It always takes a while.

Whenever I get time off from the nine-to-five (which is never nine-to-five, or ten-to-six, but more like nine-ish-to-whenever-all-depending), it takes a few days to settle down enough to switch gears and start writing. Unless I have an urgent deadline, and at this point there really aren't any, aside from my ever-ambitious self-imposed ones. So it always takes a while, but I'm finally at that stage, at the creative boiling point, and now it's pen to paper again - or, rather, fingers to keyboard - and away we go...

...which means I shouldn't be hanging around here, blogging, but this is warm-up (I tell myself) after a few days of mostly manual labour, gift-shopping, and general sloth.

What am I writing? Well, now. "In the Dark Places" is out there, being read (intently, and with much enthusiasm, one hopes) by a couple of agencies, so I will hold off on revising that until I either hear something or (the more likely option) I don't. Hollywood mostly doesn't call back. That's the way that machine works.

I have two or three other screenplays brewing, but the story that haunts my waking dreams these days is a comic-book script - the first in a four-part mini-series that I'm working on with my TLJ-Next co-writer, Dag Scheve. It's called "Secret Questions, Secret Answers", and if all goes well we'll be pitching it to publishers late this spring or early summer. We have a fantastic artist lined up, and as soon as there's something to show I'll show it. (Just to be clear, it has absolutely nothing to do with TLJ. We'd love to do a TLJ comic-book some day - the series was always meant to have a graphic novel sensibility to it - but this is not it.)

So at some point in early January I intend to have a solid draft of "Secret Questions, Secrets Answers: First", and then we'll take it from there. "Second" is being written by Dag, and we've yet to discuss "Third" and "Fourth".

Why a comic-book? Because I've always wanted to do one (my 'career' as a writer began with me making my own comics back when I was a wee laddie); because I'm lucky enough to have teamed up with two very talented people, and I recognise an opportunity when I see one; and because I want to work on a project that doesn't depend on other, less talented people putting millions and millions of dollars into something, and then seeing it go belly-up when that doesn't happen. Most of all, it's just a fantastic story that needs telling, and this is a good way to tell it. Good stories tend to knock around your head until you let them out or silence them forever. And the latter is certainly not the preferred option.  ¶ 18:06