles, but in the coming months, I’m going to stray away from those to give you a much more personal look into my efforts to finish my book (again) and this major turning point in my life. That said, if you want a more steady string of reviews, previews, and opinions on comics, video games, movies and more from myself and a bunch of other talented writers and hardcore fans, Infinite Ammo is the site for you.  When I finally get the chance to work on it again, RED Comics will also appear on Infinite Ammo, but I love the series too much already to not post it here as well.

—Thanks for Reading!—